>My high end Dell XPS was $2600, and the M1 Air blows it away for half the price.
Isn't "blowing it away" a little hyperbole? An XPS with 1185G7 has around ~10% worse single core and ~25% worse multi-core CPU performance than the M1. An improvement sure, but not the leap some people make it out to be.
I don't notice a 10% worse single core performance, but what I do notice is going OOM because the Air is limited to 16GB RAM (base model 8GB is personally unusable in 2021). Or being limited to 1 external display due to the design of the M1.
Apple silicon needs to support at least 2 external displays before I can consider one and I'm honestly surprised they currently do not. The next generation of Apple chips might be useful, particularly if linux kernel support improves too. A 2023 Macbook Pro has a lot of potential.
The XPS 13 is also limited to 16 GB of RAM, and it's actually more expensive than a M1 Macbook Air, so I'm not sure why you're using that as a comparison. Even if you bump the Air to 16gb of RAM and 512GB SSD it's still $50 cheaper than the comparable XPS 13 which is $1499, which btw has a worse 1920x1200 screen vs the 2560x1600 one on the Air.
I'm not sure what source you're using for performance. But at least with Geekbench 5 results it's not as close as you're saying. The M1 Macbook Air scores 1699 in single core, and 7362 in multi-core[1]. The Intel Core i7-1185G7 scores 1446 in single core and 4924 in multi-core[2]. That's about 18% better single-core and 50% better multi-core performance, for me that's a pretty big difference.
This isn't true, I have an XPS 13 (9310) with 32 GB of RAM. You can also get the XPS 13 with a 4k screen, although I do not understand why you would. 1920x1200 is already much higher DPI than I care for, 2560x1600 and 4k are just a battery drain.
I'm going off my own benchmarks using Geekbench 5, where the M1 scored 1700 single core and 7500 multi core, and the 1185G7 scored 1550/6000 multi core. (There are people with better results than this on Geekbench as well.)
I wasn't making an argument about the price by the way, I do understand the Air is cheaper, but in my opinion it is cheaper because it is a lesser quality device with key functionality missing. Of course, for some people the Macbook Air is the best value because they don't need or care about these things. Which is totally OK, but having used both devices both the Air and the MBP are non-starters for me.
As I said, I hope future revisions can improve things and be more competitive.
Yes, it isn't only about pure performance numbers. Better performance with much lower heat, much better battery life. "Blows it away." Every laptop seems to have a drawback or two however.
Isn't "blowing it away" a little hyperbole? An XPS with 1185G7 has around ~10% worse single core and ~25% worse multi-core CPU performance than the M1. An improvement sure, but not the leap some people make it out to be.
I don't notice a 10% worse single core performance, but what I do notice is going OOM because the Air is limited to 16GB RAM (base model 8GB is personally unusable in 2021). Or being limited to 1 external display due to the design of the M1.
Apple silicon needs to support at least 2 external displays before I can consider one and I'm honestly surprised they currently do not. The next generation of Apple chips might be useful, particularly if linux kernel support improves too. A 2023 Macbook Pro has a lot of potential.