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You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less tha

You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years. It's under $20/mo if we bin it in 3.5 years. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m1-chip-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-space-gray/5721600.p?skuId=5721600 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m... I feel like the Chromebook on the lower end is great for a lot of uses/people and the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up. Looking at the best selling laptops at Microcenter, they're $600, $700, $700, $1100, $800, $800, $750, $900... Having an M1 Air slotted in at $800 seems right in-line with the market.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
8GB is pretty sad though and it’s soldered on with no ability to upgrade
- The_Colonel 4y ago
  Especially if you plan to use it for next 5 years. Perhaps if you're sure you don't want to do anything other than web browsing, but then maybe you don't actually need the M1. BTW, the cheapest M1 Air (8 GB RAM) in Austria is 1200 EUR.
- shinycode 4y ago
  But it’s more than RAM and it’s enough even for web dev so for most people it’s way enough
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I tried to do web dev on an 8GB Mac and it wasn't fun. If you use an IDE, it will be constrained for memory if you have things like browser windows open, you will have a bad time if you try to open multiple projects and running Docker made it all worse. Virtual machines were out of the question which made mobile app development difficult. If you can stick with a terminal or some lightweight editors, 8GB might be okay for you, but I feel like 8GB has been pushing it for at least 5 or more years now.
    - danaris 4y ago
      Did you try it on an Apple Silicon Mac? There was a lot of discussion of this at the time the M1s first came out, with loads of people (who had never touched one) confidently declaring that 8GB of RAM was far too little...and then nearly everyone who actually bought an 8GB M1 Mac saying "yeah, it might not handle heavy loads well, but that's what the Pro machines are for—in normal use, it has no problem at all with 8GB." And then a bunch more people talking in a fair amount of detail (that kind of went over my head) about what Apple did to improve memory management with the M1 so that this would be possible. So don't assume that 8GB on an Intel Mac is the same as 8GB on an Apple Silicon Mac. Now, it does sound like you were trying to run a whole bunch of rather heavy stuff on it—y'know, the stuff that one might call "pro", and possibly even buy a "pro" machine for? The kind of thing where if you're buying the absolute bottom of the line, you might be able to expect that it wouldn't work well.
      - shinycode 4y ago
        I don’t assume, I currently have a MacBook Pro M1 with 8gb of ram. It all depends on what kind of tools and IDE you have. When I avoid a having 50 tabs on chrome and only the apps I need it’s perfectly usable for web dev. Of course 16go is more confortable but I’m working with 8 with no problem on light web dev.
      - bernawil 4y ago
        I honestly think it was all just hype, or some sort of FOMO of every reviewer not jumping on the M1 hype-train. I own a base Macbook Pro 14", 16GB RAM. If anything, it feels like less than 16GB (maybe because the shared video memory or macos bloat) saved by the fast SSD that's inevitably going to fail not too far and turn the laptop into e-waste. I feel like every single talk point of the early review cycle was a huge exaggeration: 1. battery life just browsing the web is no more than 4/5 hours. Like any other windows laptop. 2. Performance is really nothing special really. Things like maximizing/minimizing a youtube video are choppy and lag for 2/3 seconds. I mean, it's still the best value in the market for the screen, keyboard, chassis, speakers combo but Apple Silicon is extremely overrated.
      - heavyset_go 4y ago
- unregistereddev 4y ago
  Agreed. My personal laptop has 8GB of ram. It's fine for web browsing, sorta usable-ish for light development, but limiting for power use. I bought my laptop in 2015. This underscores your point: Buy something upgradable with decent specs and you'll get a lot more bang for your buck.
shortrounddev 4y ago
> 5 years Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep going until they physically break. But what everyone here is missing is that the consumer desktop/laptop market is dying itself. Soon it will only be for enterprise uses and gaming. Most people do all their computing through a phone or tablet. I know people who don't own a laptop.
- zpeti 4y ago
  This is the opposite of my experience. My wife still easily uses my old Mac that’s 8 years old. No performance issues. Most windows machines I had worked for around 3 years. 5 max.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    All my Windows machines from 2009 are still pretty much ok, while having been upgraded to Windows 10, came with Windows 7, and went through 8 and 8.1 as well.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  > Windows machines keep going until they physically break. That's interesting, as I just this month replaced the two kids' Dell 9020s with new PCs because the 9020s didn't support TPM 2.0, required by Windows 11. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-on-your-pc-1fd5a332-360d-4f46-a1e7-ae6b0c90645c https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-o... "Most PCs that have shipped in the last 5 years are capable of running Trusted Platform Module version 2.0 (TPM 2.0). TPM 2.0 is required to run Windows 11, as an important building block for security-related features. TPM 2.0 is used in Windows 11 for a number of features, including Windows Hello for identity protection and BitLocker for data protection." The 9 year old Dells were running just fine on Windows 10 (same as the 9 year old Air was on Catalina), but upgrading to the latest OS in both cases required a purchase.
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    I'm curious why you felt you needed to upgrade. To my knowledge Windows 11 doesn't do anything that Windows 10 cannot, except for support Intel e cores.
thfuran 4y ago
I struggle now with 16 GB on my work laptop. 8 is absolutely anemic for anyone planning to get several years out of a machine.
- omnimus 4y ago
  I have 8gig and its completely fine for webdev work. Its faster machine than my desktop. It has to be completely fine for majority of work people do on computers.
heavyset_go 4y ago
You could buy a laptop with 16GB to 32GB of memory and more than double the storage space for $800, and you can buy laptops that you can actually upgrade the hardware on. You can also spend less and get a similarly spec'd laptop. I just picked up a new laptop with 16GB/1TB and 8 cores for $500 and upgraded it to 64GB of memory for $100. I bought a low end Mac in 2015 with the same 8GB/256GB specs, 8GB wasn't enough even for browsing/chat/media/etc at the same time, and the storage space gets eaten up by the macOS base system and apps.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I have an 8GB/256GB 2015 MacBook Air. I use it for web browsing, messaging, spreadsheets, watching media, email, and photos. It has worked fine for me the whole time, and I usually have it connected to an external display. I doubt 80%, maybe even 90%, of the population needs anything more than that.
- temac 4y ago
  If all that matter to you is RAM and HD space, you can as well buy a cheap desktop tower. As for "similarly spec'd" laptops if you put good perf and low consumption in the equation, they just do not exist. Yes Intel Mac were not extremely interesting at least on the CPU + GPU + RAM + HD + power side of the equation. The M1/M2 is - esp if you also value a decent screen. And the M1 + 8GB is reasonable depending what you are doing with it.
- philistine 4y ago
  What about the most important laptop spec: the case. Is your 500$ laptop using a metal case, or are you stuck in plastic city?
  - nikau 4y ago
    Yes, the most important spec is a material for a case that cant absorb impact.
    - philistine 4y ago
surgical_fire 4y ago
> That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years My mom uses a cheap Dell laptop that is 10 years old. I bought at the time for around 350 dollars is memory serves (it was in a different currency, so it is hard to do the conversion). She is non-technical, and it absolutely suits her needs to this day. Only thing I did in terms of maintenance was buying a new battery. The cheapest Mac just won't get the same cost/lifespan ratio. Keep in mind that the vast majority of users are non-technical.
KomoD 4y ago
> You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. > the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up. Costs $1575 in my country, and significantly worse spec than laptops in the same price range
alpaca128 4y ago
> You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum Some people simply do not care about tech to a point where almmost any price is too high. I just had to persuade a relative to spend $250 to replace a 16+ years old Intel Core Duo with an HDD. It takes 2 minutes to open a browser window on that thing and she didn't even consider that a problem. The replacement will probably last until it refuses to boot.

