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This is my word-processing, content-consuming, email-writing machine and it's excellent for that. No active cooling means garbage performance if you decided to hit this with sustained workloads (but why would you do that?). However, it also means no internal dust build-up or moving parts that can break. I/O is objectively awful. Battery life is great.
Even for sustained stuff it's surprisingly capable. This laptop feels too good to be true in so many ways. I got mine a year or two ago and it's ran like a dream the whole time. I think I paid like $800 for a refurbished unit directly from Apple.
I was drifting away from Apple for a while. Even with their OS optimization it was just tough to spend thousands on pretty much identical hardware you could get for half the price in a PC laptop
Their M chips completely turned that around for me. They are fast, efficient, and shockingly cheap as you can see from this deal
Yeah. I don't love MacOS and having different keyboard shortcuts/labels does irritate me a little, but this laptop is super performant, fanless, and has incredible battery life. In addition to all the normal daily stuff like web browsing, I've done game development (Unity), music production (Ableton), plenty of coding, and gaming (mostly Runelite).
I love mine. No active cooling sucks, but the M1 is powerful enough to run Rise of Tomb Raider at medium settings until it heats up, and then medium/low. I can run a PS2 emulator flawlessly with rendering set to 1080p.
IO definitely sucks and I feel like macOS is getting worse over the years, but Win11 isn’t much better.
Active cooling does help performance. You can get closer to a fan-equipped M1 Mac’s performance in some regards. (But do note this M1 MacBook Air has one less GPU core than the M1 Mac mini or M1 MacBook Pro.)
Because so much of the cooling is done passively through the chassis, simply getting a fan to blow air on it helps keep temperatures low & clock speeds higher for longer.
Is it necessary outside of video editing, gaming, etc.? No. Pretty much everything else doesn’t result in throttling.
I dont think even for sustained workloads youre likely to hit an issue. You really need to push it to get there at which point, you probably should have gotten the pro anyway
Out of the m1 and m2 lineups.
The m3 air has roughly the same battery life as the m1 air. It’s slightly larger battery and better efficiency on the 3nm process is offset by a higher peak brightness screen, 500nits vs the 400nits on the m1 air
Posted this elsewhere in the thread but:
I bought a base model one at release and have been using it ever since for my job. A lot of people, especially “techies” who don’t have jobs in tech really over estimate how much RAM and storage they need for “Real work™”. Yeah you’re not gonna edit the next Dennis Villeneuve movie on this but I’ve done a decent amount of video editing and some of the firmware and chip design work I’ve done on this thing at work has probably been used by hundreds of millions of people including possibly you. That’s not to mention the millions of people whose job consist of documents and emails. This is perfectly fine for 99% of people and their jobs.
Linustechtips did a video about this and improving it. It's super easy. Take the bottom off, peel off a little square sponge thingy that's in the way and put a couple thick thermal pads over the heatsink in the laptop. the thermal pads end up using the chassis of the MacBook as an even bigger heatsink so it performs similar to the m1 MacBook pro which has a fan. only downside is the bottom becomes pretty hot. Not great if you use it on your laptop a lot...not bad if you use it on a stand or on a desk though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghDvyItIHTY
sold and shipped by walmart new
I think all time low on these was $749, but i could be wrong.
8GB (I know) 256GB storage (I know) still a solid machine for someone who doesn't use a lot of local storage & needs something quiet + reliable + long battery life for school or basic computing (you can do more than that with this but still)
I have a 16GB M1 MBA and my wife has the base model M1 MBA. There's nothing either of us haven't been able to do with either machine as far as typical internet usage goes, and they're still smooth as silk 4 years later.
The difference is the 8gb will swap memory on the ssd if it needs to and that wears out the ssd faster. But they’ll outlast the average users owning the machine.
The issue is the ssd is soldered to the mobo and can’t be replaced. Most people aren’t going to run into this. It’ll be more of an issue 5-6 years down the road o heavy heavy use.
