Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

In this day and age of Electron apps, I would say that RAM matters as much or more than CPU performance but seeing these results competes the story. M1 is good and has the potential to power pro laptops.

I agree, I would have probably bought the pro if it had a 32GB option.

With the storage IO right on the SoC I can imagine swapping to feel especially snappy as well.

Although it's worth remembering the m1 is just Apple's CPU for their low-end machines. They haven't announced their high-end 13" & 16" MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac Pros.

Also, I know Electron has a history of high-memory, but right now my Slack client is currently running at 500MB and my VS Code windows (3 projects) at < 1.5GB.

And even though my current MBP16 is spec'd at 64GB RAM, I don't think 16GB would probably feel all that slow these days.

I have seen an interesting point raised elsewhere. macOS on ARM will be able to run iOS apps (assuming the author doesn’t opt out). That means that a lot of the uses of electron or similar may no longer be needed. Slack, Spotify, etc. Some of course will still be electron, there’s no native version of VS Code for instance. But it could work out better than expected...