12" MacBook Review: Greatly Misunderstood

Hey guys, today we're going to take a look at the 12-inch MacBook Retina, specifically the 2017 model, which is the latest update available as of this video, for those who aren't familiar with this device before watching this

review

. Simply put, this is the smallest configurable modern

macbook

you can find from this video, it doesn't fit into the

macbook

pro line of the family, but it also doesn't belong to the macbook air line, rather this one has its own line or Should I say this one had its own line in case you haven't heard of this? It is important for me to reveal that the 12-inch MacBook line as of this video has actually been discontinued.

Apple quietly killed it on July 9, 2019 and it's really unfortunate because in many ways it's still a really good laptop and it's a laptop that you could buy today and be happy with if you're looking for a laptop that completely offers portability, so to speak, simply put this is a laptop that I can still confidently recommend to people, but only to a select demographic, it's not for everyone, so I guess my goal in this

review

is to tell everyone interested on the 12-inch MacBook everything important you need to know about it and whether any of these discontinued 12-inch MacBooks will be worth your money.

This may be a long review, but I hope you get something useful out of it, so let's go over the non-discount pricing and configurations. It's very fast here, there are three levels of settings to take. Keep in mind that when you look back at the 12-inch MacBook, these are the 2017 models, which are, quote, the latest updates available to you. Entry level or lower configurations start at $1300 and come equipped with an Intel Core M 3 7 and 32 as the processor, this here would be good for people who want a small premium laptop but don't need a powerful computer if you only do simple everyday tasks and perhaps some kind of light to moderate media consumption, this setup will be totally sufficient.

The following are the mid-level configurations that start at $1400 and upgrade the CPU to an i5 7 and 54, finally the top tier configurations start at one thousand five hundred and fifty dollars and upgrade the CPU to an i7 seven and 75, these myths of The heights here configurations would be great for those who want a small premium laptop, hopefully as a secondary computer, but will probably be trying to do any kind of heavy multitasking, heavy media consumption, or intense school or business work, just keep in mind that these They are drastically much more expensive. than the lower tier models at full price and then of course the amount of RAM and storage you want in your 12 inch macbook can be configured by tier, the 2017 12 inch macbook models support 7th grade dual core processors generation, so if having a quad-Core CPU is important to you then you probably shouldn't look any further into this entire Finch MacBook line, but if that doesn't matter to you then you shouldn't have anything to worry about, don't get me wrong outside By comparison, these are totally decent processors, but if you're sure your virtual workload is CPU-intensive, I recommend looking at other 2019 ultrabooks with an 8th-generation Intel CPU or later because it's much more likely Find a quad processor with better performance. central processor in those devices alternatively, regardless of how much RAM you get, you will get 1866 megahertz lpddr3 memory configurable between 8 or 16 gigabytes, which is pretty fair for what this laptop is;

Additionally, you can choose between 256 or 512 gigabytes of storage and that will be an NVME drive. Drive speeds on all 12-inch MacBook configurations seem to average about 1200 megabytes per second and 550 megabytes per second read, which is slower than most nvme drives we have today, especially on the read, but I'd say this is comparable to the handling speeds of the 2019 MacBook Air, if not a little faster in terms of battery life. I think it's quite reasonable. I can achieve 6 hours of heavy use, which for me includes extensive web browsing. with Google Chrome sending emails with the standard mail app texting via iMessage and using various graphics intensive programs like Adobe Photoshop Media Encoder and Autodesk SketchBook Pro all on battery so it's not that bad but be warned Keep in mind that my hours may vary from yours, what I really like about the 12-inch MacBook is that you can put it to sleep and it will barely consume any battery power.

I've been able to put it to sleep for days and come back to it with nothing more than a percentage of battery drain each time, so if you take good care of this laptop, the battery life will be phenomenal. On the 12-inch MacBook, it takes 3 hours to charge from 5% to 100% with Apple's 87W USB C power adapter, which is fine, but honestly. Much longer than I'm used to and between 6 and 7 hours using the included 29 watt brick, which is quite strange, but fortunately it doesn't discharge faster than it charges. Thermals are good if you use this laptop for what it is designed for, obviously.

