Macbook air m1 full review with pros and cons

hi guys this is Shubham and in this Article let's do the unboxing and have a first look at this new macbook air with inline chip and you might be noticing that i'm really excited uh yes i am actually and i simply could not get this one in india i had actually uh the aptronics store which is sort of the apple store in india offline they had promised that they'll give me in first week of december they 

never game i got fed up of them then i ordered it from my local computer dealer and he's told me that he'll give me an end of december it did not happen finally i got it i opted for the gray one but today he told me he got stock of this gold one so i just took it and guys this is the base variant of the macbook air uh that comes with eight gigabytes of uh ram this is unified memory and 256 gigabytes there are also actually 

two more variants if you want to up to uh up that 16 gigabytes of ram you have to spend about 20 000 more this is for almost 93 92 900 but again the ram and the storage upgrades are very expensive super apple tax ram upgrade from 8 to 16 will be 20 000 extra and again storage is the same thing uh so this is the one a big thing of this one is that it comes with the new uh m1 chip by apple and that's creating a lot of waves in 

fact i have the older what do you say this is the macbook air which i occasionally use i'm just updating it and i even have the macbook pro 13 inch and even a 15 inch and i find this macbook air sometimes when i do video editing on the move is sluggish with 4k let's see how actuallye this performs and we'll also compare with the macbook 13 pro later on when i get time and see how well this performed because from the uh reviews and other 

videos that i've seen this is in terms of performance supposed to be really good but let's see how it performs in the real world so let's open this up and again it's apple it's too less so you don't need a knife or something you just break this like this and you should be able to actually open it up as of now guys this uh m1 chip variant is not available on amazon india when it gets listed i will link it and if you're buying from amazon use the link it does help the channel anyways let's open this up and regarding the weight and everything this hasn't changed from the regular macbook air older one it's exactly the same let me just keep this to the side and as you can see guys this is that new gold color and only the macbook air 

 new one is in this gold color actually wanted the regular gray one but as i've told you i couldn't get it so let's open this up and to be frank guys this does not look like gold looks like copper to me agree or not or maybe you say that rose gold but not that traditional gold gold gold a little bit too blingy for my taste but what do you think i i actually prefer this regular space uh gray anyways let's see what do we get uh you get a usb type-c cable at least we get that that's nice and some apple uh stickers yes we get apple this is also in this uh same gold color i would call it copper so that we are getting and fortunately we are still getting the charging break yay so nice to see that we have

. this and we have the usb type-c connector even for this this is supposed to be a pd charger guys so let's put this back let me just clear the desk and then we'll have a look at this macbook air so guys uh here is the macbook air and again uh it's pretty dense guys i wouldn't say this is the lightest laptop now because i have tested a lot of windows laptops that we less than one kilogram so certainly at 1.3 kilograms i wouldn't say this is the lightest laptop out there apple really needs to work on the new design i would say but in terms of build quality again that solid aluminum build quality that you will expect the same thing and first let's look at the ports uh here we have the headphone jack back actually nothing uh the big deal with this one is that it does not have any fans at all no fans at all on this one so will not make noise even at loads uh that does that i want to test uh on this end we just have two usb type-c 

Ports they are actually thunderbolt 3 guys but only two ports that's the same case even with the older airs and we have that wedge design slightly thicker here and tapers off this is the same design they didn't change it so let's just open this up we also have this and it actually starts booting automatically and let me bring the old air to give you an idea almost the same same yeah internals are obviously different but if you look at it it's almost the same so the same glass trackpad that you're getting uh keyboard this one is supposed to have a better keyboard yes definitely this is that rubbish uh keyboard that i call a butterfly keyboard 

which is totally rubbish in my opinion definitely this has a better keyboard i'll just put this to the sleep and let me just configure this and then we will continue so guys we have set up this macbook air and to give you an idea yes obviously it comes with bixer and to give you an idea if i go to about this mac as you can see it's running on mac os 11.0.1 and this is the new macbook air m1 2020 edition and now this comes with the apple m1 chip and we 

have the base variant that comes with eight gigabytes of ram it's actually unified memory guys and the graphic also uses it and if i go to the storage i haven't installed purposely installed anything as.

