[ActorNightly]

Has there been any sort of long term load tests? I feel like the chassis limitations are going to result in thermal throttling compared to similar performance laptops with actual cooling design. Even if it doesn't thermal throttle, one of my main complaints with Macbooks is that you can't actually use them in your lap cause they get uncomfortably hot.

As for being worth it, wait till the next gen mobile chips in 2021. I feel like we will see similar performance fairly soon in cheaper laptops without being locked into the Apple ecosystem.

[Joeri]

The m1 macbook air reviews all say they don’t get hot, no matter what you throw at them, and they at most throttle down 15%. The macbook pro and mini stay cool and quiet and do not throttle, regardless of the workload. Any performance expectations you have from macs before the transition you should set aside, these are entirely new and come with very different characteristics.

[alwillis]

I feel like we will see similar performance fairly soon in cheaper laptops without being locked into the Apple ecosystem.

That's probably not going to happen any time soon.

If the $999 M1-based MacBook Air is already outperforming almost every Intel laptop that's been shipping (including Apple's), there's little chance Intel or AMD are going to surpass that.

Even if they get close to performance, they're not going to have the same battery life. From Matthew Panzarino's review on Techcrunch on the M1 MacBook Pro [1]:

"In fullscreen 4k/60 video playback, the M1 fares even better, clocking an easy 20 hours with fixed 50% brightness. On an earlier test, I left the auto-adjust on and it crossed the 24 hour mark easily. Yeah, a full day. That’s an iOS-like milestone."

It's important to remember: this is Apple's low-end chip for entry-level/consumer level hardware, yet it's more than competitive with a $5000 iMac Pro.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...