5 ms·

After getting the initial M1 Air, I am still struggling to find a reason to replace it. Still going strong with no hiccups!

jghn 2y ago
Same. Each year I tell myself I'll get the new one. Each year when the new one comes out I notice that for what I use it for my M1 Air is still completely fine.
- mettamage 2y ago
  The real win for me is that Macbook Pro M1 64 GB are now sold on market places within my price range. So yea, same.
  - dmazin 2y ago
    What do you feel is a good price for that?
    - mettamage 2y ago
      In my case, 2000 euro's
  - coolThingsFirst 2y ago
    Hey, as for OMSCS. I did some research and I'm deferring for a semester but tbh my motivation is pretty low. As per perception it seems decent but depending on circumstances it's def a much better idea to do an on campus programme.
    - mettamage 2y ago
      Hey, thanks for talking about OMSCS :)
ohgr 2y ago
Yeah that. I only got rid of mine because I wanted the nice mini-LED screen on the 14" MBP. No plans to replace that one any time soon!
mrtksn 2y ago
With M1 Air, Apple had to blow us away. People, including me, had hard time believing Apple's claims and many people were coping by looking at the Keynote charts and assuming that Apple must have tricked everyone by not giving proper scale metrics etc. When people put their hands on the real device, it was slaying almost everything on the market and soon it was clear that this thing is a revolution. You don't one up this easily. Apple claims 2X performance improvement over M1 Air and I am sure its mostly true but that M1 Air was so ahead that for a lot of people workloads didn't catch up yet. At this very moment I have 3 Xcode projects open, Safari has 147 tabs open and its consuming 11GB of my 16GB Ram and my SSD lifetime dropped to 98% due to frequent swap hits and yet I'm perfectly fine with the performance at this very moment and I'm not looking for immediate replacement.
- financetechbro 2y ago
  How do you manage 147 open tabs and why have them all open at once?
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    Really bad habit, when I’m into something I open some tabs and if I switch to something else I keep opening new bunch of tabs. Once I no longer remember the older tabs I create a tab group from the current tabs in case there’s a tab I care about and start fresh.
  - apparent 2y ago
    I have several hundred open on my M2 MBA and have no problem. Maybe it's because I use Brave? I don't know but have never had to think too much about it. I also don't have much RAM (either the base amount or up a little). I do restart my browser once a month or so, if things ever feel less snappy than normal.
    - 946789987649 2y ago
      I think the question is why rather than physically how. Surely that amount of tabs is useless because you'll have duplicates, irrelevant things, etc.
kome 2y ago
After getting my 2015 macbook air 11' I am still struggling to find a reason to replace it. Still going strong with no hiccups!
- knowaveragejoe 2y ago
  Do you use it as a laptop, or is it hooked up as a desktop for the most part? If the former, I'd try one of the M series in the same role and see if you notice a difference in ergonomics.
  - kome 2y ago
    At this time (and historically), I mostly use it as a laptop, but I have also used it as a desktop for long periods with an external monitor. As a laptop, I love that it's so tiny. It’s working very well so far... but I’m afraid that at some point, I’ll have to switch to Linux or OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I’m still on macOS 11 (Big Sur). MS Office has already stopped updating, along with some other software (though not much, most still updates without issues). As long as Firefox keeps receiving updates for my system, most things will be fine.
    - knowaveragejoe 2y ago
      The battery life and performance improvements alone would be worth the upgrade to me at that point.
    - windowsrookie 2y ago
      MacOS up to version 13 runs well using OpenCore even on my 2010 iMac (I did upgrade it with a metal compatible GPU). Looks like the only issue with your MacBook Air is there may be some metal issues. https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/issues/1008 https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/issues/1... If those don't look like a problem for you, I'd definitely suggest giving it a try. MacOS 13 should give you at least 3 more years of use out of it. Going beyond MacOS 13 I don't think is worth it. MacOS 14 is noticeably slower on my 2010 iMac, and there aren't any new features it can take advantage of anyways.
netcraft 2y ago
agreed, which is awesome, the only thing that worries me is that they will drop support for it earlier than they have to when they want to force people to upgrade eventually. I hope to get 10 years out of my M1
Hamuko 2y ago
My M1 Max Mac Studio also feels very good even though it's probably full of dust and cleaning it isn't reasonable.
Spunkie 2y ago
Everyone I know that got an M1 cheaped out on the 8gb model and are now struggling to use a browser with heavy sites and multitasking(zoom) at the same time. But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.
- postexitus 2y ago
  Cries in 4Gb Macbook Air 2013 /s I am fine(ish) with the above setup, I don't know what you are talking about. 8Gb is plenty for website browsing.
  - snovymgodym 2y ago
    That's a rough era, new enough to have soldered RAM and old enough that Apple felt ok with 4GB in a base model.
  - Spunkie 2y ago
    It isn't depending on what "web browsing" someone is doing, which can be a pretty wide range now. 1 persons "web browsing" is no browser extensions, a couple of gmail tabs, some light blog reading, and maybe something as heavy as reddit. While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that. 8gb is quickly becoming unworkable for people that fall closer to the latter group.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      > While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that. That's computing, not web browsing. And on not so great platform than that.
    - 2y ago
paxys 2y ago
Nor should you have a reason to replace it. The device is barely 4 years old. There was a time until very recently when laptops would be expected to last 10+ years minimum with minor RAM and SSD updates.
- dannyw 2y ago
  I don’t know when that time was. Hardware and software requirements have been moving fast for just about forever, until actually maybe the past 5 years. There was never a time when laptops were expected to last 10+ years.
ramijames 2y ago
This is where I am, too. I have an M1 Pro and I have never loved a computer more. This thing is a beast and just about anything I throw at it is fine. I can't imagine how much better the M4 is. Unless this computer gets stolen or doused with water, I'll probably have it for at least another 3-4 years. Absolutely amazing value for my money.
metta2uall 2y ago
I'm still happily using an 8GB M1 running Firefox in OSX + Firefox/VSCode/NodeJS in a Debian VM. Lots of tabs open. Both OSX and Debian can use compressed RAM.
- ohhnoodont 2y ago
  What software are you using for virtualization? I wasn't impressed with the Apple Silicon options last time I looked.

