This is the brand new 2020 macbook air with the m1 chipset in it apple's brand new silicon so let's go ahead and take a look at it now this comes in at 9.99 for the base model goes up to 2049 with 2 terabytes of storage and 16 gigs of ram this is actually a bump up from the base model it's 1249 with 512 gigabytes of storage and 8 gigabytes of ram 8 gigabytes 512 ssd 13 inch. macbook air so let's go ahead and take the bottom off here we'll take the wrapper off let's go ahead and take the top of the box off and this comes in three different colors space gray silver and gold .
- MacBook Air 13.3" with Retina Display - 30W USB Type-C Power Adapter - USB Type-C Charge Cable (2m) - Apple 1 Year Limited Warranty with 90 Day Technical Support
- Apple M1 chip with 8-core CPU and 7-core GPU
- 16-core Neural Engine
- 8GB unified memory
- 512GB SSD storage
2020 macbook air so here is the macbook air itself let me set that aside for just a moment and inside the box we have a usbc to usbc cable for charging then we have a little bit of paperwork here see if we can open this up there's no opening part but there's just some paperwork in here so we have a macbook air guide it says welcome to your macbook air a little warranty card and two space gray apple stickers so they match the space gray of the macbook which is always nice and then we have an adapter in here so let's see what we have here this is apple's 30 watt adapter let's see if we can open this up now i guess we'll rip that and take this off and it's the 30 watt adapter so usbc and then it may be different in your country but this piece comes off and can swap out with whatever you have for your country so let me go ahead and set this aside and let's take a closer look at the macbook itself so let's take the wrapper off there we go set the macbook down and this is pretty much the same as the other macbook so on the outside we have two usb 4 or thunderbolt 3 ports so it's updated for usb on the back there's nothing that you wouldn't expect and on the right we still have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and then on the bottom we just have our screws and the little feet for the bottom of the macbook air so it's exactly like we would expect for this year let's go ahead and open it up there we go i've got a little piece of paper it starts up as soon as i open it up and we'll wait for it to boot up now i've been really excited to try these out this is a fanless macbook air there were some complaints about the thermals on the 2020 macbook air my daughter's actually been using that one and this is the equivalent 1250 dollar one and this should be pretty interesting to use now before i set this up let's take a look at the keys this is the same scissor keyboard we had in the 2020 macbook air from earlier this year but some of the keys at the top have changed so we still have an escape key which is nice we have our brightness keys a little mission control key and then we've got a spotlight search key a microphone a moon and then we've got some media keys as well volume up and down and touch id so it should be really nice to use let's go ahead and get it set up now the display is the same sort of display we had before it's a 13.3 inch led backlit display 2560 by 1600 with 227 pixels per inch 400 nits of brightness it supports wide color p3 and has true tone it also supports up to one external display so the pro display 6k xdr display it will support that so if you have a pro display xdr and you want to use it with the macbook i guess it will work with that now the first thing we need to do is select our language so let's go ahead and click next i'll select english then it wants us to select our country or region and in this case it's the united states it looks like it auto detected that after just a second we'll go ahead and click continue and then it says accessibility accessibility features adapt your mac to individual needs you can turn them on now to help you finish setting up and further customize them later in system preferences so we have vision motor hearing and cognitive so if you need those you can enable those right now which is really nice to see i'll click not now and then it wants me to select select wi-fi and set that up now it's connected to wi-fi it's asking me about data and privacy i'll go ahead and click continue or telling me about it rather and then it's asking if i want to transfer anything from a mac time machine or from a windows pc i'll go ahead and click not now i'm going to set it up as new and then it's asking for my apple id so i'll go ahead and put that in once you've put in your apple id you have to agree to the terms and conditions we'll go ahead and hit agree now it's asking me to create a computer account with a password so i'll go ahead and do that now at this point it's asking me if i want to allow find my to locate this mac i do so i'll go ahead and click continue now it's asking if i want to do express setup so i'll go ahead and do that click continue again and now it's asking about app analytics if i want to share that information with app developers and i generally say yes