Why I Sold My MacBook Air

I sold my Retina MacBook Air after six months. Here’s why.

Two scenarios that the made the MBA unusable:

Scenario 1: All of the laptops* I use get hooked up to an an LG Ultrafine 5K monitor on a rotating basis depending on what laptop I’m using that day. (The LG Ultrafine 5K is designed specifically for the Mac though it works with most of my new Windows laptops too.)

Typically, I have a dozen browser tabs active, a live news stream in the background, and some productivity applications running.

All of my thin-and-light Windows laptops that are comparable to the MBA, such as the 2.4-pound HP Spectre 13 (late-2017) and 2.7-pound Dell XPS 13 (early 2019), do fine handling that modest load hooked up to the LG. The MacBook Air does not. Eventually, tabs stop responding, application switching slows, and the fans whir.

Scenario 2: Ditto on a three-week road trip where the MBA Retina was the only laptop I was using every day, all day. In a word, slow. I would not take the current iteration of the MBA Retina on another long road trip.

Problem: not spec’d adequately: The dual-core Intel Amber Lake processor and its related subsystems (like the Intel UHD Graphic 617) don’t offer much more performance than I was getting with a 12-inch MacBook. In the long run**, that’s a deal breaker.

If we were talking about an updated version of the 2-pound 12-inch MacBook, I would understand. There’s just so much performance you can squeeze into that extremely small chassis. But the MBA is a 2.75 pound, 13-inch chassis. Thin and light but not extremely so. Apple can do better than an ultra-low-power dual-core processor. Again, that’s the same class of processor that was in the 12-inch MacBook.

The fix: But Apple could rectify this easily by giving the MBA the processor it deserves. For example, update the MBA with an Intel 10th Generation processor like every other major PC manufacturer on the planet is doing right now. Something like the low-power Core i5-1035G1 or Core i7-1065G7 processors that are in Dell’s newest ultra-thin XPS 13 2-in-1 (7390).

The XPS 13 7390 is just as thin as the MBA Retina and travels like the MBA Retina but is considerably faster.

How much faster? Well, subjectively, much faster. No slowdowns on the XPS 13 7390. Objectively, the Core low-power i7-1065G7 in the XPS 7390 I’m using benchmarks much better than the Core i5-8210Y in the Retina MBA. Same goes for the i5-1035G1.

Final thought: the MacBook Pro 13

I would gladly buy an updated MacBook Air with Intel’s newest 10th gen low-power quad-core processor. Because pretty much everything else about the MBA I love.

But if Apple drags its feet on updating the MBA, the MacBook Pro with with 8th gen Intel quad-core processors, is the only way to go.

That last update to the MacBook Pro 13 put faster, newer quad-core processors in even the low-end $1,299 MBP (with 128GB of storage). That – I now realize – makes it impossible to justify buying the low-end MBA as it stands now.

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NOTES:

*I always have a stable of a dozen or so new laptops that I test.

**My initial review of my late-2018 Retina MacBook Air was positive.