The MacBook Air is a true Goldilocks of form factors. The 13in screen and full-size keyboard feel big enough to work on pretty comfortably – the trackpad is enormous, too, as we’ll discuss in a moment – but it’s contained within a chassis that’s slim (4.1mm at the thinnest point) and portable (1.25kg). The MacBook Pro is comparatively bulky, and the (now discontinued) 12in MacBook can feel cramped, but this is just right.
The trackpad is immense – 8.2 x 12cm – and offers the additional benefits of Force Touch, meaning you can do deep presses to trigger secondary functions such as dictionary lookups on words. It should also be more reliable than a conventional trackpad because it has fewer moving parts: it doesn’t actually click downwards, instead simulating a click with a small haptic buzz.
Now available at a lower entry price of [US$999], the MacBook Air is an appealing if little-changed laptop… – which is to say, it’s an excellent light laptop for light use, with a beautiful portable design, excellent battery life and lovely trackpad.
MacDailyNews Take: While we miss the 12-inch MacBook, the new 13-inch MacBook Air more than makes up for it!
The biggest issue is with disk space. My application folder is 64GB. Sure I could trim it down a bit but it doesn’t leave much space for files. I personally think 256GB is the practical minimal amount for Macs.
That fake Citizen X fool had better shut up about having given inspiration to Tim Cook and Jony I’ve about the improvements on the Mac Book Air 2019 – everyone is sick of your fake BS, fake Citizen X
Well you’re wrong. I did speak to Jony and Tim and they did take my advice. Very good advice it is too .
#MAGA eats BANNEE CITIZEN X for breakfast
While I agree with your post, you are a despicable imposter just like the other X clown…
I talk to myself a lot, and I hate that BANNED CITIZEN X guy. #MAGA
The imposter has nothing better to do with his pitiful life. Please be advised I am writing the MDN Webmaster to have you permanently BANNED…
Shitty disk space in a piece of shit keyboard. What a bargain
Give it a next gen KB, and offer a model with a processor/base storage upgrade for $200 more and you’d have a killer computing “Air line.”
Although on reflection, the much improved entry level 13″ MBP pretty much does that and offers a for sure better screen to boot. So not the priority these things had been to me until that major refresh….
The 12″ just needed more power, and an extra TB3 port. It still is better than these.
It is a pity the CPU clock is so strangled by the memory access (RAM).
As soon as you have a lot of real RANDOM acces (reads) of floating point data to the RAM (i.e. beyond the L3 cache), the CPU is clocked down to the stock 1.6GHz, REGARDLESS of the temperature or power consumption (for instance, only 1.5W power consumption and temperatures around 60°C, still only 1.6GHz on a single core). As soon as the memory access hits only the cache, the frequency goes up to 3GHz, and consumption goes up to 7W.
This is bad design, either on Apple’s or intel’s side (and it’s NOT the thermal design). But maybe this can be fixed in software. When the random memory access uses more than 32 bytes all at once, the CPU frequency goes up.
Temperature and power are measured using intel’s Power Gadget. The data provided is from an infinite loop with random reads, here’s the code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#define SIZE (25625616)
#define OVER 256
typedef double mytype;
mytype array[SIZE+OVER];
int main(void)
{
printf(“random %1.2fMiB, straight %ldB\n”,SIZE/(1024.01024.0)sizeof(int),OVER*sizeof(mytype));
long dummy = 0;
while( dummy != 1234567890 ) // end virtually never
{
int adr = (rand() % SIZE);
for( int j=0; j<OVER; j++) dummy += array[adr+j];
}
printf(“%ld\n”,dummy); // pretend to use dummy
return 0;
}
License MacOS Tim, its the sugar-drink salesperson thing to do!
Geez. Looks like Macbook Air is a stunner. The price is a stunner as well, haha. Good thing, I’ll wait for the refurbished one. Hoping it works as good as new! 🙂