I’ve never really watched Alton Brown’s TV shows. But then the other day I got an alert that the Food Network star had just started a cooking-while-quarantined livestream on YouTube. A strange impulse came over me to watch it. Maybe it’s being holed up inside for too long. The livestream quality was terrible because Brown was using the built-in webcam on his MacBook. “Apple, can you do something about the cameras on your computers? Cause they suck,” he said.
Most laptops have terrible webcams, and it hasn’t been a big issue because a good webcam isn’t a top-tier feature. But as more people are forced to work from home, wouldn’t it be nice if Apple led the charge and offered a laptop camera that didn’t output potato quality? Sadly this change has not come to Apple’s newest MacBook Air. But I’m nitpicking. There’s not much else wrong with the company’s latest laptop, and it easily remains the best MacBook for most people—at least those who prefer macOS and don’t want to switch teams to Windows.
Typo Negative
The MacBook Air is the most popular MacBook Apple sells, and the big draw for most people to upgrade from an older model should be the keyboard on this machine. If you haven’t heard, the keyboards on MacBooks haven’t been great (to put it mildly). Our own senior writer Lauren Goode had her MacBook Pro’s E key pop off, and you can find numerous complaints about similar problems on Apple laptops all over the internet (or even backstage at the Oscars).
The troubles all stem from the butterfly switch mechanism Apple began using in 2015. It doesn’t offer enough key travel—the amount of vertical distance each key moves when you press down—but the main issue is that a single grain of dust can find its way under the spring and disable the mechanism, rendering the key useless. After minor tweaks that tried to mitigate the problem, as well as a free keyboard repair program, Apple conceded and finally said goodbye to the butterfly switch late last year. The 16-inch MacBook Pro was the first laptop to ship with the improved keyboard design. Now, it’s the MacBook Air’s t