coffeebeqn 4y ago

8GB is pretty sad though and it’s soldered on with no ability to upgrade

The_Colonel 4y ago
Especially if you plan to use it for next 5 years. Perhaps if you're sure you don't want to do anything other than web browsing, but then maybe you don't actually need the M1. BTW, the cheapest M1 Air (8 GB RAM) in Austria is 1200 EUR.
shinycode 4y ago
But it’s more than RAM and it’s enough even for web dev so for most people it’s way enough
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I tried to do web dev on an 8GB Mac and it wasn't fun. If you use an IDE, it will be constrained for memory if you have things like browser windows open, you will have a bad time if you try to open multiple projects and running Docker made it all worse. Virtual machines were out of the question which made mobile app development difficult. If you can stick with a terminal or some lightweight editors, 8GB might be okay for you, but I feel like 8GB has been pushing it for at least 5 or more years now.
  - danaris 4y ago
    Did you try it on an Apple Silicon Mac? There was a lot of discussion of this at the time the M1s first came out, with loads of people (who had never touched one) confidently declaring that 8GB of RAM was far too little...and then nearly everyone who actually bought an 8GB M1 Mac saying "yeah, it might not handle heavy loads well, but that's what the Pro machines are for—in normal use, it has no problem at all with 8GB." And then a bunch more people talking in a fair amount of detail (that kind of went over my head) about what Apple did to improve memory management with the M1 so that this would be possible. So don't assume that 8GB on an Intel Mac is the same as 8GB on an Apple Silicon Mac. Now, it does sound like you were trying to run a whole bunch of rather heavy stuff on it—y'know, the stuff that one might call "pro", and possibly even buy a "pro" machine for? The kind of thing where if you're buying the absolute bottom of the line, you might be able to expect that it wouldn't work well.
    - shinycode 4y ago
      I don’t assume, I currently have a MacBook Pro M1 with 8gb of ram. It all depends on what kind of tools and IDE you have. When I avoid a having 50 tabs on chrome and only the apps I need it’s perfectly usable for web dev. Of course 16go is more confortable but I’m working with 8 with no problem on light web dev.
    - bernawil 4y ago
      I honestly think it was all just hype, or some sort of FOMO of every reviewer not jumping on the M1 hype-train. I own a base Macbook Pro 14", 16GB RAM. If anything, it feels like less than 16GB (maybe because the shared video memory or macos bloat) saved by the fast SSD that's inevitably going to fail not too far and turn the laptop into e-waste. I feel like every single talk point of the early review cycle was a huge exaggeration: 1. battery life just browsing the web is no more than 4/5 hours. Like any other windows laptop. 2. Performance is really nothing special really. Things like maximizing/minimizing a youtube video are choppy and lag for 2/3 seconds. I mean, it's still the best value in the market for the screen, keyboard, chassis, speakers combo but Apple Silicon is extremely overrated.
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
unregistereddev 4y ago
Agreed. My personal laptop has 8GB of ram. It's fine for web browsing, sorta usable-ish for light development, but limiting for power use. I bought my laptop in 2015. This underscores your point: Buy something upgradable with decent specs and you'll get a lot more bang for your buck.