to that also it's talking about screen time and we'll go ahead and click continue and now it's asking if i want to use siri so again i'll click continue and then it will help me set up the word hey and then saying siri after that so let me go ahead and hit continue hey siri hey siri open the documents folder hey siri show me my downloads hey siri what's the weather hey siri what does the rest of my day look like so siri is ready and keep in mind it did not make me use my phone and then have it transfer that data it set it up new on this device so that it's secure to this device we'll go ahead and hit continue and then it's asking if i want to improve syrian dictation i don't want them to share audio recordings so i'll hit continue that's up to you though and then do we want to use file file vault disk encryption it's on by default i generally don't use it depending on which mac i'm using but we'll go ahead and just hit continue anyway and now it's asking if i want to use touch id and or set it up so we'll go ahead and hit continue and then i'll place my finger here and set it up so we'll just put my finger on this just like you do on any other mac and then use the corners of your finger to sort of fill this out it's a super convenient way maybe we'll have face id on the max in the future go ahead and hit continue it says touch id is ready and now it's asking if i want to set up apple pay i'll set that up later and now it says choose your look you want light dark or auto i like auto depending on the time of day it goes between light and dark mode go ahead and hit continue now it's asking me if i want to use true tone now i don't like true tone on macs because i want to see things color accurate so i generally turn this off afterward but if you're a student using it and you're not doing pictures or anything like that then it's fine we'll go ahead and hit continue and then it says setting up your mac and it may take a moment now the macbook air is completely set up before we get into the software this has 802.11 ax or wi-fi 6 and it also supports abgn and ac so basically any wi-fi standard out there along with bluetooth 5.0 it still has that 720p facetime camera we'll take a look at in a moment with your stereo speakers and everything else is the same here but the keyboard like i mentioned before has changed a little bit so we now have a do not disturb button which is kind of interesting and no keyboard brightness button but if i turn the lights off you'll see that it supports a backlit keyboard so it is still backlit but it's not controllable right here it'll be in your settings so i'm not sure why they did that maybe they think it'll be more convenient or maybe it's more power efficient to let the mac do it automatically but it is something they decided to do with this particular macbook air this also has a 720p facetime camera which is kind of odd that they kept it but they say it's better due to the m1's neural engine so let's go ahead and go into quicktime we'll go to file and new movie recording and hit record now we're recording with the facetime camera on the macbook air and hopefully the footage looks a little bit better than it did last time around of course you can see my main camera above but in general this is what it sounds like this is what the microphone sound like and you could use it in a pinch if you needed it for a podcast but the microphones on the macbook pro 13-inch are supposedly much better so we'll go ahead and hit stop and minimize that and i'll save that later now the speakers this year support dolby atmos so let's go ahead and take a listen to them quickly i'll just turn the microphone around so you can hear it a little bit better now supposedly it's going to have fairly decent sound we'll talk more about that in a moment and here's the homepod mini itself it's very small let me set that aside and see what's in the box so the sound is quite good for such a small device it sounds great it's in stereo but keep in mind that it's not going to have the same sound as the macbook pros but it does sound pretty good and goes fairly loud it gets a little bit muffled at the highest volumes now let's take a look at some of the things that i think most of us want to know let's first go and take a look at the specs we'll go to about this mac and as you can see it's apple m1 and 8 gigabytes so let's go ahead and close that and i'm going to install a bunch of apps to see what it's like so we'll check out geekbench it's been updated for the m1 as well as cinebench and disk speed tests and then also you should be able to run things like microsoft office photoshop and final cut without a problem but things like photoshop will be updated fully next year they will be able to run on this though so i'll go to the app store we'll install geekbench and this feels incredibly fast just going around this so let's see if we have cinebench in here we do and we have black magic disk speed test and we'll get all of those installed and normally i have to wait quite a while for these to install but it's pretty fast we'll go into system preferences and go to keyboard and