Macbook Air 2020 thread

Associate
Joined
19 Jul 2005
Posts
2,239
Location
Lonetrek
What kind of tasks cause the fans to spin up? I'd have thought the base dual core model would have stayed fairly quiet as presumably the quad core would be even hotter?

Most commonly it's Teams video calls, but even having lots of apps running but dormant (Edge, Chrome, Word, Excel, etc) and Outlook logged in can cause it to spin up.

Basically, the Microsoft apps make it unhappy :D
 
Soldato
Joined
15 Dec 2008
Posts
2,682
Location
London
Most commonly it's Teams video calls, but even having lots of apps running but dormant (Edge, Chrome, Word, Excel, etc) and Outlook logged in can cause it to spin up.

Basically, the Microsoft apps make it unhappy :D

To be fair Teams is bloody awful in terms of resource usage. Turning off GPU Acceleration seems to help loads and doesn't appear to affect the app that much.

HorridTeams.png
 
Associate
Joined
19 Jul 2005
Posts
2,239
Location
Lonetrek
To be fair Teams is bloody awful in terms of resource usage. Turning off GPU Acceleration seems to help loads and doesn't appear to affect the app that much.

HorridTeams.png

Brilliant, will give that a go when I'm back working on Tuesday :)

Have found that eschewing the external monitor helps a lot, and the recent app and OS update have made Outlook less shonky.
 
Soldato
Joined
17 Sep 2007
Posts
11,095
Location
West Yorkshire / Market Bosworth
Decided to order a base spec MBA i3 2020 today as I need something to replace my faulty 5 year old MacBook.

My usage is mostly web based app hopefully the performance and cooling will be adequate. Should be a substantial improvement over my old MacBook at least as on paper it's about double the speed according to the benchmarks I've seen.

I did actually order the new 13" MBP (10th gen) but I had a faulty display so had to return it. Didn't buy another as I felt a bit nervous spending nearly £2k on one given the imminent ARM switchover.

At least with the base Air I can sell it next year without taking too much of a loss if needs be.

Been using mine for over a month now and I'd say it barely gets warm in normal usage (safari, iTunes, mail etc).

I tried loading up Firewatch on steam and the heat ramped up to almost uncomfortable levels and not much action from any sort of fan to cool it down. Clearly not meant for gaming and I didn't have any expectations with that - was just giving it a go.
 
Caporegime
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
27,635
Location
Lancs/London
Got a base 2020 Space Grey Air coming tomorrow as got 10% off via Very. I have a pretty high spec 2016 MBP for work but i've been using it for personal stuff and shouldn't really be doing that (torrents, photo editing etc) .... i've always wanted to get an Air again as I found the form of my old 2014 was really nice.

I'm glad they've moved away from the piece of garbage that is the butterfly keyboard and also has Retina which my old Air didn't have!!
 
Last edited:
Caporegime
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
27,635
Location
Lancs/London
Rocked up. First impressions are the screen is considerably better than my old Air but that was a given. Trackpad is incredible, again as expected.

The form feels thicker than the wedge on my old Air though, it feels pretty much identical to use as my 16 MBP. Im not going to look up the actual difference, so the feeling I'm getting isn't an accurate indication of the actual dimensions :p

Finally the keyboard is so much better than the butterfly, better in every single respect.
 
Back
Top Bottom