There has been much discussion about Apple’s recently launched new MacBook Air. Our very own Simon Betts is fortunate enough to have got his hands on one and reports as follows:
“So, thoughts on my new MacBook Air M1… OK, I’m going to sound like a fanboy but its brilliant and everything that Apple said in the launch presentation is true, it’s fast, battery life is great, and I even had it running Fortnite (don’t ask!), OBS (streaming) and DaVinci Resolve (video editing) through Rosetta, with everything running smoothly. In fact the new MacBook Air is managing to translate and run the Intel processor optimised version of these applications quicker than my old Intel based MacBook Pro. The new MBA doesn’t even seem to get warm despite the fact it has no fan. It seems that the people who were worried that the computer would throttle the processor back and slow down once it was under heavy load should now be asking why Intel CPUs generate so much heat!
I didn’t buy it for developing code which is good because it’s not ready for this at all. No Homebrew, pod install wouldn’t work, and pods need fixing to work on the Apple processor, etc. In fact the whole toolchain needs updating. I did manage to get Plumb App to perform a build (but it was a right faff), however, the evidence is that one of the new MacBook Airs with 8GBytes of RAM can do this at blistering speed, which is more than impressive for what is now the entry-level model of the Apple portable range.”
So it seems the message is, do believe the hype, and perhaps think about whether you want to keep your Intel shares, should you own any.