$799 M1 MacBook Air With 128GB Storage for Education Institutions Spotted Online

[acidfast7_redux]

I’ve worked in educational institutions managing thousands of devices and the biggest issue was running out of storage. 128 GB is not enough in most cases. I wasn’t speaking for me I was speaking generally. 256 GB should be a minimum.

Funny. We don't see that AT ALL at my university. Just about every single thing we do is cloud-based as have docking stations with thousands of base-spec ThinkPads that come it at like £3-400/machine and everything does maths/stats and writes theses on them.

No issues really and easy to check-in/out with a student card, pre-COVID.

 

[Chinch07]

Which is great in theory but the price point is tone deaf to the realities of current State and school budgets. Schools, even private, largely cannot afford to give each student an $800 laptop.

Both my high school and university handed out MacBooks that we’re more expensive than this to students who didn’t have their own. When I graduated my university even let students keep them.

 

[canyonblue737]

I bought a MacBook Pro just 15 months ago from education store for my daughter for $1199 and it was a core i5 with 8GB ram and 128GB storage. Both my son and daughter take turns using it and they have run out of space. I honestly won’t recommend 128GB unless all they deal with are just word files and spreadsheets. My daughter used garage band and filled it up.

I mean obviously you could plug in an external USB3 or SSD portable drive, but that is increased cost, decreased speed, and a hassle... but it is an option.

 

[SchrodingersMartian]

This isn’t true at all.

You don't speak for all schools. Stop acting was if you do. I work with EDU sales everyday and can at least tell you 75 I spoke with this week have more interest in the cloud than large amounts of local storage.

 

[Dwalls90]

This will never eat the Chromebook's lunch as it competes at a fraction of the price. If you're going to spend $800, why not pay a little more for more appropriate storage? I'm all for the consumer having more choices, but was hoping that if Apple wanted to play the competitive education game, that they would be more aggressive.

 

[laptech]

This will mess up the re-sale market of M1's when the education establishments upgrade their machines in 2 years time. Thousands upon thousands of 128Gb M1's will be in third party computer shops, ebay, craiglist and other resale places and potential buyers will become confused because they will go online and look for the 128Gb version and not find it on the main pages of the M1. then they will be asking themselves what M1 is this if it's not on Apple's main M1 page.

Then when it gets out and about that the 128Gb version was built specifically for the education market, only the desperate will buy one because the rest will know that the machines would have been abused to death (students are not known for taking good care of school property).

 

[Bandaman]

I mean obviously you could plug in an external USB3 or SSD portable drive, but that is increased cost, decreased speed, and a hassle... but it is an option.

Students tend to lose the drives, unfortunately.

 

[robjulo]

Both my high school and university handed out MacBooks that we’re more expensive than this to students who didn’t have their own. When I graduated my university even let students keep them.

I think that is an outlier and not the norm, at least in K-12. The norm is chromebooks. It will become more of an outlier as Covid has crushed state and local budgets. Given the choice between giving a student an $800 Mac vs a $200 chromebook......will be a no-brainer with systems that are dealing with scarce money.

Another major issue is that the MacBook's are not touch screen. A very significant amount of work my daughter does involves using the pen on the touchscreen. It's how they do assignments, just as if it was on paper to turn in.

 

[MikeSmoke]

There are some really inexpensive thumb drives with higher capacity. Maybe that would be an option for some people who need capacity and not speed. Do your Garageband session on the internal SSD, save it externally freeing up the internal SSD for when higher speed and performance is needed. It’s a Kludge but $799 is nothing to laugh about.

 

[Bandaman]

OMG... You apparently believe every school computer administrator in the world has the same characteristics, structure, and needs and requirements as yours regarding number of schools, students, teachers, grade levels, programs, budgets, etc. Whether it's a rural district with several elementary schools in Appalachia or a university such as Oxford or Harvard.

That’s literally not what I was getting at. Although not all educational institutions have the same needs, there are many in which this base storage is unusable. Also the schools doing everything in the cloud and doing word processing and messaging have literally no need for these kinds of Macs (or Macs in general ... Chromebooks would suffice). I’m referring to the students that use these Macs for what they’re intended for and the programs alone fill up the entire drive. None of what they do can be done in the cloud. For schools that are mostly cloud-based, the storage and type of computer is largely irrelevant. People giving me examples of their ThinkPad/cloud set ups is ridiculous because it has nothing to do with this article ... or Macs. I’m referring specifically to the schools in which the Macs are needed for non-cloud offline Mac usage with Mac programs doing Mac things that require actual storage, storage with isn’t there when it’s filled up with apps. You can’t store Mac apps in the cloud and use them in the cloud. And if a school is buying Macs just to do Google and Microsoft docs in the cloud and web browsing there are some serious budgeting concerns there.

