Hopefully your new Air is meeting your expectations. I have had mine for 5 Months and love it. I upgraded from a 15" 2016 MBP and I still get a smile on my face when I use it 5 months on.
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Which M1 Laptop?
- Thread starter mrgreen4242
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Hopefully your new Air is meeting your expectations. I have had mine for 5 Months and love it. I upgraded from a 15" 2016 MBP and I still get a smile on my face when I use it 5 months on.
So far so good! Fusion 360 under Rosetta has been fine in some very limited testing. Love the form factor (so light compared to my previous machine), instant on is ... instant, and amazing. Running iPad/iPhone apps is a neat little extra that I appreciate a bit more than I expected. Overall build quality is up to Apple standard. Still getting used to the screen size difference (going from a 16" MBP to this Air and a gaming PC) but Mac OS's handling of virtual desktops/Spaces and trackpad gestures is making that pretty easy so far.
I do have one problem - maybe someone reading this will have some recommendations. I had a little Anker USB-C port replicator for my MBP and it WORKS but 1) it appears to draw 15w from the power supply, which means on the little 30w PSU that comes with the Air isn't enough to also charge the laptop while it's running, and 2) the HDMI port is limited to 50hz @ 3440x1440.
So, if there's any recommendations for a port rep. that doesn't draw so much power, and will do 100hz+ at 3440x1440 (and also has at least 1x USB-C port, 2x USB 3.0 ports, an SD card and maybe microSD card reader) and ISN'T $250 (looking for more like <$50ish) I would appreciate it and I'm sure the person buying my MBP will, too, so he can have the old one.
I’m using a Caldigit SOHO dock and an Anker 65 W Power Delivery adapter. Total cost was about $150.
Caldigit SOHO $80 on Amazon.
Anker 65 W USB-C Power Adapter $46 on Amazon.
So the price for the dock went down $20 since I bought it. Not sure if it does better than 60 Hz and only one USB-A port.
Caldigit SOHO $80 on Amazon.
Anker 65 W USB-C Power Adapter $46 on Amazon.
So the price for the dock went down $20 since I bought it. Not sure if it does better than 60 Hz and only one USB-A port.
I bought a 60W Apple charger for my hub. And use the 30W in another room. I wanted an extra charger anyway, I also have that for my old Macbook Air.
M1 2-Port 13" MacBook Pro. The sustained performance load is why.
I'd go with 16GB of RAM and as much storage as you can afford (as you really cannot upgrade it after the fact; that and external drives - specifically for the purpose of remedying a small internal drive - are often inconvenient).
Question regarding the display: after being used to the great colour and sharpness (without having to turn up the brightness more than half way) on my Retina 2013 MBP, would I be happy with the display on the new Macbook Air?
I realise the new Air has a better display than the older Airs but still...
Any advice from those who have moved from a MBP to a new Air would be appreciated.
I realise the new Air has a better display than the older Airs but still...
Any advice from those who have moved from a MBP to a new Air would be appreciated.
I moved from a 15" 2016 MBP with a Retina display to a M1 MBA 5 months ago. I was hesitant as this was going to be my first 13" Mac Screen. I am happy to report that even though the MBA display does not have the same level of Max brightness, I never have my MBA set to maximum anyway, and hence not an issue. I have become used to the 13" screen and now use the MBA much more than I used to use my 15" MBP as it is more portable. As far as the screen is concerned it is an excellent display. It has a wider colour gamut than my old MBP, its a P3 compliant display. Which in plain English means it can display colours more accurately.
I agree with this (and I own the M1 MBA with 8 GB RAM). You are running some hefty apps. I might even wait until June honestly if I were the OP.
The M1BA has a better screen than my 2014 13" MBP; my partner who has the same 2014 MBP as me noticed the difference right away. Also, the M1BA has much better speakers than my 2014.
To those who have made recommendations recently/people looking at this thread for insight: so far I am more than pleased with the performance of the MBA. The ~10% drop on sustained performance hasn't really been apparent (yet). I'll probably setting in to a longer than 10 min CAD project today, so we'll see how that experience compares to the 2019 i7 MBP it's replacing. I am fairly confident that once AutoDesk released an M1 binary for Fusion360 there will be no contest...
