A cheap A18 Pro MacBook would crush the M1 Air and I have the numbers to prove it — but here’s the catch

A18 Pro MacBook vs M1 MacBook Air — (Image credit: Future)

Apple releasing a cheap MacBook next week (my guess: it’ll be named the MacBook SE) seems like a very un-Appley thing to do. But I think there are two reasons why the Cupertino crew are reportedly attacking this zone hard:

Education: Chromebooks dominate schools, and they mean new generations are locked in with Google accounts from a young age. That’s a huge potential market of long-term future buyers for Apple to hit.
Aim at refurbished: Apple keeps making new MacBooks, but to stem the high prices, people are looking to older and refurbished systems. As of early 2026, the M1 MacBook Air is the most purchased.

And it’s that second one that I’m most curious about. Normally selling for between $500-$600 (currently $449 at Walmart), this is reportedly the price range that Apple is aiming squarely at. So how does the rumored A18 Pro (found in the iPhone 16 Pro) fare against the laptop-centric M1 from 2020?

Well, we already have a pretty good idea, as we’ve tested both chips in the past. Of course, this can be a bit like comparing apples and oranges — M1 is in a laptop shell with active cooling and a higher level of power going to it, whereas the A18 Pro is running at a lower wattage crammed inside a phone.

But what I can do is give you an early indication based on what you can expect. Let’s get into it.

A18 Pro vs M1: Better single-core, but struggles under heavy loads

Built on a much more recent architecture, Apple really stepped up its game in terms of single-core snappiness in the 3nm process era. Given when we benchmarked the M1 MacBook Air, this was back in Geekbench 5 times (and we've moved a whole generation forward), I got these numbers from the Geekbench browser for a more realistic comparison.

The A18 Pro absolutely trounces the M1 Air in this area, and the end result would be that for your general daily tasks, things feel more fluid — the times an app bounces in your dock would be far shorter than it was back in 2020.

However, under heavy sustained loads of multi-core tasks (video edit rendering, heavy multitasking), the M1 will either maintain an advantage or be extremely close to the A18 Pro. It’s clear that the A18 Pro MacBook would not be for the pros (...yes I know the chip is literally called “pro”).

Apple MacBook Air M1 (late 2020) review — (Image credit: Tom's Guide)

On balance, though, it’s clear that this — before even thinking about upping the total power going to the chip in a laptop shell — is going to be more than enough for the average workload of casual productivity paired with short bursts of speed.

Oh, and shout-out to the faster memory bandwidth on A18 Pro too, which is how fast data is transferred between the chip and the RAM. This will also ensure zippiness in your tasks and offset some of that multitasking pressure.

Better graphics

iPhone 16 Pro running 3DMark Solar Bay graphics test — (Image credit: Future)

Does the A18 Pro have a smaller GPU than the M1? Yes. Does that matter? Absolutely not. GPU tech has evolved rapidly in Apple silicon, and that is shown clearly as you take a look at how the 6 cores of the iPhone chip fare against the 8 cores of the old MacBook Air.

Since we don't have apples-to-apples Wild Life benchmarks, 3DMark has done the heavy-lifting here.

On top of that, you’ve got hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Not to say that’s going to make this cheaper MacBook a gaming beast, but for casual play on Apple Arcade or any GPU-intensive tasks, you should see M1 really fall behind here.

Much better power efficiency

A18 Pro was designed as a phone chip, so power efficiency was probably the main focus in the architectural design. Here’s how our battery rundown tests fared between the iPhone 16 Pro sporting this chip and the M1 MacBook Air.

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Device	Battery life test result (hh:mm)
iPhone 16 Pro (A18 Pro)	14:07
M1 MacBook Air	14:40

Now this isn’t a fair fight — it’s a phone vs a laptop. But just take a look at how close that phone comes to the decent longevity of the MacBook.

And now imagine that same phone chip inside a laptop shell with a bigger battery… That’s hype.

Outlook

If these indicators are anywhere close to what we get, this could be low-key the best value laptop you can get in 2026 — maximum bang for your buck for those who just need a notebook to get the essentials done, binge watch and play a couple games.

The M1 MacBook Air has served us well. So well, in fact, that it continues to be the top-selling refurbished Apple laptop. But in Cupertino’s eyes, it’s long past time that this machine is put out to pasture

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Jason brings a decade of tech and gaming journalism experience to his role as a Managing Editor of Computing at Tom's Guide. He has previously written for Laptop Mag, Tom's Hardware, Kotaku, Stuff and BBC Science Focus. In his spare time, you'll find Jason looking for good dogs to pet or thinking about eating pizza if he isn't already.

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