Apple Macbook Air (M1)

Why Apple’s latest lightweight laptop is a bit like a sausage

Laptops are like sausages: it doesn’t matter what’s inside, we just know we love them. But Apple’s new Macbook Air isn’t like your average banger – because once you know what it’s made of, you’ll want one even more.

From the outside it looks identical: same ludicrously thin chassis, same 13in Retina display, same gigantic trackpad. But we like chips with our sausages, and the silicon inside this Air is one of Apple’s new M1 specimens – and that’s where all the real upgrades come from. Apple reckons it has 3.5x faster CPU and 5x faster GPU clout than the previous version, while machine learning workloads are 9x faster. Even the SSD is twice as fast, again thanks to that clever M1 brain.

You might think all this added oomph would necessitate extra cooling, but the Air is totally fanless so it makes as much noise as a mute mouse, even when churning its way through the most processor-heavy tasks. Perhaps most impressive of all, though, is the battery life: up to 15 hours of web browsing or 18 hours of video playback. Mouthwatering.

As hot as… currywurst for Christmas dinner from £999 / apple.com