2021 MacBook Air - Unboxing, Setup, and First Look

2021 MacBook Air - Unboxing, Setup, and First Look:

2021 MacBook Air - Unboxing, Setup, and First Look: The 2021 Mac Book. It I'll set it up and then we'll run some benchmarks take a general look around it and see what it'sgot to offer and so you'll see this is the packaging this is the 13-inch Mac Book Air let's go ahead and take the wrapper off it now you can get a base configuration of a 1.1 gigahertz dual core i3 or you can go all the way up to a core i7 quad core 1.2 gigahertz with 16 gigs of ram and 2 terabytes of storage this is the base in between model that's $1,299 with a 1.1 gigahertzquad core i5 so let's flip it over so you can take a look at the specs this isa 13.3 inch LED backlit display 2560 by 1600 pixels 1.1 gigahertz quad-core theturbo boosts up to 3.5 gigahertz eight gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes ofpcie-based storage it also has the Intel iris plus graphics and two Thunderbolt 3ports so let's go ahead and open it up and take a closer look so we'll removeit from the box here and it's got that normal suction that you get with anapple box so you can't remove it very quickly and here is the MacBook Air nowbefore we look at this let's take a look at the accessories in the box you don'tget a whole lot for this amount of money you do get some design by Apple inCalifornia literature you've got your MacBook Air the typical this Quick StartGuide you've got a little warranty card and some space grey stickers to match itdoes come in silver as well now let's set that aside you also get a USB C 2USB C power adapter and the power adapter for this is a 30 watt poweradapter 









So this is stuck here a little bit but it's a 30 watt power adapter andit allows you to charge your your macbook pro and you'll see 30 watt rightthere so it's just USB C no Thunderbolt on that butset this aside and take a closer look at the MacBook Air and this is the MacBookAir and like I said it's Space Gray you've got a little silver Apple in themiddle and then on one side you have two USB sea ports on the back it's justmetal on the other side you have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and that's iton the bottom you've just got four rubber feet and then the screws to openup the bottom so let's go ahead and open it up open it up here remove the pieceof paper that comes with it and immediately it boots up now what'sdifferent about this is it has better speakers we'll take a closer listen tothose in a minute it has better microphones and it has the new scissorkeyboard that the MacBook Pro 16 inch gets and so this keyboard has a lot moretravel it should have a lot more feedback 









I'll take a closer look in aminute when I try heiping on it but let's go ahead and set up the OS now I'mat the main setup screen and the language I want is English so I'll clickNext and then I'm based in the United States and it auto selected that for meso I'll click continue and then I'll select my Wi-Fi network and connect andI don't want to transfer any information but you could do this now or do it laterwe'll click continue and now I need to sign in with my Apple IDonce I've signed in with my Apple ID I'll click agree to the terms andconditions and then I'll click agree again or else you can't use it nowhere's my username and then I'll set up a password now I'll click continue onfind my and now we're at Express setup so I'll go ahead and click continueand then I like to share crash and usage data with app developers so I'll clickcontinue and screen time









I don't really use I'll just click continue and I'llset it up later and I do want to use Siri so I'll click continue I'll set uphey Siri later and then do I want to share audio recordings or not no I don'tso I'll click continue and I do use iCloud so I'll click continue on that Ido like to use that and then do I want to use a file vault disk encryption thisis really up to you I like the idea of it but it seems to cause issuessometimes too so I know a lot of people that turn thisnow I'm going to set up touch ID and that's something I really appreciate onthe new Mac so we'll go ahead and click continue then I'll place my finger on itand we'll just set it up quickly then we'll keep doing that get the edges ofmy finger and then we'll click continue and it's asking if I want to use Applepay I'll set this up later and we can set up light-dark or auto I like to useauto since the light mode and dark mode will change throughout the day so we'llclick continue and then you've got true tone now when I'm editing video andphotos I turn off true tone because you don't really want 









