Apple in October gave us a major surprise with the launch of an entirely revamped, updated version of the MacBook Air, its most popular and affordable notebook option.
We went hands-on with the MacBook Air last week, and this week, we picked up an older MacBook Air to compare the new model to see just what’s different and whether it’s still worth buying the old version, which sells for $200 less than the current model.
The previous-generation MacBook Air is a 2015 design, but in 2017, Apple introduced 1.8GHz Broadwell-generation chips that were a slight upgrade from the 1.6GHz chips the machine had previously used. No other changes were made, so technically, Apple’s old MacBook Air is outdated by several years.
Design wise, the new MacBook Air features a smaller, slimmer body that weighs a bit less, and the slimmer design is noticeable. It continues to feature the same tapered design as the previous models, and we didn’t think the weight difference of a quarter of a pound stood out.
Along with a slimmed down body, the new MacBook Air comes in three color options: Space Gray, Gold, and the traditional Silver. Space Gray and Gold are colors that are new to the MacBook Air lineup.
The biggest change to the 2018 MacBook Air models is the display, which is now Retina and a huge improvement over the low resolution display in the previous MacBook Air. The MacBook Air used to be the sole Apple device sans Retina display, but now Apple uses higher-resolution displays across its entire product lineup.
We thought the MacBook Air’s new display offered a significant improvement over the previous MacBook Air’s display, but it doesn’t quite measure up to the display of the MacBook Pro because it’s just not that bright. Brightness can be an issue outdoors in sunlight, so that’s something to be aware of.
Design wise, the front of the MacBook Air has been overhauled. Those thick silver bezels from the previous version have been replaced with sleek, slim MacBook Pro-style black bezels that look much, much nicer.
Several other MacBook Pro features have been brought to the new MacBook Air and are upgrades over the previous model. There’s a larger Force Touch trackpad, a third-generation butterfly keyboard, better speakers, a Touch ID button for authentication purposes, and a T2 chip for improved security.
Inside, the new MacBook Air is sporting a 7W 8th-generation 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 processor, and unsurprisingly, it’s much speedier than the three-year-old processors used in the prior MacBook Air. Apple used to use 15W chips in the MacBook Air models, but this new, lower power 7W chip is both fast and efficient, allowing for longer battery life than ever.
The last super notable change is to the port setup. The new MacBook Air has two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack, with Apple eliminating the USB-A ports and the SD card slot from the older model. The addition of Thunderbolt 3 brings the MacBook Air in line with the rest of the Mac lineup and allows it to connect to 4K and 5K displays, faster Thunderbolt 3 storage, eGPUs, and more.
All of these changes have raised the base price of the MacBook Air. Prior to the October update, the MacBook Air sold for $999, but now the base model sells for $1,199, a $200 premium. Given the scope of the revamp, the $200 upgrade fee is well worth paying for anyone thinking of purchasing a MacBook Air.
Apple is still selling the older model at the same $999 price point, but it’s just not worth purchasing because the components are so outdated at this point.
What do you think of Apple’s new MacBook Air? Let us know in the comments.

