2 months with the MBA M1 8GB RAM and 256GB of storage

[Cromulent]

I've had the M1 MBA for two months and have to say I'm impressed with it. I bought it for University primarily, so I was only expecting to read ebooks and take notes whilst listening to music. Unfortunately, studying fell through, so I decided to try and do some programming on the MBA instead and found that it could handle ten or more Safari tabs, Visual Studio Code, Apple Music, Discord and PgAdmin4 and still feel reasonably fast. Given the fact I paid £900 for it, I'm very pleased.

What do you use your MBA for, and has it impressed you with how powerful it is?

 

[1BadManVan]

I've had the M1 MBA for two months and have to say I'm impressed with it. I bought it for University primarily, so I was only expecting to read ebooks and take notes whilst listening to music. Unfortunately, studying fell through, so I decided to try and do some programming on the MBA instead and found that it could handle ten or more Safari tabs, Visual Studio Code, Apple Music, Discord and PgAdmin4 and still feel reasonably fast. Given the fact I paid £900 for it, I'm very pleased.

What do you use your MBA for, and has it impressed you with how powerful it is?

Just personal use, but I usually have quite a few safari tabs open., some music, maybe Netflix in pip. Never an issue. I'll never push mine to its limits, but thats fine, I over spec'd it to keep it for as long as I can lol.

 

[Shirasaki]

I got my M1 Touch Bar MacBook Pro a few months before the release of 14” MacBook Pro. Used about a year. While it is way faster than my old 11” MacBook Air, I can’t say I’m impressed by it.

Granted, I keep like 10 different programs open, with 10+ safari tabs open all the time, and a couple background monitor program running constantly, but M1 really isn’t as powerful as people suggest once your use case fall off the Apple’s “blessed workflow” (video editing, swift programming and a few others). M2 won’t really change much if at all.

The only regret I have is I couldn’t afford 2TB storage back then. 1TB SSD is 5/7 full, which is kind of scary.

 

[TorontoSS]

I got the 8GB/512 config and I'm super impressed with it. I just use it for safari, one note, word, a little powerpoint and watching YouTube/netflix videos. I do keep about 4-5 tabs open, not more but when browsing different sites, the memory pressure does go up but I see zero dip in performance. I think the websites are getting cached. If I didn't watch activity monitor I'd think this thing is completely flawless (which to be fair it is given performance is great).

 

[eicca]

I use my 8/256 M1 Air as my portable machine, and since my ancient Mac Pro is my primary data storage device, I decided to go 100% iCloud on the Air.

I mostly just web browse and edit documents so naturally I never get over half in the memory pressure department. I'll have anywhere from 5-15 Firefox tabs going at one time, and every so often the memory pressure will turn yellow, but it's never actually bogged down even once.

I got it to heat up once by forcing it to play four 4K HDR YouTube vids simultaneously. They got kinda choppy and eventually stopped playing but I could still use the rest of the system.

This thing is killer for the money. I rarely fire up the Mac Pro anymore—only to manage my data archives or record some music. But the M1 Air has become my primary.

 

[adamlbiscuit]

I have an M1 MBA w/ 8 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. It impresses me every day, pretty much. I came from a 2020 MBA (intel i5 model) which was good for basic web browsing, but not much else. It was loud and hot, and I had buyers' remorse given they released the M1 just months after I bought it.

Now I finally have the M1 it still amazes me how much it can do, and all with no fan.

I use mine for basic web browsing and content consumption, but I also do lots of video game emulation and some photo editing. I also play a couple of recent games - currently Resident Evil: Village and The Sims 4. Yes, it gets hot when playing the latter two games but I don't notice it throttling (even though it probably is to some extent).