Choosing between MacBook Air, iPad Pro just got harder
Isaw Apple co-founder Steve Jobs work his keynote-address magic in person only twice, but they were milestone presentations: the launches of the MacBook Air and the original iPad.
Yep, I was in the audience when Jobs famously pulled the first Air out of an interoffice manila envelope, and when he talked about the iPad creating a new category of middle device between a laptop and the iPhone. Back then, it was pretty clear that the iPad and the MacBook
Air were very different machines, each claiming its own niche in the computing universe.
No longer. Last month, Apple released new versions of the MacBook Air and the iPad Pro, the professional iteration of its consumer tablet. With an update to the ipadOS operating system, the iPad now works with trackpads. With the speed and muscle in the new iPad Pro — along with the right accessories — the tablet now becomes a laptop.
And for someone who now needs to replace their portable Mac, or is thinking of switching to an Apple notebook, the choice is no longer simple. Here’s a dual review of both, with an eye toward picking one as your next portable computer.
2020 MacBook Air
When the MacBook Air launched in 2008, it was impressively slim and light, but its svelte design came with significant compromises. It was underpowered and lacked many of the ports and features found in other portables of the day — no CD or DVD drive — and was overpriced, clocking in at close to $2,000.
Apple refined the Air over time, lowered its price and computing trends caught up with it — many ultrathin PCs copied its design. But one of the refinements Apple made was not a positive one.
The Air, along with all of Apple’s notebooks, was given in 2018 a new keyboard design that had reliability issues when even small specks of grit got under the keys. Rather than using a mechanism that looks like a pair of scissors, which is how earlier Apple keyboards worked, each key’s internals resembled a butterfly. This design also meant the key didn’t travel as far when you tapped it, a feel that many longtime Mac users abhorred.
So the biggest news for the 2020 iteration of the MacBook Air is something that walks it backwards. Apple has reverted the keyboard to a scissors-style mechanism, calling it the Magic Keyboard, and for those who have avoided the Air because of the butterfly variation, it’s a godsend.
With the demise of the simply named MacBook, the Air once again becomes Apple’s thinnest and lightest laptop, weighing in at 2.8 pounds and only 0.63 inches at its thickest. It comes in space gray, silver or gold. It remains one of the slimmest and most backpack-friendly notebooks you can buy.
And this is not an underpowered Air at all. It uses Intel’s latest Icy Lake processors. The Core i3 chip is available in the lowest-priced version, which sells for $999. If your primary use of a laptop is email, social media, a web browser, light photo editing and streaming video, it’s more than adequate. But if you need to do anything more challenging, look at the Core i5 version ($1,299) or upgrade either to the Core i7, which adds between $150 and $250 to the price.
Battery life is excellent — using the Air as my primary notebook, I never had to charge it during the day, even with multiple Zoom video conferences and lots of time accessing the web.
By design, the Air is stingy on ports, with only two USB-C Thunderbolt connections on the right side and an old-school headphone jack on the left. One surprising feature: For a notebook this thin, it has remarkably good sound.
I’ll probably need to replace my 2014 Pro in about two years, when Apple will likely quit supporting this model for updates to the operating system. If the evolution of the
Air continues on this path, it’s the machine I’ll buy, rather than springing for the moreexpensive MacBook Pro.
2020 iPad Pro
Apple has touted the pro version of its iPad as a laptop alternative since its initial release in 2015, but for me, it’s a hard sell. Sure, there are great keyboard cases that make typing on an iPad a breeze, but to manipulate text and other objects on the display, you still have to reach up and touch the screen. That’s uncomfortable.
Apple has resisted making its laptops’ displays touchenabled, with its executives saying that touching an upright screen is ergonomically incorrect. Strangely enough, that argument falls away when those same honchos talk about using the iPad for laptop-like tasks.
Apple released an update to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro at the same time it launched the new MacBook Air. When I requested an Air to review, Apple threw in the iPad Pro as well. At first I was all, “Yeah, OK, sure, why not?” That was before I paired the company’s Magic Trackpad 2 to it.
The latest version of the tablet’s operating system, ipadOS 13.4, builds in support for trackpads and mice. Forgive my use of a cliche, but this is a game-changer. As with any cursor on a computer, it morphs depending on the context.
While I still think a traditional laptop like the MacBook Air is a better choice for most people who need a fullfledged portable computer, the iPad Pro with the latest ipadOS update, a decent keyboard case and a trackpad, is a versatile contender, albeit an expensive one.