A MacBook Air sitting idle (with the screen saver disabled) can last for 32 hours if the screen brightness is on minimum. At 50%, it can sit idle for around 16 hours, and you will get just 8 hours. Don't expect though to run Sims 4, Battlefield 4 and Crysis all on Ultra and get a solid 60fps. But most if not all games are perfectly playable on this machine. On low-medium (on brand new intensive games) and medium-high on slightly older games. The Sims 4 doesn't look toooo intensive so I can see this running just fine on the Macbook Air!

When we upgraded all our Macs to macOS Sierra, my daughter was upset because Sims 3 broke. After much scouring of the internet, I found the solution and tweeted about it:

My daughter's fave game, Sims 3, was getting stuck on the loading screen in Sierra. This Info.plist edit fixed it: https://t.co/HzjgWnB7cr

— Rob Griffiths (@rgriff) December 14, 2016

It dawned on me, though, that if that forum post ever vanishes, I'll be in trouble with future new Macs and/or reinstalls, so I thought I'd document it here, too. Read no further unless you (or a family member) play Sims 3 and want to get it working in macOS Sierra. And really, try the linked forum post first; this is just a backup plan.

The following is quoted verbatim as posted by user 'Ashpeef' on the Sims forums. I organized it as a numbered list and formatted some text, but left the content unchanged.

Sims 4 For Macbook

It's probably the Launcher that crashes at the time it hands over control to the game itself. You could try starting the game directly, bypassing the Launcher. Here's how (also a rather long story, I'm afraid...) :lol:

1. Within your Applications folder, locate and open the folder The Sims 3
2. Find the application The Sims 3.app, then right click (or hold the Control key and click if you can't right click) to get the context menu.
3. In that menu, select Show Package Contents. A new window opens with only one item: the folder Contents
4. Within that folder there is a file info.plist (usually the second item)
5. Right or Control click that file for the context menu and there select Open With
6. You'll probably have to scroll down almost to the bottom of the list to find TextEdit.app. Use that program to open the file.
7. Now the real thing: locate the line <key>CedegaGameName</key> about 2/3rds down. Note: not the one just above it with CedegaGameDir!
8. The next line should end ...Bin/S3Launcher.exe</string>
9. Change S3Launcher.exe to TS3W.exe and save the file.

The next time you start the game, it should begin straight away with the EA and Maxis logos.

Can Sims 4 Run On Macbook Air 2020 Review

If you later on want to start with the Launcher again, just do the same thing, this time changing TS3W.exe back into S3Launcher.exe

To make this easier to do in the future, I made an alias of the info.plist file in our Documents folder. And as I'm not a masochist, I used BBEdit, not TextEdit, to edit the file.

Sims 4 Macbook Mod