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

Their line from the video about being the highest performance chip in single core appears to be true. This is of course a synthetic benchmark but the single core result is very promising. Note that the single core and multi core scores exceed the top-of-the-line 16” MacBook Pro (9th generation 8-core i9 2.4 ghz). I actually made the call to sell my 16” for the new Air yesterday. It’s looking like a good call. Glad I’m selling my 16” while it still has some value.

You can see all Air results so far here: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=MacBookAir10%2...

I bought the new Air, but I’m keeping my 16” as it may be the last laptop of that quality that can run programs without telling some stranger over the network that you’ve run a specific program.

Current (and presumably future) macOS does this and you can’t turn it off, except with Little Snitch. New APIs in macOS 11 means that Little Snitch will no longer be able to block OS processes, so it will require external network filtering hardware.

I’ll likely end up with Linux on the 16”, and use the new one for things that are not secret/private.