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Apple had never release a MacBook Air that's faster than the previous top of the line MacBook Pro. This is a first.

The air has had great battery for a while that's true, but now it has great battery and great performance.

I find it very interesting that due to the existence of the Emoji Bar, and the lower performance and worse battery life due to Apple Silicon, the MacBook Air is now a far more Pro machine than the 15 inch MacBook Pro.

In the late 80s and early 90s, every computer that Apple made was better than all their other machines. Even if they were making a smaller budget device like the SE or SE/30, performance increased so quickly that it would beat all the previous machines.

For one short year, in 2020, due to the ARM transition, Apple repeated that feat. It could keep on going, if for example, the refresh of the Macbook Air comes out in 2022 and beats the Pro machines that came out in 2021.

Yep, going from a Mac Plus to an SE-30 is probably the closest experientially to my MacBook Pro 15/Intel Mac Mini-> M1 Mac Mini in my memory.

Form factor basically same, screen the same, OS the same, yet somehow the qualitative feel changes with the new responsiveness. I don't switch to any Mac other than the M1 now except of necessity because of the instant ability to feel the downgrade.

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