**The MacBook Air is Back in Business**

I'm thrilled to say that the MacBook Air has finally seen a price cut this generation. When it was first refreshed back in 2018, it started out at $1200 for the base model. Last year, it got a $100 price cut, and today's 20/20 MacBook Air starts at just $999.

Not only is the price lower, but you also get more storage to boot - 256 gigs instead of the previous 128 gig base model. And if you're a student or have a .edu email address, you can save an additional $100 on the MacBook Air, potentially bringing it below $1,000.

**Upgrading is Worth It**

Before you go out and grab that base model, I'd highly recommend upgrading at least a little bit. The base model comes with a dual-core i3 processor, which is perfectly reasonable for most people's needs. But if you're willing to shell out another $100, you can jump up to a quad-core i5 chip - the same spec as the MacBook Airs I'm using right now.

Other upgrades worth considering are 16 gigs of RAM or more SSD storage, but at $1099 with a quad-core chip, this thing actually makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. It's not a powerhouse, but it's enough laptop for what the vast majority of people need.

**The MacBook Air is Now Competitive**

For context, my current daily driver is the XPS 13 2&1, which I really like and which isn't cheap. But the thing is, the new MacBook Air is actually very equivalent to the XPS 13 if you look at the specs - same display size, 8 gigs of RAM, 10th gen i5 processor, 512 gigs of storage... the only real difference is that this is a slightly lower wattage Y series chip.

The takeaway here is that Apple has actually become competitive on price. I'd argue that for a lot of people, the MacBook Air may be a better call based on the build quality, Mac OS, and legendary reliability (notwithstanding the keyboard issues for a couple of years).

**A Legitimate Upgrade**

I've been kind of harsh to the air in the past - the previous generation was just fine but not really great. But the 20/20 MacBook Air pretty much rectifies all of my major issues. This is a legitimately excellent laptop, and that's not something I've said about a MacBook Air in like 8 years.

If you're in the Windows camp, there's not a lot here to tempt you away when it comes to looking at the MacBook Air as a premium laptop. There's a lot to like - an excellent screen, good keyboard, finally one of the best trackpads in the business, killer build quality, Thunderbolt 3, and good performance.

