It gives the MacBook Air hope in a face-off it would normally lose with Intel chips, especially the ultra-low-power processors Apple opted for in the past.Īs it stands, the M1 SoC is the fastest chip for ultra-portable laptops on the market. The 4.5 x 3-inch touchpad on the Surface Laptop isn't as large but it feels just as silky and acts quickly to Windows 10 gestures, like a two-finger swipe to zoom. I'll put this down to personal preference but I'm not a fan of the Force Touch trackpad and its faux presses. It has a smooth glass surface and responds quickly to swipes and gestures. The 4.7 x 3.2-inch touchpad on the MacBook Air is comically large for a laptop this size. The bad news is that the Surface Laptop 4 remains more comfortable to type on. Surface Laptop 4: Keyboard and touchpadįor Apple fans, the good news is that the Butterfly keyboard is gone for good, replaced by a traditional Chiclet-style keyboard on the latest MacBook Air model. The touchscreen on the Surface Laptop 4 is responsive and comes with pen support for greater precision. Apple continues to refuse to add touchscreens to its laptops at the detriment of creatives who like to use a stylus to draw or take notes. What gives the Surface Laptop 4 an edge over the MacBook Air is the touch-enabled screen. But that's because the white balance is warm or neutral whereas the MacBook Air has a crisp, sheet-of-paper tone. Interestingly, colors looked more saturated on the Surface Laptop 4 when I viewed these two screens side-by-side. Peaking at 366 nits of brightness, the MacBook Air narrowly outshone the Surface Laptop 4 (349 nits) although, once again, both panels fell short of the 389 nits average. Both fell short of the 84% category average. With that out of the way, the MacBook Air regains some ground by covering 81% of the DCI-P3 color gamut whereas the Surface Laptop 4 reached only 77%. The notch on the front edge is a nice touch and the top-firing speakers are preferred to down-firing ones. It remains a remarkably slim and lightweight laptop and the unibody aluminum chassis was built with precision craftsmanship. It has the same slim wedge-shaped design as before, available in traditional Gold, Space Gray and Silver color options.
If you've seen a MacBook Air in the past few years, then you know how the newest model looks.
Sleek and sophisticated but showing their age, the MacBook Air and Surface Laptop 4 are portable and sturdy ultra-thin laptops that could use some updates. Our review unit, with an 8-core M1 GPU, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, goes for $1,649. Upgrades cost $200 for 16GB of RAM and another $200 for 1TB of storage. Look at the fine print and you'll notice this version has a 7-core GPU.įor $1,249, you get the 8-core GPU model with an M1 SoC, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. For $999, you can buy the base model with an M1 SoC, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.
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