Apple MacBook Air 2020 Core i5 Review – The best MacBook you can get? – No

[passenger]

Is this Intel's fault for not giving OEMs sufficient data in the lead-up to release? Will this no longer be a problem when passively cooled Apple-designed ARM chips take over in the Air? I hope so.

Even then it's still not a valid excuse, especially for the 16" inch version where every one already knows how much power intel 14nm would use.

It's not even for the 13" mba. You could handle the old 28w 4c8t 14nm in 13" mbpr before, but now you could not handle 10nm Y series?

Yes, heat is more concentrated when you shrink the lithography, but checkout how zen 2 with 7nm is handled well in Asus G14. They are all brand new products that didn't exists before, and Asus nailed it while Apple didn't, that's all. You may argue that it's a lot of heatpipes in G14 and mba are supposed to be light machine so they can't really play similar tricks, but I would say enough of this endless thin and light game. No one really benefits from that extra 200 grams you save, except Apple, who could advertise them and attract more people that don't really know what they need. Someone have to stop this. Besides, G14 is not heavy, even light, if you consider how much power is packed into it.

[S.Yu]

The cleanliness of Apple's internals impress me time and again, people could copy the exterior, but never the interiors.
But the inclusion of a single fan without a heat pipe to the SoC is simply baffling.

There are a lot of baffling things about the cooling choices of Apple laptops these days, including the long threads about the MacBook Pro 16. I understand when there is a huge range of Windows machines by manufacturers such as Lenovo that it gets difficult to engineer solutions for so many different chassis and combinations of CPU/GPU. But Apple does not have this excuse - the chassis stay the same for years at a time. Thermals should actually improve over time - but they don't.

Is this Intel's fault for not giving OEMs sufficient data in the lead-up to release? Will this no longer be a problem when passively cooled Apple-designed ARM chips take over in the Air? I hope so.

Of course, you reminded me that Apple is soon transitioning to "Mac on ARM", by then all thermal issues would certainly be resolved. There's no valid reason for A series chips to throttle more in a laptop than in iPP.

[menem]

Cooling solution in this computer is ridiculous. Dell 9300 can have regular heatsink.

[powerslave12r]

Man, what happened to Apple?

They have PWM on most (all current?) of their notebook displays and on the flagship OLED iphones.

They were supposed to set the display benchmark.

[Gabe]

Any update on the i3 / i7 version benchmarks mentioned in the article? When can we expect those?

I'm wondering what's the difference in real-life usage, especially the i3 variant. Perhaps the better thermals help more?

Also, I wanted to mention that I absolutely love your objective reviews. All other review sites just link to Geekbench scores that inflate the everyday performance a lot.

[jayg]

I'm looking for a new Macbook without PWM. I'm looking at the "Pro 13 2019 i5 4TB3". Would there be a way for me to check if my display matches the one tested by NotebookCheck, "APPA03E".

Also, the display seems to be the same as in the "Pro 13 2018 (Touch Bar, i5)". But, in your review for that, you guys detected PWM. Just curious what might be the reason for the different results.

Thanks.