Finally, that day has arrived. After teasing him in June at WWDC 2020, Apple today finally unveiled its first in-house Apple Silicon: MacBook Air with Apple M1 SoC. The new Apple Air looks just like the current MacBook Air, with the same Retina display 13-inch, but it brings updates under the hood thanks to the new Apple M1 chipset.
The new MacBook Air comes with the new Apple M1 chipset, an 8-core processor, combined with an 8-core GPU, and a 16-core neural engine. Apple claims that the MacBook Air is now three times faster than the best-selling Windows laptop in its class, and more than 98% of Windows laptops sold this year that is a big claim.
The MacBook Air is now fanless anyway, and Apple is confident that the M1 can maintain its performance on the MacBook Air without any active cooling, which I would like to see while turning it on. Anyway, when coming back to the MacBook Air it comes with 16GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. Apple also says that the SSD is now the M1’s storage controller and faster flash memory than before, which says something when looking at the SSD in the MacBook Air is also fast.
The company is also now improving the FaceTime HD camera. Thanks to the new ISP in the M1, MacBook Air’s webcam video quality will improve, and also noise reduction has improved, a higher dynamic range, and better white balance. For I / O you get two Thunderbolt ports for USB 4.
As we expected, the battery life improves with the new M1 chip. Apple claims that the MacBook Air will run for 15 hours of web browsing and 18 hours of video playback. They are not the best metrics to judge battery life, but Apple always tells us so. However, these numbers are much better than the previous generation MacBook Air.
Pricing and availability
The new Apple MacBook Air with M1 chip comes in Gold, Silver and Space Grey colour variants, is priced at 92,900 Rs for the 256GB storage version, which is same as the Intel version that was introduced earlier this year. The 512GB version costs 1,17,900 Rs which is even cheaper than the earlier model. It is already available to order from Apple online store and will be available from Apple Authorised Resellers offline and online retailers in India soon.