**A New Recommendation**

The next time someone asks which premium laptop I recommend, the MacBook Air is very quickly reclaimed its spot on top. Although for being real, the XPS 13 still has a spot in my bag for now.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the 20/20 MacBook Air and it is a very very good laptop is it enough to make you switch from Windows maybe not but it is in my opinion the best Mac they've made in years for a very very long time when someone would ask me which premium laptop they should buy the MacBook Air was the default answer for me and the reason this became the default is actually really straightforward Apple absolutely killed it with this second generation macbook design not only was the actual design itself incredibly thin and light but really nailed the fundamentals of a laptop so the build quality top-notch battery life was some of the best on any laptop you could get keyboard was good trackpad was world class performance was decent the SSDs were snappy I mean really even here in 2020 this old MacBook Air really only falls flat on the screen side and well I guess it's a little slow now but it's really not that bad especially considering this is seven years old now so when Apple finally decided to put the old MacBook Air out to pasture and instead replace it with an all-new model in late 2018 it was a big step forward but this laptop still has its fair share of issues so there's a lot of things I really like here the Retina display is an absolutely massive leap over the last generation MacBook Air Retina 2560 by 1600 1610 I mean there's a lot that's good with this display some of the things though not so hot I will say given the fact that most Windows laptops have definitely switched to touchscreens at this point that the lack of a touchscreen feels a little bit odd on the MacBook Air these days although to be fair apples pretty much making the iPad pro computer now so I guess that's kind of irrelevant but there are actually some legitimate criticisms of this 2018 MacBook Air first and foremost the butterfly keyboard so I will freely admit that I am in the camp that I actually don't think the butterfly keyboard was that bad while yes there's not a lot of travel and while yes it was absolutely plagued with many many reliability issues but for me it wasn't the worst keyboard in the world something that actually did bother me a lot more than that however was the performance this MacBook Air was I want to say slow because it certainly wasn't it was a little bit pokey right you only had a sick dual-core processor is low-wattage it just didn't give me a lot of confidence in the performance it was of course a very expensive laptop which brings us to this the 20/20 MacBook Air which claims to solve pretty much all of those major downsides of the last gen model whoo there we go all right so we have the MacBook Air of course it only comes in 13-inch size I know that used to sell the 11 and that was always my favorite but I feel like the 13 is probably the better option for most people so physically especially on the outside this is basically completely identical to the last generation model what smells fresh I forgot the the new MacBooks always just immediately turn on the second you open the lid wait here comes the real test real keyboard so this does take advantage of the magic keyboard something we'll take a look at a little bit later but it's pretty much the same as on the 16 inch MacBook we haven't done like a legit unboxing of a Mac in a long time you still get Apple sticker sorry oh okay I'll put this on your Samsung Galaxy has 20 old trophies Oh see we would have completely missed this normally I just skip by the unboxing because who cares we get silver Apple stickers now we do still have the same tiny 30 watt USB C power adapter as well as our USBC cable now of course it should be no surprise that this MacBook has exactly two ports pair of Thunderbolt based USB C port or Thunderbolt 3 base 2's PC ports we do still have the headphone jack but hardware wise the MacBook Air is not really all that different besides that sweet keyboard that cool Josh can you like when I do that can you like play like a harp sound like Mighty Car Mods probably the most noticeable change with a 2020 MacBook Air is the return of the magic keyboard although return is not quite accurate and as you can see here I have all three of the most recent MacBook Airs the 20/20 model with the magic keyboard the 2018 model with the butterfly switch as well as the older school MacBook Air with the much-loved old school keyboard what did they call the old one they just call it the keyboard yeah I don't think I had a name for it okay cool good I'm not crazy so it's the original keyboard yeah man this thing absolutely holds up so it has just sort of good key travel good feel and that thing is solid um I mean I'm definitely biased here this one still feels okay to me but again I never really mind these keys that much however this is gonna be the real test whoo I like this a lot you know what I actually think I like the 2020 MacBook Air keyboard most the magic keyboard feels good it feels like a nice blend honestly of the old-school MacBook Air keyboard and the butterfly switch it's kind of in the middle it's certainly a lot closer to the old school you know what I'll give them a big thumbs up here this feels a lot better I think everyone can agree even me was a little bit biased then the 2018 MacBook Air yeah I mean just it's so much more