Apple has officially unveil the new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini powered by the M1 chip.
Design-wise the new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini looks very similar to the previous models and most of the upgrade made by Apple is under the hood, specifically by switching from Intel to their very own M1 Chip.
With the new M1 Chip with the new Mac OS Big Sur, the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini all perform significantly better than the previous generations.
- up 3.5x faster CPU
- up to 6x faster GPU
- up to 15x faster machine learning (ML) capabilities
- up to 2x longer battery life
Mac mini;
The base model of the Mac mini will retail for $699, that includes 8GB unified RAM and 256GB SSD storage, with different assortment of ports, including HDMI 2, two Thunderbold/USB 4, 2x USB-A, an Ethernet and a 3.5 mm headphone jack, that can support two displays including Apple’s Pro Display XDR in full 6K resolution. It supports Wifi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0, it also has a built-in speaker. You can checkout the full specs here.
Macbook Air;
The Macbook Air still sports that wedge-shape design and similar dimension as the previous model. One brave change that Apple made with the Macbook Air is that they remove the fan, which means it’ll be very very quiet no matter how hard your Macbook Air is working.
The Macbook Air will retail starting at $999.00, and the starting model will have 256GB SSD of storage and 8GB RAM, both are configurable if you require more RAM and more storage. It also supports Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, and Touch ID. It also have two (2) Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports for charging, and DisplayPort, and a 3mm headphone jack. If you want to know more about the specs of the new Macbook Air with M1 chip, you can go here.
13-inch Macbook Pro;
This was a surprise from Apple, since I did not expect Apple to switch any of their Macbook Pro to the new Apple Silicon M1 chip. I was expecting the iMac instead of the Pro, the iMac is the desktop equivalent of the Macbook Air.
Just like with the Macbook Air, the 13-inch Macbook Pro will have the same design as the previous generation. It will still have the Touch-bar and Touch ID. Compare to the Macbook Air with M1 chip, the 13-inch Macbook Pro will feature an active cooling system for that intensive computing needs.
Even though both the 13-inch Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air looks similar, Apple said that the new 13-inch Macbook Pro will be;
- up to 2.8x faster in Xcode
- up to 5.9x faster in rendering complex 3D title in Final Cut Pro.
- up to 3.5x faster when designing game in Unity Editor.
- up to 11x faster in machine learning (ML) tasks in Create ML.
- Separate out beats, instrumentals, and vocal tracks from a recording in real time in djay Pro AI, thanks to the amazing performance of the Neural Engine.
- Play back full-quality, 8K ProRes video in DaVinci Resolve without dropping a single frame.
- Compile four times as much code on a single charge
Speaking of charging and battery, the 13-inch Macbook Pro with M1 chip have a 58.2-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery that provides up to 17 hours of wireless web browsing and up to a staggering 20 hours of video playback.
It has studio-quality mics for recordings and calls and even though it uses the same 720p web cam with M1’s image signal processor (ISP) it offer better images, with noise reduction, greater dynamic range and improved white balance video calls. It also offer better security with the Secure Enclave in M1 and Touch ID.
The new 13-inch Macbook Pro have two (2) Thunderbolt ports with USB 4 support for connecting more peripherals and native support for Apple’s Pro Display XDR in full 6K resolution. You can checkout the full specs of the 13-inch Macbook Pro with M1 chip here.
The base model for the new 13-inch Macbook Pro with M1 chip will retail for $1,299 and it will have 8GB RAM and 256GB storage, which of course can be configure up to 16GB of RAM and 2TB of (SSD) storage.