I loved yesterday’s “One More Thing” Apple event. This is the one I was looking forward to more than the iPhone event and it so happened that I was done for the day when the event began (thanks YouTube for the reminder feature!) and I caught the entire event live (well not really live, as it is a recorded event, but you get the point).
Apple announced its M1 chip (based on the A14 in the iPhone 12 but with improvements of-course). There are three new devices based on this chip – the Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro (in increasing order of price). Unlike the Intel versions there are no variations in CPU (i3, i5, etc) within the various models or between them. All use the M1 and you can choose between 8GB or 16GB RAM and varying SSD sizes. They all have 2 Thunderbolt/ USB 4 ports, and both the laptops are 13” – no variations there either. The MacBook Pro and Mac Mini have fans, and that’s about it!
In a way it’s quite simple. Want a desktop or a laptop? If desktop then the Mac Mini is your choice. If laptop then it comes down to whether you want the fan or not. Having a fan means the MacBook Pro has better performance as even with the same M1 chip as the MacBook Air it can do better sustained performance thanks to the cooling offered by the fan. So unlike the previous MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro where the Air had a $hitty Y series Intel CPU that wasn’t great, here you have no such bargain. It’s only a question of whether you expect to do “pro” sort of work with the MacBook or not. If yes, go with the MacBook Pro; else MacBook Air.
Oh and one more thing. The Air has the gold colour option so that could be a deciding factor too. :)
I wanted a laptop, and I liked the gold colour and wasn’t looking for something with high performance. Plus I really wanted to experience the fanless experience. So it was the MacBook Air for me. I didn’t want to go with the base model of 7 cores, so it was the more pricey 8 core version for me. Further, I decided to bump up the RAM to 16GB as that’s a reasonable amount nowadays what with everything being memory hungry; and I also upgraded the SSD to 1TB. I figure if I am going to be travelling (lol!) with the laptop and want to take advantage of the 18 hours of video playback battery time I’d need space to store the movies too.
So that’s it. I saw the event, was hooked line and sinker and ordered the above! I hope the device lives up to its marketing hype 🤞🏼 but either ways this is a momentous moment in computing history and I wanted to be in the front trying it. 😍