Eight Christmas gift ideas for tech lovers in 2020

From laptops and keyboards to video games and wireless chargers, the SCMP Tech team wraps up our top gift ideas for 2020

Reading Time:5 minutes

Tech gifts are for everyone, including Santa Claus. Picture: Shutterstock

Karen Chiu,Matt Haldane,John Artman,Masha Borak,Minghe Hu,Josh YeandXinmei Shen

Published: 7:00am, 22 Dec 2020Updated: 3:45pm, 22 Dec 2020

The holidays are almost here. Still looking for last-minute gifts? Our tech reporters have spent the past year experimenting with various gizmos, gadgets and games. From the priciest to the cheapest, here are our favourites. (All prices are for reference only.)

1. MacBook Air - US$999

The 2020 MacBook Air is equipped with Apple's proprietary Arm-based M1 chip, making it much more power efficient than past Intel models. Photo: Matt Haldane

Some of us are dedicated Windows and Android users, not Apple fans. That includes one of our editors. But this year’s new Apple laptop has won him over:

“I have only ever owned two Apple products – a MacBook Pro and iPad Pro – until the new M1 MacBooks were announced.

After reading a deluge of incredible reviews, I picked up the baseline M1 MacBook Air the weekend after it came out. Having used it for about three weeks now, I can confidently say the hype is real. It’s hard to imagine getting this much value out of any other machine at this price. But the real winner here for me is battery life.

Laptop companies often make claims of 10-hour battery life, Apple included. Some people swear they get that, but I’ve never had a laptop last that long with my million Chrome tabs open as I try to get real work done. Some of us aren’t just playing videos on loop with the Wi-fi off. But the M1 really will keep you powered all day. I can end a workday with 35 per cent battery left, sometimes more. That is about eight hours of straight work, mostly in Chrome, but also sometimes in programs that are not yet optimised for the M1 chip, like Evernote.

I’m impressed that programs designed for Intel chips run so well through Apple’s Rosetta 2 emulation software. This is something that Microsoft could not even get right on Windows.”