 The other day I'm looking at a list of the best-selling laptops on Amazon. I had to do a double take. The best-selling laptop currently in 2020 is the MacBook Air. But not the new MacBook Air. The MacBook Air that was released three years ago, discontinued six months ago, and originally designed 12 years ago. And come on guys, I know that the logo is so so pretty, but this thing can't possibly still be worth the $750 it's been selling for. To find out we got our hands on the second and third best-selling laptops on Amazon. Both Acer Aspire 5's that come in at $300 and $500 respectively and should kick the absolute pants off of this relic. This video is brought to you by GlassWire. What's going in and out of your network when you're connected to the internet? Find out with GlassWire and see if there are any suspicious apps behaving badly on your PC or Android device. Offer code Linus gets you 25% off down below. When the MacBook Air was unveiled it was revolutionary. Apple called it the world's thinnest notebook and shocked people by only including, huh, a single USB type A port and dropping the hard drive, CD drive, and ethernet port. Scandalous. At least it was back when the basic design of this laptop was established in 2008. Now we did get some changes to the I.O. and the screen in 2012 and while technically this is the 2017 model, the only difference between it and the one from five years earlier was an update to Intel's 5th gen core processor. So how well has it held up then? Hey, hello there. You gotta give Apple credit. Hinge feels good. It's thin, but it's strong. Actually by today's standards the I.O. is very favorable to type As, SD card reader, Thunderbolt 2, and those old-school Apple fans will love this. I'm tippity-tappity. I'm typing. I trip over the cord. Bam! MagSafe! Just like that. Hey, MagSafe is freaking cool. I love it, but wow, this screen is a real blast from the past. Is that a TN panel? Look at that viewing angle. Now you see it, now you don't. You know in fairness for a cheapo laptop, it's not bad. Certainly a lot thinner than the Acer. Certainly a lot less flex than the Acer. What's the deck flex? Wow, man, there's almost none. Apple really does do some things very well, don't they? Meanwhile in PC land, this has gotten a lot better for like a budget PC compared to years past, but definitely still some flex there compared to like look at that. The keys are moving, the deck ain't. I guess then we should kick off the comparison with some reasons why buying the MacBook Air 2017 might not actually be a horrible idea. First of all, for the price, the build quality is absolutely outstanding. The all-aluminum chassis gives the Air a premium feel that you simply don't get on a $750 laptop because it's a very expensive laptop. You don't get on a $750 laptop because it isn't a $750 laptop. It's still a thousand dollar machine. It's just discounted to $750. So what that means is it comes with some other perks compared to budget machines as well like fast storage, even if there isn't much of it, and a high quality Wi-Fi and Bluetooth solution. For lighter tasks then, particularly if you really want Mac OS, the MacBook Air hides its age surprisingly well. While writing this script on the Air, it was shockingly hard to complain about with a trackpad that still beats those found on our Acer machines along with a keyboard that is quite frankly better than a modern MacBook. Even the MacBook Pro 16 inch. Now there are better keyboards out there, like I would rather have a Surface laptop or a Dell XPS to write on, but this one is really good and a lot cheaper than either of those machines. What I can complain about though is the screen. The first thing I noticed was the massive bezels and the second was the 1440x900 resolution. Compared to even our $300 laptop here, it is a lot less sharp, not to mention the mediocre colors and viewing angles by modern standards. Now the 16 by 10 aspect ratio helps it make up a little bit of ground, but not enough to make up for the years of panel technology advancement that has taken place since 2013. Another area that the MacBook Air gets trounced by our $300 laptop is performance. Browsing the web, navigating folders, launching applications, it all lacks the snap that we got on the dual core Ryzen 3 in even our $300 machine, and then gets absolutely trounced by the four core Core i5 in our $500 machine here. So if you need to do anything other than writing documents in Word or browsing Facebook, you'll probably wish that you had something more powerful than this. With all of that said though, and this has really surprised me, after spending some time with these three laptops, if it was my money, given that most of what I do on my portable computer is word process, I would probably choose the MacBook Air. I know right? Well, the thing is the Aspire, like look at it. It looks like a stock image of a laptop. The keyboard and trackpad are so much worse, and the Air's reduced weight and better battery life are going to be a big deal to a lot of shoppers out there, not just me. Now to be clear, the $300 Aspire 5 is a fantastic deal, but depending what you're after, so is the Air. So what all