Got my M1 MBA

[Joelist]

M1 MBA Base Model received. Setup as follows:

1) Immediately after initial startup complete I updated MacOS to 11.1

2) Downloaded Zoom

3) Installed my Office 365 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook)

So far it is outperforming my MBP 16 with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD.

I will post more as I go, including things like running the exact same application and process on both machines and checking memory usage.

 

[JohnnyGo]

It would be great to hear from someone with “regular” workloads (Zoom, Office, Email)

What email client if any do you use ?

 

[Dr_Ian_Malcolm]

It would be great to hear from someone with “regular” workloads (Zoom, Office, Email)

What email client if any do you use ?

If it helps... My workflow is typically Office-based: Word, Excel, and PP... I also utilize Zoom for calls that often go for 4-5 hours at a time. My M1 MBA 16gb 1tb absolutely breezes through all of it. Battery is as advertised, it’s really crazy sitting in a Zoom meeting for a couple hours and seeing a 6% decrease in battery. All while whisper quiet and no heat. Coming from my MBP13, I was used to heat and fans, which never bothered me, but it is definitely nicer without them.

 

[Apple_Robert]

M1 MBA Base Model received. Setup as follows:

1) Immediately after initial startup complete I updated MacOS to 11.1

2) Downloaded Zoom

3) Installed my Office 365 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook)

So far it is outperforming my MBP 16 with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD.

I will post more as I go, including things like running the exact same application and process on both machines and checking memory usage.

Congrats on your new fruit.

I am mulling over the M1 MBA base model.

Glad to continue reading so many positives about the machine.

 

[Joelist]

I use Outlook for email. I use the other Office apps for file work and also do work in Salesforce.com and host meetings on Zoom.

 

[Joelist]

So far...

Zoom ran superfast for meetings and no sign of the MBA even getting warm. Video and audio were excellent and I could see the effect of the DSP on the webcam.

Excel and Word have been effectively instantaneous, so has Outlook. The speed in everything is just ridiculous. This feels much faster than my FAR higher specced MacBook Pro 16.

Next step is going to be to run the exact same process on this and my MBP and compare them in Activity Monitor.

 

[Joelist]

Starting my comparisons:

Slack runs like lightning on the M1 and hesitates a bit on the MBP. Interestingly, it is the same size on Activity Monitor - Memory for both (x86 version on MBP; Apple Silicon version on MBA)

Excel is also WAY faster on MBA. And here the memory size is also different. With the same file opened Excel on MBP 16 is 280 MB versus 124 MB on the MBA.

PowerPoint again far faster on MBA. Memory size on MBA 301MB size on MBP 16 409MB (both have same deck open).

So the data so far is interesting. On normal work based usage this thing is instantaneous - like an iPad Pro. And the memory usage part is showing an interesting trend too.

 

[JohnnyGo]

Great to hear Office 365 apps are well behaved and actually consuming less memory!

 

[Joelist]

My next step was installing a game playing app named VASSAL (http://www.vassalengine.org) and running some of my favorite games on it. It runs just fine and the games all run properly. As to how much memory it consumes - it seems the same on both.

 

[Joelist]

Well, I have used it as my daily driver for a few days now and I think I now have accounted for all my daily driver tools:

Slack
Zoom
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
Salesforce
VS Code

Everything is zippier than on my MBP 16 with i9, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD. As to memory size some stayed the same and some (like Excel for example) got smaller. It seems the ones that are already native to M1 are smaller.

So here I sit with a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD giving me a superior user experience in terms of quickness and to be honest everything else except screen size over a MBP 16.