jghn 2y ago

Same. Each year I tell myself I'll get the new one. Each year when the new one comes out I notice that for what I use it for my M1 Air is still completely fine.

mettamage 2y ago
The real win for me is that Macbook Pro M1 64 GB are now sold on market places within my price range. So yea, same.
- dmazin 2y ago
  What do you feel is a good price for that?
  - mettamage 2y ago
    In my case, 2000 euro's
- coolThingsFirst 2y ago
  Hey, as for OMSCS. I did some research and I'm deferring for a semester but tbh my motivation is pretty low. As per perception it seems decent but depending on circumstances it's def a much better idea to do an on campus programme.
  - mettamage 2y ago
    Hey, thanks for talking about OMSCS :)

ohgr 2y ago

Yeah that. I only got rid of mine because I wanted the nice mini-LED screen on the 14" MBP. No plans to replace that one any time soon!

mrtksn 2y ago

With M1 Air, Apple had to blow us away. People, including me, had hard time believing Apple's claims and many people were coping by looking at the Keynote charts and assuming that Apple must have tricked everyone by not giving proper scale metrics etc. When people put their hands on the real device, it was slaying almost everything on the market and soon it was clear that this thing is a revolution. You don't one up this easily. Apple claims 2X performance improvement over M1 Air and I am sure its mostly true but that M1 Air was so ahead that for a lot of people workloads didn't catch up yet. At this very moment I have 3 Xcode projects open, Safari has 147 tabs open and its consuming 11GB of my 16GB Ram and my SSD lifetime dropped to 98% due to frequent swap hits and yet I'm perfectly fine with the performance at this very moment and I'm not looking for immediate replacement.