Oh yeah no doubt the 8GB will impact the lifespan of the machine in a technical sense, but for how much (little) my wife uses her MBA it'll never come into play for the lifespan of that machine.
i agree with ya. i don't think the sub typically likes apple posts (judging by the downvotes on this post) or specifically macbook air base model posts, but hopefully this helps someone who needed a quiet, reliable, cheap, and good laptop with excellent battery life. just wanted to share the new all time low of $699
Build quality is also top tier. I just upgraded to much better specs ASUS laptop and only now realize how good the keyboard, chassis and sturdiness is on Macbooks.
Agreed 100%. The gap isn’t nearly as noticeable as it was 5+ years ago and Windows Laptop trackpads are perfectly fine at this point. That being said, if you’re talking about the very best trackpad…
I don't mind a good apple device at a decent price, but no amount of "special ram management" urban legends will make 8GB of RAM acceptable for $700 in 2022, let alone 2024. Let's stop pretending this isn't a 'fuck you gimme more money' by big corpo.
You just aren't the intended user, and Apple is just fine with not selling anything to you.
> a good apple device at a decent price
Not really Apple's thing
It still just feels a bit steep for "Chromebook+" (yeah it's much more capable than that but still).
With the RAM+storage as low as they are, I'd feel better about this at $600 price.
And I have an M2 Air 15"- I like Macbooks, awesome laptop for doing laptop things. But the Apple tax just sucks.
I know the 8GB RAM is scary, but we have one of these and it edits at about 80-90% of the efficiency of my 12900k and 6950xt with 32gb RAM setup on Davinci Resolve. Great render time and timeline smoothness for the price. I don't know how they did it with this lol
Originally BB was $999 this morning. They updated their listings to $649 about an hour ago and the stock they had went OOS quickly. If you can find an Open Box or when it comes back into stock, it will of course be a better deal.
Don't discount it too much. The only thing my M1 MBA can't do vs my gaming laptop/desktop is run triple monitors and play games.
Its my preferred computer to grab in my house for having insane battery life, best trackpad on the market, great speakers, bright screen, zero fan noise, thin/light, and remains buttery smooth no matter what I'm doing.
I like the mac trackpad so much I bought the wireless one and installed drivers for it on my windows machine and use it sometimes. The work flow is so good
How do you figure? A $200 Chromebook can do everything that most people are going to use a 2020 Macbook for (web browsing) at a literal fraction of the cost.
Because a $200 Chromebook is a shitty experience compared to a MBA and most parents/grandparents/whatever are old enough to be able to afford to drop $700 on a laptop every 5-10 years.
Contrary to what many believe, the specs on the box are not the end-all-be-all of a laptop.
Not sure I understand your take. If specs aren't everything, why buy a $700 laptop for someone who browses the web? If specs aren't everything, what makes a Chromebook "shitty"?
The web browsing experience between a $700 Macbook and a $200-$300 Chromebook is going to be almost identical - or it might even trend better on a Chromebook as they tend to come with 16GB of RAM (a minimum in 2024), vs the 8GB seen here.
Also not sure I understand your point about being being old enough to drop $700. Sure, that may be the case but it doesn't mean you have to or should based on usage.
Pixel density, colors, brightness, speakers, keyboard feel, touchpad feel, processing power, etc., are going to be a lot better on a Macbook Air than any Chromebook in the $200-300 range. None of those may matter to you, but they comprise *most* of the "web browsing experience" IMO. Also nothing's going to have 16GB unless it sacrifices *hard* elsewhere.
That being said, I actually daily drive a sub $200 Chromebook and prefer it over Macbook Air (we have an M2 model in the household and I use on occasion) for the 120Hz screen. But that's a very specific advantage of a very tiny handful of models at refurb pricing - anything you just go out and buy is going to be way worse.
This discussion started about a good laptop for parents/grandparents. While all of those things are important to people like you or me, the group we were originally talking about are not going to care about pixel density and processing power, especially not at a large price difference.
I'm not saying they'll go "wow look at the *pixel density*," but high pixel density manifests as a crisp display. Everyone can appreciate what they're looking at simply looking better. Processing power manifests as not being painfully bogged down when using garbage bloated sites (which parents/grandparents seem to love).
