hi everyone Aaron here for ZolloTech and this is the 2020 MacBook Air and it's
been in constant use since its release in my house and so I wanted to share how
it's been overall what it's like to use how its thermals are and also what my
daughter thought of it since she's been using it for school and things like that
and so the first thing is its design and the design is classic MacBook Air
although it has gained a little bit of thickness because they've added that new
scissor style keyboard that's sort of new but old again we have this wedge
shape which is really nice pretty typical at this point of many laptops
and we have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on one side on the back we don't
have anything else and then we have two Thunderbolt three ports their full
Thunderbolt three ports so you could use them with a display or you could use
them with an e GPU and game some graphics performance if you wanted to
edit some video on this or something like that and so this is really nice it
is a little bit heavy but not necessarily as heavy as an iPad pro with
a keyboard for example but it's not much different than the MacBook Pro if you're
looking for size compared to the 13 inch version now the overall build of course
is typical MacBook Pro it's very strong and the logo does not light up I get
asked this all the time but they remove this quite some time ago I think in 2016
they removed the light-up logo from most MacBooks
and replaced it with just stainless steel so it looks pretty good but you
won't have that light that's classic Mac and now inside this is where this makes
the biggest difference as far as using a MacBook so if you're familiar with the
butterfly keyboard that we had for about four years
Apple replaced it in 2019 with the MacBook Pro with a revised scissor
switch and if you're someone that really didn't like the old keyboard you'll
probably love this keyboard it has great travel on all of the keys they work
great they're backlit and for those that touch type this will be fantastic so
just pressing the keys like normal they sound pretty good let me open notes here
so just like in my other videos where I type hi how are you today so if I type
hi how are you today
and so it sounds pretty quiet compared to the the butterfly keyboards it's much
nicer to type on it has great feedback when you're pushing down you have good
resistance and just in general this is a great keyboard now one of the things I
like most about this keyboard is not just the feedback that we get from the
keys but also the physical buttons at the top I much prefer these to the touch
bar now some people might prefer the touch bar but it's something I never use
on macbook pro so we've got our adjustment for everything from the
keyboard to the backlight of the display and our volume it's just super easy to
use and then of course we have touch ID which is great it works well and then a
huge trackpad which works just like the track pads on any other MacBook at this
point the display does go fairly bright but it's not as bright as others and I
wish they would add a lot of brightness so you could comfortably use this while
you're outside it does work fine but it's not as bright as some others when
you're outside so you can see it it's a Retina display it's just as high-quality
as any of the other Mac books but it doesn't have all of the color gambits
that you get with the MacBook Pro as far as variable refresh rates and all those
things so for our MacBook Air user coming from the previous MacBook Air to
this one the display will look phenomenal but if you're coming from say
a 2016 MacBook Pro to this it'll look about the same you probably won't notice
much of a difference but it isn't as good as the newer MacBook Pros it's very
slight it depends on what you're doing but most people will be fine with this
display no I wanted you to be able to hear the speakers on the MacBook Air
because they're pretty good they're not as good as the 16 inch MacBook Pro but
they have a phenomenal sound for what they are and they go nice and loud so
let me go ahead and turn this up we'll go to my channel and then you can see a
montage where I did a camera comparison between all of the 20/20 iPhones so let
me go ahead and play that for you again are really nice cameras but let me show
you some samples comparing them along with some video
now hopefully that gives you an idea of the overall sound quality I think they
sound phenomenal there like I said not as good as the MacBook Pro but most
people won't even notice that they go nice and loud loud enough that they're
too loud for most people to listen to sustain so they're great that way now
the question I probably get asked most about when it comes to the MacBook Air
is how does it perform when it gets hot or how are its thermals does it throttle
the CPU a lot because it's not super fast this is the quad core i5 version
with eight gigabytes of RAM and the Intel iris + graphics so it's not the
top of the line it's the one I would normally suggest for most people now
overall speed and usability is fine if I go to something like Safari go to Apple
it's nice and fast loading different web pages it has no issue with that if you
wanted to do some light editing with Final Cut Pro it will handle 4k video it
will handle most tasks with ease however it is going to get a bit warm and so I
have ice that menu here running and I also have Intel power gadget and this
can show you the actual frequency that it's running as far as the CPU frequency
is concerned now as you can see overall here the frequency is at one point one
it can turbo boost much higher than that depending on what you're doing so if I
go back into Safari for example go to Apple you're going to see the CPU boost
up here and that's completely normal that's just how it handles things so it
will boost the CPU go back down as needed so if we go and look at the
iPhone se for example you can see it boosts back up and goes back down and it
stays nice and silent now if you close this you're going to see this drop back
off and you'll see the CPU go back down it's running it only 920 mega Hertz
