 The last MacBook Air had two fatal flaws. Apple's butterfly keys were a disaster and the dual core processor kneecapped any potential for serious multitasking. Both of these are now fixed in the 2020 model. But now the MacBook Air has two even bigger problems. Dell and HP are now building laptops that not only outperform the MacBook Air, but also manage to match its legendary build quality. So what to recommend then? A laptop for sure, but which one? We'll find out. As expected, the 2020 Air's all aluminum chassis is exceptionally thin and rigid, serving as a reminder that Apple's billion plus dollars a month in R&D must go somewhere. They really are a leader when it comes to working with premium materials. Like the competitors we've chosen, the Air features two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a headphone combo port, but Dell gets bonus points for the placement of its charging ports on either side and its micro SD reader, while the Spectre X360 actually stands out from both of the others, thanks to their inclusion of a type A USB. Something the 2020 Air absolutely nails though is the speakers. These are legitimately the best sounding thin and light speakers that I have ever heard. The combination of a shocking amount of bass and Dolby Atmos produces a sound that somehow feels twice as big as the machine itself. The only problem is that to produce this much sound out of such little speakers, it's very clear that there's a lot of software trickery at play. Which is where the HP Spectre X360 comes in for the kill. Although the X360 cannot produce the lower notes that the MacBook Air can, at medium volumes, it does produce a clearer sound that can make speech easier to understand, which can be really important for things like video calls. As for the XPS 13, well, you're gonna have an exceptional listening experience on that as well, using the set of dollar store earphones that you dug out from under the couch cushions. From the outside, there's another striking difference between these laptops. The MacBook Air has significantly more last gen looking thick bezels, especially on the top, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. You see, in a premium ultrabook, I'm looking for a couple of things. Great build quality so that I can take it with me on the go, excellent battery life, same thing, and an exceptional keyboard so that I can really get to work. And that thicker top bezel on the MacBook Air, surprisingly gives it the best keyboard here. Allow me to explain. After a sip from this bottle, back in stock on lttstore.com, but I forgot to bring it, so. For a good typing experience, you need three things, a stiff chassis, consistent key switches, and comfortable hand positioning. Now, all three contenders here nailed the chassis stiffness and the key switches. But if your hands are a little larger, you're likely to be less comfortable on the Spectre X360 or the XPS 13 compared to the MacBook Air. And this is due to its much larger palm rest area. So if your hands are hanging off of the edge of your laptop, you can't really rest them there, particularly if those edges are super sharp, like on the X360. In an attempt to quantify the importance of this, we actually grabbed a set of calipers and some Lysol wipes and measured the length of people's hands in the office versus how long their hand is while typing to find the ratio between the two. This ratio was plugged into existing hand length data for the entire population to figure out what percentage of people are likely to be comfortable on each of these laptops. Turns out just 36% of females and 21% of males are going to be comfortable on the X360. Ouch. Now, the Dell was a big improvement, but the MacBook Air? Well, 92% of females and 77% of males are going to be more at ease on this thing thanks to the additional space on the palm rest. I personally think out of the three, I would go XPS 13, but if I had to make a blanket recommendation, thing is I got small hands, guys, the MacBook Air is one that I could be more confident in. Interestingly, this metric, which we've never really looked at before, probably explains why Alex won't shut up about how great the Surface Laptop's keyboard is when I personally don't find it to be that exceptional. On that subject, all of our test subjects have exceptional displays that deliver accurate colors to the viewer, but there is one area where Apple really nailed it here, the resolution. 