[microtonal]

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC.

And the fan on the Intel Air was loud and the CPU performance not great :(. The Intel Air and the M1 Air are like night and day. Even though I have the 14" Pro now, IMO the MacBook Air M1 is the most revolutionary Mac of the past decade, if not more.

[pstadler]

Used an MBA M1 for a year before switching to a MBP 14" M1 Pro. The MBA is the best laptop I‘ve ever had. Fanless, light, insane battery life, always cool and blazingly fast. No noticeable difference between the M1 (8/7 16GB) vs. M1 Pro (10/14 32GB) in daily use, although I don’t usually depend on long running processes going full throttle.

I believe the entry-level MBA is the best laptop you can buy when it comes to price-performance ratio.

[microtonal]

Fanless, light, insane battery life, always cool and blazingly fast. No noticeable difference between the M1 (8/7 16GB) vs. M1 Pro (10/14 32GB) in daily use

Indeed. I only got the M1 Pro because I often do larger builds and two AMX (matrix multiplication) units is nice for some machine learning tasks. Other than that, I liked the Air more.

I hope that they carry over some features of the Pro to the next generation Air, in particular MagSafe, supporting more than one external 4k/5k display, and perhaps >16GB, and it would be so perfect.

[fmajid]

If anything the M1 MBA is too cool, it freezes my lap off. Intel’s done a heroic job of maximizing performance on x86 but you’ve got to pay the price for the inefficiency of its legacy CISC architecture and power efficiency and thermals is it.

[daviddever23box]

This - bought an Amber Lake-Y Core-i5 based MacBook Air (True Tone. 2019 - A1932) and returned it, as the fan noise was frequent and ridiculous. (I've heard that the Ice Lake-based sucessor was worse.)