The butterfly keyboard is no more – the 2020 retina MacBook Air has a new-to-it scissor style keyboard. This model also makes the leap over to 10th-gen Intel Ice Lake CPUs, which are also found in the 2020 13″ MacBook Pro with 4 Thunderbolt ports. The 2020 ‘Air and 4-TBP ‘Pro are the only Macs to have ever shipped with Intel Ice lake (10nm). All desktop Macs with 10th-gen Intel CPUs run instead on Comet Lake (14nm). With this new CPU architecture, the 2020 ‘Air finally leaps over to DDR4 – incasing the max memory bandwidth to 58.3 GB/s. Ice Lake also comes with a few new quirks – a Gaussian & neural accelerator, “Intel deep learning boost”, Intel adaptix, and introduces AVX 512.

Ice Lake vs Comet Lake (Intel 10th-Gen CPUs)

In the case of 2020 Macs, Ice Lake CPUs more or less refer to mobile 10th-Gen intel, whereas Comet Lake refers to desktop 10th-Gen intel. Ice Lake offers better graphical performance and power efficiency, building upon a 10nm fabrication process. Comet Lake, also being 10th-generation, are instead built upon the 14nm process and are used in the final round of 27″ Intel iMacs. All 2020 MacBook Airs come with an extra 24 KB of L1 data cache – over Intel Coffee Lake’s 32 KB L1 data cache, for a total of 48 KB! Ice Lake also doubles the L2 cache per core over the previous generation, to 512 KB!

Missing OS features past macOS Big Sur

Just like the outgoing Mid-2019 model: this MacBook Air does not support low power mode, minor Spatial Audio, Portrait mode, 3D landmarks in Apple Maps, or interactive globe features. It does however support sidecar. This model doesn’t support minor live captions in FaceTime HD, emoji dictation, and loses out on some sidecar features despite being compatible with sidecar. You also can’t react with your hands using the built-in camera, use minor presenter overlay, game mode, and high-performance mode in the screen sharing app.

On macOS Sequoia and later: there is no Apple Intelligence, nor any live audio transcription features.

Integrated Graphics, Iris Plus

The Intel Iris Plus line of Integrated Graphics continue trend of “vampire video” (that’s where the video bites into system memory). The 2006 Mac mini was the first Mac in a long, long time to do this, and more Macs started doing this in the late 2000’s – early 2010’s. Apple Silicon GPUs nowadays have unified memory, changing the traditional views on how system memory is used and shared throughout the system.

What You Need to Know

• These ‘Books shipped with 8 GB of RAM which is fine for basic tasks, but is increasingly impractical these days. For a serious speed boost, opt for 16 GB of RAM, and more storage.
• Multiple NANDs allow for parallel processing/RAID, increasing Read/Write speeds for the main boot drive via the PCIe bus.
• Although the Intel Ice Lake CPU architecture supports up to 32 GB RAM, implying it may be possible to soldier greater than 16GB RAM for this machine. This cannot be confirmed nor denied for this MacBook Air.
• This model is sometimes simply referred to as the Retina 2020 MacBook Air.

Closed Lid Mode: All Intel ‘Books support “lid closed” (or clamshell) mode, which leaves the built-in display off and dedicates all video RAM to an external display. To used closed lid mode, your ‘Book must be plugged into the AC adapter and connected to an external display and a USB or Bluetooth mouse and keyboard (you might also want to consider external speakers). Power up your ‘Book until the desktop appears on the external display and then close the lid. Your ‘Book will go to sleep, but you can wake it by moving the mouse or using the keyboard. The built-in display will remain off, and the external monitor will become your only display.

To resume use of the internal display, you need to disconnect the external display, put the computer to sleep, and then open the lid. This will wake up your ‘Book and restore use of the built-in display.

Battery life is claimed to be 11 hours of wireless web, 12 hours iTunes movie playback, and up to 30 days of standby time.

Mac OS

• Requires macOS 10.15.3 (Build 19D2064) Catalina or later. Still currently supported.

