So I purchased the base model of M1 MacBook Air, and after using it for a couple of weeks,
here are the 3 things that I love about this laptop and 3 things that I hate.
Let's start with the gorgeous 2560x1600 resolution screen which is way higher than typical 1080p
panels that you will find on comparatively priced windows laptops. It's also really bright clocking
400 nits of brightness and offers wide viewing angles and 114% sRGB color gamut. These are
insane numbers for any laptop in this price range. I find Macbook air's all aluminium build quality
just amazing. There is no creaking, flexing or bending and the fit and finish is impeccable. It
almost feels like a unibody design with no visible gaps or seams. You have a choice of going with
traditional colors like Space Gray or Silver, but I decided to go with the Gold color which looks
stunning in my opinion. I appreciate the fact that Apple doesn't litter their laptops with
ugly stickers. You also won't find any vents at the bottom of macBook Air because of its fanless
design. Now let's talk about the keyboard. Ever since Jony Ives introduced the dumbass butterfly
keyboard, macbook users have been plagued with horrible typing experience. But not anymore
since the M1 Macbook Air uses a more traditional Scissor Switch Keyboard. I love typing on this
laptop. It provides nice balanced keys that offer just the right amount of key travel and
perfect actuation force resulting in great tactile feedback. When it comes to the typing experience,
I will put the Macbook Air right up there with Thinkpad Carbon X1 which has the best keyboard in
my opinion. Moving on to the trackpad, M1 MacBook Air offers a large glass trackpad which is a joy
to use thanks to its smooth surface. Interestingly this trackpad doesn't physically move or click,
but simulates clicking using some voodoo magic called Force Touch. I also appreciate the fact
that this laptop comes with a fingerprint sensor that doubles as power button
While the screen on the M1 MacBook Air is great, I hate its chunky bezels and the lack of touchscreen
display. Being used to touchscreen displays on both my windows laptops and chromebooks,
it's very jarring to suddenly use a laptop without any touchscreen functionality.
It feels weird and archaic in 2021. Honestly I don't understand why Apple is resisting
touchscreen displays on their laptops. Especially now when the M1 MacBook air natively supports many
iOS apps that are designed for touch. After using Yoga 7i and Flex 5 touchscreen laptops
with support for Active Pens, I am convinced that all thin and light laptops need these features.
For the price, M1 MacBook Air is a ridiculously fast machine.
In fact this is the fastest thin and light laptop that I have ever used. And mind you guys,
I am only using the base model of MacBook Air which comes with a puny 8GB system RAM. Yet,
I can run over a dozen apps and smoothly toggle between them without any lag. Resource hungry
apps like Davinci Resolve video editing software runs butter smooth despite low system RAM. Now a
typical thin and light windows laptop with only 8 gig system RAM will choke if you try running
anything like Davinci Resolve on it. You will most likely need a fat gaming laptop with tons of
system RAM and a discrete nVidia GPU to run such a resource hungry app. So why is the M1 MacBook Air
able to deliver this crazy performance despite low system RAM and lack of discrete GPU? First
and the obvious reason is the M1 silicon. It's the fastest chip in the market in low thermal envelope
category, putting both Intel and AMD to shame. Enough has already been said about this chip,
so I will move on to the second reason which is the on-die unified memory architecture. It
allows the system RAM to sit very close to the CPU and the GPU cores. As a result both graphics and
compute cores can fetch opcodes and data packets very quickly resulting in a blazing performance.
I think both Intel and AMD should consider using this unified memory architecture in their future
chip designs. So guys here is the bottom line. Apple's M1 chip is a total beast and there is
nothing in the windows world as of now that can compete with it. Added bonus is its blazing
fast SSD which keeps up with the M1 silicon resulting in a kickass overall performance.
In my opinion, Apple has learned all the wrong lessons from the success of iPad. I hate the
iPadification of the new M1 Macbook Air. Apple has gone full proprietary mode with this laptop,
and there is literally nothing that you can upgrade on M1 Macbook Air. This is a tightly
locked and sealed device with zero upgrade options down the road. So that means you are
stuck with the 256 gig SSD storage and the 8 GIG system RAM that comes with the base model.
You have the option of picking more RAM and SSD during purchase, but Apple will charge you an arm
and a leg for these upgrades. Now the good news is that the base model with 8 GB system RAM is plenty
for most folks. Like I mentioned before, the base model of M1 MacBook Air performs like a champ and
chews through any task that I throw at it. But who knows how the macOS and various popular apps
will behave in future. Software tend to get bulky and resource hungry over time, and if you intend
to keep this laptop for a long time, the lack of upgrade options may be its Achilles heel.
The 3nd thing that I love about the MacBook Air is its fan-less design and stellar battery life.
Apple claims 18 hours of battery life during typical video playback and 15 hours during
internet surfing with WiFi turned on. Unlike other laptop makers who proclaim long battery
life but fail to deliver on their promise, Apple is shockingly accurate with its claim provided
you are using the Safari browser. But I found that while using Google chrome or Mozilla
firefox browser, the battery life takes a hit by almost an hour. M1 Macbook Air has broken my
nightly ritual of charging all my devices before going to bed. Since its battery life is so good,
I don't feel the need to charge it frequently unlike all my other windows laptops. I also
love the M1 MacBook Air's fanless design. It runs whisper quiet, even while running demanding tasks
like video and photo editing. This almost feels magical because intuitively I expect
the fans in my laptop to kick in and make a lot of noise, when I am doing something CPU
intensive. But the M1 MacBook air keeps chugging along nicely and all I hear is a pin drop silence.
Mac-os looks pretty but boy do I miss windows. There are some basic features that I took for
granted on windows 10, and I sorely miss them on mac-os. For e.g. when I am downloading or
copying a file, I can see its progress right in the taskbar since windows explorer icon
is dynamic and shows the progress in real time. Similarly while rendering a video, I can see the
progress by just looking at the application icon on the taskbar. This functionality is missing in
Mac-os and as a longtime windows user, I find this omission very surprising. Also windows 10
allows you to automatically snap windows by dragging them to the corners. You can't do
that on mac. I am sure there are third party apps that replicate this feature, but mac-os
natively doesn't support it. In Windows 10 you can use something called Microsoft PowerToys which
makes it easy to create complex window layouts and quickly position windows into these layouts. So
long story short, while I love the M1 macbook Air's hardware,I miss features from windows 10
operating system. In the past Apple allowed dual booting via Boot-Camp,
but unfortunately the M1 MacBook Air doesn't support it and that sucks.
So these are the 3 things that I love and hate about the M1 MacBook Air. I will be doing a full
review of this laptop here on this channel, so please subscribe to Techno Panda if you haven't
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