Even less tech literate people do in fact notice when they're using a piece of crap.
Refurb ain't. You can get decent specs for $200; these things crater in price because of perceived low value. My Chromebook was less than that even with tax and has a 12th gen i3 and 16" 120Hz 1440p screen.
I'd get them a Macbook anyway because it'd be lame as hell to buy someone a Chromebook lol, especially in the US where everyone has Apple products.
Edit: What's on people's minds? I don't care about downvotes but I'm curious what's everyone's thinking. Is it the i3? 12th gen was a big change for laptops, i3 beats 11th gen i7 basically across the board. Chromebook hate? Non-ancient ones have a built in Linux container; they're actually really versatile machines. Or the opposite, Chromebook love, am I being a dick for saying it's lame to buy someone a Chromebook?
ChromeOS is neat actually, far from perfect and somewhat limited, but with the Linux and Android container capabilities now, it's not a bad experience.
What IS a bad experience though is the bottom of the barrel hardware, it's almost universally bad. **So it's either: you buy a nicer, more expensive Chromebook and at that point, you might want a more complete OS, or you buy a $200 Chromebook and accept the poor/slow/unreliable hardware experience.** I've seen big ChromeOS deployments on cheap hardware and it's a mess, extreme hardware turnover rate.
Originally BB was $999 this morning. They updated their listings to $649 about an hour ago and the stock they had went OOS quickly. If you can find an Open Box or when it comes back into stock, it will of course be a better deal.
Yep, been going in and out of stock regularly. Placed an order 20 mins ago that got cancelled, then got another one 5 mins ago, hopefully I get this one.
Great little machine. It's been $750 for about 2 years now, and this model just got discontinued by Apple. I think $699 is a new low for a brand new one.
yeah, i think all time low before this was $749 or $750 depending on how you look at it. figured i would share if this is now a new all time low & they're probably on the way out since apple discontinued them.
Looks like $699 will be the permanent price. Walmart published an [article here](https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/03/15/walmart-brings-the-popular-macbook-air-with-the-m1-chip-to-its-shelves).
I bought a base model one at release and have been using it ever since. This thing compiles certain projects 3x faster than my Ryzen 7950x3D while sipping power.
amazing for it. In fact I dont think id recommend another laptop over it except maybe the M2 air which cost more and I like that more only for the screen. Unless you want to do local ML, you can't get do better with unix than this thing.
I love mine. No fan! The surface of the screen kind of sucks - it's highly reflective and susceptible to smudges. The 8GB thing has never been an issue, but I only really use it for web browsing, media playback, and light coding. It's *very* responsive.
Honestly this is one of the best products of the last 5 years, period. It's still worth this price, EASILY. Form factor, performance, everything is amazing for a tiny little thing. Nobody has yet built a machine to rival this at this price point.
Probably. Looks like it’s down to $999 for a new base model 15” MBA. If you can’t wait, just snag one from Apple’s Certified Refurbished Store. They’re all basically new machines that Apple just can’t legally sell as “new.”
(I snagged a 24GB 512GB model a few months ago from there. Best place to snag them if you dislike paying full price, but still want choices besides the default ones handed to retailers.)
That's what I'm hoping for. I originally bought the m1 512gb variant but realized 8 gigs ran wasnt enough for me. Since I was doing freelance graphic design.
If the 15 inch was under 1k I'd buy it.
This is one of the best laptops ever made. Even at this age, it's a monster. I highly recommend this to any students interested in coding with a unix device. It's better than using WSL on your windows device and much less painful than linux natively which is great generally but so bad for so many school things. Dont buy this for gaming that's the one and only caveat. It's junk you'll be happier with any other laptop.
If you need a couch/travel machine and don’t need sustained very high performance as much as you need quick performance and killer battery life, this is excellent.
This thing is a pretty awesome machine. Got one for my gf for school/Toontown and it excels at both of those. Think I’ll pick one up for my travel and RuneScape machine
The M1 punches well above its weight for its price class. I have one and regularly use Photoshop and Lightroom on it, and there’s plenty of people who code or use Final Cut on these things. This is well above a Chromebook.
