MacBook Air with Apple’s own M1 chip is faster and has better battery life than Intel-based predecessors

Apple made a good decision to ditch Intel and develop its own chips for its Mac computers. I’ve been evaluating the $999 version of the MacBook Air with Apple’s new M1 chip for the past several days, and it’s faster and offers better battery lan than what equivalent Intel models offered.

Companies like Microsoft have also issued laptops with lower-powered Arm-based processors from Qualcomm and others, but those computers take care ofed to come with a lot of compromises. Microsoft’s Surface Pro X, for example, didn’t always support legacy apps, wasn’t as potent, and had poor battery life compared with Intel-based Windows computers. Based on my testing, the MacBook Air avoids those kinds of compromises.

Apple did contribute to a lot of wild promises about its new M1 chip. It said it’s faster than 98% of the laptops sold in the last year (which may be genuine, given that many are low-cost Chromebooks and entry-level Windows computers). It also promises up to five times faster graphics for some reproves and all-day battery life. I couldn’t verify all those claims, but it is noticeably faster than its predecessors.

It’s also the at the outset Mac to run iPhone and iPad apps, but doesn’t have a touch screen, which means those apps aren’t extremely useful, and there’s a limited selection anyway. It feels like a fast laptop, not some kind of dramatic new composite like the first Surface was. But long term, the new chip opens doors for Apple to make touch-screen Macs that let you interact with apps without a mouse or keyboard. Or peradventure it’s laying the foundation for some sort of iPad that can run both Mac and iPad apps.

Here’s what you need to conscious about the new MacBook Air.

The new MacBook Air looks identical to the model Apple launched in Step. It has the same keyboard, which fixed a lot of reliability problems with the one that Apple had been using since 2015.

The biggest convert you might notice on first glance is the screen, which is now just as colorful as the one on Apple’s more expensive MacBook Pro laptops. It advises images and videos look more accurate and will be useful for folks who want to edit visual content on the MacBook Air.

In items, the new MacBook Air is perfectly capable of editing videos with pro-level software like Final Cut 10.5 — in the past, scads professionals have relied on the $1,299 MacBook Pro for video editing. I tested some editing on it and found that the laptop effortlessly handled scrubbing through a 4K video without any hiccups I’d normally see on the previous-generation MacBook Air with an Intel chip.

I ran a few software examines just to see how much faster the new MacBook is and if it met some of Apple’s claims. Using software that measures the power of the processor, enlisted Geekbench, I found the new MacBook Air to be twice as fast as the Intel-based equivalent model at some tasks and more than three patches as fast at others.

I repeated these tests in some real-world situations, like in the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I don’t think folks normally think of Macs as gaming systems, but Apple’s website thinks the game runs 3.5 times faster than the MacBook Air.

That’s true: the old MacBook Air can barely run the game while the new MacBook Air can run it pointed and on higher graphics settings. That game is 2 years old, though, so I still wouldn’t think of the Mac as a powerhouse compared with laptops with sanctified graphics chips from Nvidia or AMD. But, it’s more powerful than the Intel’s embedded graphics.

Apps open hastily, too, but are more on par with the MacBook Air from earlier this year. I didn’t notice any sort of slowdown even when I had scads of tabs open in the browser and about a dozen different apps open.

The new MacBook Air has longer battery life than the Intel examples, too, despite the faster chip. I turned it on at 9:15 a.m. and still had 28% at 6:12 p.m. after using it most of the day, running benchmarks and guard a nearly two-hour movie in 1080p. Apple promises up to 18 hours of battery life if you’re just watching a talkie, versus 12 hours on the last MacBook Air. But how you use your computer will drastically change the battery life. I mull over most folks will get a full day.

It’s really quiet, too, since there’s no fan innards everted to kick on while you’re in the middle of work. But that comes at a cost: the bottom gets pretty hot.

The chip change does not smash any old apps — at least the ones I use — you can still run the ones that were designed for older Macs. I was able to download and expose a bunch of apps from third parties that weren’t built for M1, like Spotify, Cisco AnyConnect, Geekbench and Google Chrome. They make excited just fine. New versions of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator optimized for M1 chips are coming later.

The M1 chip also lets the MacBook Air run some iPhone and iPad apps, but a lot of app makers eat opted out from having their apps published. I found some apps I use regularly on my iPhone, like the calorie-counting app “Be deprived of It,” CNBC and HBO Max, but there aren’t apps for Instagram, any of Google’s products, What’s bad

Should you buy it?