It because it makesthe screen warmer than the reality of what you're seeing but for now I'llleave it on on this Mac because this is more for documents and things for me sonow here's the home screen and you can see all of the different applicationsI'll go into system prefe rences and I like to turn it on so the dock moves alittle bit so let me set this up I want it to magnify some and so when I move mymouse cursor over it the applications kind of magnify in a little bit and thenI like to get rid of a lot of these things so let me do that and then I'llcome back in just a moment and we'll check benchmarks and things and we'llcheck out the keyboard now everything is set up and I want to check out thekeyboard because Apple has acknowledged that most people prefer scissor switchesover the butterfly mechanism now the butterfly switches didn't reallybother me that much but now that I've had experience with the 16 inch MacBookPro I really appreciate them and I also really appreciate that there's no touchbar here









Because, I really don't care for the touch bar now let me go into pagesand I'll try typing on it and so let's try hi how are you todaythat's usually what I try out and there's a nice feedback with that and Idon't type like most people and you'll see I can type normal but I Ihave my own style kind of that works pretty well so that's really nice wehave the Escape key we've got touch ID now of course and thetrackpad is supposedly 20% larger now before we run any of the benchmarks andtake a look at that the keyboard is nice and everything but let's see what themicrophone and the speaker sound like within here because this still has the720p webcam which is not so great but let's see if we can record a little bitof a video here so now you can see I have the FaceTime camera activated let'sgo ahead and hit record so you can hear the difference in audio between mystudio mic here and what's coming through the FaceTime camera and threestudio or three mic array on the MacBook Air and so now you can hear the MacBookAir and 









I'm not so sure it's that great but it's definitely something you coulduse when you needed to record in a room you're in a pinch and maybe you need torecord a podcast or something like that and of course it's sufficient for thingslike FaceTime but this 720p webcam is not so great so now let's take a look atsome of the benchmarks we'll go over to Geekbench 5 we'll run that first thenwe'll run Cinebench let me make sure everything is closed out here so we'llrun a cpu test and let's see what it returns and you can see for the CPU wescored 951 for single core and 2464 for multi-core and this is the quad coreprocessor so you can see one processor four coreseight threads so let's go ahead and see what we can get for compute as far asopen CL or metal let's take a look at metal for metal we scored eight thousandthree hundred and eighty so these are the Intel iris plus graphics sohopefully they're a little bit better now let's run open CL quick for open CLthe MacBook Air scored seven thousand five hundred and twenty two so let's goahead and see what we can get with Cinebench now









I'll run the CPU test andlet's see what we get Cinebench finished and it scored ninehundred and twelve points now this is not terribly fast but this should dowhat most people need it to do as far as word processing you could even edit a 4kvideo on it now let's take a look at the actual disk speed test and see what weget with that now with disk speed test let's goand hit start and see what we get now this is the 512 gigabyte version andinitially we're getting about 1500 or 1500 megabytes per second right speedand 1199 megabytes per second or one thousand three hundred and seventeenmegabytes per second read speeds so I'm just letting it run back and forth soabout 1,500 right 1,300 read which usually it's the other way around butthat's what we're getting so it seems to be pretty good it's not as fast as sayan imac pro or a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro but it's plenty fast now when I wasrunning benchmarks the fans spun up to full speed but they never went above 50decibels so usually they stuck around 35 to 40 now let's take a look at thespeakers now here's one of my latest videoslet me turn up the speaker so you can hear them I'll turn them up all the wayand we'll hit play so the sound is quite nice and it seems like they should do anice job when you're trying to listen to music or just watch a video on YouTubeor the internet now the battery in the MacBook Air is good for about 11 hoursof wireless web surfing or 12 hours of Apple TV app movie playback according toApple now that's if you're not doing anything else and probably 









If yourbrightness is at about 50% or lower now the actual battery size is 49.9 watthours and this is a really nice weight it's not too heavy and in fact it'sabout 2.8 pounds so it really should fit nicely in a bag if you want to carry itaround it feels very well built and nice and solid and of course we still havetouch ID which is nice if it needs to be unlocked quickly or you want to useApple babe now I really think this is a great laptop for someone that wants tomaybe go to college write documents maybe you want to use Pages KeynoteMicrosoft Word and maybe occasionally edit a photo or edit a video with it youcan edit 4k video with these last year's MacBook Air work just fine with thisit's not going to be as fast as a MacBook Pro or anor something along those lines but it will be plenty fast if you want to dosome light editing and things like that but let me know what you think of theMacBook Air I'd love to hear if you want to see a review. CLICK HERE