Apple 13″ M1 MacBook Air Review
It is hard to explain just how incredible the performance of the new M1 SoC from Apple is in the 13” MacBook Air. It has nearly the power of a Mac Pro inside a completely fanless case. It runs insanely fast with absolutely no noise and very little heating of the computer case. The published benchmark numbers are eye-popping but in practical usage it shows identical results. I tested converting a DVD quality video from 1.78 GB MPEG-2 to H.265 video using a beta version of the Handbrake video converter. I benchmarked this conversion by running it on the new M1 13” MacBook Air with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB of SSD storage against a 2013 6 core, 12 thread Mac Pro with 64 GB RAM and 2 TB of SSD storage. The Mac Pro is older but still no slouch. It still rates about a 5000 on Geekbench 5 benchmarking suite.
The settings for Handbrake were set to high quality H.265 with no change in frame rate and constant quality RF set to 19. The video is 42 minutes and 24 seconds long. Here is the incredible part, the M1 with 4 performance cores took just 41 minutes to convert the video to 477 MB of high quality HEVC video. The Mac Pro took 56 minutes to do the same thing with its 6 cores, fan and 130 W of power. The M1 uses approximately 15 W and dissipates heat using conduction with the MacBook Air’s case.
The MacBook Air was 33% faster than a Mac designed for high performance video encoding. And it did it without heating up the case by more than a small amount—it was never uncomfortable to hold. There was no throttling of the CPU in evidence.
Earlier I said that the published benchmark numbers for the M1 are stellar. In Geekbench 5 my M1 13” MacBook Air is 1740 single core and 7657 multi core. The single core score tops the current Geekbench charts. Another popular benchmark is Cinebench R23. In that the MacBook Air received a 7226 multi core score and 1494 in single core. These compare favorably with other notebook CPUs though not quite as overwhelming as in the peak performance testing Geekbench 5. Cinebench tests CPU performance but is a ten minute test that also tests thermal performance. In single core, the M1 just barely loses out to Intel’s Tiger Lake Core i7-1165G7 at 1532 and beats it easily in multi core at 4904. The other CPUs that beat the M1 are all desktop class like the Ryzen 7 1700X which is a 95 W part or the Intel Core i9-9880H which is a mobile CPU but draws a 45 W TDP and go much higher in bursts.
As I said, if you’ve been following the computer Industry for the last few years, CPU performance seemed to be stalled. Yearly improvements were only in the low teen percentages or less. The M1 is a game changer. It’s a low power 15 W SoC that can now compete with CPUs in the 45-85 W range and beat them handily. And the best part, this is the slowest, least impressive Apple Silicon SoC that Apple will ever manufacture. It only gets better from here.