APPLE MACBOOK AIR (M1, 2020)

The top tier performance at a hard-to-beat price.

$1,499, www.apple.com.au

Of all the M1 devices Apple released recently, the MacBook Air is the one that benefits most from the new Apple-built processor. Now on par with the Macbook Pro 13, the MacBook Air is just 23 percent off the previous Core i9 MacBook Pro 16, which is a little bit ridiculous for a passively-cooled Ultrabook. It’s also now the record holder for the longest battery life laptop we have on file. At 19 hours and 6 minutes in 1080p movie playback it’s more than double the average current ‘long-lasting’ Ultrabook lifespan here.

If you can afford to drop a couple of hundred extra on the MacBook Pro (M1, 2020) then you’ll get a nicer keyboard with a handy Touchbar, better quality speakers and more robust cooling architecture, but other than that the MacBook Air offers an almost identical feature set, for less.

Starting at $1,499 the MacBook Air scores a 400-nit 2,560 by 1,600 pixel Retina display with full DCI-P3 HDR colour

reproduction, capable of professional-level cinematic colour grading. Because it’s also got the same M1 processor as the MacBook Pro it can also handle intensive workloads like rendering and transcoding.

System memory on the new MacBook Airs is integrated into the M1 chip, which means most will be able to get away with just the entry 8GB of RAM. We found 8GB of Apple’s Unified Memory was enough to get 86.6 fps on games like Total War Saga: Troy using Low 1680x1050 resolution settings. This system also outperformed the XPS 13 (9310) by 40 percent in Geekbench 5 multi-threaded CPU tests.

If that wasn’t enough the MacBook Air also has a fingerprint reader, a dedicated AI processor, access to iOS and MacOS apps and a new web camera to round out a pretty amazing package.