Last week I bought a 13" MacBook Air in Midnight (24GB memory, 512GB SSD).

I hadn't been planning on buying it. Instead, I was expecting to upgrade my current desktop (M1 Ultra) to an M4 Ultra later this year. Assuming, of course, that we would see an M4 Ultra later this year. But as we know, that didn't happen. (Maybe we still will*?)

At any rate. This machine. A 13" Midnight MacBook Air.

It's beautiful. Have you seen it yet?

I ended up buying one because it's cheap, and I haven't had a travel laptop in a while. This new laptop could also double as a new build server to replace my M1 Mac mini, and I figured someday I'll hand it down to my daughter.

The size is perfect for what I'm after. I can use my 13" iPad Pro as a second display, with the bonus that I've now got instant stylus support in Acorn because of that.

And it's so amazingly fast.

I wasn't expecting that last part. So fast.

Its name is Jimi by the way.

What I'm personally interested in is, how fast can Jimi build Acorn (~200k lines of code). Sure, the single-threaded performance of the M4 processor will certainly beat my M1 Ultra (named "SRV"), but the Ultra has so much more RAM and CPU cores. How close will the Air match the performance of my desktop?

With a full build of Acorn, including running hundreds of regression tests, Jimi outperforms my M1 Ultra at 3m21s vs 4m43s. And when purely compiling Acorn, where you'd think the Ultra would have an edge, I get 1:36 (Air) vs 2:05 (Ultra).

I'm sorry, what?

This $1400 machine is beating my $4000 desktop machine with a 20 core CPU, 48 core GPU, and 64GB of memory? What why how?

So I'm pretty happy with this dinky little travel / build machine. It's a joy to hold and fun to use.