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Laptops · Apple MacBook Air

Apple MacBook Air 2010

6owners with an opinion
83%of verdicts positive
2/0positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and design; criticized for repairability and display.

What people wrote

Likes it
I’m halfway done turning a 2010 MacBook Air with a broken screen into a headless batocera game machine for my living room (halfway because I had to order some more tools because I’m missing a torx driver). It’s actually going to create my ideal computer, I love the keyboard and trackpad of the MacBooks and you just plug in an external display and it works. One helpful thing that isn’t easy to google: if you need to get to Mac recovery console but your MacBook’s screen is cracked, take it apart and disconnect the LVDS (lcd screen) cable, and it basically turns your MacBook into a Mac mini. Otherwise it will boot to its own screen first until the OS is up and ready.
Doesn’t like it
The problem is that because they can't be upgraded, they are no longer 'perfectly good'. I recently was donated a 2010 MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM, and a paltry 128GB SSD. What the hell is anyone supposed to do with that?! If the RAM wasn't soldered to the board I could probably at least upgrade it to 8GB and someone could at least use it for email and Facebook. So I don't really get your point. My original point is that these laptops are not perfectly good anymore - but if I could pop that 2010 Air with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, it could be useful for someone. A student, maybe. Boot it with Windows and you'd probably even be able to run a more recent OS.
Likes it
> VSCode is an inferior product in many respects, like speed and resource usage This is a rote complaint but how often do you really notice it? Even on my ancient spare 2010 MacBook Air, VSC is responsive and it uses less RAM than other apps like Teams or Skype, or simply loading Gmail in Chrome. Yes, vim uses less RAM but it also has like 5% of the functionality. Is it possible that this is specific to particular plugins or languages? I mostly use Python, JavaScript, Terraform, and Rust but I did notice that Java is, as always, a lot more demanding.