MacBook Air M1 ,1 Week Review, Switch from 15” MBP

[badlydrawnboy]

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I thought it might be useful to summarise my thoughts after using the new M1 MacBook Air after using it for a week, and how it compares with a 15” MBP, if anyone else is thinking of upgrading.

The summary is for those that don’t want to read a long post is I am really happy with the switch, the new Air is faster, more responsive, with battery life that is amazing.

The Spec of the Air that I purchased was a Space Grey MacBook Air with 8 GPU cores, 16GB Memory and 1TB SSD

The MacBook Pro 15.4” that it replaced was a Late 2016 model A1707, Intel i7 2.7GHz 512GB 16GB Silver with Touch Bar

There were 3 things I did not like with the MacBook Pro

1. This was the first MBP released with the ‘butterfly keyboard’, and compared to the 15” 2012 Retina MBP I was using before, I hated typing on it. The travel is very shallow and it almost felt like typing on an iPad screen. Also the keys were prone to get dust under them causing them to work intermittently. The keyboard has already been repaired once in the Apple Store.
2. Some like the Touch Bar, and some don’t. I fall into the later category. When I first got it, I thought it was pretty cool, but then grew to dislike it for two reasons. Firstly having to take my hands away from my normal typing position to use it, also I am used to typing without looking at the keyboard and you definitely need to look at the Touch Bar to use it. Secondly it was too easy to accidentally brush your fingers on the touch sensitive keys. I had two main problems, in Outlook Microsoft thought it was a great idea to have the send key on the far left side. Too many times while I was half way composing an email when I would accidentally send it. The virtual esc key is also on the far left and I would often hit that and lose what I was typing.
3. The Fan, whenever I was doing anything processor intensive the fans would come on, particularly playing games would sound like you were sitting next to a hair dryer.

I was a little apprehensive as I since 2002 had always bought one of the Apple 15” pro Laptops, would I be happy with the performance of my first MacBook Air and would the 13” Screen be enough?

I was hoping for reviews to be published before launch day last Tuesday as I could not decide between the 13” Pro or Air. At 6 AM on 17th of November I woke up to find that while no formal reviews had been published a couple of users had got hold on units early and initial indications were that these M1 MacBooks were pretty powerful. So I checked online stock at Apple Stores near me, the one in Bath, England had stock of the 16GB versions of both Pro and Air, but with 1TB SSD rather than 500GB that I was originally going to order. For this reason I went for the Air, as the cost was starting to add up.

I decided to give the Air a go, and if it worked out, I would sell the MBP, which would cover most of the cost of the switch. If I could not live with the screen, or I was not happy then I would return the Air.

I was aware that some of the Apps I use (Screenflow for example) was not compatible with Apple Silicon (AS) yet, but I have a 27” iMac that can handle that until a AS native version is available. Also I was aware that Microsoft had a Beta version of Microsoft 365 available. I use a lot of the Omni Group’s app and I knew that all of these were AS Native as well as Final Cut Pro, Motion and Compressor.

My Macs are used for typical office work during the day ( Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OnmiFocus and the Apple Notes App as well as eMail). I am keen photographer so use Affinity Photo and do some video editing when I am not working.

Performance of the M1 MacBook Air

I did create a thread discussing various benchmark comparisons here

A summary of the main ones:

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Edit : Table above has been updated since the original post as most scores are now higher as spotlight indexing has finished.

So the new M1 Air is around twice as fast as my old MBP. It really feels that way as well, Applications open much faster, normally in one ‘bounce’.

Safari and web browsing is ‘super snappy’ web pages load and render insanely quick on this M1.

Also love the ‘instant on’ as you open the lid, occasionally on the MBP it would hesitate for a few seconds before the screen came on.

The Keyboard

One of the reasons I wanted to switch was the Keyboard which does have a much better typing experience than the MBP, although not quite as good as the MacBook Pro 2012 retina, but pretty close. One improvement that I was not expecting is that it is a more comfortable tying experience as the Air has a tapered case design so the lower edge does not dig into your wrists like the MBP used to.

Not only has the Air got a set of traditional function keys, Apple has changed the functionality of three of make them to be more useful.

View attachment 1678471

The F4 Key is a shortcut to spotlight search, F5 Siri and F6 Silence Notifications.

Rosetta 2

The new Rosetta 2 works very well, and with the power of the M1 chip even Intel Apps run on the whole quicker than my previous MBP. Do check App compatibility though, as for example my screencast App of choice, Screenflow can’t run even under Rosetta 2 yet.

