MacBook Air 2019 Review [This is a revised article.]
Thursday, August 22, 2019
A few months ago a staff member purchased the 2019 MacBook Air model. It was a tough decision between this and the MacBook Pro since we had never owned an Apple product prior to this other than trying out an iPhone 7 Red product. The link is at: https://savvywealthmedia.com/2018/10/07/iphone-7-red-review/.
The reason the staff member bought it was to diversify electronics holdings, get additional storage for technical work and also take it to blog and meetups to work remotely. Although there hasn’t been significant “use” of the machine yet, we’d like to give our two cents about this product and its specifications and how it holds up.
First off the product comes in gold, space gray, silver outside color finishing models. We opted for the darker space gray because of its distinguished look.
It had various starter price points of $1099 up to $1299. Notice the “one-dollar less” price point to make you think it is less than it really is play on psychology.
Models come with a Retina display. And the screen dimensions are 13.3 inches diagonla with an LED backlight using IPS technology and has a native 2560 by 1600 resolution aka 16:10 aspect ration. This screen uses True Tone technology and is able to do certain scaled resolutions of 1024 by 640, 1440 by 900, 1680 by 1050.
The Macbook Air also comes with Intel UHD Graphics 617 and allows you to have Thunderbolt 3 supported external graphics processors or eGPUs. It also has the option for support a 5120×2880 external display up to 60Hz or Native DisplayPort over USB-C. Adapters are also available.
The laptop has an interegrated Touch ID sensor to log you in. It also has a 720p Facetime High Definition camera.
While it is not the fastest laptop, most people get this laptop to just do some light office productivity and surfing and programming and day to day work. So it has a basic 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor. This features Turbo Boost that can get as fast as 3.6 GHz. And also has a L3 cache that is 4 MB in size.
The storage can be configured to different storage requirements. While the base model has 128GB. These are not normal hard drives. These are solid state drives (SSD’s) which are a whole lot faster. 512GB or 1TB options are available.
Memory base default is at 8GB LPDDR3 onboard memory with 2133MHz speeds but you can configure the device to have 16GB memory.
The battery comes with a 49.9 watt hour lithium polymer batter. It allows 12 hours of use to just surf the web on wireless. If you were playing iTunes movies it takes about 13 hours of use on battery and allows up to 30 days of being on standby.
The laptop comes with a 30W USB-C power adapter and ports. The Thunderbolt ports have speeds up to 40Gb/s while USB-C 2.1 Generation 2 are up to 10Gb/s.
In terms of weight. It is 2.75 pounds and dimensions are at the bulkiest points 8.36″ by 11.97″ x .61″.
In terms of connectivity the wifi supports IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n and 802.11ac capabilities. It also has Bluetooth 4.2 technology.
In terms of multimedia there are stereo speakers as well as three microphones and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
Keyboards are full size with at least 78 keys that are backlit.
There is a light sensors and also a Force Touch trackpad to control the cursor and pressure sensing clicks, drawing, gestures and accelerator capabilities.
You want to make sure you operate your equipment only between 50 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit and your voltage is 100V to 240V AC. Any place with high humidity over 90% noncondensing should be avoided. And it can be stored in places up to 15,000 feet high or shipped up to 35,000 ft. Normally you operate it under 10,000 feet. Most planes operate between 28,000 to 35,000 feet. The highest peak in North America known as Denali or Mount McKinley is about 20,146 feet. Mount Everest is 29,029 feet and Mount Kilimanjaro is 19341 feet.
The operating system comes with Siri voice assistant and closed captioning and text to speech.
It also comes with iMovie, GarageBand, Keynote and Safari and FaceTime and messaging apps as well as access to iTunes and the App Store and Time Machine.
There is at least 3 months or 90 days of free or complimentary tech support and a limited warranty of one year. Additional coverage can be purchased.
The company also tries to boast its environmental responsibility by showing it is ENERGY STAR compliant with no PVC’s or mercury in its display and no arsenic. There’s also a way to trade in your old machine for another.
When we first bought the machine it came superfast and arrived in less than a week and was fast enough to even surprise us as they were very transparent about shipping times and arrival times coming from all the way from another country into ours. The box was gorgeous and it came wrapped in a nice package and box and plastic. It came with some Apple stickers and a small set of warranty and instructions. And also the cable and charger.
The laptop even was precharged and booted up upon opening ahead of time and started you in setup mode to start its first use. The screen was gorgeous and was a nice blue background running MacOS Mojave.
The speakers spoke to you to tell you to set up the laptop with its accessibility features already enabled. You could enable the dock to bounce and have animation features. It also had a mirror finish screen that you could literally see yourself in. The aluminum exterior felt premium and cool to the touch and was sleek metal with curved edges. It felt relatively light and easy to carry.
There were no songs by default I could play and it also asked for a wifi connection to connect and set up.
We did not get a chance to delve deep into the innerworkings of the machine but find it is a gorgeous looking machine and upgraded to the 1 Terabyte drive and it still was very sleek and was cool to the touch.
We can see why people admire these machines and hope to review more models in the future.
