And although the M1 Air does thermal throttle as I mentioned, it's nothing like the previous
intel models. Not only because it's fanless so you don’t have a fan, but also because
it's so much faster that many tasks don’t need as much CPU power to do, for example
video exporting or web conferencing, and because many of those tasks use dedicated chips to
speed them up.
Because of that, in real-world use, I never once wished that I grabbed the M1 MacBook
Pro. The M1 Air is so fast, that I didn’t even need my 16” MacBook Pro for the extra
graphics performance, and I’m not the only one. I know multiple people that ditched their
much more expensive larger MacBook for these M1’s for serious productivity work, which
is something we would never believe we could do just one year ago.
You do get a smaller display, but you get so many benefits, one huge one being battery
life. Over the last 9 months I have thrown almost
everything at this fanless machine, Even pro photo and video editing and I have the base
$999 model that you could score for as low as $850 using the link in the video description
below.
Now yes, I have had it choke on me multiple times, but it was for 1 very specific reason
that's a very easy fix which will be my biggest recommendation in just a bit. Other than that,
in the real world the M1 Air performed just as good as the Pro in real world tasks, and
in most tasks outperformed my 16” Macbook Pro so I no longer needed to use it.
And that battery life is insane, I went from about 2.5 hours of 4K video editing on battery
to almost 8 hours with the M1 Air and unlike windows computers it doesn’t slow down when
its unplugged. I’ve literally never experienced such freedom when video editing on the go,
sure my 16” MacBook was good since it retained performance unplugged, but you still had to
worry about battery life where with the new Air or Pro’s I don't even have to take a
charger with me.
By now you know that we lean very heavily on buying the Air over the Pro, but what about
the two biggest reasons people say it's worth buying the Pro? The first one is better battery
life, and yes it's true, in real world use the Pro can playback video for 5 additional
hours, and for productivity you can get an extra 2 hours of battery life, but to be honest,
that has never once been a factor because once the battery life is good enough to get
you through a full day of use, any extra doesn’t matter.
And the other reason is performance, both because of thermal throttling and having one
less graphics core, so how much has that mattered in the last 9 months? Well as you saw, thermal
throttling is definitely an issue and graphics are also weaker, but to me, it didn’t matter
at all.
When we’re looking at benchmarks you see all the differences, both big and small and
15% difference are fairly significant when you’re used to only seeing 5-10% performance
improvement in past years, but in the real world what matters if a machine is fast enough
or not.
In some cases 15% extra can make or break a machine, but with the Air, it handles pro
tasks just as well as the Pro, and even though it takes a little longer to export your projects
you don’t notice that time in the real world, and productivity performance is just as good
so because of that I’ve never felt like using the Pro over the Air.
Not only that, the MacBook Air has a secret weapon to make it an even faster machine than
the Pro for those that need the best performance and here is how you can do it to your macbook
air as well for only $30.
We bought a few thermal pads on Amazon and installed them which takes less than 20 min
even if you’re being very slow and careful and this will draw heat from the chip to the
body aluminum body so its not only the chip getting hot.
Not only does the performance boost significantly, but its actually better than the Pro which
has a fan because that keeps the fan running low until it gets really hot. Its also keeps
your M1 chip running cooler for most tasks which is great for longevity and it can’t
be bad for it since there are temp limits in place.
The only downside is that the bottom could get hotter, but for most use cases you don't
actually notice it. Now we have removed ours so keep testing fair, but even though my performance
dropped back to stock it doesn’t matter because this thing is still super fast even
for heavy use.
In Fact, I’ve recently had someone ask if they can get by with an M1 air until the M1X
Macs come out, and I said yes definitely like i have tons of times, but the crazy thing
is that once he tried the new Air, he said he doesn’t even need to wait for the M1X
because it handles everything more than good enough.
And although I’m super excited about these more powerful chips since the M1 sound like
old new now, and we always want newer, bigger and better things, most people, the M1 chip
is more than fast enough even in a fanless machine and though it might seem boring to
buy something that already seems like old news, for $899 or less, give it a try, I think
you’ll be shocked by how well it works. h
The M1x Macbooks will be great, but because of how good the MacBook Air is, it will still
be the number 1 laptop, even when competing with much cheaper laptops on Amazons top laptop
sellers list. Whats even more crazy is when you look at top electronics its still #1 compared
to other much cheaper accessories.
After 9 Months, the MacBook air is still setting record breaking sales records, and premium
windows laptops can’t even get close in sales, performance, and now even price.
What really proves this point is when we compared the air to two brand new surface laptop 4’s
with a powerful AMD processor and intel's latest as well, and although the AMD processor
had way more powerful raw performance, when it comes to real-world use, the MacBook Air
Smokes it which is crazy, and it also comes in at a much lower price and has better hardware
in most categories.
The display is fantastic, beating out windows laptops that cost much more. Same thing goes
for the speaker, keyboard, and trackpad. The build quality is fantastic, and the ports
are thunderbolt 4 so they can be split into 3 thunderbolt ports for a low price.
As I mentioned at the start, there was a time when I had my Air choke up, and what
I found seems to be a bigger deal with M1 machines then intel, and that is when the
ssd fills up. M1 chips really rely on fast RAM and when that 8 gb in my case fills up
it uses the SSD which is also very fast, but if your ram is full
and your ssd is close to full the M1 chip really seems to slow down when doing photo
or video editing.
Because of that, if you will fill more than 200GB of SSD, make sure to either get 16GB
of RAM or 512GB of SSD and you’ll have no issues at all.
After 9 Months, the MacBook Air is only getting better and better software and value wise.
Windows laptops can’t catch up in performance or price, and even Apple's M1 iPads were a
big miss not only because of prices that went up this year and being forced to pay for 16GB
of ram if you need more storage
and
of course because of the lackluster iPad OS 15.