 of now so roughly out of the 256 gigabytes you will roughly get about 216 gigabytes 216.7 gigabytes free to yourself and apart from that again i just made a few changes and this is a control center one thing was very surprising uh just go to the security and privacy tab guys and here for some reason the firewall was off so i switched it on and again even for the mouse trackpad i enabled the stop to click apart from that i haven't done anything now 

what i would do is and if i like the instant on if i just switch it on it just switches on automatically and i like the screen quality on this one actually uh it's pretty good and it can go very bright let me actually uh as you can see it can go up to 400 nits i believe which is actually very good because many of the windows laptops 

uh hover around some of them actually max out at just 250 nets many do about 300 and only some of the very high end goals 400 450 and 500 this goes up to 400 what does it mean it means that yes indoor no issues even outdoors it is fairly visible it's not easily visible fairly visible so let me do one thing guys i will actually install some apps now and i want to test how it does in editing i use final cut so face final cut pro it's called fcp now instead of fcpx so i'll just install it and i also have it on my macbook regular macbook air and even the macbook pro 13. so what i'll do is this earlier part of the video in fact i will edit it on this one and i'll place all the files on this external ssd and render it and all the different mac computers that i have to see does it make a real difference so let's have a look at there and see and so i just wanted to give you uh initial uh impressions uh about the performance also let's also check the speakers i haven't done that let's just go to youtube and if i search my own channel keyboard is definitely better than the butterfly one let's just use this i'm natasha and my specialty is making all your apps this is matt's country hi guys this is ranjeet and in this video let's do the unboxing and have a first look at this ipad 8 that's the fourth generation are also known as and definitely i have to say uh the speakers like all macs are actually pretty good way better than many of the windows or laptops windows laptops i don't know for some reason the speakers are just not locked here it's actually pretty loud so let me just uh install final cut on this one and let's see how it edits so that i can give you my initial impressions about the same i completely forgot to mention you guys one problem that i had while setting this up is that it simply was not connecting to my wi-fi network it was finding all the wi-fi networks but when i clicked it was not connected and this is very strange because we must have used over 120 devices with this wi-fi network uh it's a ubiquitin network and did not have any issues but here it actually gave me a problem connecting to this network manually i had to set it up and it finally connected but this is one initial bug that i encountered which is very very strange just thought that you guys should know that so guys now i'm editing the video that we shot earlier on this one wanted to test it and all the files i'm keeping it on this ssd so that we can just take this project and render it uh on this 13 inch pro that i have and even the older air to see the performance difference and guys we are this is a 4k project and as you can see we have two timelines this is the bottom and this is the top and both are in 4k and just notice how fluid it is in editing it's like butter i didn't expect this because this is the lower end eight gigabytes of ram as you can see in final cut pro it's just amazing uh and this is not even uh when better performance i'm using the better quality so that means while editing i'm seeing the full 4k resolution here so then also i'm not seeing any frame drop so at least in final cut while editing it's a very very smooth experience they're not i say it is almost close to the imac pro that i have that cost about four and a half lakhs so very very smooth in editing initial impressions and we have been editing it for next past five minutes and uh it's just barely warm guys here to touch uh the other macs which i edit if it's two 4k files they would have got actually hot till now i uh this is getting a little bit warm but not hot at all so it's warm to touch because we are pushing it with two 4k files so initial impressions guys an instant on as you can see you just open it up instantly it switches on initially uh what do you say impressions while editing even two 4k files it's handling it fine actually i did index i expected with a single 4k file it will do the job but these are two 4k files that i'm doing then also it's actually doing a pretty good job uh so guys now have uh rendered and played around with this uh actually uh outputted that file and uh played around with these new computers and also tested with the old ones so wanted to give my quick impressions on it know that this is a review guys i have to test it a lot but uh i want to test this native app and i use final cut on this one and first let me talk about the results but i also face some compatibility issues and you guys should be aware of that if you're buying this one because this does not run on intel x86 processor this is basically an arm chip apple's own m1 chip and to get the best performance those apps should be actually written uh and compatible with the m1 chip most of the apple applications are compatible but if you use third-party apps there is where the problem happens yes it has rosetta and it did install result automatically that's a conversion but even with rosetta i wouldn't say it's 100 compatible with some of the third party apps and plugins first let's talk about the rendering results i use final cut to render the first part of this video on this one and let me actually talk about the results and it was a five minute the first five minutes and 15 seconds of this video actually was edited on this one the editing process as you saw was very good even the two 4k clips that we have editing was butter smooth so i liked it as good as my big imac pro that cost a lot has 32 gigs of ram eight proper core xeon chip uh so that way it was very good uh but export time for that five minute 15 seconds clip was six minutes 56 seconds on this uh macbook air and one uh which is actually not bad at all it's a 4k clip uh that if i compare with this macbook air this is not the latest macbook air guys this is the 2018 edition this actually runs on the core intel core i5 it's a dual core and this one the same video clip actually it took 14 minutes 33 seconds so this is

