Why I’m buying a MacBook Air with M1 — Apple World Today

The announcement is out there. Apple has delivered three Macs — a 13-inch MacBook Air, a Mac mini, and a 13-inch MacBook Pro, all with the outstanding M1 SoC. As a writer who focuses on Apple, I had to jump on one of these three machines immediately so I can write about them. I chose the MacBook Air, and here’s why.

I currently have two MacBooks; a 16-inch MacBook Pro and a 13-inch MacBook Air. The MBA is my travel machine, because I usually am more concerned about light weight than a bigger screen when I’m on the road. It’s also a “backup and beta” Mac — if my MacBook Pro goes into the shop (like it did when I spilled a glass of water onto it…), it’s there for me to do work, and I’ve also been happily testing macOS Big Sur on it. That 13-inch MBA has Touch ID but no Touch Bar, a really nice keyboard, and a display that — although nice — just doesn’t seem as bright and clear as the one on the 16-inch MBP.

The new M1-powered MBA will allegedly be 3.5X faster than the existing generation — my existing one uses a 1.6GHz dual-core Intel i5 CPU, and it definitely shows a bit of a lag in certain operations. It has 16GB of RAM and 500GB of storage.

I ordered a similar model of the M1 — 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The display shows 400 nits of brightness; sadly, I can’t compare that to the existing display specs as the brightness isn’t listed. The case size appears to be identical to the existing MBA, and there’s no improvement to the FaceTime camera specs, although the images should look better due to signal processing. To quote Apple’s press release,

Other new features in MacBook Air include Apple’s latest image signal processor (ISP) in the M1 chip, which improves camera image quality with better noise reduction, greater dynamic range, and improved auto white balance and ML-enhanced face detection so users look their best during video calls

Even with getting onto the Apple Store within seconds of it coming back up after the announcements, there’s already a slight waiting time for delivery. Mine’s showing a delivery date no earlier than November 24, although I have seen Apple “under-promise, over-deliver” before.

So why the MBA and not an MBP? Well, I’m going to see just how good the MacBook Air does with the M1 chip before I think about jumping on a new Pro machine. If that M1 MBA happens to perform as well as my 2.3 GHz 8-core Intel Core i9 MacBook Pro, I might find myself doing all of my work on the smaller Mac, connected to a 27-inch display, of course. If it doesn’t, then at least I have the opportunity to run my favorite iPhone and iPad apps on the MBA while I wait a few years to replace the MBP.

These are exciting times for Mac owners. I’m going to be thrilled to try out the M1-powered MBA and I’ll share my experiences with you.