Apple M1 in 2026: Performance Six Years Later

The Apple M1 was released in November 2020 as the first Apple Silicon chip for Mac. Six years later, it is noticeably behind newer generations of the M series, but it still handles programming, photo editing, office tasks, and light video editing with ease. The M1's main limitations today are its maximum of 16 GB of memory and a GPU that falls noticeably behind newer generations of Apple Silicon.

8 Cores and Unified Memory

The M1 is manufactured using a 5 nm process and contains 16 billion transistors. Its CPU consists of four performance cores and four efficiency cores. SMT is not supported, so the processor has eight cores and eight threads.

The M1 uses a Unified Memory Architecture: the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine access the same unified memory. The chip was available with 8 or 16 GB of memory.

8 GB is already insufficient for heavy multitasking, large development projects, virtual machines, and processing large files. For these tasks, it is better to look for a configuration with 16 GB.

M1 Performance

The M1 scores around 2347 points in Geekbench 6 Single-Core and 8341 points in Multi-Core. In Cinebench R23, its results are approximately 1512 points in Single-Core and 7728 in Multi-Core, while in PassMark CPU it scores around 14,100 points.

For comparison, the base Apple M2 is approximately 10-15% faster than the M1 in most CPU tests:

In single-threaded tests, the M2 outperforms the M1 by approximately 6-11%, and in multithreaded tests by 12-16%. Therefore, the CPU difference alone is relatively small as a reason to upgrade from the M1 to the M2.

The MacBook Air M1 is fanless and may reduce its clock speeds under sustained load. The MacBook Pro 13 and Mac mini, with active cooling, lose less performance during extended compilation and rendering.

Integrated Graphics

The M1 was available with a 7- or 8-core GPU. The 8-core version reaches approximately 2.6 TFLOPS FP32. Base MacBook Air configurations were also available with 7-core graphics.

Compared with newer Apple Silicon GPUs, the M1 is already noticeably weaker. It handles photo editing, hardware-accelerated video, and undemanding games.

The M3 and newer Apple Silicon chips are significantly faster in 3D and support hardware ray tracing, which the M1 lacks.

The chip also includes dedicated hardware blocks for video encoding and decoding. As a result, the MacBook Air M1 can handle light video editing even without active cooling.

Devices with Apple M1

The first computers with the M1, released in November 2020, were the 13-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini.

In 2021, the processor appeared in the 24-inch iMac and iPad Pro, and in 2022 Apple installed it in the fifth-generation iPad Air.

Is It Worth Buying an M1 Device in 2026?

The M1 is noticeably behind newer Apple Silicon chips, but it still handles web browsing, office applications, programming, and photo editing with ease.

When buying a used Mac with an M1, the amount of memory should be the primary consideration. For development and multitasking, it is better to choose a configuration with 16 GB. 8 GB is sufficient for browsing, documents, video, and other undemanding tasks.

For a MacBook Air M1 with 8 GB of memory and a 256 GB SSD, a reasonable price target is around $350-450. The 16 GB version is a more attractive option at approximately $450-550.

If the price approaches $600, it is better to compare the M1 with the MacBook Air M2. When the price difference is small, the M2 offers faster CPU and GPU performance and a more modern platform.

For a Mac with an M1 that has already been purchased, the processor's age alone is not a reason to replace it.