New MacBook Air Announced as First Apple Silicon Mac With M1 Chip and Fanless Design

[MacRumors]

Apple today introduced a new MacBook Air as its first Mac with a custom Apple Silicon processor known as the M1 chip. The new MacBook Air is up to 3.5x faster than the previous-generation MacBook Air, with up to 5x faster graphics performance.

Key features of the new MacBook Air:

• Apple-designed M1 chip with 8‑core CPU and 8‑core GPU
• A completely silent, fanless design
• Up to 3.5x faster CPU, up to 5x faster graphics, and up to 2x faster SSD
• Up to 9x faster machine learning
• 13-inch Retina display with True Tone and P3 wide color gamut support
• Up to 2TB of SSD storage and up to 16GB of memory
• Up to 18 hours of battery life
• Two Thunderbolt 3/USB4 ports
• Magic Keyboard, Force Touch trackpad, and Touch ID
• Wi-Fi 6

The new MacBook Air along with new 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini models are available to order now on Apple.com and through the Apple Store app, with the first deliveries and in-store availability to begin November 17. The new MacBook Air continues to start at $999 in the United States, with $899 pricing available for students and other educational customers.

The first three Macs with M1 chips mark the beginning of Apple's transition away from Intel processors in Macs. Back in June, Apple revealed its plans to begin using its own custom Apple Silicon processors in Macs, promising industry-leading performance per watt. At the time, Apple said that the transition would take about two years to be completed.

In the interim, Apple teased new Intel-based Macs in development, including an updated 27-inch iMac released in August. Apple said that it will continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come.

Article Link: New MacBook Air Announced as First Apple Silicon Mac With M1 Chip and Fanless Design

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

He he, I think Apple will from now on keep using their own chips forever and ever. Their ego will not let them switch anymore, even if in, say, 10-15 years they are eventually behind the silicon competition.

Totally different question, though... I wonder will there be some sort of official Boot Camp support at launch of Macs with M1 silicon? Oh yes, I mean Windows for ARM running on M1 chip. And yes, running it natively (non-virtually). Crazy? Not at all. Although proper integrated GPU driver is needed. And bootloader should allow dual-boot setup, as it does currently with Intel.

I'm an active driver dev for Boot Camp (Trackpad++), so I'm sure: Windows user community on a MacBook is too large to be ignored. So either they (AAPL/MSFT) do it soon, or we (geeks/devs) have to do it later. Just thinking out loud

 

[Steve121178]

Redesign next year then...

 

[MacFather]

No rounded display corners, no buy!

 

[Unregistered 4U]

And this is the LOW end of what Apple’s doing. The LOW END!

 

[mcfrazieriv]

Simply boring. :|

I feel so disappointed with this CEO's bean counting innovation.

 

[oneMadRssn]

Fanless is pretty good. It's one of my favorite features of the 12" Macbook.

 

[zeropoint88]

No fan. MacBook returns. Sort of.

 

[itsmilo]

Let me guess. Same crappy webcam

 

[Blackstick]

"Support Intel for years to come"...

I lived the PPC to Intel transition. By Mid 2007 it was unheard of to get software updates on PowerPC stuff, less than 2 years after the WWDC announcement.

 

[C. Robert]

Its a great introduction. Look forward to what they get next.

 

[profets]

Low end of the Silicon SoCs, yet tremendous performance improvement, significant power savings, and to top it off fan-less design. Honestly quite impressive.

 

[erasr]

Ok they’ve absolutely smashed it out the park here.

 

[waquzy]

Let me guess. Same crappy webcam

Improved

 

[TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️]

I'm going to miss the Fan : Now we won't know if the Mac is working hard or not.

 

[Steve121178]

All that money saved buying Intel chips and it’s stays the same price? Eh??

 

[Chuck Kemp]

Being retired, I have no need for a MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air suits my needs great

 

[edwrap]

Wow, can’t believe they switched from expensive Intel chips to their own ARM chips and kept the price the same. The profit margin on these must be insane, even for Apple.

 

[cardfan]

This looks so misleading. No interest here.

 

[triangletechie]

This new Air will be very tempting. The latest intel models were so severely underpowered.

 

[cardfan]

All that money saved buying Intel chips and it’s stays the same price? Eh??

It actually costs more than buying intel chips. But you do you. Lol.

 

[Perry Barhydt]

No fan! Awesome

 

[Nautilus007]

I guess for someone who is ready to upgrade to a new air, this is great.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Windows user community on a Mac(Book) is too large to be ignored.

I don’t think so. Well, you’ll find out in a bit If they don’t say anything, then it’s not too large to be ignored.

Let me guess. Same crappy webcam

Sounds like same hardware, better ISP control.

 

[falkon-engine]

Holy $&@!... no more fan?!!! Gotta wait for benchmarks but it seems that Apple has just laid intel and x86 to waste...