Steve Sande — Apple World Today

Hands-down, the best hardware of the year from Apple has to be any of the three Macs sporting the M1 system on chip. For me, that Mac is the 2020 13-inch MacBook Air.

I already own a 16-inch MacBook Pro as my primary work computer, but after spilling water on that device in early 2020 and having it sent out for service, I decided that I really needed a backup laptop. I started off with a refurbished late 2019 MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air has always been one of my favorite laptops, ever since I watched Steve Jobs pull one out of a manila envelope at Macworld Expo. But it has always taken a backseat to the MacBook Pro in terms of sheer speed and capability…until now.

This little M1-powered Mac is ridiculously fast. In a benchmark test using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test — used to determine what video processing a computer can handle — it beat my 8-core Intel i9 powered 16-inch MacBook Pro.

Of course, storage speed isn’t the only thing you want to test on a computer, so I did some head-to-head comparisons rending video in iMovie both on the 13-inch MacBook Air and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Guess which computer won the race?

On the MacBook Pro, the rendering of the video file took 4 minutes, 21.3 seconds. (4.36 minutes)

On the M1 MacBook Air, that same rendering took just 3 minutes 11.5 seconds. (3.19 minutes)

The M1 MacBook Air rendered the video 26.8% faster than the loaded MacBook Pro.

This little computer starts at just $999 ($899 for education purchases) and it’s definitely a lot of Mac for the money. If you don’t currently own an M1 Mac, make plans to get one in 2021.