The MacBook Air's Intel Core i5-5350U CPU and 8GB of RAM enable smooth and speedy multitasking. When listening to Rocky Romero's 'RPG Vice' and Survive's 'Sorcerer' on the notebook, I noted clear vocals, full bass and accurate synths. Good sound never gets outdated, and the MacBook Air continues Apple's track record of laptops with sweet-sounding audio, blasting enough volume to fill our medium-size conference room. Here, dragging and dropping items - something you need to relearn on the Force Touch trackpads that appear on more advanced MacBooks - is a whole lot easier. It's also arguably easier to use than those in Apple's 12-inch MacBook and MacBook Pros, as it actually moves.

The MacBook Air's 4.0 x 2.9-inch trackpad offers accurate tracking and a solid feel to each click. The 12-inch MacBook's similarly designed keys are even shallower, with 0.5 mm of travel. While I hit a relatively similar 74 wpm on that machine, my hands started to hurt during the test, which I attribute to how much less travel is in those keys. That speed, and the comfort I experienced during the test, is enabled by the 1.4 millimeters of travel in the keys, which require 72 grams of force to actuate.įor comparison, I tried out the shallower, clickier keys on the 15-inch MacBook Pro (whose keys have 0.8 mm of travel and require 74 grams of actuation force). With it, I hit an average of 76 words per minute on the typing test, which isn't too far from my 80-wpm average. The MacBook Air offers a pleasant typing experience, with keys that actually feel like they're moving - something I'll never take for granted again. Unfortunately, this brightness isn't enough to produce solid viewing angles, as I saw color darken at 45 degrees to the left and right. That's similar to the 340-nit 12-inch MacBook, and it outshines the 290-nit category average, the 319-nit Swift 7 and the 286-nit ZenBook UX330UA. The Air tries to make up for its color deficiency with brightness, emitting up to 336 nits. The Swift 7 (105 percent), ZenBook UX330UA (106 percent) and 12-inch MacBook (117 percent) all rated higher. Our colorimeter measured the MacBook Air as producing 71 percent of the sRGB spectrum, which is beneath the 100 percent category average and low for this price.

Even though Apple doesn't seem to believe the Air needs a Retina-level, or at least full-HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) display, I felt as if my eyes had gotten worse after using this machine for extended periods, as text on the screen doesn't look as sharp as it does on any of my personal devices.

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