MacBook Air (2018) review: Just short of great

Why aren’t I excited?

When Apple finally did it — yes, “finally” is totally called for here — and, at long last, updated the MacBook Air with a Retina display and streamlined design, I felt like the new laptop wasn’t just a much-needed refresh of the company’s entry-level Mac. I thought I was looking at my next laptop.

My personal machine (a 13-inch MacBook Pro from late 2013) is getting old, and now that I’ve been effectively priced out of the Pro-level laptops, I needed an alternative. The 2018 MacBook Air looks like the clear successor. It almost looks like a machine meant to obsolete the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro: It has comparable features (like two USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports and Touch ID) for less money.

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After using the MacBook Air for a few days, though, I think I can tell where the money went. This is a laptop that can handle the everyday tasks of modern “computing” with aplomb, but push it beyond that and you’ll run into its limitations pretty quickly. That’s not unexpected for something that isn’t a “pro” level machine, but if you widen your view beyond Apple’s walled garden, you can see other laptops, even cheaper laptops, that provide comparable experiences.

Even within AppleLand, the Air’s role is more than a little unclear. Taking a look at the entry level, you have the skinny 12-inch MacBook starting at $1,299, the MacBook Air starting at $1,199, and the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro starting at $1,299. Now look at the fine print:

• MacBook: 1.2GHz dual-core Intel Core M3 processor (7th gen), 256GB Storage

• MacBook Air: 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor (8th gen), 128GB Storage

• MacBook Pro: 2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor (7th gen), 128GB of storage

The difference between the MacBook and the MBA is obvious: If you prioritize slim design and storage over performance, the MacBook is for you. But if you want more power, then you have a dilemma. The MacBook Air and Pro are now much closer in form factor and overall specs. So what are you getting — and giving up — be selecting the Air over the entry-level Pro?

Well, it’s complicated, but the Air makes a strong case.

Full MacBook effect

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The MacBook Air looks similar to the old model, but it’s nothing short of a complete redesign. The aluminum unibody is significantly smaller, building the frame around the 13.3-inch screen with noticeably smaller bezels. That makes the overall footprint smaller, and it’s one of the most friendly designs to being carried around.

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The unit Apple lent us for testing was space gray, which was a bummer — I really wanted to see the gold variant up close and personal again. It’s a newer gold sheen than the older iPhones and MacBooks, with just a hint of red. Notably, Apple updated the gold finish of the 12-inch skinny MacBook to match.

Nothing wrong with space gray, though, and it definitely blends well. If you want to make sure it doesn’t get scratched, Apple’s leather sleeve for the 13-inch MacBook Pro fits the new Air as well.

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Let’s talk about the wedge. It’s still a super-friendly design that’s easily carried around, so it’s not hard to see why so many laptops these days have it. The new MacBook Air is just 0.61 of an inch at its thickest point, or about 10% thinner than the old 0.68-inch-thick MacBook Air. At 2.75 pounds, it’s also a quarter pound lighter.

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All of the edges have chamfers with just the right amount of softness. Nothing feels too sharp, and you always feel like you’ve got a good grip no matter how you hold it. However, because the lower half of the laptop is so light, it’s sometimes hard to open with one hand. On, say, the MacBook Pro, the weight of the keyboard section is heavy enough to make sure only the lid goes up when you pull it. On the Air, you sometimes need two fingers (or worse, two hands) to make sure the keyboard stays put, depending on how you’re holding it. My review unit might have been just a little stiff out of the box, though.

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On the left side are the two USB-C ports, which Apple calls Thunderbolt 3 ports, which is probably more precise since there are different flavors of USB-C out there (Thunderbolt 3 means the port meets a certain spec for throughput, which lets it connect things like 5K displays). It’s the same number of ports as the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro, but it’s twice as many as the 12-inch MacBook. It won’t exactly save you from dongle hell, but at least you can connect power and one other device before getting there.

On the right side, there’s a headphone jack. So there’s that.