 

[[AUT] Thomas]

NAND cycle concerns are way overblown unless you’re running a data centre. I’ve been running 96 GB and 128 GB SSDs in my Macs for close to a decade now.

The failed drives I’ve had, and I have had more than one, were much larger capacity. They failed for other reasons.

Well, you have been lucky or you didn't notice the performance loss on the storage or you treated them well... Anyway, I observed it on very old macbooks (not mine, all of them used and abused) with small SSDs and generally small 2,5" SSD with 128GB or less. You don't need to run a data centre for that and the SSD doesn't "hard fail". It's more like the SSD feels slow, e.g. write performance dropping intermittently. On an empty disc no problem (as the wear leveling of the controller uses the least used blocks) but the less choice the controller has the bigger the issue. And that's again where the small SSD gets in trouble, because that tends to be 90% full a lot more likely than larger SSDs.
That said, newer SSDs can potentially deal better with the problem. Yet, I wouldn't buy a QLC SSD at the moment... that's still the equivalent of an SMR hard disk... works well as read-intensive drive though.

 

[smulji]

At that price, I wish I could get the discount.

I know, right.

 

[7493920]

Wow, everything is so cheap in the states!

(I understand that they don't pay tax and have abysmal social service from a European perspective.)

Sales tax is not included in prices for merchandise in the US but most states do have it. Where I live add about 10% to any USD price you see. (And some states don't. Some states are high tax and have better medical care, some states are lower tax. There's a lot of difference in how things operate on a state by state basis.)

 

[mannyvel]

Really, at this price just strap a USB-C ssd onto your MBA and call it a day.

 

[kckeller]

For those who keep looking in the educational store, to be clear, this is NOT the general (education-discounted) public price. This is the eCommerce store which is available to institutions for institutional purchase, and you have to be registered with Apple as an authorized buyer to access the store. Students and faculty can't buy these for themselves at $799 currently.

 

[The Game 161]

Incredible deal

 

[2ilent8cho]

Cannot believe some are defending 128GB still, this is like when Apple were still shipping iPhones with 8GB all over again. I have a 128GB MacBook Pro 13" as one of my play Mac's. I've had to delete Microsoft Office off it because I could not update XCode because of not enough free hard drive space and I only use this Mac for Xcode and installed Office out of habit. The Big Sur installer is 12GB which is 10% of the total storage and needs 16GB free to install.

If it was 512GB as the base MacBook Air and a special 256GB been made available for education at lower cost that would have been fine, but 128GB on a premium device in 2020 is pathetic unless these were being sold at Chromebook prices. You cannot use the 'cloud storage' argument, Apple give managed edu apple ID's 200GB of iCloud storage, Mac has no selective Sync for iCloud , so Teacher has 128GB Mac and 150GB in iCloud, what do you think is going to happen when they sign in?

Use Microsoft OneDrive? yes that client has selective Sync and files on demand but teachers don't want to mess with selecting what folders to sync , and if you use files on demand it will keep slowly using more space up as it caches stuff and won't be long until you as Sysadmin cannot push the latest version of Excel out without it failing on these devices due to lack of disk space, like I have had this week on some 2013 MacBook Air 128GBs we still have that are close to end of life for us.

The only place I could justify 128GB in a Mac is in an IT Lab with folder re-direction to a home share so there is zero user data stored on the device, but again for the cost of a Mac, 128GB should not even be an option.

Also think ahead 3 years... you might be able to just about get by with 128GB now with some compromise, but in a few years? Yeah..... right. MacOS will be bigger, Word will be bigger, Garage Band will be bigger.

and if you think well 128GB is fine if you just want a device for web browsing, yeah that's true, but go look at what happens when you give kids laptops over on reddit in r/k12sysadmin and then think about how much Apple will charge for a new keyboard on a MacBook Air once the little angels have pecked keys off.

 

[SchrodingersMartian]

For those who keep looking in the educational store, to be clear, this is NOT the general (education-discounted) public price. This is the eCommerce store which is available to institutions for institutional purchase, and you have to be registered with Apple as an authorized buyer to access the store. Students and faculty can't buy these for themselves at $799 currently.

That’s great news. This will keep the folks trying to scam the system away.

