Apple has just equipped its MacBook Air with the brand-new, in-house designed Apple Silicon M1 processor. It's a true revolution for Apple to have been able to manufacture a MacBook with a home-made processor in Cupertino. The company just unveiled this new 2020 MacBook Air via a virtual conference, the last "One more thing" keynote of the year.
MacBook Air 2020: Apple promises speed
According to Apple, this MacBook is three times faster than windows in its class. It's also 98% faster than the previous generation. Apple aims to demonstrate its commitment to offering customers increasingly powerful and long-lasting products. This laptop represents a significant leap forward, according to Apple, in terms of energy efficiency and performance compared to its Intel competitor. Based on the ARM architecture, it allows users to run iPadOS and macOS applications natively. Furthermore, Apple has updated applications such as Numbers, Keynote, and Pages to work with the new M1 processor.
Applications such as Photoshop and Lightroom work correctly on these new Macs. The Rosetta 2 emulator will also allow applications not yet updated for the ARM architecture to run.
Configuration and performance
The MacBook Air features a 13-inch Retina display and comes with 16GB of memory and an SSD that can be expanded up to 2TB. It incorporates the new Apple M1 Silicon processor with 8 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores . This processor is manufactured using a 5-nanometer process. It integrates 28 billion transistors and consumes 10 watts.
The laptop features Touch ID for fingerprint recognition to maximize the security of your MacBook. The Magic Keyboard has replaced the butterfly keyboard. Connectivity options include two Thunderbolt USB-C ports and an HDMI 2.0 port. The operating system is the latest macOS Big Sur . Battery life for this MacBook Air is 18 hours for video playback and 15 hours for web browsing. For graphics output, Apple promises a GPU five times faster than Nvidia's MX450 iGPU.
The 2020 MacBook Air is therefore very powerful thanks to the integration of Apple's in-house M1 processor. It remains to be seen whether these promises will hold true in real-world use. Pre-orders are already open for €1,399 (512GB SSD) and €1,159 (256GB SSD). Other products are also available, such as the MacBook Pro: €1,449 (256GB SSD) and €1,679 (512GB SSD), as well as the Mac Mini: €799 (256GB SSD) and €1,029 (512GB SSD).
