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Review on Renewed Apple MacBook Air 13.3" with Retina Display, Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD - Space Gray MVFH2LL/A by Adam Koodziejek ᠌

Revainrating 3 out of 5

The average quality of the product, especially for such money.

I love macOS, how it looks, what kind of experience it offers, what kind of software is written on it - these factors at one time made me completely abandon Windows machines. But, unfortunately, with the advent of the "great" and terrible macOS Catalina, I constantly experience frustration: - regular bugs in the face of belatedly activated trackpad and keyboard (which many people write about on Reddit and the Apple forum); - problems with sleep mode (the laptop sometimes just does not wake up - I tried to solve this problem with the help of official support for a month, but in the end I solved it myself by turning off the safe sleep mode through the terminal); - strange networking (an elementary connection via a local network to a Windows computer causes random errors); - Hanging at the end of AirDrop reception (and only from a personal device, everything is fine from strangers); - and much more. I got the impression that Apple does not pay enough attention to its creation, they switched to more ambitious iPads, in connection with which poppies, users suffer, and where to expect solutions to problems is unknown. All hope for new ates, but the impressions are already spoiled and most likely after some time I will return to the iPad Pro again, since now instead of the not very pleasant Smart Keyboard there is a normal Magic Keyboard, like on laptops. I'm more than satisfied with the Air itself, but the unreliable keyboard, weak cooling system and Catalina are a huge fly in the ointment. If you are mainly engaged in texts, documents and processes that are not the most demanding on the system, this laptop (like the 19 and 20 models) will be a decent machine, albeit with some drawbacks. However, for the same tasks, you can get an iPad (any) with a keyboard that will cost you less, will not make noise, overheat, and in general will be even more productive (including graphics). Well, or you can look at something from Windows solutions, of which there are quite a lot of decent ones now. Choose wisely.

Pros
  • - ated and quite pleasant to the eye display, switching to MBA from iPad Pro 12.9 (2 gen) did not experience discomfort (although it lost 120Hz with DCI-P3). - Excellent build quality, monolithic body, the paint hasn't peeled off / hasn't worn off in a year and a half (Space Gray). - An entertaining and rather comfortable keyboard (assuming you have 10-finger touch typing skills), but not without drawbacks (read more in the shortcomings). - No TouchBar and thank God. - Gorgeous sound (although the iPad Pro is better, but there are more speakers). - Fast SSD (2022 Air version only). - Energy-efficient processor (it is also in shortcomings). - Pretty fast charging from the bundled adapter (you can also charge your smartphone, Nintendo Switch and everything that has a USB-C connector with it). - Acceptable autonomy (from 9 to 16:00 holds, sometimes even up to 18:00) in work tasks in the face of the open Safari browser (5-8 tabs), printing documents in Word, editing images in Pixelmator Pro, correspondence in Telegram. - Light weight, even if there are not enough stars from the sky (the same MacBook Pro 13 weighs about the same).
Cons
  • - The screen works almost always at 100% brightness, but I would not say that it is required higher, although this hurts autonomy. - The assembly is excellent, but there are chips on the corners, although I use the laptop very carefully (but there are no scratches). - After a year of operation, the T / E key got stuck, the gap began to be squeezed strangely - I had to hand it over to the official service center, because blowing with compressed air did not help. They returned the device a week later with a new topcase. Pretty sad, considering that I have never had this happen with any device from the apple company. And I didn’t eat over the laptop, and I didn’t let the dust into it on purpose. Everything was within normal use (at work on a desk, at home on my lap/sofa/bed). I also advise you to take the version with the American layout with normal Shift and Enter. - After a year and a half, the speakers began to wheeze at high volume levels, but not critically. - The processor is normal for this device, but if I knew what an interesting cooling system Apple engineers came up with so that this device would not have the slightest chance to encroach on the level of Pro models of their own laptops, I would hardly take it. And it's not even about performance, but about the rapid heating of the case and turning on the fan in trivial tasks. No, when working with texts, the browser - everything is ok, but everything related to graphics (even YouTube videos) causes unpleasant heating in this laptop. - macOS (more details in the comment).