Of keyboards and displays

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The two most significant changes to the MacBook Air that will affect the day-to-day experience of every user are the new third-generation butterfly switch keyboard and the Retina display. Of course. A laptop, fundamentally, is a keyboard and monitor attached with a hinge — everything else is just gravy. As the newest addition to Apple’s laptop family, the new Air benefits the most from how Apple has evolved those features over the past few years.

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The keyboard on the MacBook Air is definitely the best experience I’ve had typing on a butterfly Mac. Even though this is technically the same design keyboard as in the 2018 MacBook Pros, I felt the experience was a bit quieter, with a tad more overall machine stability with every keystroke. I suspect that’s most likely due to the overall size of the machine, though it could simply be personal bias (I tend to prefer smaller machines). In any case, it’s a better experience than the second-gen butterfly keyboard on the mid-2017 MacBook Pro I use for work.

Up in the top right of the keyboard is the power button, which doubles as the Touch ID fingerprint sensor. MacBook Pros have had this feature for a while, of course, and now the Air gets it, along with the T2 chip that controls it. The T2 acts as a kind of “little buddy” to the CPU so it doesn’t get too bogged down with secondary tasks. Besides Touch ID, the T2 also handles audio processing, security features like encryption, and “Hey Siri.”

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I had no complaints with Touch ID on the MacBook Air, and I couldn’t tell whether it was faster or slower than on my MacBook Pro, so if you use the feature, you should be set. There are a few other ways to unlock MacBooks, though — one of them being unlocking with an Apple Watch, which I also set up. The T2 isn’t involved with Apple Watch unlock, something I could tell since it rarely unlocked the machine faster than a fingerprint. Or just typing my password, really.

This was my first hint that the processor in the MacBook Air was nothing to write home about. More on that in a bit.

Apple upgraded the screen on the MacBook Air from a 1,440 x 900 to a 2,560 x 1,600 Retina display. At 13.3 inches, that’s a pixel density of 227ppi, with more than 4 million individual pixels.

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Sure, three cheers for Retina and all that, but this is table stakes for today — especially for Apple. Yes, the display is gorgeous, and, yes, photos and videos look great on it, but it’s also relatively weak in another department: brightness. Whereas the MacBook Pro can get as bright as 500 nits, the new MBA maxes out at 300.

Don’t get me wrong: that’s not at all dim by today’s standards, but if you happen to use your laptop either in bright sunlight or under studio lights, you’ll notice.

And while the Air’s screen looks great, the MacBook Pro still does it one better with a wider color gamut. Most folks won’t care, but putting the MBA next to my 2017 work MBP, I could see that the Air couldn’t quite match the black levels of the Pro: black areas still looked dark gray, even at half brightness.

The new trackpad is a big upgrade. It’s 20% bigger, for starters, but it’s also a Force Touch trackpad. While Force Touch, as a differentiating feature, is a forgettable feature, it does mean that the trackpad isn’t actually a proper button — instead, the pad vibrates in a sophisticated way to make it feel like you clicked. In my perspective, this is a good thing: Not only does it give your MacBook one less way to break down, but you can also go into settings and make the click even quieter than it already is.

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Apple greatly improved the speakers for the new Air, claiming they’re 25% louder. The T2 chip does great work here, too, creating convincing surround sound. While that’s a welcome upgrade, the speakers still aren’t as loud as on the MacBook Pro. Playing a Dolby surround sound sample clip, the Pro’s sound was a bit louder, with better bass. Both machines rendered the surround sound about equally, though.

The little engine that almost could

Our review unit was powered by a dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 chip and 8GB of RAM. The storage was 256GB, but in terms of performance it should be the same as the base model.

Running Geekbench tests, the 2018 MacBook Air scored 3,721 for single-core and 6,737 for multi-core. Since the chip is a dual-core design, it’s expected that the Air doesn’t fare that well against competitors like the Surface Laptop 2, which scores 11,983 on average. But even in single-core the Air isn’t the best; the SL2 scores 3,817.