Form factor & Screen Size

This was one of the aspects I was most concerned about as I had always used a 15” laptop screen previously. Would I be happy with a smaller screen ?

I was surprised on how good the screen is, particularly the fact that the Air now has a P3 wide colour gamut screen, which is important to me for photo editing. Also the screen on the Air has a much wider viewing angle than the MBP.

I have a 27” iMac so if I need a bigger screen I can always use that, and having the combination of a smaller and lighter portable makes more sense with a 27” iMac. The smaller size makes it more comfortable to use in bed or lounging on the sofa than the 15” was. If I did not have the iMac I probably would invest in a large monitor for long video and photo editing sessions.

Noise, Heat & Throttling

The Air was no fan, so unlike the MBP that under load sounds like a small hairdryer next to you, this is completely silent. Heat wise the only time it has got warm was playing World of Warcraft. It got hot, but not uncomfortably so.

I have not done extensive tests on throttling as to keep the Air cool the system will reduce power and clock speed. Looking at tests done by other YouTube reviewers this generally amounts to a 15% decline in performance. Given the huge increase in performance over my previous MBP (100%) this does not concern me.

Battery

I only used to get around 5-6 hours battery life on the MBP. To be honest I don’t know how long the battery on the Air lasts, as I use it all day and charge it at night. The battery life with the performance on the Air is nothing short of amazing. Yes I know the M1 Pro lasts longer, but if the Air can last all day I don’t really need more.

Gaming

I have been known to play a little World of Warcraft and with the new expansion being released soon I though I would re-subscribe and see how it performs. World of Warcraft is one of the few games at the moment that can run natively on Apple Silicon. I won’t dwell on this as others have already given their feedback. I was impressed ,as I can play for an hour with settings more or less maxed out and still get a decent frame rate (50-60 FPS).

Final Thoughts

This is my 6th Apple Laptop and for me has been the biggest increase in performance going from one laptop to the next. After using it for a day, I decided to put the old MBP on eBay and it sold within 30 minutes. I have been impressed with the M1 Air and I hope this review is useful to anyone considering the a similar upgrade.

I intend keeping this for at least 3 years as my portable machine, and intend upgrading my iMac to Apple Silicon in due course

I am not sure if I really needed 16Gb in hindsight, although as I intend keeping it for a while, hopefully it will come in useful, and yes Safari (and just about everything else) is definitely snappier on Apple Silicon.

Thanks for the review. I bought the same device you have, but am coming from a 2018 13" MBP. My usage is similar to yours and I have an iMac Pro for heavier work. This is exactly what I expected based on reading and watching a bunch of reviews, so it's good to see it confirmed by someone in a similar situation!

 

[Strangedream]

Thanks for this great comparison James!

This post is particularly helpful to me because I have the exact same late-2016 15" MBP as you mentioned in your review (tho mine is space gray). You answered all the questions I had without even knowing it.

I'm still waiting for the 2021 M1+ 16-inch MBP - I don't have a desktop nor an external monitor so I need a laptop with a large screen. Otherwise I'd definitely have pulled the trigger on the this year's 13" M1.

 

[jwolf6589]

Ok, I am not a big Facebook user, so I logged in and scrolled up and down the news feed, switched to other friends news feeds and all was pretty smooth to me on M1 Safari. Not sure if it makes a difference but I am on Big Sur on iMac and M1 Air. As I said the Air was smoother than the iMac but I would not have said the iMac as bad. What in particular do you do on Facebook that you see the lag?

Scroll through lots of newsfeeds and it definitely lags in safari but not on Firefox on the same machine. Don’t know why but I think safari issue.

 

[James_C]

I'm still waiting for the 2021 M1+ 16-inch MBP - I don't have a desktop nor an external monitor so I need a laptop with a large screen. Otherwise I'd definitely have pulled the trigger on the this year's 13" M1.

Yep, If I did not have the iMac as well, I probably would have waited like you. Fingers crossed you don't have to wait too long.

 

[James_C]

Scroll through lots of newsfeeds and it definitely lags in safari but not on Firefox on the same machine. Don’t know why but I think safari issue.

Newfeed scrolling is fine on the M1, slightly laggy on the iMac.

 

[James_C]

Small update, I ran all the benchmarks again on my Late 2014 27"iMac, Generally faster than the 2016 MBP apart from the SSD speed test. Interesting that a 6 year old iMac has a higher Metal score than the M1, this was using the AMD Radeon R9 M295X Graphics on the iMac. Test also highlights the huge speed difference on a 6 year old SSD compared to the one in the M1.