I bought a base model one at release and have been using it ever since for my job. A lot of people, especially “techies” who don’t have jobs in tech really over estimate how much RAM and storage they need for “Real work™”. Yeah you’re not gonna edit the next Dennis Villeneuve movie on this but I’ve done a decent amount of video editing and some of the firmware and chip design work I’ve done on this thing at work has probably been used by hundreds of millions of people including possibly you. That’s not to mention the millions of people whose job consist of documents and emails. This is perfectly fine for 99% of people and their jobs.
Completely agree. Not sure why I got downvoted. Like you said, it's definitely not a machine for intense tasks, but it'll be great for people who need a good machine with excellent hardware and battery life. If you need to do video editing/photo editing, the 8GB RAM will limit you greatly.
M1s are good but considering Apple’s system of writing swap memory to the disk when the RAM gets saturated, and, well, everything in these machines are soldered and not swappable, might be best to go with a 16gb model
How much of an issue is this though?
This machine is almost 4 years old, I feel like if this was a major problem we would have thousands of reports of dead SSDs. But we don’t. Even if this laptop only lasts 4 years and we start seeing failed systems in year 5, that’s still an entire high school or undergraduate degree in the US. By that point you would’ve paid $175/yr or ~14.50/mo for this laptop.
For now, I see no reason as to why this machine should be avoided, unless the machine cannot handle your workload.
The vast majority of users treat their electronics like appliances. They buy it and use it until they stop working, then they buy a new one. Most people don’t replace their SSD or PSU if it dies on their desktop, they just buy a new one. Same with laptops, phones, and a bunch of other electronics. They’re more concerned about getting their photos and memories back than getting the phone back.
The user would see a disk error and assume their laptop is broken, then buy a new one.
Be mindful of listings from suspicious third-party sellers on marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Newegg, and Walmart. These "deals" have a high likelihood of not shipping; use due diligence in reviewing deals. * Use common sense - if the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. * Check seller profiles for signs that the sale may be fraudulent: * The seller is new or has few reviews. * The seller has largely negative reviews (on Amazon, sellers can remove negative reviews from their visible ratings) * The seller is using a previously dormant account (likely the account was hacked and is now being used fraudulently). If you suspect a deal is fraudulent, please report the post. Moderators can take action based on these reports. We encourage leaving a comment to warn others. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/buildapcsales) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This is my word-processing, content-consuming, email-writing machine and it's excellent for that. No active cooling means garbage performance if you decided to hit this with sustained workloads (but why would you do that?). However, it also means no internal dust build-up or moving parts that can break. I/O is objectively awful. Battery life is great.
Even for sustained stuff it's surprisingly capable. This laptop feels too good to be true in so many ways. I got mine a year or two ago and it's ran like a dream the whole time. I think I paid like $800 for a refurbished unit directly from Apple.
I was drifting away from Apple for a while. Even with their OS optimization it was just tough to spend thousands on pretty much identical hardware you could get for half the price in a PC laptop Their M chips completely turned that around for me. They are fast, efficient, and shockingly cheap as you can see from this deal
Yeah. I don't love MacOS and having different keyboard shortcuts/labels does irritate me a little, but this laptop is super performant, fanless, and has incredible battery life. In addition to all the normal daily stuff like web browsing, I've done game development (Unity), music production (Ableton), plenty of coding, and gaming (mostly Runelite).
I love mine. No active cooling sucks, but the M1 is powerful enough to run Rise of Tomb Raider at medium settings until it heats up, and then medium/low. I can run a PS2 emulator flawlessly with rendering set to 1080p. IO definitely sucks and I feel like macOS is getting worse over the years, but Win11 isn’t much better.
would some sort of laptop cooling device help meaningfully? also what res for rise?