Taking low-light pictures on the Pixel 3 just got a whole lot better.
The camera on the Pixel 3 and 3 XL is already fantastic, but with Google’s latest over-the-air update available Wednesday, it gets even better. Known as Night Sight, Google first touted the feature during the Pixel 3’s original launch in October. The update lets you take better low-light pictures without a harsh, unnatural flash, meaning you can capture a clear photo of your dinnerplate the next time you whip out your phone in a dim restaurant.
Both the Pixel 3’s front- and rear-facing cameras will have Night Sight and the update will roll out to all Pixels, including the Pixel 2/2 XL and original Pixel/XL in the next few days. (The feature works best, however, on the Pixel 3 and its updated hardware.)
Night Sight works by taking up to 15 frames in a third of a second, so you’ll need to hold the phone steady for a second or two after firing the shutter as it renders the image. The camera uses machine learning to judge the right color, white balance and lighting conditions based on the content of the image, and if the camera’s gyroscope senses a notable amount of motion blur, it’ll shorten its shutter speed to reduce blur.
“Night Sight is HDR+ on steroids,” said Google engineer Marc Levoy in a previous CNET interview.
Night Sight is available in the camera’s menu option More, but if the camera senses a low-light scenario, a small dialog box will automatically pop up in the camera’s viewfinder to suggest turning it on.
The feature works impressively well. With dusk and night settings, Night Sight brightened up scenes with accurate colors and lighting sources that were true-to-life. But where it really shone (no pun intended) was in environments that had very, very little lighting. Cameras will always need some light to take a picture, but when I took photos in a dark room with very little light, the Pixel 3 managed to capture whole objects pretty clearly.
To see how well Night Sight works, take a look at these images below. Pictures taken with Night Sight enabled are on the right.
CNET editor Patrick Holland, who reviewed the Huawei P20 Pro, noted that phone has a similar feature. However, the Pixel 3’s photos ended up appearing more “realistic-looking.” In addition, while the Galaxy S9’s dual-aperture camera is a solid low-light performer, it blows out highlights and softens corners too much. The Pixel 3 with Night Sight captures images that are sharper and more detailed, and has a wider dynamic range overall.
Another CNET editor, Stephen Shankland, said he preferred the white balance on the Pixel 3’s Night Sight to that of the iPhone XS Max. In a photo of a park, for example, the Pixel 3’s image had warmer tones and colors were more true to life.
To see how these two phones fare against one another, check out the pictures below. Pictures taken with the iPhone XS Max are on the left and the Pixel 3’s Night Sight images are on the right.
In general, Night Sight works so well that it might end up spoiling you and giving you what you think is a “bad” low-light photo. There were a few incidents when I snapped a photo with the Pixel 3 and thought to myself that the image looked “terrible” because it looked grainy and I could see digital artifacts and noise. But soon after, I quickly realized I’d taken the picture in a near pitch-black setting and that it was noteworthy that the camera managed to capture anything at all.
For even more Night Sight pictures, click through the gallery below.

File associations no longer work properly on Windows 10 after a buggy update. Windows won’t let you select certain applications as your defaults. We tested multiple PCs running the stable version of Windows 10, and they all had this problem.
This is a strange bug. It affects some applications, but not others. For example, Windows 10 won’t let you make Adobe Photoshop or Notepad++ a default application for images or text files. But you can make other applications, like IrfanView, VLC, or Google Chrome, your defaults.
For example, here’s what happens when we try setting Notepad++ as our default application for .txt files in Windows 10’s Settings app. Windows just ignores our choice and chooses Notepad as the default.
The same problem occurs when we try choosing a new file association by right-clicking a file and using the “Open With” context menu. After picking Notepad++ and selecting “Always Use This App,” the file opens correctly in the application we chose.
However, the next time we open that file, it opens in Notepad rather than Notepad++. Windows just forgets our chosen file association.
Again, we’ve tested multiple Windows 10 PCs running the April 2018 Update and every single one we tested has this problem. It doesn’t affect every application, but it does at least affect Photoshop and Notepad++. This bug does not appear to affect PCs running the October 2018 Update, which was pulled because of multiple data loss bugs and has not yet been re-released.
Based on our research and various social media posts we’ve found, our theory is that this stopped working properly when Microsoft released the KB4462919 update on October 9. But we really don’t know. It’s broken on the stable version of Windows 10 today and it’s probably been broken for a while. This definitely used to work!
Windows 10 seems like it’s getting buggier and buggier. Why doesn’t Microsoft test things like this before releasing updates?

With the iPhone XR containing the same A12 Bionic chip as the iPhone XS, we expected it to offer identical performance, and this has now been confirmed. Macworld reported on the results it found from iPhone XR benchmarks …
The iPhone XR offers the same performance enhancements over last year’s iPhone X as its more expensive siblings.

The iPhone XR is right in line with the XS and XS Max—easily within a margin of error of a couple of percentage points. This makes it 13 percent faster in single-core performance than the thousand-dollar iPhone X of last year, and about 10 percent faster in multi-core performance.
In the GPU-powered Compute benchmark (which uses the Metal API), performance is about 40 percent faster.

Indeed, in one of the iPhone XR benchmarks – a GPU test – the iPhone XR came out on top, likely as a result of having fewer pixels to push.