Thermal throttling won't occur even on the n3 and i-5 configurations as long as you stay within the subjective range of light to moderate computer use, all of which is near the end of this review, but so that have a quick idea, it's Including things like web browsing and using iMessage, you know all the basics, but if you go crazy and stupid launching programs and multitasking between them, the 12-inch MacBook can get noticeably hot when tact and will sporadically throttle the CPU if temperatures rise too much. stop, the next thing I want to talk about is the ports you get and I really shouldn't say that plural because the only notable I/O you get is a USB 3.1 gen2 on a type C port, that's seriously just a USB port C and it's not even a Thunderbolt 3 port, there's an audio I/O port on the right side or colloquially a headphone jack, so I guess you could consider it a 2 port, but when it comes to almost all your file transfers, connectivity with third parties. accessories and situations where you need to charge your 12-inch MacBook or power another device through your 12-inch MacBook, everything has to be through this USB C board and that will be really annoying for a lot of people, it's not the most convenient selection of ports, so if you need a lot of USB Type A accessories, you'll need to get some adapters.

Now let's talk about this guy's 12-inch Retina display, it's one of those 16,210 aspect ratio displays that balance a screen. resolution of 23:04 by 1440 and a pixel density of 226 pixels per inch, a couple of hundred fewer pixels and successful at that 16 to 10 aspect ratio, so it won't be the 2.5k screen to which you may be used to, but Hopefully in the end that won't be a big problem for you, it's still a beautiful, sharp laminated screen with above-average color accuracy and exceptionally excellent viewing angles with the help of some color calibration that photographers and other creative prosumers could do on this screen. almost perfect in minutes, unfortunately, it's hard to see outside in the intense sunlight, so you'll have to find some shade or something if you're going to be working outside a lot, the screens have little to no flexibility, which is quite pleasant.

I'm sure why you'd want to put your hands on the lid like that, since it's not a touchscreen or anything, but some find it quite reassuring to know that the display's flexibility is minimal. Keep in mind that you're going to get a noticeable widescreen aspect ratio on this screen when watching most YouTube videos and movies, so if you really hate that stuff, you'll want to keep this in mind because smaller laptop screens They will always make the widescreen format extremely obvious, the 12 inch MacBook speakers are pretty fantastic, they don't have as much bass, but on the other hand, I can confidently say that these speakers are much clearer and crisper than most of the speakers you'll find in equivalent Windows laptops or Chromebooks, as these speakers are so good that you can play music comfortably.

Take them off and potentially enjoy it, that's not something I can say about most laptop speakers unfortunately, but hey, the ones on the 12-inch MacBook are phenomenal, you should really give them a try. The keyboard on the 2017 12-inch MacBook is Apple's second-generation butterfly. keyboard that is quite famous because it is not exactly an engineering success, so to speak, it is not the best keyboard I have ever used, but when it works well I can't help but feel convinced that it isn't either. I like the way Apple is. Able to fit a full size backlit laptop keyboard with decent sized keys and physical function keys on the 12 inch MacBook.

What I don't like about this keyboard is the keystroke height and key travel, if you have big hands, the key travel. is practically non-existent, so typing on this keyboard will be extremely uncomfortable, especially if you come from mechanical keyboards, plus your fingertips may feel irritated after a while of typing on this keyboard because of how shallow and hard each one is. one. The keystroke is felt due to the narrow keystroke height, so this keyboard will definitely take some getting used to. On another note, it is somewhat easy to get dust on this keyboard if you use the 12-inch MacBook for a long period of time in a dusty place. environment if set on the keyboard it can temporarily break the keys, it has happened to me many times in college so trust me.

I've had keys break due to dust getting on the keyboard, which ruined a few school days for me as it couldn't. They have been fixed until I got home to blow compressed air through the keyboard, so be very careful 12 inch MacBook user if you end up getting one if you are willing to put up with some of these fiscal issues and find ways to fix the engineering issues then this keyboard might end up being good for you when it works this keyboard has its moments of respectability the trackpad however is amazing maybe even perfect I would say not the ideal size for a large laptop and not too small, easy to get used to, easy to gesture and has a nice quiet click that can even be muted.

