The M1 Apple processor has changed everything, and now that it powers the new generation of MacBook Air laptops, it’s an exciting alternative to the iPad Pro.
After months of speculation and predictions, the new iPad Pros are finally here, and it’s time once again to compare them to Apple’s M1 MacBook Air. The new M1 chip blows the competition out of the water. The Air has an impressive battery life, and its fanless design makes it totally silent. And thanks to Big Sur ’s new design language and the M1 chip’s ability to run iPhone apps on MacOS, the MacBook Air is more like the iPad Pro than ever before. On the flip side, the new iPad Pros will come with the same M1 chip found in the MacBook Air and Apple’s other recent Mac products. That means the iPad Pro is more like a computer than ever. With so much in common, which one will come out on top? Ever since its redesign in 2018, the MacBook Air has only been available in a 13-inch size. That’s no different with Apple’s M1 MacBook Air, which uses the same exterior chassis as the previous model. It’s got the same 2,560 x 1,600 resolution (227 ppi), the same 16:10 aspect ratio, and the same thin (but not ultra-slim) bezels. Its Retina display also features True Tone, which dynamically adjusts the white balance to match the ambient light. The iPad Pro’s display is a little different. There are two sizes of iPad Pro to choose from — 11 inches and 12.9 inches — with the former having a 2,388 x 1,668 resolution and the latter coming with a 2,732 x 2,048 resolution. The 11-inch iPad Pro has a 264 ppi pixel density, which should make it a little sharper than the MacBook Air, despite having similar screen sizes. Both the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros come with True Tone and have an edge in that their dynamic refresh rate goes all the way up to 120Hz, giving them beautifully smooth scrolling and animations. The MacBook Air is still locked at 60Hz. The 12.9-inch iPad Pro comes with Apple’s new Liquid Retina XDR display. It’s a mouthful, but the new display has some promising features. Along with its high refresh rate, it also has 10,000 mini-LEDs in the panel. That allows the screen to have 2,500 dimming zones, giving it an impressive 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and nuanced HDR. Apple says it’s on par with the Pro Display XDR, but that remains to be seen. It should be impressive, though. Both the MacBook Air and the iPad Pro now come with Magic Keyboards. In both cases, that’s a vast improvement over what was on offer before. Previous models of the MacBook Air were stuck with the shallow, failure-prone butterfly keyboard, while the keys on the iPad Pro’s keyboard case were soft, mushy, and unsatisfying. For both devices, this is a major upgrade. The Magic Keyboard is very different from both previous keyboard designs. As we said in our MacBook Pro 16 review, it’s “the best Mac keyboard ever released,” with large keys, a snappy mechanism, and even a physical Esc key. We love it. Let’s talk about the MacBook Air first. The M1 MacBook Air makes a monstrous leap in performance. The previous MacBook Air from earlier this year was stuck with just two cores and four threads in the base model.