then you can see we have options for turning the keyboard back light off after five seconds of inactivity to save power but there isn't an easy way to reach the backlight so it's interesting that they've removed that from a very simple way to adjust the backlight but let's go ahead and do this we can maybe adjust it here we've got the display we can adjust that and then the keyboard brightness i guess they put it in the control center so it's there you can adjust it but again i think it was way more convenient as a keyboard button so we can bring the keyboard light brightness up and down right here so turn the lights back on let's take a look at some of the benchmarks so we'll go into launch our launch pad here we'll go to geekbench 5 and again this is specific for the m1 it should be nice and fast you'll see it recognizes macbook air 10 comma 1 mac os 11.0 see if we have any updates first we do have 11.0.1 so i'll update that a little bit later and let's go ahead and hit run cpu benchmarks but it says cpu architecture apple silicon let's see what we get it completed and now you can see we have 1706 for single core and 7 398 for multi-core so that is incredibly high and it'll be interesting to see how it compares to other things or other devices so that's pretty impressive single core you can see it's much higher than a 20 20 27 inch retina macbook pro or imac rather and all of pretty much every macbook there is out there so it's faster single core multi-core performance is very close to well it's faster than the 16-inch late 2019 macbook pro but not quite as fast as some of the newer imacs but either way for a fanless mac that's incredibly impressive for what it is so let me go ahead and close that and we'll take a look at the next benchmark now i don't know if cinebench has been optimized for the macbook air yet but let's see if we can run this wait for it to open geekbench here there we go cinebench r23 go ahead and hit accept and hit start so let's see what we get here now finished with cinebench and as you can see it's 6880 points that puts it just below a 12 core mac pro basically so that's pretty impressive as far as its score of course that puts it below a ryzen threadripper or a core i9 but still this is a fanless macbook air with eight gigs of ram which is really impressive to see these scores now let's take a look at the actual disk speed so we'll go over to i guess we don't have it here there we go let's go back in here and go to blackmagic disk speed test and it says you need to install rosetta because this is not an optimized app so when you're actually installing an app that's not fully supported yet by big sur on m1 it will install this for you and then run just like it would with photoshop so now let's go ahead and open blackmagic disk speed test and let's make sure the settings are on one gigabyte we'll go ahead and click start test and let's see what we get so it's so far 2732 megabytes per second write speed and 2796 megabytes per second read speed on the right speed now we're above 3000 for the right speed and 2700 for the read speed so this is incredibly fast i think double that of last year's macbook air so that's really impressive now the macbook air has a 49.9 watt hour lithium polymer battery that's good for 15 hours of web browsing or 18 hours of apple tv movie playback according to apple so that means if you're on a flight that's going across country or somewhere else or in the car for a long time or just in the office and you need this to last it should last you easily throughout the day so it'll be interesting to test that out and then also you have a bunch of m1 apps that are supported for this device so even if your app is not optimized for it yet it will work but if you have an m1 optimized app it should be much faster than its intel counterpart that you have on previous mac so it'll be interesting to see how this goes over time and after running all those benchmarks the bottom of this was nice and cool it really wasn't that hot it was barely warm and normally a macbook would be very hot after running all those benchmarks so it's pretty impressive as far as that but in the future we'll have full photoshop support and we'll see that probably next year but other than photoshop support final cut pro has been optimized all of apple's apps are optimized and we'll see things like pixelmator in the next couple days or coming weeks with other apps that will be optimized for m1 that should take advantage of everything internally including that new neural engine for things like motion tracking and final cut pro so i'm interested to try this over the next few days now if there's something specific you'd like to hear about the m1 macbook air or the macbook pro or the mac mini any of those let me know in the comments below and i'll try and do that when i do a full review of this after i've used it for a little while but let me know if there's anything specific you haven't found anywhere else that you'd like to know about this new macbook air if you'd like to get your hands on this wallpaper.

Comments
Post a Comment
If you have any doubt. Tell us