Apple MacBook Air M1 13 Inch

Apple MacBook Air (2020) M1

It may look the same on the outside, but Apple's new MacBook Air is a radical reinvention of the crowd-pleasing laptop

Compare Apple's new 2020 model MacBook Air to its immediate predecessor and you might come away a bit puzzled – the screen, keyboard, chassis, ports and other external-facing features are basically identical to the unit Apple released back in April. Looks can, however, be deceiving, and the new Air's most exciting additions are all quietly hidden under the hood – and they're big ones.

It's been well known that Apple's been working on creating a range of new Macs that are powered by the same chips used in its iPhones and iPad, and the late-2020 Air is one of the first devices to arrive with that new architecture, dubbed 'M1'. 

It's no exaggeration to say that M1 is revolutionary, and in more ways that one. Along with providing significantly improved battery life (the new Air can last up to twice as long as its Intel-powered predecessor, going from 8 hours to 16 hours in some tasks), M1's huge surprise is that it's also a performance powerhouse, able to go toe-to-toe with Intel's best Core i7 laptop CPUs, meaning that the MacBook Air can do readily handle 'tough' jobs like video-editing and even a bit of moderate gaming (though to be clear, it won't replace a true gaming laptop with an Nvidia or AMD graphics processor).

Apple hasn't stopped there, however. Impressively, despite those drastic game-changing improvements to battery life and performance, the M1 Air is somehow cheaper than its Intel forebears, with an Australian starting price of $1,439 compared to $1,599.

And, as alluded to before, this is still a high-quality thin-and-light laptop in every other respect, with a high-resolution 2,560 x 1,600-pixel 13.3-inch IPS display, recently-revised 'Magic' keyboard, huge and responsive trackpad, and a generous starting config of 256GB SSD storage and 8GB of memory.

The only sticking point is that one or two older apps may have issues with Apple's new M1 chips, although in extensive testing across dozens of apps and games we've found no serious 'show stopping' problems. If you're looking for a new laptop, this one should be high on your list.

Score: 4.5/5

Verdict: A revolutionary laptop that delivers long battery life and performance in spades at a nice price. The new benchmark for an all-rounder.