travel and of course you have to keep in mind that the 2020 MacBook Air does have touch ID you also have the inverted T layout really I think two things that most people appreciate and what you don't have is a touch bar I again I think a little bit biased here because I don't really mind the touch bar but I do feel like most people will prefer the full-size Escape key and everything being sort of as you remember it especially if you're upgrading from an older macbook air this should feel right at home so when it comes to the webcam on the MacBook Air it is fine I don't think anyone would consider this to be high quality but it's good enough for a video call but what they haven't proved this year are the actual microphones so the MacBook Air has three microphones built in and as you can hear while it might not sound amazing it actually is significantly better than most laptops you met twice as good as the 16 inch MacBook Pro but they're definitely doing some really good work here on the audio front speaking of audio according to Apple these speakers are not only 25% louder but delivered double the base we are the test drivers we put tech through its paces mic today I really want to find out if you ended up joining the Z flip gang but first we have a test drivers bonus exclusive on the Xbox series X you know what that's actually really impressive so while again you can't really compare this to something like the 16 inch MacBook which obviously has much larger speakers but for a 13 inch laptop this is about as good as I've ever heard that's really impressive drivers y-yes yes I am if you'd like to follow the test drivers you can find it everywhere your ears can listen to beautiful podcast music on the radio no we can't you can't listen to the test drivers on the radio we pop open the MacBook Air we'll see this looks exactly like last year I'm not entirely sure what I expected so we do have our three battery cells the trackpad which also takes up a huge amount of space underneath here the two speakers which also are fairly large and it does have a fan so now there are a lot of rumors when the MacBook Air is are fresh there will be fanless however it does have a fairly small fan because it does have a believing seven watt chef yeah there we go so we also have under this tiny little flap the Apple t2 chip now that actually does a lot so not only does it run like touch ID but it handles the SSD it handles your audio and it also can actually help out the processor so this t2 chip can do things like offloads like video processing specifically with like h.265 this is a nice little setup very simple done very simple Apple's really put all the main components like right here the rest is just like a fan and battery and speakers so the night bugera has always been a battery life champ but something that's kind of interesting is that while yes it's still rated for the same like roughly 11 hours of use it almost seems like they could have gone a little bit bigger on the batteries so you can see there's a little bit of dead space here there's a little bit of dead space down here especially pull up a little flap which there's no actual battery in the same thing here and here I almost wonder if maybe they just sort of hid their battery life goals and they're not really pushing but it does seem like there's at least a little bit of empty space that Apple could have extended the size of the batteries a bit I guess there's that confident I'm gonna put our t2 chip little thing back in place before it catches on fire so after running some benchmarks and spend a little bit of time with this twenty twenty MacBook Air it's actually a pretty major upgrade so there's a couple of things to consider first of all we're going up to 10th generation Core processors which have obviously brought a major wave of performance across the board but especially when you compare this to the 2018 model it's not even close you keep in mind I am taking advantage of the core i5 model this is the quad core so if you have the base core i3 you still have the dual core chip so it'll be a little bit closer but I'm seeing significantly better CPU performance here the graphics are way way better and that actually has proven out with a couple of real features right so you're probably gonna be playing a lot of games on your MacBook Air but using Thunderbolt you actually can drive a full 6k Pro display XDR with the MacBook Air now keep in mind that even the iMac pro can't run it at full resolution so it's actually pretty impressive what they've been able to pull off here oh hi quarantine Austin here with a quick update so since recording the main part of this video there have been a few people who have claimed that the MacBook Air is now thermal throttling and is running dangerously hot is not true so let me explain when you take a look at the heatsink it is obviously an odd design to have the fan not directly attached however you also have to keep in mind the MacBook Air has a 10 watt chip so if you pull up these full specs available I'll have linked in the description it is using a core i5 1030 and g7 now this chip is rated with a 1.1 gigahertz base frequency now yes it can and does boost up to 3.5 gigahertz all the time and when you think about what you do with a MacBook Air like web browse and do things it's very bursty right so it's really easy for it to jump up and down up and down totally fine however when you do through the worst case scenario a days so something like said event which is a 