Still, Geekbench scores have little to do with what a machine can actually handle. To test that, I put the MacBook Air in point position in a typical workday, running my typical suite of apps: Slack, Trello, TweetDeck, Skype, a handful of Apple apps (Calendar, Reminders, Apple News, Messages, and Maps), and two Chrome profiles running 2-4 windows, each with ~12 tabs on average, with Amazon Music streaming music in the background.

That’s almost never too heavy a lift for my quad-core MacBook Pro, but it was a definite workout for the dual-core Air. About an hour into the day, as my Chrome tabs started multiplying, I heard the cooling fan kick in. Soon after, when I authored a tweet in TweetDeck, things got really laggy: The time between my keypress and a character appearing onscreen extended to a second or more.

That wasn’t typical performance — most of the time the MacBook Air managed to keep up with my actions, but here and there you could tell it was struggling: an extra second to switch between apps, a touch more confusion about the resolution of an external monitor, a spinning beach ball lasting longer than usual. Not deal-breakers, by any means, but as they add up, they get more noticeable.

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There were two quirks that bothered me: After raising the lid, the MacBook Air (with default Energy Saver settings) didn’t always wake up automatically. On every other MacBook I’ve owned, the screen dutifully lights up and asks me to log in every time I open it up; the Retina MBA, however, often required a quick press of the power button. I’m not sure if this is a bug or an off setting, or something else.

The MacBook Air is also the first Apple laptop to include a new security feature: When the lid is closed, it turns off the microphone. It’s a hardware disconnection; you can’t turn it back on with software. This sounds like a great idea from a security perspective, but it presents a problem for workstations: If you use the built-in mic for conference calls, you’ll need to keep the lid open, which might not be possible for some setups. In those cases, you’ll need to use an external mic.

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Speaking of microphones, the Air’s do a great job of picking up voices for “Hey Siri.” Even standing 12 feet away, I was able to activate Siri with a command that was barely stronger than a whisper. Too bad Siri, as a digital assistant, still isn’t that great. Asking it to show me recipes for chicken marsala, it just performed a web search, and was flummoxed by any kind of follow-up.

I was impressed with the battery life. While I didn’t get close to Apple’s rated spec of 12 continuous hours of “wireless web,” I did manage to squeeze about 6-7 hours out of it while working and streaming music, which isn’t too shabby.

The Air down there

There’s a lot to like about the MacBook Air. The physical redesign is masterful, and in many ways it leapfrogs most of the other laptops in Apple’s lineup. The T2 chip, third-generation butterfly keyboard, and “Hey Siri” functionality are all features limited to Apple’s newest machines, and you won’t find them on any 12-inch MacBook.

Add to that a feel-good extra: the new MacBook Air is the first Apple laptop made of recycled aluminum. While this doesn’t manifest in any feature — the recycled material doesn’t appear to affect aesthetics and durability — if you’re the type to drive a Tesla because it’s good for the planet, it’s a point in favor of the Air.

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So back to my original question: Why am I not excited?

The MacBook Air is a beautifully designed machine. They keyboard feels great. It all the latest MacBook bells and whistles, including support of external graphics cards. Performance-wise, however, it’s clearly not as capable as a “pro” machine. That’s fine — Apple doesn’t pretend otherwise. But once you’re there, at the “decent laptop” level, you have a lot of choice, and often for less money.

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The Surface Laptop 2, for one, packs comparable performance and design into a package that’s $200 cheaper than the MacBook Air, plus you get a touchscreen. The Huawei Matebook X Pro costs about the same, but throws in a higher-res screen and more storage. And for the same price as the entry-level MBA, you can get a Dell XPS 13 with more storage plus an Intel Core i7 chip.

If the new MacBook Air came in at the same price as the old one, it would be a steal. Sure, you pay for the privilege of being able to use macOS on the Apple ecosystem. But in years past that also meant access to cutting-edge features and design. As pretty as the MacBook Air is, there’s nothing that innovative about it. In today’s Apple, it seems, privilege amounts to just staying current.