#IS THERE IMESSAGE FOR MACBOOK AIR WINDOWS#

But very few of them have the same iconic look and feel of the aluminum Air.

You can get edge-to-edge screens, log in with your face, and find faster and more powerful processors.

#IS THERE IMESSAGE FOR MACBOOK AIR WINDOWS#

There are dozens of Windows laptops in the same price range that beat this Air on any number of metrics. Most of all - keyboard aside - the overall design and quality of the hardware is top-notch. The speakers are pretty good for a laptop of this size and class. The trackpad is big, accurate, and doesn’t suffer from false taps from your palms. Logging in with Touch ID is really convenient (and I also prefer physical function keys to the Touch Bar). The True Tone Retina display is beautiful and makes other screens look garishly blue by comparison. I really like this laptop and think it’s very good. Is this MacBook Air good enough to become The Default Laptop? My answer is that it depends on your needs - which is just another way of saying “no.” If we were able to set this whole keyboard issue aside, I would be asking a different question, the one I led the review with. Perhaps more importantly, Apple introduced an extended keyboard service program, so if something goes awry you have four years of coverage. This so-called “Gen 3.5” keyboard has what Apple will only describe as “new materials” inside the butterfly switches. No, it hasn’t completely redesigned them, but it has tweaked them yet again to improve reliability. That’s because Apple finally made some more serious interventions on its keyboards. The keyboard is covered under a four-year warranty, at least

This Air is very good, but it’s not quite that. It was the easy, obvious choice - the thing you could safely recommend to anybody. The classic MacBook Air was The Default Laptop (capitalization intended) for many people. But I’m not sure it has the same pedigree. It has the same wedge shape, about the same price, and the same name. The real question for this new Air is whether it can live up to the classic MacBook Air that dominated the laptop industry for over half a decade.

After all, if you want to use a Mac, you only have a few options. That’s much closer to what I think this laptop should cost - and more importantly it’s much closer to being the entry-level price Apple should be charging for its entry-level laptop. The biggest difference for most people is that Apple has cut the price down by $100, so a model with 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM now costs $1,099. And it still - yes - has a controversial and divisive butterfly keyboard to type on. It still has Touch ID for securely logging in. The processor is unchanged, a Y-series chip that does the job but can struggle under heavy loads. There are still two USB-C / Thunderbolt ports instead of MagSafe and traditional USB-A ports. It still has a beautiful Retina display - only now it’s True Tone so it matches the color temperature of the room. There’s not a lot that’s changed with 2019’s iteration of the MacBook Air - it’s a minor tweak on the major changes Apple introduced last year.

Is there imessage for macbook air