In early evening with decent light, the webcam looked a little murky. The Macbook’s webcam isn’t bad as such, it’s just not as bright as I’d like. Video conferencing has become my social life outside the four walls of my home not only are fitness classes done over the platform, but I’ve “attended” two birthday parties in the past week conducted over Zoom. More limiting was the webcam, which I thought would be better. Unfortunately, unless you have a green screen, you need a quad-core i5 or better, which the basic MacBook Air doesn’t have. One thing it offers is virtual backgrounds. Love it or loathe it, Zoom is a popular service these days. But the 2020 Macbook Air did struggle in one surprising task – Zoom calls. The difference is noticeable, and the keyboard is much more comfortable – and less noisy – to use. That ditched the butterfly in favour of another scissor mechanism. But the new MacBook Air has the Magic keyboard, which came with the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The butterfly keyboard, which replaced the tried and tested scissor mechanism, failed to find favour among Mac fans. In fact, Apple had a taste of it when it changed the keyboard. It’s a smart move we’ve all seen what happens when tech companies try to introduce change. Apple has found a formula that works and it is sticking with it. The ports are kept to the bare minimum – two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a headphone jack – but the Force Touch (I still dislike that name) trackpad is a decent size. It’s sleek, minimalist and as small as Apple could possibly get everything in a 13-inch device. There isn’t a huge difference between the new MacBook Air and its predecessors when it comes to looks. It did struggle in one surprising area, but I’ll come back to that in a bit. Throw in the usual word processing and a couple of light games, and the MacBook Air performed admirably. The basic specs allowed me to do a bit of photo editing, some iMovie work and a little trimming of audio clips, with no trouble or slowdowns. That costs extra, of course, and the upgraded specs can add up to more than double the original price.Īpple says the new MacBook Air is two times faster in its CPU performance, with graphics up to 80 per cent faster than its predecessor.
#Best mac for artists 2017 upgrade#
If you want something a little more powerful, you can upgrade the chip to a quad-core i7 chip, increase the storage up to 2TB and boost the RAM to 16GB. The review version that landed on my desk came with the dual-core i3 1.1 GHz processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage on its solid state drive – the entry-level spec on the device that will set you back €1,229.įor most people, that will be fine and more than enough to tackle the basic tasks every day. The screen is the 13-inch Retina screen – Apple’s own standard for its high-quality screens – and your colour options for the case are grey, gold and silver.
#Best mac for artists 2017 update#
With that in mind, I was interested to see if the 2020 update to the MacBook Air would persuade me to invest in a new model. It may lack some of the newer bells and whistles of the updated MacBooks, but I already own it, which is an obvious bonus.
My own one is nine years old and, while not used quite as often these days, it’s still going strong. Where do you stand on the MacBook Air? I’m a fan.
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