Biting apples

MacBook Air 2018 review

Mar 3, 2019

I swear it is just a coincidence, but in the exact same days as Stephen Hackett's wife and Jason Snell's one bought a new 2018 MacBook Air, my sweet half surrendered to my insistence and went to the local Apple reseller to buy a new MacBook Air for herself.
She's doing her doctoral years, so she was able to purchase it with a 10% educational discount form Apple and a nice 0% interests - 10 installments from the store itself.

Having had it around for a few days, and being able to use it a few times, here are my impressions on it.

Form factor

This thing is cool. I wouldn't say extremely light: chemistry imposes a certain weight to Aluminium, nor you nor Apple can take away, but it surely is cool as a form factor on its whole.
It's rather thin, and I would fear of bending it if it were thinner, and smaller as of footprint than the previous version thanks to the reduced bezels around the screen. For comparison, it has the same height and width of the current 13" MacBook Pro.

Screen

For me, the lack of a Retina screen on the MacBook Air was the biggest reason on why I stopped advising friends to buy one. Every day, at work, in front of a non retina screen, I suffer for text granularity - it is very true when they say once you go Retina, you can't go back - and for the old MacBook Air, being the only Apple laptop without a high resolution screen was the single huge drawback.
2018 MacBook Air, by contrast, has one of the best Retina screen I've seen so far, better than the one I have on my 2015 MacBook Pro, better than the ones on the iPhones we have at home. I cannot tell you what makes this greatness, specs are quite the same of my MBP. Maybe being few generations ahead of anything else we have at home is what makes it different. All I can say, is that's a great screen that alone is worth the upgrade from any previous Air.

Touch ID

The second best feature this MacBook bears is Touch ID. So far only present in Mac laptops with a Touch Bar, Touch ID brings to laptops the same revolution it brought to iPhones since the 5S: invisible security. If having a password is common sense security, I have often encountered users that hadn't set it up on their portables. I've never bored to ask them why, but I could bet some money one of the reasons was that they didn't want to type the password in every time, or that they were afraid of forgetting it for some reason. Placing your finger on a exquisitely smooth surface erases that complexity in a blink, making security almost a pleasure.
I cannot say whether the Touch Bar is a success or not, if it will be worth having it around on future MacBook Pro releases or if it will just be a failed attempt. What is already clear though, is that Touch ID has become a must-have, regardless of the presence of the bar alongside it. Maybe the Touch Bar will only remain in high end MacBook Pros - a tool for professionals that can value any sort of input capability; on a consumer device, Touch ID can be here to stay... at least until Face ID comes to the Mac!

Audio

Having brought Beats expertise in-house after 2014 massive acquisition shows its results in this MacBook Air when it comes to speakers. Apple engineers have managed to fit 2 audio grills on the sides of the Air's keyboard, so that sounds can freely come out from them. Previously, sound waves came out from the venting slots above the function keys, bounced on the screen and were reflected back to the listener: it was a clever solution, but one that surely sacrificed volume. Come the new Air, waves come out directly from the audio grills with a big gain in volume and clarity. The first time I used them, I had to lower the volume not to disturb others for how unexpectedly loud they were.
The Air also spots not one, but three microphones, likely used for ambient noise reduction.

I/O.

This MacBook Air has the same third generation butterfly keyboard the new MacBook Pros have. Now, this keyboard has received a lot of criticisms from many Mac commenters over the years, especially previous versions which were much more prone of breaking.
I was so worried from all the articles I had read, I almost freaked out when a biscuit crumble fell among the keys of the Air's keyboard!
This latest generation has a silicon membrane under each key that should prevent the keys armageddon reported for previous generations, and I surely hope this is the case.
As for key travel, the first time I tried it in a shop the keys didn't convince me, feeling too much flat. Having tried it for a longer time, I must say the feeling is pleasant. The dome and butterfly mechanism does its job in giving the proper resistance, and the size of the single keys - at first so clumsily big - make seem the older ones small in comparison.

As far as ports are concerned, there isn't much to say: the Air surprisingly houses a headphone jack and unsurprisingly houses two USB-C ports that can both charge the MacBook and both support Thunderbolt (up to 40Gbps) and USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gbps).
Maybe in some other parts of the world classic USB has already dwindled, but here, every USB stick around still carries an old USB port, every business networking is still done over Ethernet, every camera has a SD Card that has to somehow be connected to a PC to download the pictures. And thus, every MacBook Air needs to be paired with an USB-C dock to expand its ports.
This might be an ode to USB-C versatility, and it is quite marvelous if you think at how many things can be accomplished via one single port. On the other side, if the one port to rule them all approach has advantages, an adapter will surely be useful earlier or later. My advice is to buy one and keep it in the backpack just in case you needed it.

Misc

  • battery life is great, charge it overnight and forget about it;
  • trackpad is bigger than usual, but that's no bother - on the contrary it makes gestures even more comfortable;
  • my fiancĂ© is coming from a Win PC, it will be interesting to see how she will discover macOS;
  • farewell glowing Apple logo, I guess we will only see you in short Pixar movies;
  • this Mac is made by 100% recycled Aluminium, making it the greenest Mac ever made;
  • I feared that, coming from a Win PC, my sweet half could not find the apps she was used to work with. Luckily, and as a sign of the progresses the Mac ecosystem has done in the last decade, she was able to find Mac counterparts of all the applications she needs to use, even this specific app for statistical calculations.

Final Words

When her old Lenovo mini-PC was showing the first signs of failure, we began to think on what to do, on how to eventually re-arrange family Macs to suit new needs. Things became much easier when Apple finally unveiled the new MacBook Air: the best selling Mac portable was brought in line with its siblings at the right compromise between portability and power.
The new Air truly sits in a sweet spot. MacBook Pros have rightfully become very powerful machines, with big onboard processing power, Touch Bar for increased input options, P3 color gamut and true tone displays. On the other end, new MacBooks have remained the ultraportable machines they were born as, there for who is willing to pay a premium price tag to have razor-thin laptops weighting the least of all other Mac laptops.
The Air finally occupies a segment that was long left empty, the one originally held by the iBook first and MacBooks then: the computer for the rest of us, one with the right compromises between portability, specs and price, rather affordable (999$, anyone can hear me?) and versatile enough to face many of our everyday tasks.

You make your own considerations, my next Mac could well be the new MacBook Air.



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