New MacBook Air Announced as First Apple Silicon Mac With M1 Chip and Fanless Design

Apple today introduced a new MacBook Air as its first Mac with a custom Apple Silicon processor known as the M1 chip. The new MacBook Air is up to 3.5x faster than the previous-generation MacBook Air, with up to 5x faster graphics performance.

Key features of the new MacBook Air:

• Apple-designed M1 chip with 8‑core CPU and 8‑core GPU
• A completely silent, fanless design
• Up to 3.5x faster CPU, up to 5x faster graphics, and up to 2x faster SSD
• Up to 9x faster machine learning
• 13-inch Retina display with True Tone and P3 wide color gamut support
• Up to 2TB of SSD storage and up to 16GB of memory
• Up to 18 hours of battery life
• Two Thunderbolt 3/USB4 ports
• Magic Keyboard, Force Touch trackpad, and Touch ID
• Wi-Fi 6

The new MacBook Air along with new 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini models are available to order now on Apple.com and through the Apple Store app, with the first deliveries and in-store availability to begin November 17. The new MacBook Air continues to start at $999 in the United States, with $899 pricing available for students and other educational customers.

The first three Macs with M1 chips mark the beginning of Apple's transition away from Intel processors in Macs. Back in June, Apple revealed its plans to begin using its own custom Apple Silicon processors in Macs, promising industry-leading performance per watt. At the time, Apple said that the transition would take about two years to be completed.

In the interim, Apple teased new Intel-based Macs in development, including an updated 27-inch iMac released in August. Apple said that it will continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come.