So as pros, as creators, I'm telling you be patient. - Patience is not my middle name. I has switched my entire life over to the base model $999 MacBook Air featuring the brand new Apple M1 chip. I'll spoil the entire video right now for you. This is the new default recommendation for a laptop for me. Now I'm gonna do my best in this video to not just give you the hype and just explain over and over again. Oh my gosh, it's so fast, even though that's what I wanna say. But the baseline, what you expect out of a laptop is now different. I think that's the thing that really is landed with me.
[Ken] You know Austin's serious when he's putting you into story time and not actually just tryna get you straight into the video.
I have, look I have, we're still in the intro right now. I haven't even begun the actual video, this is just the preamble before I show you charts and benchmarks and I show you how I've edited this entire video on the base model MacBook Air.So I saw your video. You, it seemed like to me you were trying to sort of temper expectations a little bit by like telling professionals don't upgrade yet, you know wait for the M1X or whatever, but I've got to ask you are you using an M1 Mac yet?
So I am full-time laptop dailying the M1 MacBook Pro but I don't do very much of my professional work on the laptop. I got this big old desktop behind me and that's that's still gonna be a long time before that's a Apple Silicon Mac. - But spending time with it has really made me realize like I knew it would be good based on what we seen with the iPad Pro, but I didn't I wasn't ready for how good it really was going to be and how few compromises are. I was like, everything just works so well.
Yeah, that's the thing like I when I talked about it in my video, this comparison we talk about with Android phones and iPhones all the time where it's like I don't think we've realized how efficient the chips in the iPhones have been, that they do so much with like four gigs of RAM and a baby battery.
So I'm curious, what, what is your normal workflow? Cause I know, obviously you're probably not editing on your your MacBook Pro, but like what do you do on that? Have you had any like bottlenecks or run into any issues yet?
No problem, I mean so I do a lot of thumbnail stuff in in Pixelmator, there was eventually a beta version and now already Pixelmator 2.0 is out.So that was the bottleneck that I'd found and that's already fixed. And I've been very impressed at how fast a lot of these fixes are coming because the new version of Chrome, there's a beta of the optimized Photoshop already. So it's happening.
Now back to the rest of the content. Grandma has a lot of broken screens. So if you put it alongside some other laptops and other devices when it comes to the benchmarks, it is a no brainer, right? You put it beside the last gen MacBook Air and it's hilarious but this thing even benches alongside something like my maxed out 16 inch MacBook Pro which has a TDP of like 6 or 7 times this, right.
It is a very power hungry laptop, it is a very loud laptop. And even it struggles in some cases specifically in the single core to keep up with this little puny MacBook Air. Like one core on that Ryzen system is like 4 or 5 times the entire power consumption of this MacBook. And yet in the single core basis this MacBook is more powerful and it feels like it, right? It's one thing to look at benchmarks. It's one thing to see the, the synthetic sort of scores. It's one thing to see people like me talk about it. It's another thing to experience how fast the web feels in Safari, right?
How fast it is to boot up, how fast it is to close the lid, it's asleep, open it up and literally by the time I have the lid half open it is already unlocked itself. So with the new M1 MacBook Air. There were a bunch of things that jump out to me. First of all, is how big of a difference this is from the previous model that came out just a few months ago. Now, if you look at it, it is very much the same. So this has lost the fan, which to be honest, the fan in the previous MacBook Air didn't exactly do a lot.
But hardware wise, basically the same, same screen same trackpad, same design same two Thunderbolt 3 ports. Although this time they have been upgraded to USB 4 which basically means that they're still Thunderbolt ports. Now the internals are really what have been changed. Gone are the days of the Intel processors and in are the brand new Apple M1 chips.
If you're not familiar with M1 and you somehow made it this far into the video this is essentially a supercharged version of what you would find in the latest iPhones and the latest iPad Air. It is based on that same A14 but it has been tuned and modified for Mac use, right? So it's an eight core chip. So you have four high performance cores and four low performance cores and that enables a ton of things. But what's interesting about this chip is not so much the raw performance which obviously is a huge part of it but it is no longer based on the same Intel AMD x86 architecture.
Instead the M1 uses the ARM architecture which again is lifted directly the mobile side of the world, right? So things like iPhone, things like Android phones they all use ARM based chips.But what Apple have done with the M1 is build a mega chip that really does deliver crazy performance. And let's keep in mind, this is the base model.So the way that a traditional legacy app that hasn't been updated for the M1 works is very simple.
Now, as soon as you go to launch it you will have Rosetta run in the background. So it might take a little bit extra time to first load at the beginning. But beyond that, it's actually a really smooth experience. So apps such as Slack run just as well as they did before.In fact, some of the more interesting things were when I tried Fortnite which obviously is an older game. It is a game that hasn't been updated for Macs in a while and certainly doesn't support Apple Silicon. But I was getting 60 FPS. Right?
