1.5 month review - Apple MacBook Air M1 Base Model

[NoTechTipsPlease]

Close to 2 months ago, I decided I needed a new laptop because my laptop's battery life was not enough. I'm in high school and use my laptop for nearly the entire day. My previous laptop was a fairly budget Asus Zenbook. The battery unfortunately barely lasted half the day. It had a Ryzen 5 3500U and 8GB of RAM. It was certainly good enough in terms of power, but battery life just killed it all for me. My choice of upgrade was the MacBook Air with an M1 processor. I really didn't need much more than the base 8GB of RAM, and I figured I could get external storage once I ran out. 

 

Pros

- Great performance with M1 chip, everything feels snappy

- No regrets with going 8GB of RAM instead of 16GB

- Battery could probably last me two days instead of two hours on my old laptop

- Great keyboard and trackpad

- Beautiful screen, 2560x1600 resolution is great and macOS scaling works well

- Build quality is solid

- Decent speakers

- Fanless 

 

Cons

- Slightly difficult to get used to macOS coming from Windows

- Not very good at gaming but that's expected

- Bad webcam

- Finder doesn't seem to be as functional as File Explorer on Windows

 

 

 

[Action_Johnson]

Yeah in the laptop space, unless you need Windows for whatever reason, software compatibility or games, MacBooks are just usually a superior product for "general computing". Especially with people who have zero idea how computers even work. 

 

I have colleagues still using 2012 MacBook Pro's who do commercial advertising photography, and are just now thinking about upgrading because they've heard how much of a fuss M1 is. My office computer when I'm not at the office, is a 15" 2015 MBP.

 

Solid display, terrific keyboard, perfect touchpad, metal chassis that can take a beating. I couldn't fathom trying to DD a 7-10 year old Windows laptop for work. It would be untenable.  

[Commodus]

On 4/1/2022 at 12:48 AM, UnironicChromeUser said:

Close to 2 months ago, I decided I needed a new laptop because my laptop's battery life was not enough. I'm in high school and use my laptop for nearly the entire day. My previous laptop was a fairly budget Asus Zenbook. The battery unfortunately barely lasted half the day. It had a Ryzen 5 3500U and 8GB of RAM. It was certainly good enough in terms of power, but battery life just killed it all for me. My choice of upgrade was the MacBook Air with an M1 processor. I really didn't need much more than the base 8GB of RAM, and I figured I could get external storage once I ran out. 

 

Pros

- Great performance with M1 chip, everything feels snappy

- No regrets with going 8GB of RAM instead of 16GB

- Battery could probably last me two days instead of two hours on my old laptop

- Great keyboard and trackpad

- Beautiful screen, 2560x1600 resolution is great and macOS scaling works well

- Build quality is solid

- Decent speakers

- Fanless 

 

Cons

- Slightly difficult to get used to macOS coming from Windows

- Not very good at gaming but that's expected

- Bad webcam

- Finder doesn't seem to be as functional as File Explorer on Windows

 

 

 

Have to echo this. My wife has the M1 Air, and even 1.5 years later it still strikes me as one of the best values in laptops. It's not so much that it's the best at any one thing as that it's great at most of them, and occasionally defies expectations. That it's as quick as it is while remaining fanless is one thing, but the battery life is sometimes ridiculous. My wife can go through a full day of work and a two-hour Zoom call without coming close to plugging in.

 

My only wish is that the eventual M2 model improves on this formula without taking any steps backward. The webcam will almost certainly be an improvement.

 

 

[rikitikitavi]

On 3/31/2022 at 9:48 PM, UnironicChromeUser said:

Finder doesn't seem to be as functional as File Explorer on Windows

Can you specify?

Fyi, some functionality in macOS/finder is hidden behind modifiers/shortcuts, for example such common things like merge folders and cut’n’paste files.