Apple MacBook Air 2020

Is the design of Apple’s recent entry level laptop air-tight?

The MacBook Air range is back and it’s trying to fill the space Apple recently made when it discontinued the 12-inch MacBook in 2019, as well as be a good upgrade. What is nice is that Apple has managed to reduce the base price of the 2020 MacBook Air by $100, so you can get a configuration with a 1.13.2GHz dual-core Intel Core i3 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $1,599. If you are doing any more than the lightest of web browsing and document processing you’ll probably want to go for the 1.1-3.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB RAM and 512GB storage configuration for $1,999. This is the first quad core processor on a MacBook Air, so the performance bump will be dramatically larger than that of previous generations. If you do want to bolster performance even further then you can upgrade the CPU to a 1.2-3.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU for an extra $150, or double the RAM for $300 more and then there are also two additional storage options of 1TB and 2TB, which cost an additional $300 and $900 respectively.

We got our hands on the standard Core i5 variation, which was about 20% behind the average quad-core devices here on the Geekbench 4 multi-threaded CPU test. This is about five to 10 percent lower than we were anticipating, but it’s still more than enough to get you by if you have light browser based workloads.

Battery life is seven hours and 55 minutes for 1080p movie playback, which means you’ll just get through a work day under light usage.

A great lightweight work device for those wanting MacOS on a tight budget.

“We got our hands on the standard Core i5 variation which was about 20 percent behind the average quad-core devices here on the Geekbench 4 multithreaded CPU test.”