 significantly faster almost like half the time less than half the time it took but i also have the macbook pro as i've told you this is the macbook pro 13 inches this is again not the latest model this is the 2016 model i purchased in 2017 late 2016. uh this also has the intel core i5 it's a dual core variant and this one actually exported that clip in seven minutes 57 seconds uh so yeah still actually the m1 chip is faster but guys remember this is a pretty old computer this is just a dual core if it would have been the new uh proper quad core one it would have been faster effect i also just for kicks also tested the same video clip on my imac pro to get an idea how it performs and the imac pro completed that in just three minutes five seconds so yes this is actually pretty fast but i won't say if you have a fast what 

do you say uh computer uh mac computer this won't be like twice or thrice fast guys that's what uh i'm hearing that's not the case uh but yeah if it's faster than comparable what do you say uh macbooks uh but these results were in final cut but if you use some third-party video rating softwares like adobe etc which are right now not optimized for the m1 chip the results will be a lot slower and also you will face compatibility issues in fact i face compatibility issues even with final cut if you guys know i use this uh what do you say uh for at the footers to add that to the red geek 

ranging etc but with this m1 chip i actually could not do it because that's a third-party plug-in and that simply did not work yes rosetta came and it worked compiled it but when i was trying to use it then the performance of the editing it was sluggish just touching one one frame per second making the editing uh unusable so i had to actually remove that plug-in so if you rely on third-party plugins and if you're sort of a professional you will have to actually

 do that even if you use final cut so you have to weigh the pros and cons because the problem right now is that many of the third-party plugins are simply not compatible with the m1 chip so again if you're a professional i won't say that right now to go out and jump on this one because you might be relying on some third-party plug-in that you need for your work and if that is not compatible then you'll have issues for example one of my friends is a professional uh what do you say photographer and he does a lot of work on photoshop 

he also got this and he was happy with it photoshop worked in rosetta but he also had to actually use some third-party plugins for his regular work and while he was using that it simply used to crash it so again there are some compatibility issues and you got to be careful with that so i would say this is a great laptop battery life i would say is excellent and also when i was even editing yes it slightly got warm but it simply did not get hot at all and because it does not have any fancy no noise while editing so that 

was a great experience and initial impressions guys looks like the battery life will be also very very good but i would say if you have some obscure what do you say applications that you need to run make sure they are natively already ported with the m1 chip if that's not the case you might actually fall into compatibility issues guys that's my frank opinion i will test this laptop a lot more so stay tuned for that and if you have any specific questions do let me know i'll use this laptop as my primary computer for the next week or so and in the later part maybe next week or something i'll try to post its full review anyways guys that's it for now and if you guys are still not subscribed to the youtube channel hit that subscribe button this is shubham and i hope to see you in my next  Article take care guys