My wife and I went on a short trip where I had to work. I normally use a windows desktop, but couldn’t bring that.
I used her base m1 air, and was blown away by how well it handled my work. Not just that, but it used significantly less ram and cpu power.
On windows my cpu usage is higher and my ram usage normally over 8gb. On here air, I was hitting around 6gb ram usage and the cpu was maybe around 15-20%
I am still in a little disbelieve that her laptop handed my work so much better than my desktop i7-8700 or laptop i5-11th gen intel handles it.
I’m totally picking up a MacBook this fall.
Now just need to decide between the air and pro, the air is probably fine, but I like the dedicated hdmi port as I will use it with a monitor a lot. Not sure if a usb-c hub will suffice.
USB-C docks/dongles generally aren’t that big a deal if that’s your only deciding factor. They work fine without any weird hiccups or behavior.
If you’re buying used, it’s worth noting that the earlier M1, M2, and M3 non-Pro/Max chips had some limitations with external monitors. The M1 and M2 MacBook Air only supported one external monitor alongside the Mac’s built in screen. The M3 Air could do two external monitors with the lid closed, or one external monitor and the built in. The M4 Air can do two external monitors and the built in display at the same time. The Pro and Max chips could always do two external monitors and the built in display starting from the earliest M1 Pro.
The big difference between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro is that the Pro has a built in fan. The Air will passively cool itself and might have to throttle your workload until the laptop cools down. The Pro can kick on the fan to help run heavy workloads longer. In practice it’s actually difficult to get a MacBook Pro to kick on its fan. Anything short of virtual machines or large video rendering can usually be done without the laptop getting so hot it would need to kick the fan on or throttle things. If you’re somewhat price conscious and aren’t pushing the machine’s limits, the Air’s definitely worth a look.
i was really impressed with M1 Pro i got from my employer. I never had a mac nor an iphone before.
Ultimately, i didn’t not buy a mac when I had an opportunity because I didn’t want to live i.a walled garden
Try emulating switch games on it. Works well
The base M1 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM was the woooooorst once I got a couple browsers open or something.
M1 Max MBP with 32GB of RAM was an overcorrection… but friggin unstoppable and recently cost half of its MSRP
16GB minimum pls OP justttttt in case! Hehe you’re def gonna find a deal, refurb or w/e, on whatever you choose!
Just wait until something goes wrong, then you will be very surprised.
You’re being downvoted but it’s true, they are very difficult to repair and non modular so some parts are crazy expensive. Broken display ribbon cable? $20 replacement cable? Nah it’s a whole new hi-res aluminum shell display for you!
But to be fair I don’t expect to be repairing many of the M1 Airs, it’s a very mature design, 10 years of form factor iteration and a small low power logic board. I’ve hardly worked on any of them, though I own one myself. A few abused batteries are starting to need replacing. It’s just the freaking batteries are glued in, so so stupid; not a reliability problem but an extra half hour of work over screws when replacing the battery.
