Lifewire purchased the MacBook Air to evaluate its features and capabilities. Read on to see our results.

The new MacBook Air with Apple’s custom M1 chip looks a lot like the MacBook Air of old, but looks can be deceiving. While the line doesn’t receive any major physical revisions for the Late 2020 edition, the addition of Apple’s ARM-based M1 processor takes the lightest MacBook to new heights. With impressive processing power and benchmark results, whisper-quiet operation, and all-day battery life all packed into a familiar lightweight form factor, the M1 MacBook Air is an impressive machine.

The MacBook Air line has always been admirable from a portability standpoint, but it’s always felt more like a second laptop than something primarily designed for work. If you want to get actual work done, that’s what the MacBook Pro is for. With the sheer power of the M1 chip, however, I began to wonder if Apple had finally shaken up that paradigm. I was able to spend about a week with the new MacBook Air as my main laptop, both in the office and on the road, which gave me a chance to test that theory.

The elephant in the room with Apple Silicon is that it locks you out of dual-booting Windows, and locks you out of apps and games that aren’t available on macOS. With that in mind, I tried using the M1 MacBook Air for every non-Windows task possible, testing things like real-world performance and responsiveness, how it affected my productivity, battery life, and even how well it handles gaming.