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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

I just bought a MacBook Air. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this redefines how we think about a laptop. Whereas previously a laptop was something that spent the bulk of its time plugged in, and only capable of short bursts of number-crunching/gaming due to thermal and battery limitations, I can literally get a good few hours of gaming untethered on this machine. And this is a base-level MacBook Air, I imagine the Pros are even better.

I've owned a few "gaming" laptops, but until the M1 MBA I haven't had one that run games for more than an hour while on battery power, and even then it sounded like a jet taking off.

Software support is another, though Rosetta works surprisingly well, the general lack of Mac support in games combined with the removal of 32-bit support in Catalina mean, you're not exactly spoiled for choice.

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I can get a few hours of light gaming in on my Zephryus G14 on battery, and it has a vastly faster GPU than the one in the M1 such that I can also still play demanding games when tethered to a wall (it also has a VRR 120hz screen). A trick that the MacBooks can no longer pull of at all since eGPU support was killed.

It's a fantastic experience, but in no way has having this laptop for the last 6 months "redefined how I think about a laptop." It still does all the same things a laptop does, it still has all the same limitations a laptop has (like the physically small screen vs. other common gaming choices - be it desktop monitors or TVs). The M1 in the MBA doesn't really change any of that. Especially since the loss of bootcamp & eGPU means the MBA is a rather terrible gaming experience unless something drastically changes between game devs, Apple, and MacOS. The extra battery life is definitely welcome, but it's not game changing revolutionary, either. For some it may now be enough to go all day without charging, which is a key milestone, but many people were already there with the existing set of ultrabooks, too. Beyond that, eh? Kinda like a phone that can last 2 days. Cool trick, but it wouldn't change anything about my day to day life unless there happens to be a power outage overnight.

No idea why you are being downvoted, is HN really a group of Apple shills? I have the Zephyrus G14 also and love it. I'm closely watching the M1 but I really don't think it can compete with a GTX 2060. That matters a lot to me.

It also has an AMD 4900HS which while not an M1 is a fantastic processor.

> I'm closely watching the M1 but I really don't think it can compete with a GTX 2060. That matters a lot to me.

Per anandtech the M1 comes kinda-close sometimes to the 1650 mobile: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

It's then soundly wrecked by the 1660 Ti mobile, and the 2060 MaxQ is then faster yet still. They obviously also take a lot more power at peak, but that's also going to be a huge difference in the actual gaming experience, too.

What kind of gaming are we talking about?

The M1 on Mac Mini has a GPU on par with a 1650 ($150) discrete desktop GPU. It's by far the strongest integrated GPU ever.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

On closer inspection the M1 seems to be about 85% of the 1650 and is closer to the RX 560 a $130 discrete GPU

Blizzard already released ARM64 builds of WoW. More than likely D3 and Starcraft 2 as well. They were already fantastic supporters of the metal API so I imagine it was an easy transition for them.

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>the general lack of Mac support in games combined with the removal of 32-bit support in Catalina mean, you're not exactly spoiled for choice.

There are people already running 32-bit windows apps through Wine on the M1. When there is a will there is a way.

I wondered about that, doesn't it get hot and throttle performance?

According to Dave2D's youtube review the Air will throttle after 8 minutes of full load. The Pro never throttles.

https://youtu.be/XQ6vX6nmboU

Wow. That is pretty amazing. I have 15" 2018 mbp and it throttles if I look at it wrong ;-)

shhh. it will hear you.

It does get kind of warm, but it's not uncomfortable, and the throttling is not too bad, after 10 minutes you lose like 10% performance, after which it's solid. Probably the Pro doesn't have that issue.

My Air hasn’t gotten warm yet and I’ve been trying to really hammer it while I’ve been setting up my dev env and running benchmarks.

I have not tried Civ 6 late game benchmarks yet tho ;)

+1, I've had a beast of a Lenovo laptop, and though had a great GPU, fans were broken because of which the FPS was capped to <30.

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