As intimated in my last blog post, I have bought a refurbished M1 MacBook Air (7 GPU cores/8CPU cores/8GB Unified Memory/256GB SSD) from Apple, this is still a current model & is covered by the same warranty as a new Mac. I've been using it for almost eight days now, most of the time with the power supply disconnected & it has yet to complete five full battery charge cycles. That is impressive performance.
I've noticed a physical difference between the Thunderbolt 4 ports on this Air vs the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the old Pro: peripherals connect far more firmly when pushed in. An internal difference is each Thunderbolt 4 port has its own dedicated Intel Thunderbolt control module, the older Pro had the two ports sharing a single controller. This spreads the load faster & more efficiently.
This thing does not lack for performance despite being the base model in the Mac portable range. There are four power cores rated at 3.2 GHz & four efficiency cores of 2.4 GHz. It's no contest against the old Pro's 2.3 GHz dual-core Intel i5. It refuses to run hot, the internal temperatures don't get wildly high despite it being a fan-free design.
Its M1 series SoC (System on Chip) is derived from those in iPads & iPhones, so there are some iPhone/iPad apps that run perfectly well on this Mac. To access such apps you have to be running Monterey & have installed the apps previously on an iPhone or iPad. Go to the App Store, click on your Apple ID in the lower left corner then you'll see two tabs at the top reading "Mac apps" and "iPhone & iPad apps." Most when selected will have the disclaimer that they were developed for mobile devices & are not verified for macOS. Download them anyway and try them. I have so far found 29 such apps to be viable on macOS.
