Apple has just equipped its MacBook Air with the brand new Apple Silicon M1 processor concocted in-house. It is a real revolution for Apple to have been able to manufacture a MacBook in Cupertino with an in-house processor. The Company has just presented this new MacBook Air 2020 via a virtual conference, the last “One more thing” Keynote of this year.
MacBook Air 2020, Apple promises speed
According to Apple, this MacBook is 3 times faster than windows on the market in its category. It is also 98% faster than the previous generation. Apple thus wants to affirm its desire to offer its customers increasingly efficient and autonomous products. This laptop has made a real breakthrough according to Apple in terms of energy efficiency and performance compared to its competitor Intel. This laptop is based on ARM architecture and allows you to run iPadOS and MacOS applications natively. The applications have also been updated by the manufacturer, including Numbers, Keynote and Pages, so that they work with the new M1 processor.
Applications like Photoshop and Lightroom work fine on these new Macs. The Rosetta 2 emulator will also make it possible to run applications not yet updated for the ARM architecture.
Configuration and performance
The MacBook Air has a 13'' Retina screen and is equipped with 16 GB of memory and an SSD drive of up to 2 TB. It integrates the new Silicon Apple M1 processor with 8 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores . This processor is engraved on a 5 nanometer manufacturing process. It integrates 28 billion transistors and consumes 10 Watts.
The laptop is equipped with Touch ID for fingerprint support to keep your MacBook as secure as possible. The Magic Keybord keyboard replaced the butterfly keyboard. On the connectivity side, we find among other things two USB-C Thunderbolts ports and an HDMI 2.0 port. The operating system used is the brand new MacOs Big Sur . On the battery side, this MacBook Air will have an autonomy of approximately 18 hours in video playback and 15 hours in web browsing. For graphics output, Apple promises a GPU 5 times faster than Nvidia's MX450 iGPU.
The MacBook Air 2020 is therefore very efficient following the integration of the M1 processor manufactured internally by Apple. It remains to be verified whether these promises will be kept in real use. Pre-order is already open for the sum of €1,399 (512 GB SSD) and €1,159 (256 GB SSD). Other products are also available such as the MacBook Pro: €1,449 (256 GB SSD) and €1,679 (512 GB SSD) as well as the Mac Mini: €799 (256 GB SSD) and 1,029 ( 512 GB SSD).
