I have just purchased a new M1 Apple Silicon Macbook Air with 8GB RAM. How exciting! I thought I would give some initial impressions. Before getting into it, I would like to admit I agonised and agonised about returning it the next day (I even wiped it and boxed it back up!) as I bought the 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD version and wondered if I had made a mistake getting the 8GB RAM version. I guess the one question most people will ask initially is if they need the 16GB. It’s tricky. At the moment, the 8GB versions are easily available for immediate purchase, but any Macbook Air or Macbook Pro 16GB variant has a 2-3 week lead time, so it seems these have been massively more popular, and I can see why. I wish I had managed to snag one, but in practice it seems to be not as important as you might think. The unified memory architecture means RAM is super quick to read/write by the processor, and the super fast SSD (2GB/s reads/writes) seems to go a long way to make a ‘paging’ event almost impossible to notice. So, despite panic ordering a ‘proper’ Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM and 1TB disk (at almost double the cost, £1900!) of this base Macbook Air I relented and realised that this is a perfectly great machine and perhaps the computing bargain of the decade. Given that this is the tip of the iceberg on what is in the pipeline, I’m very happy to just enjoy this machine and see if the mythical 14 inch MacBook Pro surfaces soon. Once that comes around, I can jump on it without regretting this purchase too much. So, if you can, probably get the 16GB edition, but its not quite the dealbreaker you might think, especially if you are using it for light-ish tasks. But, having said that, I’ve ran Webstorm on it fine, Capture One, Affinity Designer/Photo, Logic Pro etc etc… It breezes through it all. Google some youtube videos and see what it is capable of, it might just be equivalent to a 16GB machine for most users.
Value
The value of the Macbook Air base configuration is probably the best thing about it. For a measly £999 you get a chip faster than most high end laptops, and a really decent 256GB SSD. If I had to recommend a laptop for someone with a grand to spend, it’s a no-brainer. Nothing in the windows world really touches it. Some people don’t like Mac OS, and I get it, but the value of what you get is astounding with their suite of Office style apps, GarageBand, and iMovie being worth hundreds of pounds alone or at least difficult to replace for free on Windows with programs of comparable quality. The build and feel of the laptop is also second-to-none with the touch ID in particular being super useful.
The screen is also retina, albeit not as bright as the Macbook Pro. I doubt you can get a Windows laptop with a screen like this for the money, perhaps a surface would come close, but that’s not really a laptop.
The speakers are also shockingly good. Loud and clear. I know people say this all the time, but it true in this case that it really is fairly amazing how good they are. Much better than an iPads and you could comfortably listen to Spotify and work quite happily.
Performance and Battery Life
Ridiculous. It’s like having an iPad running MacOS with none of the drawbacks of an iPad. It is a proper real-world minimum 10 hour battery life. Maybe if you really insist on doing intensive things all day it might fall short, but the 10 hours really is a minimum and the new MacBooks will be a coffee shops worst nightmare when they re-open! And, it’s not even like you are sacrificing anything, check the various benchmarks online, and see for yourself. It’s simply game-changing, no hyperbole. Dump your Intel stock, they have ran out of runway. AMD can hang in on core count, value and a more modern design, but they must be getting a little nervous that the pie Intel owned will be shrinking just as they are starting to eat into it.
It is also amazing to have no fan. No whining whirr. No hot base. It’s very zen.
Ports and Connectivity
The connectivity is perhaps the only real, minor downside, but it depends on your perspective. It has 2 usbc ports which is probably enough for anyone’s daily tasks. The battery life is so good, that even if one is used for power, another for an external disk like a samsung T5, it is super easy to just unplug power for a few hours to gain that extra port without having to care. As far as I know there is no throttling when on/off power so performance won’t even be impacted If you have more demanding needs or require a traditional rectangular usb port a small hub is your best bet. But, how often do you plug things into a laptop? For me it’s almost always for an SD card and on an adhoc basis, so 2 usbc ports are perfectly fine.
You can only connect one monitor at the moment as well. I think this is a hard limit despite some workarounds on the internet, but I’m sure one would be plenty for my needs, so not a problem. More ‘pro’ machines coming will surely fix this.
One interesting thing I only just learned about is WiFi6. The new machines support it. The difference in performance between old WiFi standards and WiFi6 is like the hub and switch analogy in networking. Only one device can send/receive at a time on current WiFi networks and we simply don’t notice because the speed and processing power is enough to compensate, but this advancement should make a massive difference in letting all machines get the bandwidth they need. So, these new laptops could be a good push to modernise your home network. And with that improvement, perhaps you need a smaller disk on your machine to host something large and bulky like an older less accessed Capture One catalog, put it on an ssd network share (Unraid!) instead and enjoy the disk space savings. I’m going to try this myself.
