So now I have a MacBook Air M1 with me as well and I have tested the device for a day.
People kept complaining about battery life and heat on the 14" due to all of these Youtube videos showing benchmarks and such, but I would like to share my personal experience:
1. There is ZERO difference in battery run time between the MacBook Air and the 14" M1 Pro with 10 cores. I have tried everything. They basically get the same battery run time with the exact same tasks, whether it is light computing or heavy computing (playing games, modeling in Fusion 360, photo editing in Capture One Pro). Both get about 10-12 hours under light use, and worst case about 2-3 hours when CPU + GPU are stressed to their absolute limits.
2. The 14" M1 Pro is still a lot faster than Air M1 even in Low Power Mode.
3. In Low Power Mode, the Air is... not bad but it's very very slow in comparison to the 14".
4. In Low Power Mode, both still get the exact same battery life with light use. That means the Air and the 14" get the exact same run time to me when both are in Low Power Mode.
5. In Low Power Mode, the fan in the 14" NEVER goes above 2300RPM no matter what I tried. Even Cinebench on loop for a whole 2 hours on top of a blanket did not get the fan beyond 2300RPM. It seems Low Power Mode is just Apple limiting the 14" to a certain power draw package? Need more confirmation on this, but I honestly could not get it to beyond 25-30W. Also, 2300RPM with the 14" is SILENT. My office's ambient noise level is 26dB and I can clearly hear any slight buzzing. Even putting my phone over the 14" vents did not detect any noise above ambient here. Practically, the 14" in Low Power Mode is as silent as the MacBook Air.
6. Without Low Power Mode, then yeah, the 14" will blast the fan when the CPU is stressed a lot and power consumption of the SoC goes beyond 35W. Even then, it's not maxing out the fan and it's more of a low whir. But without Low Power Mode, the 14" is over twice as fast as the MacBook Air at literally everything... from opening apps to running tasks.
6. The Air's max brightness is about 13.5 to 14 out of the 16 steps of brightness on the 14". Obviously the screen on the 14" is much nicer and much sharper.
7. The Pro's speakers are far better than the Air. I think that goes without saying.
8. The Pro charges up much faster than the Air. The Air takes about 3 hours to fully charge from 5% to 100%. The Pro takes 2 hours with a 100W charger. If that sounds like a lot, it took almost an hour for the Air to reach 50% but the Pro took only about 25 minutes or so. By the 1-hour mark, the Pro was already around 75 - 80%. This was with me still pushing the machine all that time.
So my conclusion: the Air is a good entry level machine, but... honestly, if I wanted the same configuration (16GB RAM and 1TB SSD) as my 14", I'd have to spend $1599 (or $1649 if I wanted that extra GPU core). At that point, it's pretty close to the base 14" Pro. I'd totally want to spend the extra $1000 for:
1. Twice the performance at all of my tasks, even in Low Power Mode
2. More ports
3. 4x bigger Touch ID button (matters a lot if you end up using Touch ID a lot) + 2x bigger Esc key
4. Better speakers
5. Better screen, and brighter outdoors
6. Faster charging
7. Slightly bigger trackpad
8. More screen real estate
9. Better webcam (relevant since I also do Zoom quite a lot)
Also I had the M1 13" Pro (just sold it recently) and the only thing I could say about the 13" Pro was... it might have lasted slightly longer under light computing tasks? And that's it.
Overall, from my point of view, the 14" is totally a worthy upgrade over the Air if anyone can afford it. But with that said, I got this Air for $849 on a recent deal. And at that price point, honestly... this is probably the best value for anyone's money. If I didn't need the extra performance of the 14" and I was on a tight budget, I'd totally go for this Air. It is plenty fast for random office tasks and Youtube. Plus it is absolutely silent and there's not much of a reason to go with Low Power Mode on it since it's not going to gain anything (but it loses quite a bit of performance). Oh, and also: no notch!
People kept complaining about battery life and heat on the 14" due to all of these Youtube videos showing benchmarks and such, but I would like to share my personal experience:
1. There is ZERO difference in battery run time between the MacBook Air and the 14" M1 Pro with 10 cores. I have tried everything. They basically get the same battery run time with the exact same tasks, whether it is light computing or heavy computing (playing games, modeling in Fusion 360, photo editing in Capture One Pro). Both get about 10-12 hours under light use, and worst case about 2-3 hours when CPU + GPU are stressed to their absolute limits.
2. The 14" M1 Pro is still a lot faster than Air M1 even in Low Power Mode.
3. In Low Power Mode, the Air is... not bad but it's very very slow in comparison to the 14".
4. In Low Power Mode, both still get the exact same battery life with light use. That means the Air and the 14" get the exact same run time to me when both are in Low Power Mode.
5. In Low Power Mode, the fan in the 14" NEVER goes above 2300RPM no matter what I tried. Even Cinebench on loop for a whole 2 hours on top of a blanket did not get the fan beyond 2300RPM. It seems Low Power Mode is just Apple limiting the 14" to a certain power draw package? Need more confirmation on this, but I honestly could not get it to beyond 25-30W. Also, 2300RPM with the 14" is SILENT. My office's ambient noise level is 26dB and I can clearly hear any slight buzzing. Even putting my phone over the 14" vents did not detect any noise above ambient here. Practically, the 14" in Low Power Mode is as silent as the MacBook Air.
6. Without Low Power Mode, then yeah, the 14" will blast the fan when the CPU is stressed a lot and power consumption of the SoC goes beyond 35W. Even then, it's not maxing out the fan and it's more of a low whir. But without Low Power Mode, the 14" is over twice as fast as the MacBook Air at literally everything... from opening apps to running tasks.
6. The Air's max brightness is about 13.5 to 14 out of the 16 steps of brightness on the 14". Obviously the screen on the 14" is much nicer and much sharper.
7. The Pro's speakers are far better than the Air. I think that goes without saying.
8. The Pro charges up much faster than the Air. The Air takes about 3 hours to fully charge from 5% to 100%. The Pro takes 2 hours with a 100W charger. If that sounds like a lot, it took almost an hour for the Air to reach 50% but the Pro took only about 25 minutes or so. By the 1-hour mark, the Pro was already around 75 - 80%. This was with me still pushing the machine all that time.
So my conclusion: the Air is a good entry level machine, but... honestly, if I wanted the same configuration (16GB RAM and 1TB SSD) as my 14", I'd have to spend $1599 (or $1649 if I wanted that extra GPU core). At that point, it's pretty close to the base 14" Pro. I'd totally want to spend the extra $1000 for:
1. Twice the performance at all of my tasks, even in Low Power Mode
2. More ports
3. 4x bigger Touch ID button (matters a lot if you end up using Touch ID a lot) + 2x bigger Esc key
4. Better speakers
5. Better screen, and brighter outdoors
6. Faster charging
7. Slightly bigger trackpad
8. More screen real estate
9. Better webcam (relevant since I also do Zoom quite a lot)
Also I had the M1 13" Pro (just sold it recently) and the only thing I could say about the 13" Pro was... it might have lasted slightly longer under light computing tasks? And that's it.
Overall, from my point of view, the 14" is totally a worthy upgrade over the Air if anyone can afford it. But with that said, I got this Air for $849 on a recent deal. And at that price point, honestly... this is probably the best value for anyone's money. If I didn't need the extra performance of the 14" and I was on a tight budget, I'd totally go for this Air. It is plenty fast for random office tasks and Youtube. Plus it is absolutely silent and there's not much of a reason to go with Low Power Mode on it since it's not going to gain anything (but it loses quite a bit of performance). Oh, and also: no notch!