You'll have to experience this trackpad in person to really appreciate how quiet it can get after some adjustments and excellent tracking. Everywhere is also sporting this kind of 3D touch functionality, which is where it gets its name from, the four-touch trackpad, it's great to have and can sometimes save time, but I don't think it's very useful for the average consumer. . so I'm not going to go into too much detail about it, it's just a fun feature that improves the usability of this trackpad to some extent, but it's not an essential enough experience to call it a great trackpad in the end.

I think it's absolutely incredible. The things I didn't go into much depth about are the built-in webcam and microphone, so I'll just give you a quick rundown: They both get the job done because I really don't like the quality of the webcam. I try not to use the webcam because of how ridiculous the quality is, but if you need it, it's there, so the 12-inch MacBook is quite interesting, although it does have compromises in certain areas, such as port selection and possibly the keyboard, it still has a lot of good things going on. Plus, you can fix some of these hardware dilemmas pretty easily if you know what to do and that leads to this.

The reason why I am still very confident in being able to recommend this laptop to certain people is because outside of comparison, this laptop has a ton of respectable hardware that makes it very suitable to be anyone's secondary computer or even the Someone's first computer if they're willing to stretch it that far, plus it's not the kind of MacBook you'd get for its internals. but rather because of its size, because that is a category in which the 12-inch MacBook offers complete performance. I get it, although it's a pretty strange concept to take that first, since you know that when you buy any type of computer, ideally you'll want a powerful one. that would work exceptionally well over a long period of time, but with the 12-inch MacBook I think most people can overlook the limitationsof hardware more effectively as long as they have it as a secondary computer.

Well, I think we can all agree that gaming and video editing is not possible with this one, which should be obvious. Ideally, nothing graphics-heavy should be attempted on the 12-inch MacBook line of computers, as they all have integrated graphics; However, color grading is an exception as long as you're grading photos, not videos, everything else outside of graphics work should be doable at least to some extent and here's a small list of what includes light media consumption to moderate, web browsing, even with Google Chrome, bulk file management tasks, writing articles, creating graphics or presentations with candy like Office 365 or working as a student, such as commercial work and programming, if your workflow is limited to a combination of any of the things I just mentioned, you will most likely find this laptop quite beneficial considering what it is, more so if you get this as your secondary computer as a side note for artists.

You can probably also draw on this laptop and make some good artwork on it, given that you're using a dedicated external drawing tablet and not using Photoshop, so move on. your illustration tasks, but I wouldn't recommend doing this as pretty much any of the Microsoft iPads or Surfaces would be a much better choice for most amateur artists, and if you're a professional artist, ideally you shouldn't use just any type. Ultrabook, right. I mentioned that you can colorize photos on this machine and I just want to reinforce that statement. Also, yes, the 2017 12-inch MacBook Retina can handle raw photos quite well, so photographers could make exceptional use of this laptop to marvel in the field taking photographs and in fact, it is a super slim and super light laptop to grade your work on the go.

I think photographers would enjoy this laptop the most out of all the people who are attracted to it. I do this quite a bit, so I can guarantee you that the 12-inch MacBook is a good option for those who need a portable color grading machine. The only thing you'll find particularly annoying is port selection, you'll need adapters for all your interfaces as programming is totally doable on a 12-inch MacBook D, although the screen is smaller than most programmers expect. would feel comfortable, so this may not be the most comfortable laptop for coding, although it is a little smaller than the Surface Pro Six screen and I said in my review of that device that programming feels comfortable on that screen as long as practice good style. those who know what that means, so if you practice good programming style and code in simple text editors or contact IDs like Visual Studio code, then I think you can make things work and of course if You're a high school or college student using this laptop to do basic schoolwork on the go like essays and stuff like that, it's more than capable, no questions asked, well that was my 12 inch MacBook review.

It's a great laptop that I honestly think is widely

misunderstood

. close to my vision of the ideal ultra dollar, thin and light, looks great and has great battery life, amazing speakers, a really nice screen and it's so thin and light I could put it in my tablet case in my backpack and I almost forgot about it if I thought the MacBook Air felt like air. You hadn't really held this guy yet. Thanks for watching. I'll see you again in my next video.