3d modeling application what you'll see is when you have that CPU sitting at a hundred percent it starts out at 3.5 gigahertz but then the system gets very hot and it does start to lower the clock speed now I want to be clear this is not throttling right pretty much all laptops will do this they will have a really high boost frequency and they'll come down to their base in this case the MacBook Air at least mine lands around 1.5 gigahertz cover is still pulling 12 watts more than the rated TDP so yes it does run warm you will pretty much instantly see the MacBook Air had 100 degrees Celsius on the CPU but spoiler alert so does like every other Apple laptop that's ever been made clearly Apple are not concerned about running it at what is very clearly the max temperature but it is that the max it is not a dangerous temperature for a processor to run at may be a little uncomfortable if you're running at a hundred degrees all the time however you're also probably shouldn't be 3d rendering on your MacBook Air there are better choices anyway back to the video but getting away from the benchmarks because honestly it's a MacBook Air you're probably not getting this as a speed demon the real difference here is just in the everyday usability right so the old MacBook Air was fine but it felt a little bit pokey especially compared to newer systems like the XPS that I daily every day the MacBook Air however feels just as snappy is pretty much any modern premium laptop out there now when you get into video editing and sort of hard core tasks you are going to start running into some throttling but in general day to day use this thing feels very very quick and that's not something I've been able to say about the MacBook Air in a long time I can't believe I'm about to say this but the MacBook Air has actually seen a price cut this generation so when this MacBook Air was first refreshed back in 2018 it started out at $1200 for the base model last year it's $100 price cut but today the 20/20 MacBook Air starts at 999 dollars on top of that if you look at the site you can see that you start out with 256 gigs of storage as opposed to 128 of the previous base model those are both big wins and on top of that if you're a student or someone with a dot edu email address you can actually save a further $100 on the MacBook Air free potentially bringing this guy below $1,000 this could legitimately be the new student special however before you go rush out and grab that base model I actually would highly recommend upgrading it at least a little bit so the base model of the MacBook Air comes with a dual core core i3 processor perfectly reasonable go work for only another $100 you can jump up to a quad core i5 chip which is what these MacBook Airs I'm using right now has now it's up to you obviously there are other things you can upgrade to 16 gigs of ram just kind of expensive you can get more SSD storage which is up to you but at 1099 with a quad core chip this thing actually makes a lot of sense for a lot of people it's not a huge powerhouse but the thing you have to consider is that the MacBook Air used to be the standard default laptop for most people right and I feel like this spec of the MacBook Air really comes very close to replicating that old formula not a powerhouse not crazy what it is is enough laptop what I would argue is the vast majority of people out there so for context my current daily driver is the PS 13 2 & 1 I really like this laptop and while sure it's not the cheapest thing in the world it's actually pretty reasonably priced and yet and yet my friends new MacBook Air is actually very equivalent if you look at the XPS 13 what you're getting here for the exact same price is almost the same spec 13-inch display you've got the 8 gigs of ram the 10th gen i 5 you've got 512 kicks of storage really the main difference here is that this is a slightly lower wattage y series chip but the main takeaway here is that Apple has actually become competitive on price right I would argue that for a lot of people the MacBook may be a better call based on the build quality based of the fact that's running Mac OS based on the fact that these have pretty legendary reliability well notwithstanding the keyboard issues for a couple of years but yeah man I'm like legitimately surprised at how good this MacBook Air really is look I've been kind of harsh to the air in the past the previous generation was legitimately one of my favorite laptops to recommend to people when it came to the 2018 refresh it was just fine it wasn't really great though when it comes to the 20/20 air they pretty much rectifying all of my major issues I mean this is a legitimately very excellent laptop and that's not something I've said about a MacBook Air in like 8 years 7 years a long time obviously if you're in the windows camp there's not a lot here to tempt you away when it comes to looking at the MacBook Air for what it is a premium laptop there's a lot to like we've got an excellent screen good keyboard finally one of the best track pads in the business if you got killer build quality Thunderbolt 3 good performance vast SSD I mean there's very little to complain about especially considering that this guy now has a reasonable price yeah bet you didn't see that one coming did you I watched the whole video you didn't I already mentioned the fact that I'm amazed this computer is not ludicrously expensive unlike usual yeah that the next time someone asks which premium laptop I recommend the MacBook