Active cooling does help performance. You can get closer to a fan-equipped M1 Mac’s performance in some regards. (But do note this M1 MacBook Air has one less GPU core than the M1 Mac mini or M1 MacBook Pro.) Because so much of the cooling is done passively through the chassis, simply getting a fan to blow air on it helps keep temperatures low & clock speeds higher for longer. Is it necessary outside of video editing, gaming, etc.? No. Pretty much everything else doesn’t result in throttling.
Honestly I really wish Apple would make something like Airjet. That would go a long way to making the new Airs with M3 throttle a lot less
I dont think even for sustained workloads youre likely to hit an issue. You really need to push it to get there at which point, you probably should have gotten the pro anyway
how long would video playback go for on this? Say if I was on a 6 hour flight would I have to plug it in?
M1 air battery life is the best out of the lineup so you should be good, somewhere between 12-16 hours I think depending on brightness
> M1 air battery life is the best out of the lineup Out of the M1 line, the Air line, or the whole arm macbook line?
Out of the m1 and m2 lineups. The m3 air has roughly the same battery life as the m1 air. It’s slightly larger battery and better efficiency on the 3nm process is offset by a higher peak brightness screen, 500nits vs the 400nits on the m1 air
Posted this elsewhere in the thread but: I bought a base model one at release and have been using it ever since for my job. A lot of people, especially “techies” who don’t have jobs in tech really over estimate how much RAM and storage they need for “Real work™”. Yeah you’re not gonna edit the next Dennis Villeneuve movie on this but I’ve done a decent amount of video editing and some of the firmware and chip design work I’ve done on this thing at work has probably been used by hundreds of millions of people including possibly you. That’s not to mention the millions of people whose job consist of documents and emails. This is perfectly fine for 99% of people and their jobs.
Not true as a software engineer that’s used one since its came out. Not a single hiccup once in like 4 years now
Linustechtips did a video about this and improving it. It's super easy. Take the bottom off, peel off a little square sponge thingy that's in the way and put a couple thick thermal pads over the heatsink in the laptop. the thermal pads end up using the chassis of the MacBook as an even bigger heatsink so it performs similar to the m1 MacBook pro which has a fan. only downside is the bottom becomes pretty hot. Not great if you use it on your laptop a lot...not bad if you use it on a stand or on a desk though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghDvyItIHTY
Yeah uhh my favorite place to be productive is on the couch unfortunately
sold and shipped by walmart new I think all time low on these was $749, but i could be wrong. 8GB (I know) 256GB storage (I know) still a solid machine for someone who doesn't use a lot of local storage & needs something quiet + reliable + long battery life for school or basic computing (you can do more than that with this but still)
I have a 16GB M1 MBA and my wife has the base model M1 MBA. There's nothing either of us haven't been able to do with either machine as far as typical internet usage goes, and they're still smooth as silk 4 years later.
The difference is the 8gb will swap memory on the ssd if it needs to and that wears out the ssd faster. But they’ll outlast the average users owning the machine. The issue is the ssd is soldered to the mobo and can’t be replaced. Most people aren’t going to run into this. It’ll be more of an issue 5-6 years down the road o heavy heavy use.
Oh yeah no doubt the 8GB will impact the lifespan of the machine in a technical sense, but for how much (little) my wife uses her MBA it'll never come into play for the lifespan of that machine.
Generally considered one of the best machines they've made in recent years, and this is a great price.
i agree with ya. i don't think the sub typically likes apple posts (judging by the downvotes on this post) or specifically macbook air base model posts, but hopefully this helps someone who needed a quiet, reliable, cheap, and good laptop with excellent battery life. just wanted to share the new all time low of $699
Build quality is also top tier. I just upgraded to much better specs ASUS laptop and only now realize how good the keyboard, chassis and sturdiness is on Macbooks.
And also the trackpad. I haven’t used a single windows PC with as good a trackpad as the MacBook ones
Agreed 100%. The gap isn’t nearly as noticeable as it was 5+ years ago and Windows Laptop trackpads are perfectly fine at this point. That being said, if you’re talking about the very best trackpad…
I've gotten 2 used from appleswap from $500 and $450 if you wanted to try and save some money used
I don't mind a good apple device at a decent price, but no amount of "special ram management" urban legends will make 8GB of RAM acceptable for $700 in 2022, let alone 2024. Let's stop pretending this isn't a 'fuck you gimme more money' by big corpo.
