I use two additional screens every day, so people who have a similar work flow might be upset about this. The M1 MacBook Air only supports one external monitor instead of two like on the last MacBook Air. Those are great improvements, but they probably aren't going to drive a lot of upgrades in the short term. The new MacBook Air still looks and feels exactly like the last MacBook Air, just with a faster processor, better screen, support for iPhone/iPad apps and longer battery life. On a strict design level, there's not much 'wow' factor here. But how you use your computer will drastically change the battery life. Apple promises up to 18 hours of battery life if you're just watching a movie, versus 12 hours on the last MacBook Air.

after using it most of the day, running benchmarks and watching a nearly two-hour movie in 1080p. The new MacBook Air has longer battery life than the Intel models, too, despite the faster chip. I didn't notice any sort of slowdown even when I had lots of tabs open in the browser and about a dozen different apps open. But, it's more powerful than the Intel's embedded graphics.Īpps open quickly, too, but are more on par with the MacBook Air from earlier this year. That game is 2 years old, though, so I still wouldn't think of the Mac as a powerhouse compared with laptops with dedicated graphics chips from Nvidia or AMD. That's true: the old MacBook Air can barely run the game while the new MacBook Air can run it fine and on higher graphics settings. I don't think folks normally think of Macs as gaming systems, but Apple's website says the game runs 3.5 times faster than the MacBook Air.

I repeated these tests in some real-world environments, like in the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Illustrator macbook air m1