That's a nuts idea that I'm getting better performance in a game on a base model, thin and light fanless MacBook than I did in pretty much any Mac beforehand. Now there is a little bit of a performance penalty to running these apps in the backwards compatibility mode when Rosetta is running underneath, but it's minor enough and the chip is so powerful that it means that essentially all apps going forward are going to be updated right? I mean, it's just a no brainer that if you wanna make a Mac app you need to keep it up to date for Apple Silicon at some point.
One of the downsides to switching over to Apple Silicon is you no longer have Boot Camp support. So this may come at some point in the future there's certainly nothing stopping the Windows on ARM version to run on this if Apple, Microsoft can get together and figure something out. Now battery life is something of course everyone cares about, right? And that is where you would expect this to do better, right? I mean the ARM based chips that you have inside your phones have been hyper hyper optimized to get the most amount of battery life possible, right? And with this MacBook Air, what you're getting is the exact same size batteries, pretty much the exact same battery as the previous MacBook Air.
But you are getting now 30, 40% more battery life.And that's a real number. So I was buying Pokemon cards on eBay because that's my life now, the other night in bed. And I just was, I was on for like an hour or whatever I look up and I see I've got 77% battery life and it showed I had 12hours remaining on the Air.And I'm just like, are you serious? - Yeah, I tweeted this cause I was kinda shocked by it I had, I was just in Safari which is like best case scenario for this laptop. And I was just in like scrolling through stuff and doing email and calendar back and forth.
And I'd been using it for a bit and I checked battery and it still said 100%. And I just moved across the room and I had to think to myself, did I just unplug this or have I really been using it for like half an hour? And it still reads a hundred percent. And I used it for about an hour and a half and I closed the lid and I went to sleep and it had 96% battery left. - There was a few years there where the Mac was in the wilderness. The, they just weren't quite as competitive, you had all these thermal issues you had all these keyboard issues, but this MacBook Air and specifically the M1 chip inside has completely changed everything.
Now, if I'm going to talk about negatives, there are a few. And to be fair, some of those are certainly very specific to a more professional workflow and certainly are not what the MacBook Air is intended for. So you can only run two displays off of an M1 based Mac. So if you're using a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, you can pretty much only connect one external display. The MacBook Air and indeed all the M1 Macs only have two Thunderbolt slash USB-C ports. But when I look at this specifically with the Air, the trade-offs that you make in exchange for the advantages and the performance and the compatibility and the battery life It's a very easy call.
Okay, so help me out here right?So in working on my video on the Air and obviously the Pro and stuff but I'm mostly been focusing on the Air. I cannot think of a single good reason if someone is in the market for a MacBook Air specifically to not buy this one can you think of any reason why you wouldn't want to jump on this as a gen 1 product?
Well Apple is not even selling an Intel MacBook Air anymore so it seems like they agree and this is the, this is the confident piece of their transition it's just most popular laptop baseline M1 chip is a way to go. I'm gonna agree with you.I'm gonna say there is no glaring downside. I mean now that I've tested it and I've seen how well the development is going, I don't see a glaring downside. I think the pessimist would say that Apple is gonna move on from M1 chips quickly and this is the worst version you can ever buy and I think that that's true.
But if this version with its incredible battery life and it's really good performance is good enough for you. There is no downside, I'm gonna get this for my mom, my dad,my sister this is the laptop that they should just get. - It's so good that it's hard for me to talk about without sounding like I'm biased or that I'm an Apple shill or whatever, but it's like it's very rare to have a new product come out which does so many things so well, right? Like my job is to be critical and to review things and to talk about the upsides, the downsides and where you want, why you may wanna wait.
And sure, look, I should probably wait for the 16 inch MacBook which is going to have all these same sort of advantages and it'll have the extra ports and stuff. But like I've seen how smooth and how fast everything is on these devices and how good battery life is. I can't put that genie back in the bottle. I can't forget that I've experienced this kind of speed. And if it's this good on a base model MacBook Air how good is it gonna be when that iMac comes out, when that MacBook Pro comes out, when that Mac Pro comes out, right? That's what I'm really excited for.
This is one of the biggest leaps in a while where I think it's going to be a long time before it's an obvious no go. I think there's gonna be at least two years where there're every laptop is gonna get compared to this MacBook Air. Like every laptop in this price range is gonna get, gonna get compared and probably lose on paper in a lot of ways to the MacBook Air.
It really does to me bring the MacBook Air back to the default status of this laptop is the laptop I would recommend to anyone unless they have a good reason not to wanna get it, right? Unless you want a big screen, unless you need Windows for some reason, unless you wanna game the MacBook Air is it. And that is something that is been a long time since I've been able to say that this is such a clear class leader across the board.
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