area is very quickly reclaimed its spot on top of the list although for being real the XPS 13 still has a spot in my bag for nowthis is the 20/20 MacBook Air and it is a very very good laptop is it enough to make you switch from Windows maybe not but it is in my opinion the best Mac they've made in years for a very very long time when someone would ask me which premium laptop they should buy the MacBook Air was the default answer for me and the reason this became the default is actually really straightforward Apple absolutely killed it with this second generation macbook design not only was the actual design itself incredibly thin and light but really nailed the fundamentals of a laptop so the build quality top-notch battery life was some of the best on any laptop you could get keyboard was good trackpad was world class performance was decent the SSDs were snappy I mean really even here in 2020 this old MacBook Air really only falls flat on the screen side and well I guess it's a little slow now but it's really not that bad especially considering this is seven years old now so when Apple finally decided to put the old MacBook Air out to pasture and instead replace it with an all-new model in late 2018 it was a big step forward but this laptop still has its fair share of issues so there's a lot of things I really like here the Retina display is an absolutely massive leap over the last generation MacBook Air Retina 2560 by 1600 1610 I mean there's a lot that's good with this display some of the things though not so hot I will say given the fact that most Windows laptops have definitely switched to touchscreens at this point that the lack of a touchscreen feels a little bit odd on the MacBook Air these days although to be fair apples pretty much making the iPad pro computer now so I guess that's kind of irrelevant but there are actually some legitimate criticisms of this 2018 MacBook Air first and foremost the butterfly keyboard so I will freely admit that I am in the camp that I actually don't think the butterfly keyboard was that bad while yes there's not a lot of travel and while yes it was absolutely plagued with many many reliability issues but for me it wasn't the worst keyboard in the world something that actually did bother me a lot more than that however was the performance this MacBook Air was I want to say slow because it certainly wasn't it was a little bit pokey right you only had a sick dual-core processor is low-wattage it just didn't give me a lot of confidence in the performance it was of course a very expensive laptop which brings us to this the 20/20 MacBook Air which claims to solve pretty much all of those major downsides of the last gen model whoo there we go all right so we have the MacBook Air of course it only comes in 13-inch size I know that used to sell the 11 and that was always my favorite but I feel like the 13 is probably the better option for most people so physically especially on the outside this is basically completely identical to the last generation model what smells fresh I forgot the the new MacBooks always just immediately turn on the second you open the lid wait here comes the real test real keyboard so this does take advantage of the magic keyboard something we'll take a look at a little bit later but it's pretty much the same as on the 16 inch MacBook we haven't done like a legit unboxing of a Mac in a long time you still get Apple sticker sorry oh okay I'll put this on your Samsung Galaxy has 20 old trophies Oh see we would have completely missed this normally I just skip by the unboxing because who cares we get silver Apple stickers now we do still have the same tiny 30 watt USB C power adapter as well as our USBC cable now of course it should be no surprise that this MacBook has exactly two ports pair of Thunderbolt based USB C port or Thunderbolt 3 base 2's PC ports we do still have the headphone jack but hardware wise the MacBook Air is not really all that different besides that sweet keyboard that cool Josh can you like when I do that can you like play like a harp sound like Mighty Car Mods probably the most noticeable change with a 2020 MacBook Air is the return of the magic keyboard although return is not quite accurate and as you can see here I have all three of the most recent MacBook Airs the 20/20 model with the magic keyboard the 2018 model with the butterfly switch as well as the older school MacBook Air with the much-loved old school keyboard what did they call the old one they just call it the keyboard yeah I don't think I had a name for it okay cool good I'm not crazy so it's the original keyboard yeah man this thing absolutely holds up so it has just sort of good key travel good feel and that thing is solid um I mean I'm definitely biased here this one still feels okay to me but again I never really mind these keys that much however this is gonna be the real test whoo I like this a lot you know what I actually think I like the 2020 MacBook Air keyboard most the magic keyboard feels good it feels like a nice blend honestly of the old-school MacBook Air keyboard and the butterfly switch it's kind of in the middle it's certainly a lot closer to the old school you know what I'll give them a big thumbs up here this feels a lot better I think everyone can agree even me was a little bit biased then the 2018 MacBook Air yeah I mean just it's so much more travel and of course you have to keep in mind that the 2020 MacBook Air does have touch ID you also have the inverted T layout really