Details

• Announced March 18th, 2020
• Apple model number: A2179 (EMC 3302)
• Model ID: MacBookAir9,1
• Order: MWTJ2LL/A (Space Gray)
  • MWTL2LL/A (Gold)
  • MWTK2LL/A (Silver)
• Discontinued November 10th, 2020

How it stacks up in Geekbench 6 vs an M1 MacBook Air

• Single Core: 1063 (i3) / 1152 (i5) / 1199 (i7) / 2344 (M1)
• Multi-Core: 1886 (i3) / 2883 (i5) / 3179 (i7) / 8354 (M1)
• OpenCL: 3258 (i3) / 4212 (i5) / 6456 (i7) / 18559 (M1)
• Metal: ~6000 (i3) / 7949 (i5) / ~8500 (i7) / 30267 (M1)

Core System

All CPU options are Hyper Threaded, 10nm Ice Lake CPUs. The i5/i7’s are Quad Core!
Socket/package: FCBGA1526, PCIe v3.0

Legend: L1i = L1 Instruction Cache, L1d = L1 Data cache

• Intel Core i3-1000NG4 ($999): 1.1 Ghz, 2 Cores, 4 Threads, 3.2 GHz Turbo
  9W TDP, 10nm, Per-Core: 32KB L1i/48KB L1d, 512KB L2, Shared: 4 MB L3
  Comes with: MMX, SSE 4.2, new AES, VT-x w/EPT and VT-d, MPX, New: AVX 512
• Intel Core i5-1030NG7 ($1299): 1.1 Ghz, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.5 GHz Turbo
  10W TDP, 10nm, Per-Core: 32KB L1i/48KB L1d, 512KB L2, Shared: 4 MB L3
  Comes with: MMX, SSE 4.2, new AES, VT-x w/EPT and VT-d, MPX, New: AVX 512
• Intel Core i7-1060NG7 ($1249): 1.2 Ghz, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.8 GHz Turbo
  10W TDP, 10nm, Per-Core: 32KB L1i/48KB L1d, 512KB L2, Shared: 4 MB L3
  Comes with: MMX, SSE 4.2, new AES, VT-x w/EPT and VT-d, MPX, New: AVX 512

CPU Configuration notes:

• Intel Core i3-1000NG4 ($999): with 8 GB RAM, 256 GB storage
• Intel Core i5-1030NG7 ($1299): with 8 GB RAM, 512 GB storage
• Intel Core i7-1060NG7 ($1249): This was only available as a CTO/BTO. If configured with the i3 base model, it would be cheaper than to buy the “as configured” i5 $1299 model. (See below)

Video

• Intel Iris Plus Graphics: 300 MHz Base (all).
  • Max Dynamic Frequency: 900 MHz (i3), 1.05 Ghz (i5), 1.1 Ghz (i7)
  • 16GB Max VRAM allocation, DX12, OpenGL 4.5
  • Dev ID: 0x8A5C (i3), 0x8A51 (i5/i7)
• 13″ IPS TFT LED-backlit LCD Retina display, 2560 x 1600 @227PPI
  • Support for millions of colors
  • True Tone technology
  • Arsenic/PVC/Mercury/Beryllium-Free display
  • Rated EPEAT Gold
• “Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colors and”
  • 1x 6K@60Hz, 1x 5K@60Hz Millions of colors, or 2x 4K@60

Memory

• All models: 8/16 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X SDRAM @58.3 GB/s
  • 16 GB (+$200), chipset supports up to 32 GB.
  • 2 Memory Channels

Drives

• 256 GB PCIe v3.0 SSD (Base model), ~1319MB/s read, ~1007 MB/s Write
  • 512 GB (+$200)/1 TB (+$400)/2 TB (+$800)

Expansion/Misc

• 2x USB-C style Thunderbolt 3 ports (40 Gb/s), with support for USB 3.1
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• WiFi: 802.11ac (a/g/b/n)
• Bluetooth: BT 5.0
• 720p FaceTime Camera
• 3 Microphones with directional beamfoaming
• Stereo Speakers, support for Dolby Atmos
• Charging via USB-C
• Touch ID Sensor
• LED-Backlit Scissor Mechanism “Magic keyboard”
• Color options: Silver, Space Gray, Gold

Battery

• 11H Web / 12H iTunes Movies, 30 days standby.
• 49.9 W/h Li-Ion Polymer battery

Included Peripherals

• MacBook Air
• 30W Power Brick + 2-Meter Cord

Physical

• Size:H/W/D 0.16 – 0.63 x 11.97 x 8.36 in/0.41 – 1.61 x 30.41 x 21.24 cm
• Weight: 2.8 lb./1.29 kg