financetechbro 2y ago
How do you manage 147 open tabs and why have them all open at once?
- mrtksn 2y ago
  Really bad habit, when I’m into something I open some tabs and if I switch to something else I keep opening new bunch of tabs. Once I no longer remember the older tabs I create a tab group from the current tabs in case there’s a tab I care about and start fresh.
- apparent 2y ago
  I have several hundred open on my M2 MBA and have no problem. Maybe it's because I use Brave? I don't know but have never had to think too much about it. I also don't have much RAM (either the base amount or up a little). I do restart my browser once a month or so, if things ever feel less snappy than normal.
  - 946789987649 2y ago
    I think the question is why rather than physically how. Surely that amount of tabs is useless because you'll have duplicates, irrelevant things, etc.

kome 2y ago

After getting my 2015 macbook air 11' I am still struggling to find a reason to replace it. Still going strong with no hiccups!

knowaveragejoe 2y ago
Do you use it as a laptop, or is it hooked up as a desktop for the most part? If the former, I'd try one of the M series in the same role and see if you notice a difference in ergonomics.
- kome 2y ago
  At this time (and historically), I mostly use it as a laptop, but I have also used it as a desktop for long periods with an external monitor. As a laptop, I love that it's so tiny. It’s working very well so far... but I’m afraid that at some point, I’ll have to switch to Linux or OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I’m still on macOS 11 (Big Sur). MS Office has already stopped updating, along with some other software (though not much, most still updates without issues). As long as Firefox keeps receiving updates for my system, most things will be fine.
  - knowaveragejoe 2y ago
    The battery life and performance improvements alone would be worth the upgrade to me at that point.
  - windowsrookie 2y ago
    MacOS up to version 13 runs well using OpenCore even on my 2010 iMac (I did upgrade it with a metal compatible GPU). Looks like the only issue with your MacBook Air is there may be some metal issues. https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/issues/1008 https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/issues/1... If those don't look like a problem for you, I'd definitely suggest giving it a try. MacOS 13 should give you at least 3 more years of use out of it. Going beyond MacOS 13 I don't think is worth it. MacOS 14 is noticeably slower on my 2010 iMac, and there aren't any new features it can take advantage of anyways.

netcraft 2y ago

agreed, which is awesome, the only thing that worries me is that they will drop support for it earlier than they have to when they want to force people to upgrade eventually. I hope to get 10 years out of my M1

Hamuko 2y ago

My M1 Max Mac Studio also feels very good even though it's probably full of dust and cleaning it isn't reasonable.

Spunkie 2y ago

Everyone I know that got an M1 cheaped out on the 8gb model and are now struggling to use a browser with heavy sites and multitasking(zoom) at the same time. But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.

postexitus 2y ago
Cries in 4Gb Macbook Air 2013 /s I am fine(ish) with the above setup, I don't know what you are talking about. 8Gb is plenty for website browsing.
- snovymgodym 2y ago
  That's a rough era, new enough to have soldered RAM and old enough that Apple felt ok with 4GB in a base model.
- Spunkie 2y ago
  It isn't depending on what "web browsing" someone is doing, which can be a pretty wide range now. 1 persons "web browsing" is no browser extensions, a couple of gmail tabs, some light blog reading, and maybe something as heavy as reddit. While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that. 8gb is quickly becoming unworkable for people that fall closer to the latter group.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    > While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that. That's computing, not web browsing. And on not so great platform than that.
  - 2y ago

paxys 2y ago

Nor should you have a reason to replace it. The device is barely 4 years old. There was a time until very recently when laptops would be expected to last 10+ years minimum with minor RAM and SSD updates.

dannyw 2y ago
I don’t know when that time was. Hardware and software requirements have been moving fast for just about forever, until actually maybe the past 5 years. There was never a time when laptops were expected to last 10+ years.

ramijames 2y ago

This is where I am, too. I have an M1 Pro and I have never loved a computer more. This thing is a beast and just about anything I throw at it is fine. I can't imagine how much better the M4 is. Unless this computer gets stolen or doused with water, I'll probably have it for at least another 3-4 years. Absolutely amazing value for my money.

metta2uall 2y ago

I'm still happily using an 8GB M1 running Firefox in OSX + Firefox/VSCode/NodeJS in a Debian VM. Lots of tabs open. Both OSX and Debian can use compressed RAM.

ohhnoodont 2y ago
What software are you using for virtualization? I wasn't impressed with the Apple Silicon options last time I looked.