shortrounddev 4y ago

> 5 years Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep going until they physically break. But what everyone here is missing is that the consumer desktop/laptop market is dying itself. Soon it will only be for enterprise uses and gaming. Most people do all their computing through a phone or tablet. I know people who don't own a laptop.

zpeti 4y ago
This is the opposite of my experience. My wife still easily uses my old Mac that’s 8 years old. No performance issues. Most windows machines I had worked for around 3 years. 5 max.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  All my Windows machines from 2009 are still pretty much ok, while having been upgraded to Windows 10, came with Windows 7, and went through 8 and 8.1 as well.
sokoloff 4y ago
> Windows machines keep going until they physically break. That's interesting, as I just this month replaced the two kids' Dell 9020s with new PCs because the 9020s didn't support TPM 2.0, required by Windows 11. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-on-your-pc-1fd5a332-360d-4f46-a1e7-ae6b0c90645c https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-o... "Most PCs that have shipped in the last 5 years are capable of running Trusted Platform Module version 2.0 (TPM 2.0). TPM 2.0 is required to run Windows 11, as an important building block for security-related features. TPM 2.0 is used in Windows 11 for a number of features, including Windows Hello for identity protection and BitLocker for data protection." The 9 year old Dells were running just fine on Windows 10 (same as the 9 year old Air was on Catalina), but upgrading to the latest OS in both cases required a purchase.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  I'm curious why you felt you needed to upgrade. To my knowledge Windows 11 doesn't do anything that Windows 10 cannot, except for support Intel e cores.

thfuran 4y ago

I struggle now with 16 GB on my work laptop. 8 is absolutely anemic for anyone planning to get several years out of a machine.

omnimus 4y ago
I have 8gig and its completely fine for webdev work. Its faster machine than my desktop. It has to be completely fine for majority of work people do on computers.

heavyset_go 4y ago

You could buy a laptop with 16GB to 32GB of memory and more than double the storage space for $800, and you can buy laptops that you can actually upgrade the hardware on. You can also spend less and get a similarly spec'd laptop. I just picked up a new laptop with 16GB/1TB and 8 cores for $500 and upgraded it to 64GB of memory for $100. I bought a low end Mac in 2015 with the same 8GB/256GB specs, 8GB wasn't enough even for browsing/chat/media/etc at the same time, and the storage space gets eaten up by the macOS base system and apps.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
I have an 8GB/256GB 2015 MacBook Air. I use it for web browsing, messaging, spreadsheets, watching media, email, and photos. It has worked fine for me the whole time, and I usually have it connected to an external display. I doubt 80%, maybe even 90%, of the population needs anything more than that.
temac 4y ago
If all that matter to you is RAM and HD space, you can as well buy a cheap desktop tower. As for "similarly spec'd" laptops if you put good perf and low consumption in the equation, they just do not exist. Yes Intel Mac were not extremely interesting at least on the CPU + GPU + RAM + HD + power side of the equation. The M1/M2 is - esp if you also value a decent screen. And the M1 + 8GB is reasonable depending what you are doing with it.
philistine 4y ago
What about the most important laptop spec: the case. Is your 500$ laptop using a metal case, or are you stuck in plastic city?
- nikau 4y ago
  Yes, the most important spec is a material for a case that cant absorb impact.
  - philistine 4y ago

surgical_fire 4y ago

> That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years My mom uses a cheap Dell laptop that is 10 years old. I bought at the time for around 350 dollars is memory serves (it was in a different currency, so it is hard to do the conversion). She is non-technical, and it absolutely suits her needs to this day. Only thing I did in terms of maintenance was buying a new battery. The cheapest Mac just won't get the same cost/lifespan ratio. Keep in mind that the vast majority of users are non-technical.

KomoD 4y ago

> You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. > the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up. Costs $1575 in my country, and significantly worse spec than laptops in the same price range

alpaca128 4y ago

> You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum Some people simply do not care about tech to a point where almmost any price is too high. I just had to persuade a relative to spend $250 to replace a 16+ years old Intel Core Duo with an HDD. It takes 2 minutes to open a browser window on that thing and she didn't even consider that a problem. The replacement will probably last until it refuses to boot.