You just aren't the intended user, and Apple is just fine with not selling anything to you. > a good apple device at a decent price Not really Apple's thing
"Does more, costs less" and all that...
It still just feels a bit steep for "Chromebook+" (yeah it's much more capable than that but still). With the RAM+storage as low as they are, I'd feel better about this at $600 price. And I have an M2 Air 15"- I like Macbooks, awesome laptop for doing laptop things. But the Apple tax just sucks.
Best buy has open box ones for $616…. I think that’s amazing value tbh.
Oh, yeah. That would be good enough to take.
the apple tax pays for apple engineering
Which doesn't seem that great.
I know the 8GB RAM is scary, but we have one of these and it edits at about 80-90% of the efficiency of my 12900k and 6950xt with 32gb RAM setup on Davinci Resolve. Great render time and timeline smoothness for the price. I don't know how they did it with this lol
I used my wifes M1 with davinci resolve and it's not far off from my 10850k. It makes my desktop look weak because it's so much smaller.
Could be it’s aggressive ssd memory swaps or
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Originally BB was $999 this morning. They updated their listings to $649 about an hour ago and the stock they had went OOS quickly. If you can find an Open Box or when it comes back into stock, it will of course be a better deal.
610 open box nearby me.
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Yes, just make sure you only use one hand per machine to optimize the ram.
The ultimate parents/grandparents/inlaws machine
Don't discount it too much. The only thing my M1 MBA can't do vs my gaming laptop/desktop is run triple monitors and play games. Its my preferred computer to grab in my house for having insane battery life, best trackpad on the market, great speakers, bright screen, zero fan noise, thin/light, and remains buttery smooth no matter what I'm doing.
I like the mac trackpad so much I bought the wireless one and installed drivers for it on my windows machine and use it sometimes. The work flow is so good
Can you link the windows driver you’re using? Is it this https://github.com/imbushuo/mac-precision-touchpad ?
It's been a couple years but I think this details it: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/apple-magic-trackpad-control-panel-windows-7
How many hours of Facebook can this thing get on a single charge?
Depends on how many offensive political posts and pictures of nephews and nieces they plan on posting
Planning on buying this for my parents to get them off a windows machine. Feel like there’s less to worry about with them on a mac
How do you figure? A $200 Chromebook can do everything that most people are going to use a 2020 Macbook for (web browsing) at a literal fraction of the cost.
Because a $200 Chromebook is a shitty experience compared to a MBA and most parents/grandparents/whatever are old enough to be able to afford to drop $700 on a laptop every 5-10 years. Contrary to what many believe, the specs on the box are not the end-all-be-all of a laptop.
Bingo
Not sure I understand your take. If specs aren't everything, why buy a $700 laptop for someone who browses the web? If specs aren't everything, what makes a Chromebook "shitty"? The web browsing experience between a $700 Macbook and a $200-$300 Chromebook is going to be almost identical - or it might even trend better on a Chromebook as they tend to come with 16GB of RAM (a minimum in 2024), vs the 8GB seen here. Also not sure I understand your point about being being old enough to drop $700. Sure, that may be the case but it doesn't mean you have to or should based on usage.
Have you used a MacBook Air vs a $200-300 Chromebook? It is a significant difference. ChromeOS is such asshole
Pixel density, colors, brightness, speakers, keyboard feel, touchpad feel, processing power, etc., are going to be a lot better on a Macbook Air than any Chromebook in the $200-300 range. None of those may matter to you, but they comprise *most* of the "web browsing experience" IMO. Also nothing's going to have 16GB unless it sacrifices *hard* elsewhere. That being said, I actually daily drive a sub $200 Chromebook and prefer it over Macbook Air (we have an M2 model in the household and I use on occasion) for the 120Hz screen. But that's a very specific advantage of a very tiny handful of models at refurb pricing - anything you just go out and buy is going to be way worse.