I think two things that most people appreciate and what you don't have is a touch bar I again I think a little bit biased here because I don't really mind the touch bar but I do feel like most people will prefer the full-size Escape key and everything being sort of as you remember it especially if you're upgrading from an older macbook air this should feel right at home so when it comes to the webcam on the MacBook Air it is fine I don't think anyone would consider this to be high quality but it's good enough for a video call but what they haven't proved this year are the actual microphones so the MacBook Air has three microphones built in and as you can hear while it might not sound amazing it actually is significantly better than most laptops you met twice as good as the 16 inch MacBook Pro but they're definitely doing some really good work here on the audio front speaking of audio according to Apple these speakers are not only 25% louder but delivered double the base we are the test drivers we put tech through its paces mic today I really want to find out if you ended up joining the Z flip gang but first we have a test drivers bonus exclusive on the Xbox series X you know what that's actually really impressive so while again you can't really compare this to something like the 16 inch MacBook which obviously has much larger speakers but for a 13 inch laptop this is about as good as I've ever heard that's really impressive drivers y-yes yes I am if you'd like to follow the test drivers you can find it everywhere your ears can listen to beautiful podcast music on the radio no we can't you can't listen to the test drivers on the radio we pop open the MacBook Air we'll see this looks exactly like last year I'm not entirely sure what I expected so we do have our three battery cells the trackpad which also takes up a huge amount of space underneath here the two speakers which also are fairly large and it does have a fan so now there are a lot of rumors when the MacBook Air is are fresh there will be fanless however it does have a fairly small fan because it does have a believing seven watt chef yeah there we go so we also have under this tiny little flap the Apple t2 chip now that actually does a lot so not only does it run like touch ID but it handles the SSD it handles your audio and it also can actually help out the processor so this t2 chip can do things like offloads like video processing specifically with like h.265 this is a nice little setup very simple done very simple Apple's really put all the main components like right here the rest is just like a fan and battery and speakers so the night bugera has always been a battery life champ but something that's kind of interesting is that while yes it's still rated for the same like roughly 11 hours of use it almost seems like they could have gone a little bit bigger on the batteries so you can see there's a little bit of dead space here there's a little bit of dead space down here especially pull up a little flap which there's no actual battery in the same thing here and here I almost wonder if maybe they just sort of hid their battery life goals and they're not really pushing but it does seem like there's at least a little bit of empty space that Apple could have extended the size of the batteries a bit I guess there's that confident I'm gonna put our t2 chip little thing back in place before it catches on fire so after running some benchmarks and spend a little bit of time with this twenty twenty MacBook Air it's actually a pretty major upgrade so there's a couple of things to consider first of all we're going up to 10th generation Core processors which have obviously brought a major wave of performance across the board but especially when you compare this to the 2018 model it's not even close you keep in mind I am taking advantage of the core i5 model this is the quad core so if you have the base core i3 you still have the dual core chip so it'll be a little bit closer but I'm seeing significantly better CPU performance here the graphics are way way better and that actually has proven out with a couple of real features right so you're probably gonna be playing a lot of games on your MacBook Air but using Thunderbolt you actually can drive a full 6k Pro display XDR with the MacBook Air now keep in mind that even the iMac pro can't run it at full resolution so it's actually pretty impressive what they've been able to pull off here oh hi quarantine Austin here with a quick update so since recording the main part of this video there have been a few people who have claimed that the MacBook Air is now thermal throttling and is running dangerously hot is not true so let me explain when you take a look at the heatsink it is obviously an odd design to have the fan not directly attached however you also have to keep in mind the MacBook Air has a 10 watt chip so if you pull up these full specs available I'll have linked in the description it is using a core i5 1030 and g7 now this chip is rated with a 1.1 gigahertz base frequency now yes it can and does boost up to 3.5 gigahertz all the time and when you think about what you do with a MacBook Air like web browse and do things it's very bursty right so it's really easy for it to jump up and down up and down totally fine however when you do through the worst case scenario a days so something like said event which is a 3d modeling application what you'll see is when you have that CPU sitting at a hundred percent it starts out at 3.5 gigahertz but