M1 MacBook Air: Holy Bleep!
I wrote a few hundred words before taking possession of my new M1 MacBook Air. I had some things to say about my impressions of the Apple announcement. Once I had a little while to work with the computer, I selected all and deleted without a moment's thought. Nothing I heard and thought I knew prepared me for the reality of using one of these beasts. Holy bleep!. I think I am going to have to unpack that:
Speed Thrills
Mother blanker! This thing is fast! I have been a person who has poo-pooed the idea of speed as a feature. My point was that we are already doing things as fast as we can on a computer. The computer is waiting on us. It is usually not the other way around. As a writer, I was fixated on how fast I can mash keys. That is obviously not something that requires a speed boost.
Thing is, we are really bad at judging abstractions like speed. I felt like my 16" MacBook Pro was as fast as it gets in a lot of categories. I was wrong about all of those categories. I just couldn't imagine how things that took 2 seconds would be better if they took only 1 second. There is still a matter of how fast I can get my hands on the keys or the trackpad to start using the app.
I still think there is an obsession with absolute speed that is not terribly important. When you open the lid of your laptop, you still have to take a moment to get oriented. There is no oppressive wait. Opening apps just seems like opening apps. We have been doing it for decades. It takes as long as it takes. It stopped feeling like a long time a very long time ago.
That said, the M1 MacBook Air rewrites the book on speed and resets the expectations of how fast things should happen. Waking from sleep is not fast. It's instant. That is something readers won't understand until they experience it. I just sound like an idiot. Professional reviewers are just shilling for Apple. Nothing is instant. That is just hyperbole. Except it isn't.
I tried to find a way to test it and I think I managed it. With one hand, I whipped the lid open as fast as I could and with the other hand, I swiped the trackpad from left to right. By the time the lid was fully open, the mouse was all the way to the other side of the screen it was ready to work instantly. This is repeatable. And I repeated it many times.
It opens apps incredibly fast. If you have GarageBand on your Mac, just open it and count how long it takes to get up and running. When I do it on the M1 MacBook Air, my count doesn't get past 1. It could actually get faster. The M2 might do it in a quarter of a second. But it is really hard to imagine that experience. Apps that are not as heavy as GarageBand open even faster.
The first time I opened Photos, it opened in about a second. Apple of my photos were already there and ready to browse. I didn't have to wait for them to come into focus and be ready. They were waiting for me after a second. I scrolled like a fool and it was all there. I opened photos, zoomed in and out. They were solid as a rock from the first second. Dang!
I will leave it to others to talk about benchmarks. And they have. You can go online and read any professional review. They will have long, boring sections and rambling videos about how F*ing fast it is at everything. To be clear. The M1 MacBook Air is faster than the fastest 16" Intel MacBook Pro. This is the point I want to emphasize. The low-end Mac laptop is now what we used to think of as a pro last week. Moreover, it would be the fastest pro out there. And it starts at $999. Bleep!
Applications and Apps
All of Apple's applications are ready for the new OS and new machines. Pages opens almost as fast as Notes. The difference is a second vs. a half a second. But very few people live inside of Apple's applications. If applications are coded for the new system, they fly just like Apple's offerings. If they have not been altered at all, they still run in emulation. They either run as fast as they always have, or faster. I have only encountered one application that didn't work at all. Unfortunately, it is one I use for recording video podcasts.
Then, there are iPad apps. I am very excited about running iPad apps on the Mac. I have been an avid iPad user since the first iPad. But sometimes, I just need a Mac. Now, I don't have to compromise. Well, not exactly now. There are a lot of iOS apps that simply don't work. Others don't work well. But some few work perfectly. And if you find one or two of those, you will be very happy. I suspect that more will be updated before long.
If you don't find your favorite iPad app on the App Store, don't panic, there are some workarounds for getting apps you legally purchased onto your Mac anyway. It involves using a third-party app called iMazing. I used the free version without buying a license. It works perfectly. One of my favorite time-wasters from the iPhone can now waste my time on the Mac when I should be working.
There are still weirdnesses that have to be ironed out. The bulk of those apps run in a window that cannot be resized. Few can go full screen. Hitting the green Zoom button toggles the app between landscape and portrait orientations, like turning your iPad or iPhone. Swiping and scrolling can be weird as well. It is a beta feature even though Apple doesn't label it that way. But I'm glad it is there. Just don't count on it right now. I will note that when the apps work, they work amazingly well.
A Time of Unlearning
These new Macs mark the advent of confusion, a time of unlearning everything you used to know about personal computers. What is a pro task? Apple is showing off editing multiple 4K video streams on the MacBook Air. Wait, what? That is not the workflow of a MacBook Air. At least, it didn't used to be. They can talk about 8K workflows for the Pro. But no one even has 8K. What are they supposed to do to show off pro Macs? I'm confused about pro and consumer. This is all very new. The low-end is more powerful than yesterday's high-end. I don't know how to think about it anymore.
I don't know what RAM means anymore. Sure, it is still random access memory, I think. But yesterday, 8GB was only suitable for basic tasks and 16GB was an insult to pros. Now, a 16GB machine can pants a 64GB machine running the same task. I have 8GB in my mini and 16 in my Air. I can't tell the difference in performance. I don't understand RAM anymore.
I don't understand performance and efficiency. Yesterday, high performance meant low efficiency. Your machine would get hot and the battery would die a horrible but quick death. That made sense to me. Today, the Pro-killing Air doesn't even have a fan. Yet I have never, not once felt it get hot or even remotely worm. I have never heard my mini's fan or felt a warm spot anywhere on it. I'm so confused.
Part of the confusion might be subconscious bias. After all, this new computer looks just like the old computer. And the old computer was functional, but little more. I look at this computer which looks identical. Yet nothing is familiar. It is like a stranger wearing my wife's body. It seems like I should know what to expect until I have any interaction with her. This is a brand new computer from the future dressed up like a MacBook Air. It's a dirty trick, even a damn lie!
Conclusion
You need this Mac, even if you don't need it. You are cheating yourself out of an amazing computing experience. If there is any part of you that loves computers for the love of computers, you simply have to get in on this revolution. You will not want to return it.
I just called it a revolution. But that isn't exactly right. A revolution is your old car goes from 0 - 60 in 6 seconds while your new car does the same acceleration in 1 second. This is something else. In this case, your old car does 0 - 60 in 1 second while the MacBook Air is a car that takes flight. We are not talking about the normal conversation about evolution and revolution. Furthermore, I suspect that the M2 is not only going to fly, it will blast off into deep space.
People got a car when they thought they wanted faster horses. We got the M1 when we thought we wanted more capable computers. This is something else entirely. The Apple executives who spoke about the M1 in an interview almost sheepishly admitted that they overshot. They also were going for more capable Macs. They didn't exactly know what they had on their hands. When they started testing, it blew them away. It took a tremendous amount of corporate courage to ship this product knowing it would humble everything else they were currently selling for two to three times the price.
At the "One More Thing" Apple event, everyone, including me, thought Apple went just a bit heavy on the hyperbole and numbers without context. It frankly made me nervous. As it happens, they under-promised and over-delivered. Forget about the numbers. These machines are unlike any computers you have ever experienced. You are going to love them. The rest of the industry has just been handed their bleep.
David Johnson