Anyone upgrade from an M1 Air to an M3 Air?

[cutienoua]

I got it 2 days ago.
much better than M1: better screen, faster wifi 900Mbps down vs 500 Mbps down.
overall faster and nice color midnight blue.
Battery life is great, the old one was maybe 6 hours top. battery was degraded.
Magsafe is great , I use to have it way back on a 2013 MacBook Air.

 

[arcite]

This is my M1 Air 16GB with 621 open Safari tabs . Plus Messaging, Whatsapp, Mail, etc. Past 500 Safari tabs I am starting to notice some struggles. I am waiting for an M3 Air 24GB to ease things a bit.

22 GIG Swap. YOU”RE THE BOSS.

 

[arcite]

Thanks, both. Playing with a friend's M1 (512, 16GB) vs my Intel i5 (256, 8GB) and their machine is slightly faster, but neither of us have issues with things slowing down or being sluggish. I'm putting the difference down almost 100% to the M1 chip.

I do shut down each night, though, which might help.

Upgrade decision waffle:

I was debating the base M3, but checking the Apple trade-in value of my laptop vs. one a year older, it's the same Fr.255 (Swiss Franc), so I may wait for the M4 as mine is working fine.

It all depends if it'll last another year with all-day battery life as I'm currently at 72% health, and a new battery is Fr.165. Add the above together and subtract from the Fr.999 education price of the M3 and it's Fr.580 to upgrade. Hmm. Tempting.

I was just watching a documentary on the growing global problem of e-waste. Which, ok, sounds like a tree-hugging non-issue, but when you realize that barely 12%! Of all electronics are actually recycled, the rest ends up in landfills/incinerators/shipped to third world countries for stripping (ie. melt it down to get out stuff like gold)….. well, good on you for keeping your machine a few extra years. Of course, the M4 will be better than the M3; it’ll probably have more cores, more cores are always good. So keep what you’re using and take care of it.

 

[ignatius345]

How would us 8GB people know if it's causing us issues?

You know RAM limitation is causing issues when your computer slows down, you start seeing beachballs, etc. I know that for me, I could have a lot of stuff cooking with my base model M1 Air before it started to feel laggy at all.

If, on the other hand, you have to go looking at Activity Monitor to discover whether you have "issues" or not and can't tell otherwise -- well, that just means maybe close Activity Monitor and get some work done instead.

 

[raythompsontn]

you start seeing beachballs

I see a beachball when I am opening TurboTax with no other applications running. I sometimes see a beachball when opening a large document in MSWord with no other applications running. A beachball is not an indication of memory limits, but of a program taking time to respond. It could be memory, but it could also be the program

 

[vorkosigan1]

I upgraded from an M1 Mini 16GB/2TB to an M3 MBP M3 Pro, and the difference is pretty big, for me. I haven't run any huge data-crunching apps, but just in day to day use, the fFinder UI is usually instantaneous--it's the snappiest Mac I've had since pre-OS X. It just feels wonderful. And the apps are faster, too, but they were fast enough-ish already. The Finder-I don't even have words. It's alike a muscle relaxing that you didn't even know was tight. Also, I think it's mostly about the CPU speed, rather than the increase CPU/GPU cores in going from an M1 to and M3 Pro.