The New MacBook Air
Following the usual intro by Apple CEO Tim Cook, Apple’s VP of Hardware Engineering, John Ternus, took the stage to act as the master of ceremonies for the unveiling of Apple’s M1 chip and new Macs, and he kicked off the new MacBook Air by reflecting back on the original debut of the first MacBook Air, over 12 years ago, pulled out of a manila envelope on stage by Steve Jobs to make the point that it was a whole new category of thin and light MacBooks.
While the MacBook Air of 2008 was a premium “executive” class product — with a price tag to match — it has since moved more into the entry-level range of Apple’s MacBook family, but as Ternus explains, thanks to the M1 chip, Apple is completely redefining what a thin and light notebook can do.
Ternus passed the stage over to Apple’s Mac Product Line Manager, Laura Metz, who outlined the capabilities of the new M1-equipped MacBook Air, which are nothing short of impressive, offering up power and performance that was once the exclusive domain of Apple’s “Pro” MacBooks.
Which makes sense, when you consider that Apple’s M1 chip is just the M1 chip. There’s no dual-core, or quad-core, or i5, or i7, or turbo-boosted version — it’s just the M1, with the same 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, and other features as every other M1 chip.
In practical terms, this means that it offers 3.5 times the CPU performance and five times the graphics of the previous MacBook Air, which Metz explained is enough to edit multiple streams of full-quality 4K ProRes video without dropping a single frame — something heretofore impossible even on a MacBook Air, much less any other similarly slim and light notebook.
In fact, Metz notes that this makes the new MacBook Air three times faster than the best-selling Windows laptop in its class, and faster than 98 percent of PC laptops sold in the past year. The M1’s SSD storage controller offers SSD speeds that are up to 2X faster, and the Neural Engine boosts machine learning performance by a factor of nine.
Best of all? It does all of this without a fan. It’s completely silent.
The power efficiency of Apple’s new M1 chip also means that the new MacBook Air gets the kind of battery life we’ve never before seen on a MacBook — up to 15 hours of wireless web browsing, 18 hours of video playback, and double the video calling time on a single charge.
Metz also went on to indicate that the FaceTime camera has been improved, although she conspicuously omitted any mention of an actual resolution increase (not surprising, since it turns out it’s still only 720p). Instead, she focused on the new image signal processor in the M1, which promises better noise reduction, greater dynamic range, improved auto white balance, and machine-learning enhanced face detection. These are all things that also came to the Intel-based 2020 iMac, courtesy of Apple’s T2 chip, which is now embedded into the M1.
The new MacBook Air screen also gets a bump to a P3 wide colour gamut on the True Tone Retina Display, while also boasting Wi-Fi 6 technology for the first time in a MacBook (the iPhone 11 lineup first added Wi-Fi 6 support last year, which later came to the 2020 iPad Pro also), and two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports.
The new MacBook Air will also still start at $999 for the base model, which features 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and a 7-core GPU in the M1. $1,249 will get you a bump up to the model with a 512GB SSD and an 8-core GPU. Both models can also be configured-to-order with 16GB of RAM and SSD sizes up to 2TB; the maximum configuration will set you back $2,049.
You can preorder the new MacBook Air starting today, and it’s expected to arrive in stores next week.