2560 by 1600 is the 16 by 10 version of QHD. The resolution that we've been saying should be standard on high-end laptops for years. Yes, yes, Dell and HP both have 4K display options that will give you more pixels than Apple, and HP even has an OLED option that will deliver absolutely stunning visuals at the expense of some battery life. But guys, these are 13-inch screens. You don't need over 8 million pixels on a display this size. All it serves to do is hurt battery life and make it more difficult to crank the backlight through the super small pixels. We still feel that Apple continues to drop the ball by not including touchscreen support on their laptops, though, but they make up a lot of that ground by adorning their ample wrist rests with what are unassailably the best track pads on the market. Now, the XPS 13 track pad in particular is getting darn close, but every time I use a non-touchscreen laptop, I find myself genuinely missing the feature. Not that often necessarily, but sometimes. Now, of course, for Apple users, there's gonna be a lot more than a touchscreen to miss by moving over to the PC. The excellent integration between Apple's laptops and their other devices just keeps getting better. I mean, one that stood out to me this time is that the Apple Watch can be used for authentication. It's been a while since I've really tried to use a MacBook. That makes unlocking the MacBook just as convenient as the facial recognition on our Windows devices. And then if you don't have an Apple Watch, Touch ID is still excellent and is gonna get you into the OS super fast. Bringing us to Mac OS. I'm at the point now where I don't really understand the hate going either way. Yes, it will take a few days for a tech savvy person to get used to the different shortcuts and general workflow. But with how web-centric almost everything we do is now, I suspect that for many people, aside from app compatibility, like whatever it is you do professionally, aside from that, the fact that you're on a completely different operating system is probably gonna fade into the background for the most part. The only thing that, the little thing, but that continually annoyed me was that to get a window, to take up half of the display, I have to like long press full screen and then use this stupid little menu. Like why the heck do I have to install a paid app to get proper window snapping functionality? Oh, Microsoft patented window snapping? That's a dick move. Dick move. Anyway, everything's been pretty positive so far and I promised a problem here, didn't I? I could point out its webcam, especially right now with work from home being such a big trend, but quite frankly, all of them are bad. So I guess we're gonna have to wait for somebody to make the first move and this isn't gonna be it. But there's a bigger one, it's performance. For some reason, Apple has decided to include only a WiFi 5 network card, which probably isn't a huge deal right now, but as WiFi 6 becomes more commonplace, XPS 13 and X360 owners are going to enjoy significantly faster WiFi. And as for the processor, well, the base model still has a dual core i3, which we find truly unacceptable in 2020. Even something like a background app install or an update can make a dual core machine feel sluggish. But the good news is, even if it costs extra, at least you can get a quad core in the MacBook Air now. So for our config, we chose the i5-1030NG7 for its decent balance between price and performance. And it is a lot better than last gen. Unfortunately, it's not actively cooled, or at least not directly. There is a fan in the chassis, but there's no heat pipe on the small wimpy heat sink assembly for the CPU, connecting it to some kind of radiator and the exhaust of that fan. What that means is that the MacBook Air 2020 only has about 10 watts of CPU power to play with before it would overheat. So needless to say then, it gets absolutely flogged by the XPS 13 and Spectre X360 with their 25 watts of available CPU power. Consuming less power means more battery life though, right? Well, the thing is, it's hard to directly compare battery life results between Mac OS and Windows. But in our testing, the MacBook Air and the XPS 13 both got a bit over 10 hours away from the wall while the Spectre X360 kept going for an additional hour, which makes recommending the MacBook Air slightly difficult. The feel in the hand, the display, the keyboard and speakers, like all the parts that you would interact with regularly are excellent. But as Spect, this is a $1,500 machine that will fall behind very fast if you try to do more than browsing the web and writing that novel you've been working on. That said, heaps of people don't need to do much more than that. And with the improved keyboard, it really is a lot better. And the additional power, which really is a lot better, this is a much more compelling machine than last gen. Furthermore, no matter what the price or performance, the XPS and the X360 are also really expensive and they will never come with Mac OS for the people who care about that. So in a total reversal here, yeah, it's flawed, but I'm ready to recommend the 2020 Air to anyone that doesn't need maximum performance and is willing to spend a little bit extra for a thin, light, comfortable laptop. And then for those who do need the performance, there are rumors of a new MacBook Pro 13 inch that might really make these Windows machines sweat. So make sure you're subscribed for that face off. If you're bored and looking for something else to watch, we recently did a video on why not to buy the MacBook Air, except we were talking about the one from 2017, which was somehow the best seller on Amazon at that time. People really need to get something newer. There's like a lot of great options out there. So go check that video out.