Is the Cheaper M1 MacBook Worth Buying?

Thanks to its outstanding appearance and workmanship, its popularity among software developers and designers, and the popularity of iPhone. MacBook is becoming more and more recognized. And more people are choosing MacBook. Here are three aspects of it. Let’s see if this new shrink version of MacBook is worth buying.

1. Performance

The Air with M1 chip is far more fluent in various system operations than Intel Air. Though both are equipped with macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 official version. Especially in animation effects, open/switch applications, sliding, page zooming in and out, typing smoothness, and sleep wake-up speed.

Thanks to the new SSD controller of M1, the continuous read and write capability is over 2400Mb/s. But Intel Air only has 1200Mb/s. Random reading and writing abilities have also been greatly enhanced. This has revolutionized applications opening and waking up from sleeping.

This M1 Mac wakes up and unlocks instantly just like your iPhone.

M1 chip scores 1732 in single-core and 7443 in multi-core on MacBook Air. This has surpassed all the MacBook product lines, including the latest i9-9980HK in the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The single-core capability is similar to the current desktop-level AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. It exceeds nearly 70% of the previous Intel Core i9-9980HK, the strongest mobile-level.

2. Battery life

M1 brings us great performance, quietness and low heat. The improvement of the battery life is also exciting. According to the Apple official website, the useable time of Intel Air is 12 hours for video playback. While M1 Air is 18 hours. It's six more hours. Here we did the comparative experiment with the remaining power after 3 hours of video playback. In the experiment, the i7 Air battery was cycled 42 times, which did not affect the accuracy of results. But M1 Air cycle was 0.

It can be seen that the low power consumption of M1 chip really improves the battery life. Many Windows computers can only improve their battery life by making them larger and thicker. Compared with that, this will be another leap forward. Now, even if you are out and working all day, you don't need to carry a charger.

3. Design

The 2020 M1 and 2020 Intel are identical in shape, design and weight.

The characteristics of clean lines, exquisite metal and durability are as usual. The aluminum housing is still lovely. Using 2020 M1 is a great laptop experience. The keyboard still adopts scissors keyboard of 2020, typing experience is still comfortable. It meets the ideal standard of a laptop keyboard. Thanks to M1 chip, typing fluency reaches its peak in both Word and LaTeX, regardless of the busy state. But on Intel Air, most people typewrite faster than Intel does when the computer is busy or hot.