MacBook Air M1

My ARM64 experiment started in 2020 with the MacBook Air M1 and I have not looked back. ARM on the desktop or your lap is possible.

[...] I have my MacBook Air M1's screen break overnight (the "bendgate"), without any reason, after 13 months. I didn't buy the extended two years warranty. I was one-month off warranty. On a MacBook Air M1 I paid something like 1000 EUR VAT included (don't remember the exact price but in that ballpark), they were asking 700 EUR to fix the screen. [...]

I replaced the keyboard MacBook Air M1 keyboard with a $20 model from Amazon and it's been going strong for a full year. [...] The board is riveted in, but there are enough screws to hold the replacement in place. [...] Keyboard: (price has gone up). [...]

[...] I hope they fixed the ultra brittle screens of their Macbook lineup. I bought a MacBook Air M1 a few years ago and I've been royally pissed off when, after 13 months (one month out of warrant in my case/country) the "bendgate" hit me: the screen died overnight, without any reason (was fine the day before, woke up: screen dead. [...] Unless I can be convinced that this time the screen isn't going to die overnight. [...]

I doubt anyone learning to program would need to subscribe to a remote dev machine just to run hello world type programs. From 2020-2023 I used an 8GB Macbook Air M1 to develop a lot of relatively heavy software, containers in the background too, and it wasn't a bad experience.

[...] As I'm a heavy desktop user, my laptop is typically with me on the couch or on vacation. Enter my MacBook Air M1: after 13 months, and sadly no extended warranty, the screen broke for no reason overnight. I literally closed it before going to bed and when I opened the lid the next day: screen broken. [...] And every single time I demo it to people I take the screen, I bent it left and right. [...] I happen to have this laptop (not my vid) and look at 34 seconds in the vid: The guy literally throws my laptop (well, the same) down concrete stairs and the thing still just works fine. The friend who sold it to me (I bought it used) one day stepped on it when he woke up. [...] I'm trading a retina display any day for a display that doesn't break when it accidentally falls on the ground. Now I love the look and the incredible speed of the MacBook Air laptops (I still have my M1 but has its screen broke, I turned it into a desktop) but I really wish they were not desk queens: we've got desktops for that. [...]

I have the same experience here with my MacBook Air M1 from 2020 with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. [...] I use this as my main machine with 2 displays attached via a TB4 dock. [...] The new machines are either fast and loud and hot and with poor battery life, or they are slow and "warm" and have moderate battery life. But I had no business laptop yet, ARM, AMD, or Intel, which can even compete with the M1 Air, not to speak of the M3 Pro! [...] Think about it: Windows 11 or Linux in a VM is even faster, snappier, more silent, and has even longer battery life than these systems native on a business machine from Lenovo, HP, or Dell. [...]

My MacBook Air M1 is as smooth as ever four years later. I am going to run this thing into the ground like my Corolla.

When I say my MacBook Air m1 was the best purchase I’ve ever made in life. [...] It’s hands down the best piece of technology I own. [...] Still runs everything I need like I bought it yesterday. [...]

I got my first ever mac (MacBook Air M1, $800) last year and... [...]

[...] Around 2015 I bought one of the very first consumer motherboard with a NVMe M.2 slot and put a Samsung 950 Pro in it: that was quite something (now I was upgrading the entire machine, not just the SSD, so there's that too). [...] There's likely even better out there and they're easy to find: they're still reasonably priced. [...] one), a no-name NVMe SSD and a laptop's battery. Oh and my MacBook Air M1's screen died overnight for no reason after precisely 13 months, when I had a warranty of 12 months, (some refer to it as the "bendgate") but that's because first gen MacBook Air M1 were indescribable pieces of fragile shit. I think Apple got their act together and came up with better screens in later models. [...] And used parts for your PC from 2014 wouldn't be expensive on eBay anyway. You're not forced to upgrade to a last gen PC with DDR5 (atm 3x overpriced) and a 5090 GPU.

[...] My original mainboard was from the first batch with the bios battery issues but still works, though I haven't had success getting it to run standalone in the coolmaster case yet. I'm happy with my framework 13 four years later. I might switch to the stiffer hinge and/or a matte screen in the future. Might try one of the AMD mainboards in a few generations when they're cheaper and put my current mainboard into another case... Edit: FWIW I bought a macbook air M1 a year after getting the framework 13, and ended up selling it. The battery life on the macbook air was significantly better, but I can still spend an entire workday in the park with the glossy framework 13 without needing to recharge so the extra battery life from the M1 didn't really have a ton of value for me.

