The first Apple Macbook Air and Macbook Pro laptops with proprietary Apple M1 ARM chips have recently debuted. This processor uses a 5nm technological process from TSMC and is said to be the most advanced chip ever developed by an American company. The first performance tests show that the 8-core ARM M1 is doing very well and competes with Intel or AMD processors without any problems. In turn, integrated graphics are even more efficient than competing solutions. How, however, is the issue of energy efficiency and battery operation? After all, the Apple M1 in this respect was to be much better than the current Intel processors. The new tests show that it is really solid.

According to the first tests of the Notebookcheck portal, Apple Macbook Air with the ARM Apple M1 chip even reaches 50% longer battery life compared to last year’s version.

Apple Macbook Air with ARM M1 is equipped with a lithium-polymer battery with a capacity of 49, 9 Wh. Therefore, it is not a very huge link, and yet the battery life is more than satisfactory. The laptop itself also has a Retina matrix (IPS) with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels – higher resolution also to some extent contributes to faster wear of the cell when working away from the power socket. In the Notebookcheck test, Apple Macbook Air with ARM did noticeably better compared to the last generation of Macbook Air with Intel Ice Lake-Y.

In a specific internet browsing test with matrix luminance set at 150 nits, Apple Macbook Air with ARM M1 managed to last 960 minutes, so until 16 hours. For comparison, Apple Macbook Air with Intel Core i3 10 generation (Ice Lake-Y) pulled out 661 minutes (11 hours and 1 minute), in turn the same laptop, but with a Core i5 processor it lasted from 512 to 617 minutes depending on whether the browser was in windowed mode (first result) or fullscreen (second result). Either way, ARM in terms of energy efficiency literally outclasses the Macbook Air with Intel processors.

Source: Notebookcheck