The 2018 Best Laptop Is Still the MacBook Air Which Has Been Mostly Unchanged Since 2012. That’s Sad, and Here’s Why, Part II

On September 12, 2018, Apple is rumored to update its line of laptops, possibly replacing the Macbook Air. Chances are, the replacement will be worse than what it is replacing, an aging product that has sat mostly unchanged since 2012.
Here is why, unbelievably, the Macbook Air is, six years on, still the best laptop in 2018.
As we saw in the teacup example, many products are about tradeoffs, and laptops are all about tradeoffs.
The essence of a laptop is portability. It’s true that many laptop owners end up using a laptop in one or two stationary spots. To them, I say, get a desktop computer. You’re using the laptop wrong. For the rest of us normals, the laptop must be portable, and portability inevitably demands compromise. There is only so much that fit in a constrained space, and so there must always be a trade-off, a sacrifice.
When you are considering the best laptop…
- You cannot have the fastest computer.
- You cannot have the most ports.
- You cannot have the most storage options.
- You can’t have it all.
Take a look at Marco’s excellent review.
This article disagrees with Marco’s conclusions, but in many respects mirrors his philosophy of what constitutes a great laptop, particularly in these concluding sentences:
“It’s designed for us, rather than asking us to adapt ourselves to it. It helps us perform our work, rather than adding to our workload.”
The MacBook Air represents the endpoint of a series of considerations that reflect that philosophy.
MagSafe
The MagSafe connector, so noticeably absent from the latest Pro models, eliminated that one nagging monkey off our collective shoulders: the anxiety that we will destroy our laptop or ourselves when we inevitably trip over the power cord. The futuristic solution is, of course, to eliminate the power cord entirely but despite Apple’s investment in wireless charging, we are still a ways off from that paradise.
Relatively long battery life
When Apple first released the MacBook Air, it was the sveltest machine out there, famously fitting inside a manilla envelope. This slightness did not come without cost: the battery life was awful. Six years on, it is the MacBook Air that is the fat mac of the product line, and improvements in battery technology means the MacBook Air has for some time hit the sweet spot between mass and longevity.
Relatively quiet
Believe it or not, the MacBook Air does have a fan. If you’re using the laptop for its primary purpose — laptoping — versus, say, rendering a 3D model of the Pleiades star cluster for your Epic Space Opera or Epic Space Multiplayer Murder Game, you should rarely hear it activate. Apple has always held a priority in making computers as acoustically inoffensive as possible, even going back as far as the ill-fated and fanless Apple III, but sometimes the tradeoffs aren’t worth it. Here, the tradeoffs are just right.
Relatively cheap
Apple famously doesn’t ship junk, but the MacBook Air, which used to be the premium end of the product line, is now its budget model. Coupled with semi-frequent student discounts, clearance sales, etc…, the MacBook Air can be had for about as cheap as an Apple product can get, which isn’t cheap but is at least… reasonable.
Relatively lightweight
When the MacBook Air came out, its wasp-waisted formfactor was immediately copied by every other manufacturer, to the point where it is now the dominant portable computer format. Though it is by no means the lightest laptop out there today (it is handily beaten in that regard by its confusingly named sibling, the MacBook, which now seems to occupy the spot once held by the MacBook Air), it is still reasonably light enough to carry around, and it still fits in a Tyvek FedEx envelope, the laptop case of choice for discerning cheapskates.
Decent keyboard
But perhaps most importantly, and embarassingly compared to the defect-plagued, unreasonably shallow offering of its premium sibling, the MacBook Air has a decent keyboard. Next to portability, the defining feature of the laptop is… typing. Over all other considerations, a laptop, is at its core, a portable typewriter. If you need a tablet, you should get a tablet, but a laptop is for typing.
The September 12 announcement will be interesting to watch for this very feature alone. Apple has been on a continuous trendline in terms of reducing the depth of its keys, seemingly hellbent on reducing a keyboard to a smooth solid surface. Yet, no one can deny the serious problems it has had with the latest attempts to do so. The chicklet keyboard on the MacBook Air itself is a shaving from its earlier keyboard iterations. The difference is that, while preferences can vary among typists, the gulf between the tactile joy from spring-loaded noise monsters from eons ago and the minimalist tic-tacs of the MacBook Air can be chalked up to individual taste, whereas the double-butterfly dust-defeated platelets that pass for a pro-level keyboard now are objectively recall-worthy garbage. Will Apple double down on this flattening, or will they cry uncle and leave the MacBook Air on team chicklet?
On this very issue alone, the MacBook Air may retain its title as the best laptop of 2018.
And that’s sad.
