Apple's ultra-portable MacBook Air laptop got a major makeover in late 2018 after three long years. Last month, it got a quick refresh.

It looks no different from the 2018 model. It has the series' signature wedge-shaped aluminium unibody design and 13.3-inch retina display with TrueTone technology that automatically adjusts colour based on ambient light.

There are still two Thunderbolt 3 ports on its left side and a headphone jack on the right. The Touch ID button, which both unlocks and turns on the laptop, remains at the top right corner of the keyboard.

The major difference is its new scissor-mechanism keyboard, which debuted with last year's 16-inch MacBook Pro. Offering 1mm key travel, it replaces the maligned butterfly-mechanism keyboard, with which I personally have not experienced any issues.

The new keyboard certainly feels better to type on, as it has a "clicky" feel and a satisfying clunk to each key press. I like the inverted-T arrow keys arrangement, which makes navigation easier. Indeed, I made very few typos and mistakes typing this review with this keyboard.

Also new here is the latest 10th-generation Intel Core processor (the base model starts with the Core i3 version). This is supposed to have twice the processing performance and up to 80 per cent more graphics performance over its predecessors, according to Apple.

The review unit comes with the Core i5 1.1GHz quad-core processor, 8GB of system memory and 512GB of flash storage.

Buyers can configure the laptop with the Core i7 1.2GHz quad-core processor, 16GB of system memory and 2TB flash storage.

In the Geekbench 5 benchmark tests, the review unit scored 1,018 (single-core) and 2,520 (multi-core) - both lower than the latest 12.9-inch iPad Pro's scores of 1,117 (single-core) and 4,660 (multi-core). It must be said, though, the MacBook Air has never been positioned as a speed demon.

I did not experience any lag when editing photos using Affinity Photo and editing videos with Final Cut Pro. But things did slow down when I opened too many tabs (I counted 20) in the Google Chrome browser, due to too much system memory being used.

While this MacBook Air cannot handle graphically intensive games such as Doom Eternal, it has no issues with Football Manager 2020.

Another downer is the lack of Wi-Fi 6, the latest and fastest Wi-Fi technology. Omitting it is a strange decision, considering last year's iPhone 11 series and the latest iPad Pro series both support Wi-Fi 6.

If you do not own a Wi-Fi 6 router, this may not matter, but it is always good to future-proof your device.

Battery life remains excellent. In a video-loop battery test at maximum brightness and volume, it lasted eight hours and 34 minutes - around eight minutes longer than its predecessor.

Weighing 1.29kg, the MacBook Air is now Apple's lightest available laptop. It is also the cheapest Mac laptop you can get, with prices starting at $1,499.

A fully souped-up model will set you back by $3,329, but the specifications of this review unit ($1,899) are probably good enough if your usage habits largely involve watching Netflix, word processing and browsing the Internet.