When comparing Asus Chromebook Flip vs MacBook Air, the Slant community recommends MacBook Air for most people. In the question“What are the best 12" laptops?” MacBook Air is ranked 1st while Asus Chromebook Flip is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose MacBook Air is:
Macbook Air has a high quality all-aluminum body that looks great and is sturdy enough that worries of accidentally damaging are mostly alleviated. It has a robust lid, well-spaced back-lit keyboard and an excellent button-less trackpad.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Great performance for a Chromebook
The Chromebook Flip has durable high-quality hardware including a high-end Intel core m3-6Y30 processor and 4GB RAM. This ensures that the Chromebook Flip is far ahead of competitors who mostly use older hardware or smaller RAM.
Pro Versatile
Has a firm, 360-degree bendable lid with sturdy, not too wobbly hinges and the 2.5-pound lightweight base makes this Chromebook very portable.
You can also turn the screen and use the laptop in three different "standing" modes (laptop, stand, tent, tablet) where the last three modes completely hide the keyboard.
Pro Great build quality
The whole chassis is made out of sturdy silver aluminium while the lid is covered with a double-layer impact resistant glass. The resistant glass protects the cover from tear and damage which makes the product more durable.
Pro Supports Android apps
The Asus Chromebook Flip supports Android Apps which can be directly installed from the Play Store.
Pro Great display
The Chromebook flip has a great 1080p display with good viewing angles. It's also quite bright at around 300 nits of brightness which makes it a decent choice for working outdoors.
Pro Great keyboard
The Chromebook Flip has a backlit keyboard which is a rarity among Chromebooks. The keyboard itself is pretty good as well. The keys have decent travel length and the keyboard feels very comfortable when typing even for long periods of time.
Pro Solid build quality and elegant design
Macbook Air has a high quality all-aluminum body that looks great and is sturdy enough that worries of accidentally damaging are mostly alleviated. It has a robust lid, well-spaced back-lit keyboard and an excellent button-less trackpad.
Pro Great keyboard
The MBA has a well-spaced, back-lit keyboard with convex keys and placed in way that the resting arms on the sides of the trackpad is comfortable.
Pro Good battery life
The 11" model lasts up to 9 hours and the 13" model up to 12 hours. Great for programming on the go as you don't have to worry about the battery dying.
Pro Best-in-class trackpad
MBA has an excellent button-less muti-touch trackpad that's highly accurate and comfortable to use.
Pro OSX is developer-friendly
OSX is based on XNU (Darwin) kernel, it's certified Unix and arguably a lot more developer friendly than Windows. Development for Unix is native on OS X.
There's a large selection of great development tools available for OSX. The operating system itself comes bundled with a powerful terminal emulator, called Terminal. Additionally, Apple provides tools, like Xcode, an IDE that contains a comprehensive collection of tools for developing OSX and iOS software, for free.
Cons
Con Pricey
Good hardware performance, smooth design, and crisp image quality come with a high price-tag, making this Chromebook slightly expensive.
Con Terrible webcam
The plainly bad 0.9-megapixel webcam produces grainy images and leaves some background colors behind and is unable to have a real focus.
Con Battery life could be better
Battery life is limited to 6-7 hours while actively surfing the web and leaving the brightness at 75%, which is decent but not the best battery life as far a Chromebooks go.
Con Low resolution screen
Depending on the model, the MBA has either a 1366 x 768 or 1440 x 900 screen and that's behind the expected 1080p screens of most modern ultrabooks.