right here so it will go up and down as needed and some people are concerned
with sustained loads how it handles that so let me go into an application such as
Cinebench run this where it really pushes the CPU so you can actually hear
it now we'll run Cinebench and it does not run terribly fast on this machine
and you're going to get much better performance out of things like a mac pro
or MacBook Pro of course but for regular use with documents and things it's fine
so let me let this run here I'll let it get
warmer and you can see all of the CPU cores are kind of pegged at this point
we're running at 1.9 gigahertz continually and I'll leave power gadget
open as well so we'll get a max frequency ids see where it levels off
and see how it sustains this temperature now the test has been going for a while
the fan is running at maximum speed and you can see here that we're at ninety
nine point eight degrees it's hovering right around 100 degrees Celsius that's
completely normal for a Mac while it sounds fairly uncomfortable and very
high most Mac's run at this very high temperature it's utilizing about a
hundred percent of the core and we're averaging 1.4 gigahertz and so you'll
see based on what we have here we're running above the average of the
advertised base clock speed so while it's not super fast it's faster than
advertised and it's staying fairly quiet so let me let you hear the fan now that
we're close to using everything at 100% for a while so it's not super loud
it's definitely noticeable but it's not super loud and you'll see now that this
test is completed the clock speeds will drop as will the temperature it will
slowly taper off and we'll be back to normal and this is completely normal
for of this MacBook Air yes it will get warm underneath here so underneath it's
very hot right here in the center you could hold your hand here but probably
not for sustained sustained periods of time but it's doing the job that it
should and as expected and actually at higher clock speeds than advertised so
as far as that part goes it's fine now let's talk a little bit about battery
life because you can get what Apple advertised under a specific scenario so
for example if you're using Wi-Fi you're using Safari you're on one Safari page
and you're at about 70 percent brightness then you might be able to
achieve the optimal battery life most people are going to get about eight
hours maybe nine hours with this depending on what they're doing if
you're using pages and just typing you'll probably get pretty decent
battery life if maybe you're in movie and watching just that movie that
you've already downloaded that's actually how Apple tests it as well
then maybe you'll get that advertised battery life but if you've got multiple
applications open such as Safari or mail and messages and the App Store and all
of these things open like many people use the computer you could get around
six hours of battery life but if you have a plug nearby just plug it in as
needed and you're good to go so it just depends what you're what
you're doing what you're needing and in general
it's a great machine now like I said before my daughter has been using this
since it came out and prior to this she's using the 2016 MacBook Pro and
she's used the older 2011 style MacBook Air and so going from the MacBook Pro to
this the first thing she mentioned to me is that the keyboard was just so much
better she immediately noticed that she writes a lot of papers or and just
writes a lot and also uses Xcode and she immediately said that this keyboard is
just so much better to use that she would never go back also she prefers
these buttons on the top other than having a touch bar so just like myself I
don't prefer the touch bar I'd rather have these physical buttons and it seems
like she would as well also it's plenty fast even with 8 gigabytes of RAM to run
things like Xcode so she's been learning Xcode and learning some programming and
it seems to run it without a problem now if you were going to do any heavy
coating or compiling or maybe you're going to video at it with it regularly
then maybe I would get the larger memory option or even a MacBook Pro 10th
generation but otherwise this one seems to do the job and this will be the
device that my daughter uses for college and it handles all of that without any
problem whatsoever and the real question is should you pick this up over the
MacBook Pro and what I tell people is absolutely if you're only going to get
the eighth generation MacBook Pro 13-inch in fact this has the tenth
generation CPU with better graphics in it so if you can afford the MacBook Pro
with the 10th gen CPU then get that MacBook Pro but if you're picking
between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro and you can only afford the base
MacBook Pro I would pick the heir any day and so the experience will generally
be better yes it might get a little bit warmer but in general I think it'll be
better most people and then get what you can
afford as far as the RAM if it only has eight gigabytes that's okay I normally
recommend 16 gigabytes as long as you can afford that if not you'll get by
with eight if you're only writing papers but if you want to edit video
occasionally or do any of that sort of work I most definitely recommend 16
gigabytes of RAM for that or more I'd love to hear if you picked up a MacBook
Air what you think of it I think it's a phenomenal machine it's really what the
MacBook Air should have been years ago and we finally have it here and it's
fairly reasonably priced depending on which one you get but let me know your
thoughts about it in the comments below of course I'll link a wallpaper for you
in the description like I normally do and if you'd like this wallpaper I can
link this one as well if you'd like and let me know what you think of this
keyboard and if you prefer the touch bar or not I definitely prefer physical
buttons but I'd love to hear what you have to say in the comments below if you
haven't subscribed already though please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video
please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you
next time