

When we knocked that up to around 16 applications, we did receive an alert that the system had run out of memory, but it didn’t fully lock up. Frequently, we could keep close to 12 applications open at one time, all running processes.

We also installed applications we need for work and personal use - Slack, Adobe Creative Cloud for Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Microsoft Office 365 including Outlook, Trello, Ulysses, iStats Menu, Mini Motorways and a few others. Messages and Photos, for instance, open much faster, which lets you get whatever you need to get done faster.

The MacBook Air comes preloaded with a suite of applications from Apple, all of which are optimized for the Silicon. And, after testing, we can assure you that’s no marketing hyperbole. In terms of speed and performance on the new MacBook Air, Apple has some big claims: up to 3.5x faster CPU, 5x faster GPU and 9x faster in machine learning. Summed up: It’s a lot of power in a small package. That’s a whole lot of tech packed into the M1 chip, and, like the A14 Bionic that powers the iPhone 12 family, this is a 5-nanometer chip with over 16 billion transistors inside. Thhose are the basics, but the M1 goes further with a 16-core neural engine, so it’s a full system in a chip package. It’s unified memory that’s built in and cannot be replaced. At its highest-end configuration, it’s an 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU with 16GB of RAM. The first processor from Apple is the M1. To solve that, Apple is using its own in-house processors to power future Macs.Īpple now owns and builds the whole process - from conception to design to picking the hardware that goes inside. But Apple can only do so much customization with Intel chips.

These were off-the-shelf chips from Intel with some Apple customizations. Historically, Mac laptops and desktops had Intel chips inside. That means pulling data from and writing it onto a solid-state drive or hard drive, knowing how much RAM or memory to allocate to a specific task and making sure graphics run smoothly. It controls every operation in tandem with the software. The brains of any computer (laptop or desktop) is the processor.
