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Almost eight months after trying a new MacBook Air, I am reviewing another (insert DJ Khaled meme here). A growing pandemic hasn’t stopped Apple from producing devices; in fact, it appears that Apple is competing for the Most products are released in a single year prize.
On the surface, the new MacBook Air is identical to its eight-month-old twin. It has the same recycled aluminum casing, an identical (and fantastic) Magic Keyboard, and… just two damn USB-C ports, though these use the USB4 standard for faster data transmission.
However, inside, the two machines couldn’t be further apart. The new model is one of the first Macs to use an Apple-designed processor, the M1.
Apple has been building its computers using Intel chips since 2006. But this year, it began the process of implementing laptops and desktops with internal chips. By making its own silicon, Apple gets more control of hardware and software – the same control it enjoys on the iPhone and iPad, which also use Apple-designed chips.
Spend a day with the new MacBook Air and the improvements are immediately noticeable. The thing is as powerful as many of the high-end Intel-powered Macs, beating the speed limits of the top-tier MacBook Air from earlier this year. The M1 is not a Mac evolution, it is a Mac revolution.
Chip and sauce
The only laptops with the M1 available so far are the $ 999 MacBook Air and the $ 1,299 entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro. The entry-level MacBook Air has one less graphics core than the more expensive Pro, but for the first time, you’re mainly obtaining the same performance in both. I say mostly because the MacBook Air has no fan. That means you won’t be able to get the most out of the chip, while the MacBook Pro’s fans will keep it cool and allow the processor to work harder for longer.
Does the lack of a fan matter? For most people, no. The MacBook Air easily outperforms its predecessor in performance. In a Geekbench 5 CPU benchmark, the new MacBook Air’s single-core score (1,692) beat the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro (1,207) and nearly matched it in multi-core performance (7,264 vs. 7.536). In real world terms, the first place I noticed a drastic improvement was Safari. It’s butter-smooth, handles more than 30 tabs with ease. (I like pinned tabs, okay?)
Apps like Safari, which are designed for the new M1 processor, are fast and nimble. I have yet to see a single stutter or pause from them. The good news is that applications built with Intel in mind can still boot perfectly fine thanks to Rosetta 2, a translation process that helps applications built for the old x86 architecture run on Apple’s silicon. You will see a message to install Rosetta when you try to download one of these applications for the first time. Installation takes a few extra seconds and the rest of the process is as usual.