 

[jwolf6589]

Newfeed scrolling is fine on the M1, slightly laggy on the iMac.

Why is there no lag in Firefox?

 

[Buran]

Good to know that WoW runs well on the Air. I don't have any current plans of using mine (8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) for gaming, but in a pinch I could plug in a USB-C flash drive containing the software and run it. I probably wouldn't get the frame rates you report with less RAM, but that's okay.

Shadowlands is out now (came out Monday) and it actually launched pretty smoothly with few server hiccups. The phasing/sharding keeps you from seeing too many other players at the same time, which really cuts down on server load and how much data your client needs to stream and what it needs to render. The tech patch that actually added all the new features came out in October, so most of the kinks were worked out already.

Like you, I love the battery life. I've been using it for my intended uses of light websurfing and writing so far, and it's perfect for that. I also did some light photo editing in Affinity Photo without any trouble or lag.

I occasionally lament that I didn't go for a RAM upgrade as that can't be added later, but then again it's been perfect for what I want to do with it 95% of the time. If I do run into low-RAM issues, I can always order more RAM the next time I buy an Air, probably in 2-3 years. Pagefile swapping to the HDD should be fast with an SSD.

 

[ClockMeister]

The 2016 Macbook Pros were straight... garbage. Like you said, almost everything about it was worse than the 2015 version. Butterly keyboard. Incredibly stupid annoying touchbar. Dongle hell. For me personally, I hated the large touchpad as well. No Intel CPU progress. No battery life improvement.

It seems like the M1 Air is a huge upgrade over the 2016 Macbook Pros in just about every way except the screen size.

The equipment (past 2015) felt to me to be a bit "cheaper" (hardware-wise at least). I've got a mid-2015 MBP (15") with 16GB of main, 512GB SSD and terrific retina display. Got it on eBay for something like $800. Plenty of ports, even has a built-in SD reader. i7. Extremely useful, plenty of battery life (5-6 hours at-a-time). Great for photo editing ... geez, tell me again why I should even consider "upgrading".

 

[ClockMeister]

Nice summary. Oddly enough, I have a 2015 MacBook Pro - probably one of the last to have the keyboard of old, and I rate that as slightly better than my M1 MacBook Air. The butterfly keyboard was just Apple losing it.

Yeah, I had one of the new "air" units for awhile (2019). Hated the keyboard. Sold the thing on eBay and bought a mid-2015 unit (also on eBay). Honestly, doubling the speed of something that already doesn't keep you waiting for very long seems like a real reason to spend a couple grand to "upgrade" (NOT!). I'll just stick with this one until I wear it out. I'm done chasing the bleeding edge with this stuff. iPhone 11 Pro/Max and 2015 MacBook Pro, a pretty awesome combination for my photography hobby.

 

[jwolf6589]

The equipment (past 2015) felt to me to be a bit "cheaper" (hardware-wise at least). I've got a mid-2015 MBP (15") with 16GB of main, 512GB SSD and terrific retina display. Got it on eBay for something like $800. Plenty of ports, even has a built-in SD reader. i7. Extremely useful, plenty of battery life (5-6 hours at-a-time). Great for photo editing ... geez, tell me again why I should even consider "upgrading".

Touch bar annoying???? Get real I love my Touch Bar.

 

[limesmoothie]

Totally agree on the battery life. I've just done 2 full days at work on a single charge, and when I left tonight I was still on 16% battery.

 

[James_C]

Touch bar annoying???? Get real I love my Touch Bar.

It's great you love the Touch Bar. It's one of those things that divides the community some love it and some don't, and that is fine as Apple offer machines with it and without it.

 

[jwolf6589]

It's great you love the Touch Bar. It's one of those things that divides the community some love it and some don't, and that is fine as Apple offer machines with it and without it.

True. A air probably could have met my needs, but I bought the 2020 MacBook pro 13 inch earlier this year and the touch bar was a primary reason.

 

[ClockMeister]

Touch bar annoying???? Get real I love my Touch Bar.

I didn't say anything about the touch-bar (though I don't care about it). Your point?

 

[drsox]

did you go with 8 or 16? I was all set to do 8 until reading all these post... lol... I don't want to get a beach ball... I just use you tube, internet, outlook, MS office, etc... ideas?

I got the 8 - plenty fast.

 

[rando_onDaInterweb]

Update 1 year review plz