The Apple M1 chip’s performance is pretty spectacular for a laptop, especially at this price point.
Macbook air 13 inch battery life off pro#
We’ve put the figures for the MacBook Pro M1 alongside for comparison and, just to show how far things have come, the results from a 2013 MacBook Pro 13-inch. We used GeekBench 5 to test the MacBook Air’s multi-core and single-core processing performance, and its GPU performance for OpenCL and Apple’s own Metal graphics processing.
It seems you can only connect a single monitor to a USB port, too, which has caused consternation amongst some users, but wouldn’t bother us especially. The two USB 4/Thunderbolt ports are enough, arguably, but what happened to the HDMI and SD card slots you used to get on Apple laptops? Grrr. It’s a little taller than regular 16:9, which could be a nuisance for screen grabs and video, say, but it does provide a little extra vertical height for regular browsing, writing and so forth.
It has that ‘Retina’ effect where you just don’t see the dots any more and makes a surprising and subtle difference to the way you view, edit and evaluate digital images. The contrast, definition and brightness are stellar, and while the 2560 x 1600 resolution isn’t 4K, it’s an important step up from a regular 1920 x 1080 screen. Apple says it has a 25% wider color range than sRGB, but doesn’t mention Adobe RGB, which leads us to assume it’s somewhere in the middle. The Retina screen is, as ever, just beautiful. The keys have a short, light travel but feel very positive – perfect for quiet, unobtrusive typing. The latest design in the MacBook Air feels really good. We didn’t have issues ourselves, but plenty of people did. The Air is usefully slimmer and lighter than the Pro, but there’s nowhere near as much in it as the name suggests.Īpple got some criticism for its first ‘scissor’ keyboards. In fact, while it feels slimmer overall than the MacBook Pro, it is a fraction thicker at the back. The case tapers to a thickness of just 41mm at the front, but the subtle ‘wedge’ design means it’s a much thicker 161mm at the back. The MacBook Air does look and feel extra-slim… though all is not as it seems. (Image credit: Rod Lawton/Digital Camera World)
The MacBook Air (nearest the camera) is actually a very similar size and weight to the Pro (behind) – it simply has a wedge-shaped body that it slimmer at the front. The battery life is an impressive 15hrs for wireless Internet use and 18hrs for video playback, though of course these figures are in ideal conditions expect the battery life to be shorter than this if you are using lots of disk access and processing power. Because of the new M1 chip architecture, the Air can even run iOS apps. Other features include a 13.3-inch 2560 x 1600 IPS Retina display, a revised ‘scissor’ keyboard design, Touch ID and Apple’s latest Big Sur operating system. It has to be done at the point of manufacture and sale. This is the only chance you’ll get, since MacBook Airs are not user-upgradable. You can configure your MacBook Air at purchase to have more RAM (up to 16GB) or more storage (up to a 2TB SSD). Unlikely as that sounds, it’s the only answer we have right now. If you want an 8-core GPU you have to pay a little more.Ī 7-core CPU? That’s an odd number, surely? The only explanation we’ve seen is that Apple is using slightly less than perfect M1 chips off the production line with, effectively, one core not working, to produce a perfectly effective and functioning – but slightly cheaper – entry model. That price, however, is for a machine with an 8-core CPU but a 7-core GPU (graphics processing unit).
The base model MacBook Air M1 creeps in just below the $1,000/£1,000 barrier, which is very impressive for a computer with these specifications, design quality and performance.
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