Thoughts on the new Macbook Air

I have the luxury of working in IT and having access to a wide variety of machines that I can borrow from work and one of those machines is the 2019 MacBook Air. Mind, you that its a Jamf DEP test machine so after this weekend I will certainly have to wipe it for more testing, but it was a lot of fun to check it out over the weekend. I’m used to carrying around a 15” MacBook Pro and by comparison the MacBook Air is so light if feels like there is nothing in my backpack. The battery life is fantastic and the machine feels solid. The keyboard is probably the best of the butterfly-style of keyboards, much better than my 2016 MacBook Pro, though I do kinda miss the Touch Bar a bit. I don’t have one on the iMac that I use as my main machine at work, but after using it for the last 2x years on MacBook Pro it feels weird to not have it. It feels like the Air loses a bit of personality when I don’t have my emoji bar and shortcuts at the top of my keyboard. Because of the screen-size, I do operate the Air more like an iPad Pro than a MacBook Pro, with liberal use of MacOS’s virtual desktop feature. MacOS has a pretty fantastic multitasking feature with Expose and Launchpad via the trackpad, but it does take a little getting used to when you’re used to a more spacious screen. I can see how people get by with it because the portability and battery life are fantastic.

I do find the MacBook Air a little annoying to podcast from though because the fan ends up flaring the entire time. Editing photos is nice with the screen, I particularly like the True-Tone display that it has that my MacBook Pro does not have. The keyboard is still flat, but not nearly as noisy as my personal laptop. I’ve had coworkers accuse me of being an angry typer because of it and trying to get work done in a quiet lecture hall can be difficult when I’m self-conscious about the noise of my keyboard. I do find the dearth of ports moderately annoying. I have a hyperdrive that I can plug into to expand them, but having everything on the left side is an annoyance, I could do without the headphone jack on the right if I could get a port on the right-hand side. If I can find a way to mitigate the fan-issues while podcasting, this may be a great eventual replacement for my 2016 MacBook Pro whenever that machine retires. I’ve gotten to the point that for my personal computer I do not want to spend more than $2000 (Which is still a lot, but my $3000 I spent on my 2016 MacBook Pro took longer to pay off than I’d like) and honestly, the MacBook Air tapping out at 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM is enough for what I normally do at home. Its not going to cut it for working 8+ hours a day (Virtualization eats up a lot of RAM and I have been known to have to do a lot of video editing at times so a graphics card is always handy to have), but for a machine that I use for after-hours and personal pursuits I think that its going to be plenty. I’m kinda eying that silver MacBook Air, it reminds me of my old 2013 MacBook Pro and I really loved that laptop.

Thoughts? Feel free to comment below or reply on social media.

-Hobie 🦖