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

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.

late 2020 macbook air
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.

Related Roundup: MacBook Air
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Top Rated Comments

neuropsychguy Avatar
65 months ago
Macrumors is degenerating into a bunch of whiny users again. 2020 has been the most impressive year for new Apple products in a long time. This is a great start to a new era for Apple.
Score: 30 Votes (Like | Disagree)
edwrap Avatar
65 months ago
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.
Score: 27 Votes (Like | Disagree)
TheYayAreaLiving ?️ Avatar
65 months ago
I'm going to miss the Fan : Now we won't know if the Mac is working hard or not.
Score: 26 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ericg301 Avatar
65 months ago

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.
uh apple had to pay for all the R&D alone for the new chips...instead of just buying them from intel.
Score: 24 Votes (Like | Disagree)
profets Avatar
65 months ago
Low end of the Silicon SoCs, yet tremendous performance improvement, significant power savings, and to top it off fan-less design. Honestly quite impressive.
Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)
FranApple Avatar
65 months ago

"We took at the fan. That is just nuts."

Yes. I agree. When things get heated, you cannot remove the heat from the case.
So then why isn't heat an issue on iPads? :)
Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)