Obviously you are visiting this page after reading the day 1 and day 2 stories. So, you are very welcome in a one’s week, maybe premature, surely not in depth, review of Macbook air 2020:
Design. Everybody (these guys for example) talks about the obsolete design of M1 Macbook air and the (at last) new redesign of M2 Macbook. Well, to my eyes the aluminum finishing of the M1’s chassis, the beautifully illuminated keyboard and the negligible weight and most importantly, thickness, are more than enough to consider this machine legendary.
Discovering a life without noise, pros and cons. It takes only a few hours to get used to the absolute quietness of this little masterpiece of high tech. And when it happens, there is no way to look back. You feel deeply grateful to Apple for removing the fun from the inwards of its machine. However, in Greece, where I live, amongst the socio-economical crisis and the political corruption, we suffer from really hot summers. Mac was fairly warm during editing family summer photos in lightroom with temperature below 30 degrees Celsius. But when the thermometer went red indicating a temperature of over 37 degrees Celsius, even simple browsing in chrome was enough to make the aluminum chasis feel hot in my hands. I was feeling pity for my Mac and I wished it had just a little fun inside it… just to make it feel a little cooler.
Rediscovering trackpad and keyboard shortcuts. Contrary to windows PCs, in Mac’s world command key is the king. After a week, I can say, with some reservation, that I got familiar with most of the command combination shortcuts, usually needed (of course a cheat spreadsheet with keyboard shortcuts is always open in a chrome tab). The trackpad gestures function smoothly, and after a few hours of use, you forget even the existence of that obsolete “gadget” called mouse.
MacOs. No doubt, it’s beautiful. But it is far from being considered customizable, at least at the extend Windows or Linux distributions are. Additionally: the disk’s storing structure is not familiar to me (no disk:c or disk:d, like in Windows), the desktop has not the Windows’ practicality and I have not yet figured out how exactly the windows management functions. For example it was not straightforward to me that you can switch with gestures only between apps in full screen mode and that app windows do not stick at the corners like in Windows OS. To be honest I felt forced to install an app (like this) to manage organize the app windows (those not in full screen mode) in a more user-friendly sticky way. Somehow, I feel that my digital desktop is a bit hostile to me.
Battery. Legendary. More than 12 hours screen time after every full charge, depending on the running apps.
Display. I like editing photos mainly in lightroom and the standards I have set after all these years in front of photo editing software are absolutely met with this fabulous display.
Performance. I “stressed” Mac only importing, editing and exporting photos in lightroom. And its performance was…epic. Every editing command was executed in the blink of an eye, making it seem effortless.
Conclusion. As many others have already commented, Macbook Air is the beginning of a computing revolution, at least as far as hardware is considered. The Os is beautiful, but not tailored to my needs. I reckon I will get used to it really soon. And then I will be totally captivated by this glorious piece of tech, even though it already belongs to the previous Apple’s silicon cpu generation