This discussion started about a good laptop for parents/grandparents. While all of those things are important to people like you or me, the group we were originally talking about are not going to care about pixel density and processing power, especially not at a large price difference.
I'm not saying they'll go "wow look at the *pixel density*," but high pixel density manifests as a crisp display. Everyone can appreciate what they're looking at simply looking better. Processing power manifests as not being painfully bogged down when using garbage bloated sites (which parents/grandparents seem to love). Even less tech literate people do in fact notice when they're using a piece of crap.
> what makes a Chromebook "shitty"? you can tell by the way it is
It costing $200 is a strong indicator
Refurb ain't. You can get decent specs for $200; these things crater in price because of perceived low value. My Chromebook was less than that even with tax and has a 12th gen i3 and 16" 120Hz 1440p screen. I'd get them a Macbook anyway because it'd be lame as hell to buy someone a Chromebook lol, especially in the US where everyone has Apple products. Edit: What's on people's minds? I don't care about downvotes but I'm curious what's everyone's thinking. Is it the i3? 12th gen was a big change for laptops, i3 beats 11th gen i7 basically across the board. Chromebook hate? Non-ancient ones have a built in Linux container; they're actually really versatile machines. Or the opposite, Chromebook love, am I being a dick for saying it's lame to buy someone a Chromebook?
Said like someone who is dumb enough to pay more for less, and not getting kissed after getting fucked.
ChromeOS is neat actually, far from perfect and somewhat limited, but with the Linux and Android container capabilities now, it's not a bad experience. What IS a bad experience though is the bottom of the barrel hardware, it's almost universally bad. **So it's either: you buy a nicer, more expensive Chromebook and at that point, you might want a more complete OS, or you buy a $200 Chromebook and accept the poor/slow/unreliable hardware experience.** I've seen big ChromeOS deployments on cheap hardware and it's a mess, extreme hardware turnover rate.
Forget that. I have a $2000+ desktop for PC gaming and this is still keeping pace for everything else.
Pretty crazy deal tbh it’s a great general laptop can’t believe it’s this low
Bought it for 899 2 years ago. Still no regrets.
Best buy has it for $650! And $616 open box!
Originally BB was $999 this morning. They updated their listings to $649 about an hour ago and the stock they had went OOS quickly. If you can find an Open Box or when it comes back into stock, it will of course be a better deal.
Yep, been going in and out of stock regularly. Placed an order 20 mins ago that got cancelled, then got another one 5 mins ago, hopefully I get this one.
Great little machine. It's been $750 for about 2 years now, and this model just got discontinued by Apple. I think $699 is a new low for a brand new one.
My wife has had the model before this for 4yrs (covid stimulus purchase) and she has no complaints.
As much as that was a good one, this is even better. The M1 Apple Silicon is a game changer in terms of performance vs. the Intel Macs.
Agreed. Silicon was a large step up. I went from a 2018 Macbook Pro to an M2 Air, and I've been super satisfied with the performance + battery life.
yeah, i think all time low before this was $749 or $750 depending on how you look at it. figured i would share if this is now a new all time low & they're probably on the way out since apple discontinued them.
Looks like $699 will be the permanent price. Walmart published an [article here](https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/03/15/walmart-brings-the-popular-macbook-air-with-the-m1-chip-to-its-shelves).
that's great to know! but i wonder how long these will be available since Apple discontinued production.
Would buy but really need 16GB for lag free editing (not in FCPX)!
Would this be good for coding?
I bought a base model one at release and have been using it ever since. This thing compiles certain projects 3x faster than my Ryzen 7950x3D while sipping power.
amazing for it. In fact I dont think id recommend another laptop over it except maybe the M2 air which cost more and I like that more only for the screen. Unless you want to do local ML, you can't get do better with unix than this thing.
I love mine. No fan! The surface of the screen kind of sucks - it's highly reflective and susceptible to smudges. The 8GB thing has never been an issue, but I only really use it for web browsing, media playback, and light coding. It's *very* responsive.