Otherwise, it's been perfectly fine for obvious daily uses and some (very light) Python scripting. No problems with (a still Intel build of) Discord for a ~4 hour, five-way video call, while running several other programs/web apps on a 3440x1440 display at 100hz, and the laptops display (I mention that because I know some people have had issues with M1 Macs and external displays).
EDIT: still haven't settled on a hub/port rep yet.
Otherwise, it's been perfectly fine for obvious daily uses and some (very light) Python scripting. No problems with (a still Intel build of) Discord for a ~4 hour, five-way video call, while running several other programs/web apps on a 3440x1440 display at 100hz, and the laptops display (I mention that because I know some people have had issues with M1 Macs and external displays).
EDIT: still haven't settled on a hub/port rep yet.
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I did a quick project in Fusion - just a simple design (as I stated in the my original post, I use Fusion for basic CAD work - no modeling or rendering, etc) and the CPU never went above 43% for Fusion, and RAM utilization was steady around 1.15gb (less than my Python IDE lol). The keyboard got SLIGHTLY warm, nothing near what my 16" MBP would be like when I opened Fusion.
Exporting and slicing the file for (3D) printing using Simplify 3D (also Intel) worked fine - CPU usage for the slicer was <20% (Activity Monitor was using more cycles than Fusion in the background and Simplify in active use lol), RAM was <1gb. Nothing unexpected, seemed as fast as any time I've used it in the past.
I decided to throw something MUCH more complex at the slicer, a high quality mini, and slicing that was identical in speed to my MBP (for practical purposes, I didn't bother timing it as it's a ~5s task). CPU usage spiked to 125% or so for a few moments, RAM ran up to ~1.5gb. Panning/zooming/rotating the more complex sliced model was a little less smooth than maybe I remember it being in the past (hard to say for sure) but still very usable. The Air's chassis was slightly, in no way uncomfortably, warm after all this.
All in all, no problems (for my particular workflows), and certainly nothing that is making me think about going to a Pro or back to an Intel machine - all of the above was done via Rosetta so it'll just get better as M1 versions of these programs are made available.
Exporting and slicing the file for (3D) printing using Simplify 3D (also Intel) worked fine - CPU usage for the slicer was <20% (Activity Monitor was using more cycles than Fusion in the background and Simplify in active use lol), RAM was <1gb. Nothing unexpected, seemed as fast as any time I've used it in the past.
I decided to throw something MUCH more complex at the slicer, a high quality mini, and slicing that was identical in speed to my MBP (for practical purposes, I didn't bother timing it as it's a ~5s task). CPU usage spiked to 125% or so for a few moments, RAM ran up to ~1.5gb. Panning/zooming/rotating the more complex sliced model was a little less smooth than maybe I remember it being in the past (hard to say for sure) but still very usable. The Air's chassis was slightly, in no way uncomfortably, warm after all this.
All in all, no problems (for my particular workflows), and certainly nothing that is making me think about going to a Pro or back to an Intel machine - all of the above was done via Rosetta so it'll just get better as M1 versions of these programs are made available.
I went through the prior transition from PowerPC to Intel, the version of Rosetta was a lot slower then. Apple really nailed the Rosetta 2 performance this time around. You will see a significant jump in performance once you get hold of a native version of Fusion.
Mr. Green. Install something like TG Pro which displays temperatures. If your Air doesn't go above 93C, then it isn't being throttled.
I also was around at that time and this is a much better experience. It worked but it was clearly a stop gap. Rosetta 2 is amazingly good. I installed a game when I noticed it was available on OSX (Avorion) and with maxed out settings, running through Rosetta it was holding pretty steady at 60fps (just a quick test run; I’m sure when you get further in to the game it’ll drop down some, but for context my gaming PC with a 2070 super gets around 120fps with the same settings.
That’s legit incredible both for Rosetta AND the M1
Not to downplay the result (rosette 2 is pretty seemless), but all the API calls are native arm code being executed. That goes for graphics too. So the hard part to emulate is game logic. So a game with simple logic and API calls for everything intensive, should perform close to native.
Mac mini is a good laptop. You just have to weld keyboard and screen and a trackpad onto it somehow