Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1

I wouldn't call my personal project "heavy load", but I have a cross-platform C++ project that I am developing on both a Windows gaming PC and a 2020 M1 macbook air. I use clang to compile on both machines. The M1 mac has noticeably faster compile times.

I see this criticism of Apple all the time and it’s completely at odds with my experience. Our family iPad Pro is older than my 8-year old son, and still gets security patches. My wife’s phone is an XS Max, launched in 2018; iOS 26 is the first release that doesn’t support it - it will continue to receive security patches for the foreseeable future. My son’s school laptop is my old 8gb 2020 M1 Air, which continues to have stellar performance and battery life and could run Tahoe if I was crazy enough to want to upgrade it. My work machine is a 2021 M1 Pro that runs just as great as the day I bought it (thanks, Al Dente!). My 3 Apple TV 4Ks are I-have-no-idea-how-old but they are still being updated and just get out of the way like a TV box should. I have no particular love for Apple (or any other company), but they’ve always treated me well as a customer. I can’t really think of another tech co that seems to make people as irrationally angry. Is it their marketing? I hate their marketing too. But their products and support are great.

To my eye that looks essentially like a tie, which may seem like not that big of a deal. When I run compilation and multithreaded integration tests on my chonky AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores, 32 threads) on Ubuntu 24.04, and on my 2020 M1 Mac mini (8 cores), *the mini keeps up*. It’s quite impressive.

Fully expect that Asahi will be an excellent drop-in replacement for when Apple finally puts my knockabout 2020 M1 Air (excellent hardware, pry it from my cold dead fingers) out to pasture. I’ve got a fair amount of criticism for the direction of Apple’s various OSes, but have to admit that the fact that my nearly 8-year old iPad Pro still runs the latest iPad OS without issue speaks volumes about the longevity of their hardware. Or some of it, anyway.

As an owner of an ice lake macbook I can tell you definitively that it’s still utter shit compared to the apple silicon ones. Best case scenario it idles at 14w system power, while my 2020 m1 mba idled at <5w and sometimes <3w at very long idle. Usually if it’s not totally idle it idles at 22w. And again, this is the problem, light load produces quite a lot of power consumption on x86 compared to arm. I bought it for the meme, it was a laugh and I wanted a late-gen x86 model with no dGPU to give x86 the best shot (mostly bought it for windows use actually). But the “it’s just macOS/optimization magic!!!” isn’t true either. x86 MacBooks still fucking suck, even the ones without the absolutely shit-tastic AMD dGPUs onboard. Those idle at closer to 50w if you have a display plugged in, btw. There’s no way to turn them off because the display outputs are hardwired to the gpu, if you are using an external display the dGPU is forced on. I tried, my old work MacBook was an i9 and it fucking sucked during the summer. The idea that macOS is just uniquely lightweight and can somehow wring better perf/w out of computational tasks than Linux or windows just isn’t supportable either. Certainly if it were true it would also show up in MT and not just 1T loads. Reality is perf/w is mostly a constraint of the processor and not the OS… just like the OS can’t magically make applications use less ram and “turn 8gb into 16gb” either. It takes X cycles for Y processor to execute Cinebench and the…

- MacBook Pro 2020 Apple M1: This laptop is simply amazing. It replaced my iPad Air 2 as my goto device to browse or have some quality time. I even reduce my gaming time to use this computer.