I started it off easy, running Bioshock 2 Remastered (at the native 2560 x 1600 resolution) and that game played smoothly, as rippling water flowed through the rooms I navigated, electro shocks hit enemies and all the underwater life outside the hallways I explored moved without a glitch. Our test MacBook Air has the 8-core GPU configuration, which (by the feel of it) could reshape the Mac in the minds of some gamers. The MacBook Pro came pretty close, with a 649. The MacBook Air scored a 653 on the PugetBench Photoshop (Intel) test, which beats the 588 from the XPS 13, but falls to the 743 from the ZenBook 13 (a rare win for the x86 crowd). The 1TB SSD in the MacBook Air we tested hit a read speed of 2692 MBps on the Black Magic Disk Speed Test (Intel), literally more than twice the 1,301.9 MBps read rate from the Intel MacBook Air. Those times obliterate those from the ZenBook 13 (17:51) and XPS 13 (18:22), as well as the 27:10 time from the Intel MacBook Air from earlier this year.Īpple also promised twice as fast storage speeds, and they delivered.

On our Handbrake (Universal) video conversion test, which transcodes a 4K video to 1080p, the MacBook Air finished the test in 9 minutes and 15 seconds and the MacBook Pro took 7:44 (on a Beta version of Handbrake that's optimized for Apple silicon). The old Intel MacBook Air Y-series Intel CPU mustered only 2,738. The Air soundly beat the 5,084 from the ZenBook 13 and the 5,319 from the XPS 13 (both tested with the Intel Core i7-1165G7 CPU and 16GB of RAM), on the comparable Geekbench 5.2 test. The Air scored 5,962 on the Geekbench 5.1 (Intel) multicore test, which was practically in a dead-heat with the 5,925 from the M1 MacBook Pro. This MacBook Air? It feels like a Pro.Īnd let's see how that shakes out in benchmarks - and I'll note that not all of our tests were done with Universal versions of apps, and Intel versions aren't optimized for the M1. Before this, I was a bit skeptical, even with Apple's boasts of 3.5x improved performance vs the Intel MacBook Air released earlier this year, because I've always pushed my MacBooks to the limit, and needed a MacBook Pro, and not an Air, to do my work. This includes when I connected an external monitor.

Most of the time, the MacBook Air with M1 felt - performance-wise - like it was identical (if not faster) than the 2020 Core i5 MacBook Pro I've used to test Big Sur, or the 2017 Core i7 MacBook Pro work computer I relied upon.

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