Apple MacBook Air 2020, intel edition. Such a piece of junk and shame on Apple for releasing it knowing that they’d have launched the M1 in just a few months. Maximum corporate greed.
I have this one and love it. The M1 would have been worthless to me anyways since I wanted 1 laptop to run MacOS and Windows. Unfortunately I think this is the last Mac I’ll be able to get because of the transition.
Do you need to boot into win? If so, I see why the new machines are not for you. If you can get away with virtualization, VMware Fusion is now free.
I used Fusion for my previous job from the start of the pan until last year (so first on an Intel Mac, then on an M1 MBP) and it was good enough for what I needed. Win for Arm was obviously faster than Win x86 on the previous machine, even when it was a preview release. Then again, my needs were not extreme.
8 months (though I imagine sales may have tanked in June when they announced the transition to Apple Silicon, so Apple probably only got 3 months of sales.)
But it was in fact the fastest intel MacBook Air - and it still is.
What few people outside Apple (or even inside given Apple's notorious secrecy) probably realized in early to mid 2020, even after the WWDC announcement, was how great the Apple Silicon/M1 MacBook Air was actually going to be, and how it would transform expectations for performance and battery life in a fanless laptop.
Perhaps Apple should have offered a trade-in scheme like they did for the Lisa/Macintosh XL. I wonder if they offered upgrades to the buyers of the October 1999 Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) which was replaced by a better model only two months later.
Let's also recall that the 2020 MacBook Air launched in March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. Nobody knew how serious that would be and what the impact would be on tech manufacturing, especially in China. It was the last major launch before global lockdowns set in and it wasn't clear when the next one would be possible.