The MacBook Air is once again the benchmark by which other laptops will be measured
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Last week I wrote that Apple seemed “astonishingly confident” in its new M1-based Macs. This week we know why: they are astonishingly good. I reviewed the MacBook Air, Nilay Patel reviewed the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Chris Welch reviewed the new Mac mini.
All three are equally impressive, but it’s the Air in particular that stands out as offering incredible power at its price point. I’m also impressed with battery life. And the fact that Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer doesn’t cause slowdown or bugs for legacy apps.
Wins all around, then. Not very often that happens in consumer tech! The webcams are still terrible and there are lots of questions about what will happen with the truly pro Macs we will start seeing in the next couple of years. But rather than constantly look ahead to the next thing, just for a moment, enjoy: a tech company made a big promise that it could do a hard thing and then did that thing.
The most exciting — or frightening, if you’re a traditional PC chip company — part of Apple’s new chips is that the M1 is just the starting point. It’s Apple’s first-generation processor, designed to replace the chips in Apple’s weakest, cheapest laptops and desktops. Imagine what Apple’s laptops might do if the company can replicate that success on its high-end laptops and desktops or after a few more years of maturation for the M-series lineup.Okay, moment’s over. Sorry. I want to pay a little more attention to one point Chaim Gartenberg made when writing about the importance of these computers:
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