App Compatability and Rosetta 2
This is where Apple probably don’t get enough credit. As far as I can tell, everything I have tried to install has worked perfectly thanks to Rosetta 2 translating it to M1 code. That is crazy. Say what you like about apple, but they really have delivered for 99% of people. I don’t have access to something truly outrageous like Maya or something like that, but anything I’ve tried has loaded and worked without a hitch, and with great performance. And it can only get better as more apps become native. Apple have hit it out of the park here. Do not worry that your old apps won’t work, they very likely will be fine (but see further below if you are a dev).
Another interesting ability is being able to run iPad/iPhone apps. This is genuinely useful! I use Goodreader as a virtual library and now have it on my Mac. I also use Fastmail and have been annoyed it lacked a Mac app, no more, install the iPad one, and it works perfectly. Not all apps are available as some developers don’t want it to eat into their Desktop versions (looking at you Korg Gadget) but it is definitely better than nothing. Almost immediately the Mac is a gaming platform, and you can even connect an Xbox/PS controller to give a console experience, smart!
But… you now definitely cannot run Windows and once Parallels and VMWare update their offerings, it will be ARM linux virtualisation. Now that more distros are multi-architecture that likely won’t be a huge problem, but for people who need to test something and deploy to an x86 system it isn’t ideal no matter how close the ARM version should be. This also extends to docker, it currently doesn’t work. When it does work, it will also be an ARM implementation. Again, it might not be a problem but it is a bit of a blow to one of Macs traditional strengths of being able to run almost all OS’s (Mac, Windows and Linux/FreeBSD et al). That party trick is over and while I do think ARM will take over (apple are proving it is possible) it’s surely still 5 years away from being mainstream on most desktops and servers, so it will still be painful for developers and might be a total dealbreaker. I’m sure Apple know this and suggest the cloud is a good alternative, but it is unarguably a loss to the platform. As an aside, it is interesting that the new PS5 and XBOX launched with what are essentially PC components. I highly doubt they will be like this next iteration. Nvidia buying ARM should bring some interesting developments…
What About the Macbook Pro?
I almost ‘upgraded’ from the Macbook Air base model to a Macbook Pro 16GB RAM and 1TB disk but chickened out. The price would have been £1,900 and it didn’t seem like double the laptop, especially when newer PRO models may come out next year. The main reason for choosing the PRO instead of just upgrading the air base config was that it had a brighter screen and longer battery life. I actually don’t want a touch bar and would have preferred function keys, but it’s not something you can opt out of. The sustained performance is also better, but it’s really marginal, if you can wait 20 minutes for something from the Pro, you can probably wait 24 minutes from the air. The screen brightness increase would have been nice, but I’ll survive. And, longer battery life is also nice to have, but it is long enough as it is. There are other small things but I think it just wasn’t compelling enough over the base model for the money at this early stage of platform maturation. I guess kudos to apple for not artificially limiting the M1 chip on the ‘cheaper’ air system. It has certainly caused me a headache in what choice is correct though.
Final Thoughts
I’m very very impressed. I now have a laptop with the holy grail of price, performance and battery life. You are sacrificing almost nothing, as long as you like Macs obviously. The only real stickler outside of x86 compatability is that Apple charges a fortune for ‘upgrades’ which have to be selected at time of purchase. An extra 8GB of RAM (which I would still recommend for longevity if you can afford it) is £200 extra. £200! These prices existed on the legacy Intel machines, so it’s not just M1 chip shenanigans. RAM certainly isn’t an exotic component, and while I’m sure apple have a custom chip for space savings, a quick search shows a 16GB SODIMM is around £50 or so. Even being generous to apple, £200 for the privilege to swap your 8GB for 16GB is a bit of a racket. Same for disk space. Upgrading from 256GB SSD to 512GB SSD is £200, and a jump from that to 1TB is another £200, a total of £400 to get to a ‘I dont care what I install’ capacity level, and that kind of neglects that the original SSD is probably £200 of value in this pricing model. A 1TB NVMe for a PC can be had for £100-£150 sometimes! Granted, it won’t be in the same performance class but Apple is definitely skimming some handsome profits here. I think the best alternative solution is a Samsung T5/T7 if you can handle the dongle aspect of it.
In summary, probably try get that extra RAM, but for under a grand (or just over), you are getting a fantastic all-purpose machine that won’t be beaten until the next Apple laptops are released.
(if you like Mac, don’t need VMs or Docker, and don’t need more disk space)