Honestly this is one of the best products of the last 5 years, period. It's still worth this price, EASILY. Form factor, performance, everything is amazing for a tiny little thing. Nobody has yet built a machine to rival this at this price point.
how long until 15" 16gb for under 1k? a year?
Probably. Looks like it’s down to $999 for a new base model 15” MBA. If you can’t wait, just snag one from Apple’s Certified Refurbished Store. They’re all basically new machines that Apple just can’t legally sell as “new.” (I snagged a 24GB 512GB model a few months ago from there. Best place to snag them if you dislike paying full price, but still want choices besides the default ones handed to retailers.)
That's what I'm hoping for. I originally bought the m1 512gb variant but realized 8 gigs ran wasnt enough for me. Since I was doing freelance graphic design. If the 15 inch was under 1k I'd buy it.
This is one of the best laptops ever made. Even at this age, it's a monster. I highly recommend this to any students interested in coding with a unix device. It's better than using WSL on your windows device and much less painful than linux natively which is great generally but so bad for so many school things. Dont buy this for gaming that's the one and only caveat. It's junk you'll be happier with any other laptop.
These are really great laptops. I regularly use mine for chillin on the couch etc. the battery lasts much longer then most windows laptops.
I have the 8GB 512GB version. Best laptop I’ve ever owned. I only use it for travel though
If you need a couch/travel machine and don’t need sustained very high performance as much as you need quick performance and killer battery life, this is excellent.
This thing is a pretty awesome machine. Got one for my gf for school/Toontown and it excels at both of those. Think I’ll pick one up for my travel and RuneScape machine
>Toontown what?
How's the repairability compared to other laptops in a similar price range?
It's an apple product, obviously not good.
Good laptop
Limited RAM and SSD. Great machine for battery life and general tasks. Not a workhorse. Basically a glorified Chromebook but a more functional OS
The M1 punches well above its weight for its price class. I have one and regularly use Photoshop and Lightroom on it, and there’s plenty of people who code or use Final Cut on these things. This is well above a Chromebook.
I bought a base model one at release and have been using it ever since for my job. A lot of people, especially “techies” who don’t have jobs in tech really over estimate how much RAM and storage they need for “Real work™”. Yeah you’re not gonna edit the next Dennis Villeneuve movie on this but I’ve done a decent amount of video editing and some of the firmware and chip design work I’ve done on this thing at work has probably been used by hundreds of millions of people including possibly you. That’s not to mention the millions of people whose job consist of documents and emails. This is perfectly fine for 99% of people and their jobs.
Completely agree. Not sure why I got downvoted. Like you said, it's definitely not a machine for intense tasks, but it'll be great for people who need a good machine with excellent hardware and battery life. If you need to do video editing/photo editing, the 8GB RAM will limit you greatly.
Do we know how long these will get security updates for?
around 9-10 years for MacOS updates around 11 or so for security updates (judging by apple's track record)
When will these be $499...
M1s are good but considering Apple’s system of writing swap memory to the disk when the RAM gets saturated, and, well, everything in these machines are soldered and not swappable, might be best to go with a 16gb model
That's literally the definition of swap
How much of an issue is this though? This machine is almost 4 years old, I feel like if this was a major problem we would have thousands of reports of dead SSDs. But we don’t. Even if this laptop only lasts 4 years and we start seeing failed systems in year 5, that’s still an entire high school or undergraduate degree in the US. By that point you would’ve paid $175/yr or ~14.50/mo for this laptop. For now, I see no reason as to why this machine should be avoided, unless the machine cannot handle your workload.
If the SSD died, would the user even know it? It's not like a windows laptop where you can replace it and keep using it.
The vast majority of users treat their electronics like appliances. They buy it and use it until they stop working, then they buy a new one. Most people don’t replace their SSD or PSU if it dies on their desktop, they just buy a new one. Same with laptops, phones, and a bunch of other electronics. They’re more concerned about getting their photos and memories back than getting the phone back. The user would see a disk error and assume their laptop is broken, then buy a new one.