Lightroom runs without a hiccup even on emulation

With a large panoramic image or something with quite a few local adjustments, not only did the MacBook get scorching hot, it also couldn't keep up. This breathed a bit of new life into my 2018 MacBook, but performance still felt lacking. Lightroom Classic released version 10 roughly six months ago, and within that version, they added GPU acceleration to things such as zoom scrubbing and local adjustments. This made me a bit hesitant when I finally bought the MacBook Air, but from my research, even the emulation performance was good if not better than my 2.5-year-old MacBook Pro. Lightroom is the only application within this review still not running natively on the M1 architecture and is being emulated through Rosetta 2, which causes roughly a 20% drop in performance. While it won't be a side-by-side comparison to my old laptop or even my desktop, I will use those to reference my experiences with the M1 MacBook Air. Instead, I'll be approaching this with a real-world perspective, evaluating how well the system functions in my daily workflow using Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, and Premiere. This review won't be filled with in-depth analysis and synthetic benchmarks comparing the performance to multiple other configurations there is a plethora of those types of reviews out there, and I encourage you to find them if that type of thing interests you. In my mind, there was no way the first iteration of their processor could compete with AMD or Intel, right? I was completely wrong. At first, I didn't believe any of what Apple was saying during their keynote announcement, considering they were using arbitrary numbers such as '5x faster than previous generations,' and to be honest, even if they used actual statistics, I would have been hesitant. That was until Apple dropped the M1 lineup.

I fully intended to get a Dell XPS, a Razer Blade, or something along those lines. Personally, I disliked the direction they took with design by removing the MagSafe power adapter, forcing all USB-C ports, and the nearly $400 impractical Touch Bar, when 9 times out of 10, I simply preferred a row of function keys, all combined with the fact that many other laptop manufacturers had caught up in terms of build quality for their laptops, which was not the case a decade ago. I told myself I wouldn't get another Apple laptop after owning one since 2007. I was recently in the market for a new laptop to replace my old 2018 MacBook Pro and after going through two Touch Bar MacBooks (one died).

Photo editor on macbook air