[...] I've been on a Macbook M1 Air for the last few years and wanted multiple screens, so I got a USB 3 hub (Dell D6000) which does DisplayLink. I had almost everything hooked in there, but still connected one screen direct via usb-c. Displaylink is good for an M1 as you can add loads of screens if you want, but you can't watch streaming services on them as MacOs thinks your screen is being 'watched'. I did want a thunderbolt hub but as far as I could tell at the time Thunderbolt and Displaylink just didn't come in the same package, so I was stuck with two cables. Three years on, I picked up an M4 machine that can do two external screens natively, great, I can reach my goal of only plugging one cable into my macbook. [...] I picked up an HP TB3 refurb (HP P5Q58AA) which was cheap (30 AUD) and seemed great on paper, only to find it needed a type of power adaptor I didn't have that put me back another 60 bucks, and when I got it all hooked up it didn't always work and couldn't support decent refresh rates on my monitors, with one always being stuck at 30Hz. There was a software update available, but for that you need a windows machine with a TB3 port, not something I have. [...] There is no HDMI or Displayport on this thing, but my monitors both have USB-C in so... [...]

I am using a MacBook Air M1 with 8 GB so I know about that. [...] Now six years later, we are still with 8 GB. [...]

In NL I can buy a base Macbook Air with 16G memory and 512G SSD voor 1199,- inc tax. I just looked up my M1 receipt: in 2020 I bought a Macbook Air M1 with 16G memory and 512G SSD for 1399,- inc tax. I did not expect the price for a base machine to go down in 2026.

I was on Sequoia as well, and just updated ... [...] The other thing I have noticed is scrolling in Firefox is more choppy, and animations are more Janky than Sequoia on this old MacBook Air M1.

I did not really walk away from this post having gained anything Then my comment won't help you much: since I swapped my MacBook Air M1's 27" monitor for a 34" one from the same brand, it's only been the exact clusterfuck of unreliable "wake up not working properly anymore" for no friggin' reason. Except in my case it was working fine, and now it's not anymore.

I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using it. I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. [...] I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. [...] A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time. [...]

I worked at a hyperscaler when the M1 came out. A MacBook Air M1, running a Linux VM was faster and more energy efficient than anything we had in the data center.

I have been using an 8GB Macbook Air M1 for non-development work, and it has been fantastic. Macos really excels at managing memory very well.

I daily-drive a base level MacBook Air M1 with 8GB RAM for writing docs and some light coding in VIM/VSCode. [...]

Yeah - this easily replaces the Macbook Air M1, which I only use for traveling. I am hoping the battery life is just as insanely good.

Fwiw i have an 8gb macbook air m1 with 8gb and it’s pretty decent. [...] The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.

I have a 2020 MacBook Air M1 with 16GB RAM - for development work, there is 0 reason to upgrade it. All day battery, silent, small, no lag...

[...] I spent the last few months building Kernx, a high-performance Java runtime designed for deterministic AI agent workloads. [...] The Results: On a standard local machine (MacBook Air M1), it sustains 66,000 requests/second with sub-1ms p99 latency. [...] I am looking for feedback on the architecture and the decision to use Scoped Values for memory safety. [...]

[...] And they make good AR-15s (but not cheap). Anyone who thinks the triggers listed as MIL-SPEC from, say, Geissele here: aren't totally fine is out of his mind. They're amazing triggers, widely used and loved. [...] Its screen never broke overnight like the one of my MacBook M1 Air did (the infamous "bendgate"). I can bend my LG Gram's screen and it's keeps working fine. [...]

It won't run on a MacBook Air M1 running Sonoma. [...]

[...] My current PC has a Ryzen 7 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 and I don't really have the need for a device to connect to a TV (which I also don't have), but I can definitely see the appeal to something that is both okay at games, as well as has hardware that the software works really well with, with minimal amounts of driver weirdness. Not everyone views building or buying PC as non-intimidating, especially because of how many different parts of different specs and vendors are there. I ended up getting a MacBook (M1 Air) and an iPhone (SE 2022) for some work stuff a while back, and while my use cases of those particular devices are a bit limited, I appreciate how most of the computing and updates out of the box... just work (at least for now, in contrast I got a bit unlucky with Windows updates on my main PC so I had to mess around with where the disk partitions are, otherwise it refused to boot after one update, no idea what's up with that). Plus maybe it'll push developers in the direction of optimize their games a bit more (or at least add more performance oriented presets). [...]

Yeah, I am using a 2020 Macbook Air M1 with macOS 15.7.1 (which I am about to install Ashasi Linux) and I have no issues as a casual user. For most people who use macbooks I see no reason to but an M5 or M4 over an M1.

