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MacBook Air M1 and MacBook Pro M1 Unboxing and Benchmarks- Compare against 2020 iMac and MacBook Air

8:25 video

The new MacBook Air and Pro with Apple M1 arrived after a long work day, a delivery at 5 PM and a long night of testing, and I have mixed results comparing them against each other and my other Macs. This is the most excited I’ve been for a tech product in a long time, even more than the iPhone 12 mini. It feels like a generational leap with a future yet to be defined: instead of the modest speed gains we expect from a sole provider of PC chips, we get a new trajectory. These first M1 products are the baseline going forward; “these are the worst they will be.”

Unboxing

Familiar: both are almost indistinguishable from their predecessors, with the difference being what you can’t see. I have the Air with 8 GB and 256 GB and the 13-inch Pro with 16 GB and 1 TB. Each box has a laptop, stickers, a charger and a USB-C cable. The Air has a function row with new keys (search, dictation, Do Not Disturb, which I like and which reminds me of the sleep button on 90s PC keyboards) and a Touch ID/power button; the Pro has the Touch Bar (unfortunately) with the Touch ID/power button. The Air’s trackpad is a little smaller, but the footprints are about the same.

I set both up at the same time (a first for me), installing the same apps and files, to compare them with each other and with two Macs I bought in the last six months: a base early 2020 MacBook Air (i3, 8 GB) and a mid-tier iMac (i5, Radeon Pro 5300).

SSD speed

Both M1 MacBooks read at over 2,700 MB/s, beating my iMac and doubling the previous Air. Writes: the Pro 3,100 MB/s, the Air 2,700 MB/s, absolutely destroying the previous Air.

Cinebench (10 minutes)

Both M1s came out ahead with about 1,500 single-core. The Pro beat the Air in multi-core by about 1,000, but still fell short of the iMac by about 1,400. (I wonder how much is due to 8 GB in the Air vs. 16 GB in the Pro; if you have a 16 GB Air, tell me your score.) It was the first time I heard the Pro’s fan: I kept holding it to my ear while installing software and heard nothing. The fan only came on after about 5 minutes of the multi-core test, with nothing during the single-core test or Geekbench, where the scores were nearly identical and beat the iMac by a healthy amount.

Metal (GPU)

The iMac’s Radeon Pro 5300 won by a lot, with over 37,000 versus just below 19,000 and 22,000 for the M1s.

Final Cut Pro export

I used the same 10 min 39 s project (my iPhone 12 unboxing, with multicam video, separate audio, transitions, titles and music). The iMac took 13:56, the i3 Air 46:14, and both M1 MacBooks the exact same 15:35. I was surprised they were slower than the iMac, and the Pro’s fans never turned on. In Activity Monitor, both barely used the CPU and weren’t fully using the GPU (the Air’s GPU percentage was slightly higher, with 7 cores vs. 8).

Premiere Pro export

An older project (multicam, titles, transitions, 8 min 6 s): the iMac 5:48, the i3 Air a laughable 52:04, the Pro 12:50 (fans definitely spinning) and the Air 14:07. The M1s maxed out the GPU and four of the eight CPU cores. The iMac beat them again, but the Air costs about $1,000 and the iMac about $2,000, and this runs under Rosetta, since Adobe hasn’t updated Premiere for Apple silicon.

Temperature

During the Premiere export, the fanless Air peaked around 109°F and the Pro around 104°F. “The only way to check how hot it is on your lap is to go ass up with a thermometer”: it can get toasty in the most extreme situations, but in general I think cooler than previous MacBooks.

Games

Casual games from the Mac App Store and Apple Arcade should work well, and more iOS games will arrive for Apple silicon Macs. I tested Minecraft Java Edition (not updated for Apple silicon): my daughter’s i3 Air is almost unplayable, with fans louder than the game music, while the M1 Air hovers around 60 fps at default settings. The Apple Arcade games I tried started quickly and ran without issues.

Takeaways

  1. It’s a mixed bag. In standard benchmarks like Geekbench they beat my iMac and many other computers, Cinebench was pretty good, and in my video exports they weren’t so great against my i5 iMac with Radeon graphics.
  2. There’s not a whole lot of difference between the two: the same chip, and the Air performed remarkably well compared with the Pro despite RAM and cooling differences.
  3. They’re baseline computers with a new architecture already outperforming computers costing twice as much in certain situations. As more apps get updated, we’ll see their potential. What tests would you like to see?

In this video

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