The iPhone XR scores better in the GPU test than the XS or XS Max (which helps boost the overall score). This is probably due to the lower resolution of the iPhone XR’s display. The graphics tests here are rendered on-screen and not at a fixed or off-screen resolution. The A12 Bionic’s GPU will deliver faster frame rates on the XR because it has to render about 85 percent more pixels on the XS and 125 percent more on the XS Max.

Many iPhone XR buyers are likely to be upgrading from an iPhone 7 or older, and gamers will be particularly happy.

If you’re upgrading from an iPhone 7 Plus to an iPhone XR, you can expect real game frame rates to be anywhere from 50 percent higher up to twice as fast, depending on the complexity of the game. That’s a huge win for everyone upgrading their two-year-old phones.

The XR is also the model to pick if battery-life is your priority.

In this test, the iPhone XR ran 19 minutes longer than the iPhone XS Max, and more than an hour longer than the iPhone XS. In a real-world scenario (i.e. not running benchmarks nonstop), that will likely translate into about 30-45 minutes more screen-on time than the iPhone XS Max and two hours more than the iPhone XS, depending on how you use your phone.

The really interesting comparison, however, is with the iPhone 7 Plus.

They have almost the exact same-sized batteries—the iPhone 7 Plus battery is 2900mAh—and both have LCD displays with similar total area. The iPhone XR’s display has a total area of around 90 square centimeters, the iPhone 7 Plus about 83 square centimeters, about 7 percent smaller. Yet the iPhone XR, with its slightly larger display and same-sized battery, lasted about an hour and 45 minutes longer in this test.
That’s a roughly 45 percent improvement in battery life with a slightly larger display and similar battery capacity. What an impressive improvement in just two years!

iPhone XR benchmarks are unlikely to be the deciding factor for many buyers – that’s going to be the new design language at a significantly lower price than the flagship models – but it’s certainly good to know that the practice matches the theory when it comes to performance.
App-opening speed tests showed that the iPhone XR was on a par with Samsung’s Note 9. Check out the best and worst features of the latest iPhone.

Intel’s server roadmap and product families have been pretty calm in recent years. The company reorganized its server chips into the Xeon Scalable family and away from the old E7/E5/E3 designations in 2017, and it overhauled the Core X series, but it hasn’t made any dramatic changes to Xeon since AMD launched the Epyc family. Those changes are apparently coming in the first half of 2019, with the launch of Intel’s latest high-end Xeon parts, Cascade Lake Advanced Performance. Unlike standard Cascade Lake chips, these chips will offer substantially more cores and support for up to 2-socket systems.
Intel’s current line of Xeon Scalable Processors like the Xeon Platinum 8180, top out at 28 CPU cores. The new Cascade Lake AP chips, on the other hand, will pack up to 48 cores using an MCM. Intel hasn’t unveiled any details on its interconnect yet, though it seems incredibly likely to leverage Intel’s own EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge). EMIB is already used on Intel’s Hades Canyon / Kaby Lake “G” silicon, and we suspect it’ll be used here as well. Details of how Intel will connect the MCMs together or how many cores are in each chiplet — that’s the sort of detail we don’t have yet.
It’s not surprising to see Intel making this move. When AMD had 32-core CPUs in-market, Intel’s monolithic 28-core chips, with their higher IPCs, weren’t at an automatic disadvantage. But AMD is widely expected to push as high as 64 cores with next-generation Epyc, and we’ve known for years that Intel wouldn’t keep fielding monolithic chips forever.
Intel predicts performance that’s 1.21x better in Linpack than Xeon Scalable 8180 (3.4x better than AMD Epyc 7601), 1.83x better in Stream Triad (1.3x better than Epyc 7601), and a 17x improvement in AI/Deep Learning inference compared with Xeon Platinum at launch. We don’t have a launch date for Cascade Lake other than 1H, so it’s a good bet that whatever Intel fields will go head-to-head with AMD’s Epyc 2 silicon, codenamed Rome, and built on 7nm at TSMC. As large as 12 memory channels is, it’s not crazy — as CPU core counts scale upwards, motherboards need more memory channels just to keep things relatively balanced.
Like standard Cascade Lake, Cascade Lake AP will feature support for Intel Optane Persistent Memory DIMMs and the hardware-level fixes for problems like Spectre and Meltdown. In the absence of a formal release date, we’re betting these chips don’t tip up much before summer — by which point they should have company from AMD.