[...] My MacBook M1 Air draws a lot of power with the lid closed, while my new Framework 12 doesn't. [...]

As I understand it, the complaint isn't about battery life during usage. The issue compared to a mac is that I could close the lid on the macbook air m1 that I'm typing this on mid sentence, and then open the lid in two weeks, and have lost basically 0% battery. [...]

[...] Also have a MacBook M1 Air for note taking and stuff.

I'm still using my MacBook Air M1 with 8gb of Ram as my personal workhorse. [...]

Sometimes, I travel with my nearly-15-year-old Thinkpad T420 in preference to my MacBook Air M1. The Macbook has a horrible keyboard with no travel. The buttonless trackpad is a pain to use; it's very hard to right-click and even with a 3rd party FOSS app to give me 3-finger middle-click, it's almost impossible to do it precisely. I use middle-click hundreds of times a day, but I have no use for trackpad gestures. [...] I can't connect a mouse, keyboard, screen and power without carrying a dock. [...] I recently had to remove Asahi Linux because it no longer had enough space to install the latest macOS 15 update -- the SSD can't be upgraded either. [...] I've upgraded RAM, keyboard, main SSD, secondary SSD and battery, and it cost me next to nothing. The only virtues of the Macbook are that it's easy to carry and the battery lasts a long time. [...]

i bought a macbook air M1 (refurbished 300 bucks) so i can use the apple creative suite for video editing and music/sound editing

[...] I own a MacBook Air M1, so I know. [...]

i have had a macbook air m1 for a while i’ve been in love with, it’s really the first laptop i ever truly enjoyed, but i got a mac mini m4 for desktop / general use as well as using it as a server… my main PC idles at 50-150W, i have never seen the mac go above 50, idles usually at about 2-4W. 🥴

I bought my MacBook Air M1 in 2024 and, although I liked it, it has had a huge dead pixel issue from day one. I've already replaced the display twice under warranty, and now that it's expired, another one appears. Looks like MacBooks have a serious dead pixel problem :') 📠

[...] Unfortunately my iPad Pro won't be supported anymore, sad but still... Dooper excited for my iPhone 14 Pro Max and MacBook Air M1! [...]

I don’t know if Adobe’s read out loud feature is just better on my iPad or if I need to update the software on my MacBook Air M1 but it’s really sophisticated and making my readings a lot easier to get through adhd auditoryprocessingissues

Not sure which Mac you have, but I use this with my Macbook Air M1 2020 because I needed something with DisplayLink (as it only supports one display natively) and 100W of power delivery, so I got the UGREEN Revodok Pro 209. Really happy with other UGREEN products I own too. NotAnAd 😂

i guess it depends on region, but i got my macbook air m1 256GB for $300 USD used from someone locally, and i seriously can’t think of more value for that price

real talk tho i got a used macbook air m1 from someone and have been using it a couple months now and i can confidently say every other company should give up on making laptops while they still can. this thing is peak. i can even type faster on it than my pc lmao

I got a @steamdeck.com for X-mas and for finishing my Bachelor’s course work. [...] Before this my primary Steam gaming was on a MacBook Air M1 w/ 16GB of memory. [...]

i got a macbook air m1 during summer to get a productivity laptop with actual battery life and it's been a game changer the windows laptop stays in service for some stuff the mac can't do like gaming or Windows in general

The iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2 updates enabled Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT integration on my iPad Pro and MacBook Air M1. But not on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. That iPhone is too old for Apple Intelligence support.

For day job it’s Storyboard Pro but it works with iPad Pro (mine is pre M1 chip) as a mirrored display with MacBook Air (M1) and I have clip on my iPad Pro for illustration work 🙂 the Tourbox console is super useful but I’ve been able to work without it as well

Sure, but I eat all these downsides and more, just for the battery life. I was a (mostly) happy Asahi Fedora user for a while, but eventually went back to macos (for the battery life). [...] The prices and ram have been fucked though, long before the latest ram crisis. I have a macbook m1 air, which I bought second hand. I'm looking at maybe upgrading to a second hand m3 or m4 air (with more ram), but honestly the prices are just wrong. Whatever I buy will be too expensive and unable to run decent llm models.

[...] I do use a Macbook M1 Air for my personal laptop and have used them for work off and on over the years... [...] This bit me a few times, but was largely worth it, until it wasn't anymore. [...]

I have a powerful MacBook Pro M2 Max with 32 GB of RAM. I updated it to macOS 26 since that it became a lot slower than my MacBook Air M1 with just 16 GB of RAM that I left on macOS Sequoia 15.7.x… What an irony given that my MacBook Pro has way better hardware specs.