 The MacBook Air is dead. Long live the MacBook Air. Here it is. At long last, Apple has finally, finally redesigned the MacBook Air with a more modern design and, yes, a retina display. It starts at $1,199 and it looks like a MacBook Air should look. It has this tapered design, it's super thin, it's pretty light. It's a MacBook Air. If you're thinking about this new MacBook Air, you probably have been hanging on to your old MacBook Air. It was the king of laptops for a long time. It changed the entire laptop world when it came out. But a lot has changed with laptops and especially Apple laptops since that first Air. So I want to talk about what's different now about laptops and how Apple has taken all of that stuff and applied it to this new MacBook Air. First, ports. This technically has three of them, a headphone jack, thank God, and two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports. That's right, MagSafe is gone, so be careful not to trip on the power cord. There's also no SD card slot. Sorry. The trade-off is that USB-C is used to charge lots of things now and you can even power up off a battery pack if you want to. And if you have the right hub, you can plug just one cable into your laptop when you sit down at your desk to connect a display, power, and a bunch of other accessories. But that means you're also going to have to deal with dongles when you plug in stuff like your iPhone. Sorry again. Second is screen. The MacBook Air has a retina display. It's 2560 by 1600 pixels, which means everything is much sharper and better. Though you should know that the screen is glossy now and it's not quite as nice as what you get on the Pro laptops. Still, it's a huge upgrade over the old Air. The bezels are way smaller now and they're black, but the screen doesn't go quite edge to edge like other Windows laptops do. Now, the last thing I should mention about the screen is it doesn't quite get as bright as I'd like it to. It's been fine even in pretty bright rooms and doors, but I found myself cranking up the brightness to almost the max level way more often than I usually do. Third is the keyboard. Apple has been trying to get this new keyboard design right for a few years now. Now, what you need to know is that the keys, they don't travel very far and it sounds kind of clacky and loud. This third generation butterfly keyboard, it is a little bit quieter than it used to be, but more importantly, it should also be a little bit more dust resistant than before because that's been a problem with MacBook Pros and hopefully it's solved now. Overall, I'm basically fine with it, but you should know it does take a little while to get used to. Oh, one more thing. There's no silly touch bar touch screen thing on the keyboard. It's just function keys that do what you want them to do when you want them to do it. Fourth is Touch ID. You can log in with your fingerprint and it's fast and easy to use. It's a thousand times better than typing in your password. Now, it's not as convenient as what a lot of Windows laptops have. They let you unlock with your face, sort of like an iPhone does, but it's still a big upgrade and inside Touch ID is powered by this super secure T2 chip that also handles a few other security functions. Fifth, trackpad. It's huge now, but don't worry about accidentally tapping it. It's really good at avoiding that. It's also a force touch trackpad, which means that you can click on it anywhere, even on the top, and it just works. Now, this trackpad isn't quite as big as the ones that come on the Pro models, but it is really accurate. Sixth, speakers. They're better and louder. They're louder. I don't know. They have better stereo separation and they're also powered by that T2 chip, but whatever. The important thing is they're much nicer than what you had on the old Air. Seventh is just overall build quality. This thing feels a lot tighter and nicer than the old MacBook Air. It weighs 2.75 pounds, which honestly isn't that much lighter, but it's smaller overall than the old Air. It's just a really good, solid laptop. Eighth is the computer stuff. Processor and RAM and storage and all of that. Now, this one gets a little bit complicated, but bear with me, because I need to tell you a story about Intel. Oh, Intel. If you haven't been following laptops, you just need to know that Intel has had not a great few years. Compared to how processors have advanced on phones, Intel's progress on laptop and desktop chips has been much slower. So, the processor on this new Air is a dual-core, eighth-gen Core i5, but it's something called a Y-series version of that chip, which means that it's lower power and not as fast as the desktop class U-series that you can find on some other laptops. Bottom line, is this faster than your old Air? Yes, but it's not that much faster and in some ways it lags behind other Windows laptops. You can do all the same stuff that you can do in your current Air. So, I've been running a half dozen apps at a time, along with more than a dozen tabs in Chrome, and everything is pretty okay. I think for what most people will do with this laptop, it's fine. So, if you're hoping you're gonna be able to step up and get way faster video editing, no, not so much. The fans are gonna spin up and you're gonna have a very long wait for your export. And the same goes with something like processing raw photos or doing anything that relies heavily on multi-core processing, because again, this Air only has two cores. Those kinds of tasks are gonna bring this thing to a chug, way easier than will happen on a MacBook Pro. As for battery life, well, I have to say that I haven't had quite enough testing time to give you like a number of hours that I can be really confident in. By the time we shot this video, I've used it for a couple of days and I got about seven hours on each of those days with a mix of web browsing and email and some photo editing and listening to Spotify and actually a little bit of fairly intense testing. So that's pretty good, but I don't think you're going to get Apple's claimed 12 hours of web browsing time. It's not a battery life champ, basically, but I am very confident in saying it's going to last longer than your decrepit old battery on your old MacBook Air. When I first started testing this laptop, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I should compare it to. Is it like a 12-inch MacBook just blown up to a slightly bigger size? Is it more like a 13-inch MacBook Pro but just with cheaper parts? I mean, you can barely tell the two of them apart when you set them side by side. So which is it? Actually, I think it's both of those things. It's a really nice laptop. Do I wish that Apple had found a way to maybe make a slightly less expensive laptop? Well, yeah, I kind of do. You can get an iPad or a Windows laptop or even a Chromebook for a lot less that does almost everything this does except for one thing, and that one thing is running macOS. Look, here's the deal. People like the Mac. It's great to have a computer that does all the computer stuff you want in a way that you're familiar with, and Apple has taken way too long to update its mass market consumer laptop. Now the wait is over, but if you were hoping that lightning would strike twice and this new MacBook Air would be as revolutionary as the old MacBook Air, well, it's not. It basically is a MacBook that finally includes all the stuff that has been happening with laptops for the past few years. A lot of people just want a good, modern, reliable Mac. Nothing fancy, really. They just deserve something that's up to par, and for those people, everybody that's been hanging on to that old MacBook Air, this is a nice upgrade. It's par for the course, but you know what? That's probably enough. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for watching, and let me know in the comments. Do you think that Apple did enough to update the MacBook Air this go-round? I think the answer is probably yes, but I'm curious to know what you think. And if you're interested in the iPad Pro, we just reviewed that thing yesterday, and in some ways it's vastly more powerful than this laptop, so you should check that video out.