Upgrade from MacBook Pro M1 2020 to Macbook Air M3 13"

ClaudiuAlex wrote:

Dear community,

I own a MacBook Pro M1 13" with the following specifications : 8GB Ram and 256 SSD. Is it worth upgrading to Apple MacBook Air 13" M3 Processor with 16 GB Ram and 512 SSD ? MacBook Pro M1 has a cooling fan, but Apple MacBook Air 13" M3 not. In this case, M3 processor will throttle faster than M1 on MacBook Pro ? I use Parallels Desktop Pro with Windows 11 ARM and Ubuntu Linux. Is it a significant performance lap between M1 and M3 or maybe a better way is to wait for M4 ?

Since you are using Parallels to run other operating systems in a virtual machine, I would not recommend getting a new Mac with only 16 GB of RAM. Yes, 16 GB will be an improvement on 8 GB, but if you are running two (or more) operating systems at the same time, you might well find that 16 GB was not enough. Then you'd be stuck again.

I would suggest getting a Mac with

• 24 GB of RAM – available on the 13"/15" M3 MacBook Airs, and the 14" M3 MacBook Pro, or
• 32+ GB of RAM – available on 14" MacBook Pros with Pro and Max chips. (I think with the latest 14" MBPs, the available sizes are a bit "odd", and go something like 18/36/48/64/96/128 GB.)

Note that Pro and Max chips have more computing engines of various sorts than 'base' chips do. That can be as significant, or more significant, than a difference in generations.

ClaudiuAlex wrote:

But is it a significant difference in performance between M1 and M3 ?

Apple's advertising says that

• The 13" M2 MacBook Air is "up to 1.4x faster" than the M1 MacBook Air
• The 13" and 15" M3 MacBook Airs are "up to 1.5x faster" than the M1 MacBook Air

A key word here being "up to". Between the "up to" and the fact that in many cases, even a slower processor is faster than the human sitting in front of the screen, it's not clear that it would be worth upgrading IF your current MacBook Air had enough RAM for what you were doing with it.

Don't get me wrong - there might be some reasons to upgrade, such as

• The better sound systems on the M2 and M3 MacBook Airs
• The MagSafe 3 ports on the M2 and M3 MacBook Airs
• The ability to get the M2 and M3 MacBook Airs in either 13" or 15" sizes
• The ability to get 24 GB of RAM on the M2 and M3 MacBook Airs
• The ability to use two external displays with the M3 MacBook Airs (but only when the lid is closed – and with limitations on Retina modes)

Maybe even the hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the M3 models, if you are a gamer, and once games take advantage of it.

But raw CPU speed or GPU speed would not be at the top of the list.

In your case, you are running Windows for ARM, and ARM versions of Linux, in virtual machines. Running two or more operating systems at the same time is very memory-intensive, and you are doing it on a laptop which only has 8 GB of RAM. That seems likely to lead to a situation in which your computer is RAM-starved, and is doing lots of swapping to compressed RAM and to its internal SSD, which may be dragging down performance. Even SSDs are much slower than real RAM.

I'm not sure what the right amount of memory is for the virtual machine workload that you are running - but my intuition says that 16 GB would be marginal.

Hi,

If I were you, I would Trade-In your M1 MacBook Pro and get M3 MacBook Air.