then the system gets very hot and it does start to lower the clock speed now I want to be clear this is not throttling right pretty much all laptops will do this they will have a really high boost frequency and they'll come down to their base in this case the MacBook Air at least mine lands around 1.5 gigahertz cover is still pulling 12 watts more than the rated TDP so yes it does run warm you will pretty much instantly see the MacBook Air had 100 degrees Celsius on the CPU but spoiler alert so does like every other Apple laptop that's ever been made clearly Apple are not concerned about running it at what is very clearly the max temperature but it is that the max it is not a dangerous temperature for a processor to run at may be a little uncomfortable if you're running at a hundred degrees all the time however you're also probably shouldn't be 3d rendering on your MacBook Air there are better choices anyway back to the video but getting away from the benchmarks because honestly it's a MacBook Air you're probably not getting this as a speed demon the real difference here is just in the everyday usability right so the old MacBook Air was fine but it felt a little bit pokey especially compared to newer systems like the XPS that I daily every day the MacBook Air however feels just as snappy is pretty much any modern premium laptop out there now when you get into video editing and sort of hard core tasks you are going to start running into some throttling but in general day to day use this thing feels very very quick and that's not something I've been able to say about the MacBook Air in a long time I can't believe I'm about to say this but the MacBook Air has actually seen a price cut this generation so when this MacBook Air was first refreshed back in 2018 it started out at $1200 for the base model last year it's $100 price cut but today the 20/20 MacBook Air starts at 999 dollars on top of that if you look at the site you can see that you start out with 256 gigs of storage as opposed to 128 of the previous base model those are both big wins and on top of that if you're a student or someone with a dot edu email address you can actually save a further $100 on the MacBook Air free potentially bringing this guy below $1,000 this could legitimately be the new student special however before you go rush out and grab that base model I actually would highly recommend upgrading it at least a little bit so the base model of the MacBook Air comes with a dual core core i3 processor perfectly reasonable go work for only another $100 you can jump up to a quad core i5 chip which is what these MacBook Airs I'm using right now has now it's up to you obviously there are other things you can upgrade to 16 gigs of ram just kind of expensive you can get more SSD storage which is up to you but at 1099 with a quad core chip this thing actually makes a lot of sense for a lot of people it's not a huge powerhouse but the thing you have to consider is that the MacBook Air used to be the standard default laptop for most people right and I feel like this spec of the MacBook Air really comes very close to replicating that old formula not a powerhouse not crazy what it is is enough laptop what I would argue is the vast majority of people out there so for context my current daily driver is the PS 13 2 & 1 I really like this laptop and while sure it's not the cheapest thing in the world it's actually pretty reasonably priced and yet and yet my friends new MacBook Air is actually very equivalent if you look at the XPS 13 what you're getting here for the exact same price is almost the same spec 13-inch display you've got the 8 gigs of ram the 10th gen i 5 you've got 512 kicks of storage really the main difference here is that this is a slightly lower wattage y series chip but the main takeaway here is that Apple has actually become competitive on price right I would argue that for a lot of people the MacBook may be a better call based on the build quality based of the fact that's running Mac OS based on the fact that these have pretty legendary reliability well notwithstanding the keyboard issues for a couple of years but yeah man I'm like legitimately surprised at how good this MacBook Air really is look I've been kind of harsh to the air in the past the previous generation was legitimately one of my favorite laptops to recommend to people when it came to the 2018 refresh it was just fine it wasn't really great though when it comes to the 20/20 air they pretty much rectifying all of my major issues I mean this is a legitimately very excellent laptop and that's not something I've said about a MacBook Air in like 8 years 7 years a long time obviously if you're in the windows camp there's not a lot here to tempt you away when it comes to looking at the MacBook Air for what it is a premium laptop there's a lot to like we've got an excellent screen good keyboard finally one of the best track pads in the business if you got killer build quality Thunderbolt 3 good performance vast SSD I mean there's very little to complain about especially considering that this guy now has a reasonable price yeah bet you didn't see that one coming did you I watched the whole video you didn't I already mentioned the fact that I'm amazed this computer is not ludicrously expensive unlike usual yeah that the next time someone asks which premium laptop I recommend the MacBook area is very quickly reclaimed its spot on top of the list although for being real the XPS 13 still has a spot in my bag for now