I bought MacBook Air M1. Bad purchase?

[antwormcity]

There's a ton of benchmarks and app tests on YouTube that show about a 10% gain in sustained workloads on the M1 MBP over the MBA due to the fan. My personal workflow almost never results in long, sustained high-CPU workloads. The MBA has been extremely zippy for me, where the Microsoft SurfaceBook 2 (quad-core i7) would throttle significantly (besides chewing through a fully charged battery in no time).

Bear in mind that the M1 is Apple's entry level chipset. If you're after workstation-class performance, either stick with Intel for now or be patient for the next set of machines coming out. Apple did say it would take two years to make the full transition.

Not sure how much to trust those benchmarks for throttling etc. There is also heat generation and impacts on battery life. Timing a photo app and library export is one way though those are quite predictable in some ways.

I am sitting here slaving on a lukewarm M1 at diagnostics temp of 55-58 deg C consistently for the last hour in a well ventilated ambient 70F room, as I sit on a sofa with well ventilated underside of the macbook. Monitoring tools show random jumps to 60 deg C.

Workload: 11 Chrome tabs, one word processor and one Adobe doc at 60% screen brightness. Don't go Safari on me - it chewed up the disk writes like crazy when I was using in the early days. I'd get an M1 Pro though it would be updated in the next 6-9 months, Apple Tax with low stock and backorders is not fun to deal with either.

Yeah, patience is something we need more of - in our day and age we want instant updates - engineering something for a new product doesn't work that way.

 

[xraydoc]

Not sure how much to trust those benchmarks for throttling etc. There is also heat generation and impacts on battery life. Timing a photo app and library export is one way though those are quite predictable in some ways.

I am sitting here slaving on a lukewarm M1 at diagnostics temp of 55-58 deg C consistently for the last hour in a well ventilated ambient 70F room, as I sit on a sofa with well ventilated underside of the macbook. Monitoring tools show random jumps to 60 deg C.

Workload: 11 Chrome tabs, one word processor and one Adobe doc at 60% screen brightness. Don't go Safari on me - it chewed up the disk writes like crazy when I was using in the early days. I'd get an M1 Pro though it would be updated in the next 6-9 months, Apple Tax with low stock and backorders is not fun to deal with either.

Yeah, patience is something we need more of - in our day and age we want instant updates - engineering something for a new product doesn't work that way.

Computers generate heat. Since the M1 runs so much cooler than Intel chips, I'd think the M1 would be more acceptable for you given they run so much cooler. Find me a passively-cooled Intel machine with as much performance as the M1.

 

[darknetone]

I use my M! MBP daily, No problems and no worries, and like any other machine with important data on it I do nightly backups.

 

[drdudj]

i'm sure the defining difference is going to be what each person's workload is, whether it's for work or for personal projects. being a first time owner of a Mac product, i couldn't be more pleased (estatic comes to mind!) with this M1, but then again my needs are minimal; email, web, photos, video conferencing, messaging, minor game play and this system more than meets those needs. in comparison to my previous 10 year old toshiba satellite win10 unit, it's like comparing a 2011 vw bug to a 2021 mustang 5.0.