They’re the new gold standard by which all laptops will be judged, and this is just the start. The M1 MacBook Air (and M1 MacBook Pro) are now the best laptops regardless of operating system. 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.

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