MacBook Air with M1 review: (R)evolution of computer

The MacBook Air with M1 packs amazing power and battery life

MacBook Air M1 gives performance gain over its predecessor, and many more hours of battery life as well.

We are all ready for a change, with all the predecessors only really improving their chipset from one Intel to another. At last a revolutionary change happened in Macbook line.

I recently purchased a Macbook Air M1, base model and immediately started to explore, over my long used Macbook Air (early 2014), which started to show some decay performance wise.

First, some summarized info:

• Price: $999 (starting), $899 (education)

• CPU: Apple M1

• Display: 13.3‑inch, 2560 x 1600-pixel

• Battery: 14:41 (tested)

• Memory: 8GB to 16GB

• Storage: 256GB to 2TB

• Dimensions: 12 x 8.4 x 0.6 inches

• Weight: 2.8 pounds

Although M1 Macbook Air does not have rumored specs, like a touch screen, apple pencil support, face id or 4K webcam, it is still a piece of tech with very cool features and a reliable design, copied from it's predecessor.

Price

The MacBook Air with M1 starts at $999, which is $899 on Apple's educational sales website.

Base model ($999) has 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, with 8-core CPU and 7-core GPU. You have to pay an extra $200 for taking the ram up to 16 gb and an extra $200 for 512 gb ssd. (There is also a $1249 8 gb RAM model which has 8-core GPU)

In near future, I will also review the differences between 8 gb vs 16 gb RAM and 7-core vs 8-core GPU.

Processor

The Apple M1 is the new system on a chip (SoC) as the CPU (central processing unit) that was inspired by their A14 Bionic chip, which is currently used on mobile device line, iPhone and iPads.

SoC (System on a Chip) is an integrated circuit (also known as a "chip") that integrates all or most components of a computer.

In M1, SoC includes CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, I/O and unified memory (RAM), which is shared by all components of the processor.

Performance

The new Macbook Air's performance - powered by the M1 processor- is "fantastic", especially if you use the apps which are "apple silicon ready".

It is really surprising to see a fanless computer to have this much power, especially comparing to my Dell XPS 13 pc, which has a fan that sometimes like a plane engine, despite it's $1449 price tag.

Apple promises CPU speeds up to 3.5x faster, GPU speeds up to 5x faster and Neural Engine for up to 9x faster machine learning. The CPU (8-core) includes a 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores.

The Macbook Air M1 definitely beat the 5,084 from the ZenBook 13 and the 5,319 from the XPS 13 (Intel Core i7-1165G7 CPU / 16GB of RAM), on the Geekbench 5.2 test. The old Intel MacBook Air Y-series Intel CPU accomplished only 2,738 (specs comparison on Apple website).

Display

The new Macbook Air has a screen real estate and resolution are same as the older Intel Air.

The only difference is the color gamut, which is P3 wide color on M1 Macbook Air, which has 25% more colors than sRGB in previous model.

Ports

The M1 MacBook Air has 2 Thunderbolt 3 USB 4 ports, just like its Intel-based predecessor, plus a headphone jack on the side. The one glitch is that the USB 4 ports are on one (left) side, due to the limitation because of the SoC placement.

There is no USB A ports, microSD reader, HDMI-out etc. So you will definitely need a dock like OKX USB-C Docking Station -which also has triple display support- to have USB 3.1 ports, ethernet, HDMI, DP etc. accessibility.

Battery Life

Apple claims that M1 Macbook Air has up to 18 hours of battery life, which is 6 hours more than 2020 Macbook Air (Intel Chip).

I personally had a 16 hours of battery -using external monitor, which definitely decreases the battery life of any notebook- mostly browsing the web, some wix'ing and watching movie in my Macbook screen right beside the external monitor. I could tell it's an impressive amount of time.

If you wish to compare the M1 Macbook Air with the previous Intel Macs: The Intel MacBook Air (9:31) and MacBook Pro (10:21) times have now been beaten by 5 and 6 hours, respectively.

Input: Touchpad & Keyboard & Touch ID

The fact is, we all hated the "butterfly switch keyboard", which Apple started to use on Macbooks 2015, until 2019. The M1 Macbook Air -gladly- has a "scissor switch keyboard", which is a joy to use.

Problem with butterfly swich keyboard is, they allow a lot of space underneath where dust, debris, and other particulates can accumulate, gunking up the mechanism and preventing it from working properly.

Touchpads on Macbooks are always good and ahead of many PCs out there, so it is not a surprise that this 4.8 x 3.2 glass Force Touch trackpad gives a delightful user experience. Haptic feedback is still on too.

The new M1 Macbook Air also has a touch id button, located in top right corner, which a nice addition for people -including myself- that finds inputting password a torture.

Webcam

If you will use your new computer mostly for video conferencing, it is better to look for another alternative, or wait for the M1x (or M2, whichever name Apple chooses to give to their new line of laptops), because 720p webcam is still here.

Though, Apple claims the M1 chip features an image signal processor that makes you look better in a couple of ways (skin tones, brightness etc.) supported by it's powerful neural engine.

Audio

M1 Macbook Air has stereo speakers, placed in both sides of keyboards, which has dolby atmos support as well. Also for video calls and "hey siri" commands, there are trio built-in microphones.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, M1 Macbook Air is an incredible bargain, which has a lower price tag that will allow you to spend that extra cash on a monitor and other peripherals.