The old Intel MacBook Air Y-series Intel CPU mustered only 2,738. The Air soundly beat the 5,084 from the ZenBook 13 and the 5,319 from the XPS 13 (both tested with the Intel Core i7-1165G7 CPU and 16GB of RAM), on the comparable Geekbench 5.2 test. The Air scored 5,962 on the Geekbench 5.1 (Intel) multicore test, which was practically in a dead-heat with the 5,925 from the M1 MacBook Pro. This MacBook Air? It feels like a Pro.Īnd let's see how that shakes out in benchmarks - and I'll note that not all of our tests were done with Universal versions of apps, and Intel versions aren't optimized for the M1. Before this, I was a bit skeptical, even with Apple's boasts of 3.5x improved performance vs the Intel MacBook Air released earlier this year, because I've always pushed my MacBooks to the limit, and needed a MacBook Pro, and not an Air, to do my work. This includes when I connected an external monitor.

Most of the time, the MacBook Air with M1 felt - performance-wise - like it was identical (if not faster) than the 2020 Core i5 MacBook Pro I've used to test Big Sur, or the 2017 Core i7 MacBook Pro work computer I relied upon.

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