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00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave 2D here. The new MacBook Air just got announced with the new
00:09Mac Mini as well as the new iPad Pro. The MacBook Air, this is the old one, was a device
00:16that I think for a lot of people was like that gateway product into the Apple ecosystem.
00:21And I think it's been long overdue for a refresh. It's now running a 13.3 inch Retina display,
00:26so 2560x1600. It's got an updated design, a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports, and those can
00:31go all the way up to 4 PCIe lanes. It's got a headphone jack, but no USB-A. Now the keyboard
00:36that they're putting into this new MacBook Air is that third generation of butterfly
00:39switch keyboard. And here's my take on that. So the original MacBook Air, one of the things
00:44that made it so vastly popular was its keyboard. I think this keyboard was loved by basically
00:50everyone that used it. Even Apple haters would touch this keyboard and appreciate that this
00:53was an excellent keyboard, especially for an ultrabook. The keyboard on the new MacBook
00:57Air is those butterfly switch keyboards. Those are divisive keyboards. I feel like some people
01:02like them, some people tolerate them, but a lot of people just straight up dislike it.
01:06And it's a keyboard that is going to shape the adoption of that new MacBook Air. That
01:10butterfly switch style keyboard has been around for several years now, and a lot of people
01:14still don't like it. The CPU that they're running is a fanless 8th gen Y processor.
01:19It's the i5-8200Y. They've bumped the clock up to 1.6. It's a respectable CPU, nothing
01:25crazy. It's a two-core CPU. I think it'll fit the needs of most people. But I want to
01:29talk about the thing that I think is most important about this new MacBook Air, and
01:33it's the price tag. So it's what I think is a very expensive machine for what you're getting.
01:39So the MacBook Air traditionally, like the old one, has been, not that it's like a budget
01:43product, but it's kind of like an entry-level MacBook. At $1,000, it got you into macOS.
01:48I think for a lot of students and professionals, that was basically what they needed. This
01:53new MacBook Air starts at $1,200, and in this market right now, in 2018, that is not an
01:58inexpensive device. See, if this thing had started at $1,000, this thing would have just
02:01crushed the market. A $1,000 MacBook Air, like the new MacBook Air, would have been
02:06amazing. People would have been buying it off the shelves. But at $1,200, it's a good
02:10laptop, but it's just not that entry-level product that the MacBook Air used to be. So
02:15you're now competing, at that price point, with other Mac products. Like the $1,300 MacBook
02:19Pro, it's a little bit heavier, like 100, 150 grams heavier, but you're getting a way
02:24better screen, a more robust CPU, a more robust system overall for an extra $100. Not that
02:29the MacBook Air is a bad system, it's just that name used to be synonymous with decent
02:34value in the Ultrabook line, and it's, I don't think it is this year.
02:39Moving on to the iPad. So the new iPad Pro looks awesome this year. There's no home button,
02:44the bezels are smaller, the whole design just looks a lot cleaner to me. I do find
02:48it weird that the corners of the display have a different radius than the corners of the
02:52device. It just looks really un-Apple to me. They probably did it to make the device more
02:56comfortable to hold, but visually, it looks weird. The performance on that new iPad Pro
03:00looks amazing. I think a lot of people don't recognize just how efficient and how powerful
03:04Apple's chips are, compared to stuff from Intel. I think we're on the cusp of seeing
03:08Apple running their own chips and stuff on their laptops, instead of using Intel stuff.
03:12The pencil. The magnetic pencil. I mean, this is something that interests me, but every
03:16single time I've used an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro, I felt like it was so silly how
03:21this one was charged and how it never connected magnetically to the iPad, but they fixed all
03:25that this year. It now has USB-C connectivity, which is nice. I feel like it's a bit of a
03:30stretch in terms of just how useful that will really be. I mean, it looks cool in pictures,
03:34you know, having external monitors and stuff like that, but because this device still doesn't
03:38have mouse support, it's going to be difficult for apps to really take advantage of external
03:42displays, because you still have to navigate through the iPad touch controls or a pen,
03:46right? And that's usually not ideal for most applications. They've also removed the headphone
03:50jack, and I think that's something that a lot of existing iPad users use, so that's
03:54honestly quite disappointing. But, in the pursuit of aesthetics, that's what they have
03:58to do. Okay, last thing. Mac Mini. This is a device that hasn't been refreshed in almost
04:03four years. It got a pretty heavy overhaul. It looks to have user-upgradable RAM, which
04:07is good. I don't think you can upgrade the storage, which is a bummer. It's got a four
04:11or a six-core CPU. Both options are pretty solid. The GPU in here is still pretty weak,
04:16so unless you're running an external GPU, you're not going to be able to run any kind
04:19of graphically intensive applications. The pricing on it is disappointing to me. It's
04:23a $300 price bump from the previous generation, and I used to think that the Mac Mini was
04:28one of their best-valued products. I mean, you could open it up, you could kind of throw
04:31in RAM storage pretty easily, and I think for a lot of developers, that was the device
04:35that they used, right? That was like the, you could plug it up to your existing monitor,
04:38your existing keyboard, and now you could develop Mac applications without spending
04:42too much money. But, at $800, that's a pretty steep investment. Not that it's a bad product.
04:47It's nice that it's been updated, and it's a pretty good-looking device this year, but
04:51it's just a lot more expensive than I thought it would be, considering the pricing of small
04:55desktops right now. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you liked it, subs if
04:59you loved it. See you guys next time.