It pains me there’s still no touchscreen, there are only two USB-C ports, there’s no SD card slot, and I know I'm bound to run into some apps that don’t emulate well (or at all) with Rosetta 2 (macOS Big Sur’s x86 Intel app translator), but these are all trivial issues. What Apple has achieved with the M1 is nothing short of groundbreaking. It makes my 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro with Intel Core i5 and 16GB of RAM look like smoldering trash now. I’ve been using the entry-level $999 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage nonstop as my only computer for a week and it still doesn’t feel possible that a laptop this thin and this light is capable of all this power and battery life. But are these new Macs really better than Intel-powered ones?Īll of the hype about the 8-core M1 chip in the MacBook Air - up to 3.5x faster CPU and up to 5x faster GPU performance, and almost double the battery life compared to the previous-gen Intel MacBook Air - is real. The new chips and laptops begin Apple’s two-year transition away from Intel processors to in-house designed silicon that's based on ARM chips.
There’s been a fair amount of hype and skepticism following the MacBook virtual event earlier this month when Apple announced a new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini with its own M1 chip. Apple didn’t send me an M1 MacBook Air to review.
