Speedy but not so much more than my 2017. It feels fast, but due to the amount of Rosetta 2 binaries, not nearly as much so. There are a few like BBedit and VSCode that have dual binaries. Android Studio is Intel, but the emulator is ARM native. Ruby via Homebrew is Intel (ruby comes preinstalled, but if you want to use pain-free global packages, you'll be using the homebrew version). Homebrew requires prepending everything with arch -x86_64 to use the Intel binaries as Homebrew is barely alpha for Apple Silicon. The typing experience is much better than my MacBook 2017 and reminds me of my 20 MacBooks.ĭevelopment is a bit clunky. The MacBook Pro has the Touchbar (along with slightly better mics and speakers, a fan, and larger). I would have paid extra not to have the Touchbar. For years Apple had the best laptop keyboards of any make, then from 2016-2019 changed to the dreaded butterfly keyboard (which caused horror stories of individual keys failing) and added the horrible touchbar as an additional insult. It's really ridiculous that we should talk about keyboards at all on a luxury brand like Apple. The last computer I had that didn't have a CPU fan was a G4. It's also fanless, which is just outright incredible. It's fast in very unconventional ways, resizing the resolution doesn't even flash, and it wakes instantly and unlocks fast in a way my work MacBook Pro 15 inch 2017 doesn't. I've seen many benchmarks but less about what it's like to be a developer with one. I've had a slew of work provided MacBook Pro 15 inchers, 2013/2015/2017 (current), and my main desktop is still a 12-Core 2010 Mac Pro with Radeon VII 3 SSDs and 96 GBs of RAM, so these are going to be my comparison points.

It's the first brand new computer I've bought personally in 12 years, the latest being the 2008 Mac Pro. Last week I received my MacBook Air (16 GB/1TB).

Android studio on macbook air m1