While Notebookcheck.net (opens in new tab) was benchmarking the MacBook Air during its review, it had to switch the MacBook Air over to Windows 10 to run some specific tests. When measuring the screen brightness to adjust the battery benchmark, the testers found that the screen was actually 32% brighter.
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For context, the reviewer originally got 415 nits of brightness when the MacBook Air was running macOS. However, when they switched over to Windows 10 (via BootCamp), the MacBook Air hit a whopping 547 nits of brightness. How does this make any sense? Well, Notebookcheck.net found that the screen was actually less color accurate on Windows 10. It’s entirely possible that Apple limited the brightness on macOS in order to maintain color accuracy. There are a couple of other possibilities as well – apart from the color accuracy. Apple may be limiting the brightness to keep all of its displays at the same exact brightness, which would ensure that all of its products are uniform. It’s also possible that Apple wants to limit its MacBook Air’s display so that customer’s can distinguish the difference between the Pro and Air. However, regardless of the limitation, the MacBook Air 2020’s screen on macOS is still super bright and relatively colorful. Although, getting an extra 100+ nits of brightness out of it would’ve been nice.
