The 2018 MacBook Air is a spot-on redesign of the original game-changer that Steve Jobs’ introduced almost 11 years ago. Read on to find out why it’s more practical than the new iPad Pro and a big improvement over the bold but flawed original MBA.
Review backgrounder: Two weeks with the new MacBook Air (256GB). One month with the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro (256GB, Wi-Fi + Cellular) and Smart Keyboard Folio.
Price: MBA already seeing discounts (I’m including the 11-inch iPad Pro for comparison purposes)
- 2018 MacBook Air with 256GB of storage: $1,399
- 2018 12.9-inch iPad Pro with 256GB of storage and Smart Keyboard Folio: $1,348 (no cellular)
- 2018 11-inch iPad Pro with 256GB of storage and Smart Keyboard Folio: $1,128 (no cellular)
Spot deals on the MacBook Air change the pricing equation. So far, the new MacBook Air is getting heftier discounts ($100 – $200). The iPad Pro 12.9* typically only $50. In this case, the MacBook Air is very price-competitive and the better deal.
Portability: close (I’m including the 11-inch iPad Pro for comparison purposes)
- Retina MacBook Air: 2.75 pounds. This is the new pinnacle of Apple’s thin-and-light laptop technology. Though at 2.75 pounds it’s heavier than the 12-inch MacBook (2 pounds), it is Apple’s thinnest and lightest 13.3-inch MacBook — a happy medium for most consumers.
- iPad Pro 12.9-inch with Folio keyboard: 2.3 pounds. It’s lighter by almost half a pound than the MacBook Air. (The 12.9-inch iPad Pro alone weighs 1.39 pounds.)
- iPad Pro 11-inch with Folio keyboard: 1.65 pounds. (The 11-inch iPad Pro alone weighs about 1 pound.)
If I hold the MacBook Air in one hand and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro w/keyboard in the other, I can feel the difference in weight. But practically, it’s a draw. That’s because the MacBook Air has slightly better weight distribution than the iPad and the difference isn’t big enough to notice in my bag.
Performance: iPad wows on benchmarks but MBA is fast enough
On Geekbench 4 benchmarks, the iPad Pro is faster than the MacBook Air. Roughly 25 percent faster in single core and more than 133 percent faster on multi-core.
Benchmarks aside, after using the new MacBook Air constantly for two weeks, I can say that it’s plenty fast. In fact, most of the time, it keeps up with my mid-2017 15-inch (quad-core) MacBook Pro when doing everyday tasks, which includes productivity, media consumption, image editing, and very light video editing.
And there are other reasons I’m okay with the hardware inside the 2018 MBA. The low-power, dual-core Intel “Amber Lake” processor (launched by Intel in the third quarter of 2018) is a good fit: the MBA’s ultra-thin chassis never gets hot (for what I do).
And Apple’s newest solid-state flash drive is so fast that it doesn’t seem to matter that I have only 8GB of memory on the MacBook Air versus the 16GB in the MacBook Pro 15.
The only time I see any remarkable difference in performance is when I hook up the new MBA to my LG UltraFine 5K Display: here, the MacBook Air is slower than the MacBook Pro when pushing around all of those pixels.
Display: iPad wins
The iPad Pro display has a wide P3 color gamut, higher resolution, True Tone, and higher brightness than the MacBook Air. That said, I really don’t notice the difference in day-to-day use. The MBA Retina display is excellent. And, yes, this is the first MacBook Air with a Retina display.
Battery life: iPad wins but…
The iPad Pro beats the MBA on battery life but the MBA still lasts a long time. Based on my usage patterns, I’m getting 6 to 12 hours on the MBA versus 8 to 14 hours on the iPad Pro, depending on what I’m doing. But let me put it this way: the MacBook Air outlasts my 15-inch MacBook Pro by two to three hours. That’s a lot.
Face ID: depends
It depends. The iPad Pro has Face ID, the MacBook Air has Touch ID. In my experience, there are pros/cons for both Face ID and Touch ID.
4G/LTE: option on iPad
This is an option on the iPad but not on the MBA.
Keyboard: MBA
I like the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard Folio (no third-party keyboard necessary for me). Apple’s keyboard is easy on the fingers with plenty of travel and I could adjust quickly.
But…the MacBook Air’s third-generation Butterfly keyboard is — for lack of a better word — sublime. I’ve always liked Apple’s Butterfly keyboards and the one on the MacBook Air is the best yet.
Getting stuff done: MBA pulls away
This is where the 2018 MacBook Air pulls away. In short, the difference is macOS and the MBA’s standard keyboard and built-in trackpad. Simple stuff on a MacBook is jarring on the iPad Pro. That includes, but is by no means limited to, cut-and-paste, editing images, and jumping between floating windows (which is not doable on the iPad).
Reasons the 2018 iPad Pro w/ keyboard is not yet a replacement for the 2018 MacBook Air:
- It doesn’t run macOS — obvious but something you’re reminded of again and again on the iPad Pro
- No trackpad/mouse: obvious drawback but doesn’t make it any less inconvenient
- Some maddening things you can’t work around, e.g., WordPress iOS bugs that don’t get addressed
- Must resort to tortuous iOS hacks to do things that are very routine on the MacBook Air
- Makes you lean heavily on cloud storage for file management
- The iPad’s USB Type C port does not recognize external devices that are recognized on the MacBook
- External USB-C monitors are only mirrored. (It mirrored my Dell 25-inch U2515H QHD 2,560-by-1,440 display but not my LG UltraFine 5K.)
Of course, the iPad Pro has lots of upsides. And I realize it’s meant, in many cases, for users not like me. That includes consumers who mostly do media consumption (e.g., web browsing, movies, books) and social media. Or artists and professionals who deal with images. Or Hollywood types who create story narratives. Or Video production/editing. Or Audio production/editing and audio buffs like professional DJs. Or Hospitals and medical professionals and Industrial applications.
In short, the iPad Pro does things that the MacBook can’t. That’s why reviewers often say that it “feels like the future.”
Summary / verdict: versus the original MacBook Air
Maybe the 2018 MacBook Air is a little boring. But I prefer practical (boring) to bleeding-edge (broken). The original introduced by Steve Jobs in 2008 (which I owned) was bold but broken: it overheated constantly and the battery only lasted a few hours. And when I say hot, I mean it was often too hot to put on your lap. (I had to stop what I was doing and turn it off to let it cool down.)
Ten years later we have superb (practical) redesign of the the original. I think it’s the best MacBook yet. And it’s a more practical design compared to the 12-inch MacBook — which had been my all-time MacBook favorite.
And the new MacBook Air tops the iPad Pro on practicality. It comes with an ecosystem that has a proven track record in traditional productivity/getting-work-done — the iPad Pro does not.
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NOTES:
*The 11-inch iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard Folio is by far the cheapest of the three, shaving off more than $200 compared to the MacBook Air and 12.9-inch iPad Pro. That’s a lot of money if you’re a student — or anybody for that matter.
And it’s by far the lightest: the 11-inch iPad Pro w/keyboard is incredibly light and indisputably the lightest of the three.
But…and this is a big “but”…it’s hard to go back to the 11-inch screen after you’ve used the 12.9-inch iPad Pro for any extended period of time.