this means is that a video that started out with us laughing at Apple's pathetic specs ended up turning into a conversation about what makes a good laptop good. Because if you can't nail the bits that you interact with, the keyboard, the trackpad, and maybe the touchscreen, nothing else matters, like I'm not going to run out and buy a car that performs great around the track, but makes my back hurt every time I sit in it. This does leave me in a bit of a pickle though. I'm supposed to be having a laugh at people that buy old laptops because of the pretty Apple logo on them, but now I'm left wondering if the best sub-$1,000 laptop really is this old clunker from Apple. Have no fear! Of course it's not! Ah, thank you Alex, we have some more contenders! Which brings us to the Dell Inspiron 13 7002-in-1 and the Lenovo Flex 14. Now we actually did a sponsored video on the Flex 14 a little while ago focusing on how AMD has been changing the budget laptop game. And even though the check has been safely cashed, I can still enthusiastically recommend this thing, especially at its current price of just $530. It fully deserves its spot at number four on the Amazon bestsellers list, and compared to the Air, it's more powerful, has a way better screen, has better I.O., and still has excellent battery life. But the MacBook Air still does have a leg up in a couple of areas. Lenovo clearly cut some corners to get the Flex under $600, and it shows in the, uh, oof, in the build quality. The screen's pretty wobbly, the keyboard and trackpad are good, but not quite at the level of the Mac, and Lenovo might have gotten the name for this thing from what happens when you press on the chassis. Also, this pen holder is excruciatingly stupid. Which brings us then to the Dell Inspiron 7000-2-in-1. At $750, it is the same price as the MacBook Air, but better in pretty much every possible way. Now, one note, by the way, guys, Dell didn't have the exact loadout that we wanted to compare this thing to. So this is the Black Edition, which has an 8th Gen Core i7 processor and a 4K display with a price of $1,000, along with a sleek black paint job. But the overall experience of things like the build quality and the keyboard are identical to the $750 version that we would actually recommend to compete with this. So then, how is it? Well, once again, the MacBook Air actually comes out ahead in the build quality contest, but not by as much this time. The Inspiron is all aluminum, has tiny bezels, doesn't have nearly the same degree of deck flex as our Flex 14. The chassis stiffness is incredible, but honestly, given the price, for the $750 model, it stands up really well. When compared to the MacBook Air, the Inspiron 7000's trackpad does fall behind, but that is more than made up for, with its touchscreen, convertibility, and generally betterness in every possible way. You get four times the storage, double the processing cores, not to mention that they are several generations newer, and the thing just feels modern. Opening applications or browsing the web, it's instantaneous, and I'm not concerned that it's going to be unusable or have support dropped in the next couple of years. You also don't have to worry about getting one of those stupid Thunderbolt 2 dongles. The Inspiron has USB Type-A, Type-C, full-size HDMI, and an SD card reader. The biggest thing that makes it stand out, though, is that when I compare the Inspiron 7000 and the MacBook Air side by side, there's just nothing that makes me really want to go back to the Air. So there we go, guys. We had to work a little harder than we thought to make our point, but we got there. Please, stop buying the 2017 MacBook Air. Our unit was manufactured in May of last year, and there's a reason that it's been sitting on a shelf since then. It's because when the 2017 MacBook Air launched, it wasn't worth buying, and the only Apple products that actually get better with age are ciders. Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. Squarespace is the place to go if you want to build yourself a simple website in minutes. They're a leader in website design, and their all-in-one platform means you can even buy domains through them, as well as create email campaigns. You can make any website from personal portfolios to resumes to fanfic websites, and even shopping ones. And they have a website analytics tool to help you keep track of how your website's doing, and find all the weak areas to help make sure you get a steady stream of traffic. They've got award-winning templates that'll make your site stand out instead of looking like it's from the 90s, and even we use Squarespace. Both LinusMediaGroup.com and LTXExpo.com were built quickly using Squarespace. If you get stuck, they've got 24-7 support ready to help you out via live chat and email, so go to Squarespace.com forward slash LTT for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, you can get 10% off today. So thanks for watching. If you guys are looking for another Apple-related video to watch, maybe check out our recent review of the Pro Display XDR, kind of in a different price category, but it's a really good video, so I'd like you to go watch it. There.