 

[SchrodingersMartian]

Cannot believe some are defending 128GB still, this is like when Apple were still shipping iPhones with 8GB all over again. I have a 128GB MacBook Pro 13" as one of my play Mac's. I've had to delete Microsoft Office off it because I could not update XCode because of not enough free hard drive space and I only use this Mac for Xcode and installed Office out of habit. The Big Sur installer is 12GB which is 10% of the total storage and needs 16GB free to install.

If it was 512GB as the base MacBook Air and a special 256GB been made available for education at lower cost that would have been fine, but 128GB on a premium device in 2020 is pathetic unless these were being sold at Chromebook prices. You cannot use the 'cloud storage' argument, Apple give managed edu apple ID's 200GB of iCloud storage, Mac has no selective Sync for iCloud , so Teacher has 128GB Mac and 150GB in iCloud, what do you think is going to happen when they sign in?

Use Microsoft OneDrive? yes that client has selective Sync and files on demand but teachers don't want to mess with selecting what folders to sync , and if you use files on demand it will keep slowly using more space up as it caches stuff and won't be long until you as Sysadmin cannot push the latest version of Excel out without it failing on these devices due to lack of disk space, like I have had this week on some 2013 MacBook Air 128GBs we still have that are close to end of life for us.

The only place I could justify 128GB in a Mac is in an IT Lab with folder re-direction to a home share so there is zero user data stored on the device, but again for the cost of a Mac, 128GB should not even be an option.

Also think ahead 3 years... you might be able to just about get by with 128GB now with some compromise, but in a few years? Yeah..... right. MacOS will be bigger, Word will be bigger, Garage Band will be bigger.

and if you think well 128GB is fine if you just want a device for web browsing, yeah that's true, but go look at what happens when you give kids laptops over on reddit in r/k12sysadmin and then think about how much Apple will charge for a new keyboard on a MacBook Air once the little angels have pecked keys off.

It’s not for you. I love what you said about Word since that happens to be a product made by my employer and I can tell you we have an version of 365 called A1 which completely runs from the cloud and I have sold many schools that on configurations less than this. I’m also not aware of any schools running GarageBand your viewing this as consumer and not as a K-12/Academic buyer.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Cannot believe some are defending 128GB still, this is like when Apple were still shipping iPhones with 8GB all over again. I have a 128GB MacBook Pro 13" as one of my play Mac's. I've had to delete Microsoft Office off it because I could not update XCode because of not enough free hard drive space and I only use this Mac for Xcode and installed Office out of habit. The Big Sur installer is 12GB which is 10% of the total storage and needs 16GB free to install.

If it was 512GB as the base MacBook Air and a special 256GB been made available for education at lower cost that would have been fine, but 128GB on a premium device in 2020 is pathetic unless these were being sold at Chromebook prices. You cannot use the 'cloud storage' argument, Apple give managed edu apple ID's 200GB of iCloud storage, Mac has no selective Sync for iCloud , so Teacher has 128GB Mac and 150GB in iCloud, what do you think is going to happen when they sign in?

Use Microsoft OneDrive? yes that client has selective Sync and files on demand but teachers don't want to mess with selecting what folders to sync , and if you use files on demand it will keep slowly using more space up as it caches stuff and won't be long until you as Sysadmin cannot push the latest version of Excel out without it failing on these devices due to lack of disk space, like I have had this week on some 2013 MacBook Air 128GBs we still have that are close to end of life for us.

The only place I could justify 128GB in a Mac is in an IT Lab with folder re-direction to a home share so there is zero user data stored on the device, but again for the cost of a Mac, 128GB should not even be an option.

Also think ahead 3 years... you might be able to just about get by with 128GB now with some compromise, but in a few years? Yeah..... right. MacOS will be bigger, Word will be bigger, Garage Band will be bigger.

and if you think well 128GB is fine if you just want a device for web browsing, yeah that's true, but go look at what happens when you give kids laptops over on reddit in r/k12sysadmin and then think about how much Apple will charge for a new keyboard on a MacBook Air once the little angels have pecked keys off.

I am sure some people can get by just fine with 128GB. In fact, I did so when I had a MacBook. A lot of people use the cloud to store items of importance, instead of loading up the SSD.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Mac has no selective Sync for iCloud

That's true. However they do have Optimise Mac Storage:

 

[acidfast7_redux]

Sales tax is not included in prices for merchandise in the US but most states do have it. Where I live add about 10% to any USD price you see. (And some states don't. Some states are high tax and have better medical care, some states are lower tax. There's a lot of difference in how things operate on a state by state basis.)

I know I always shop in NH.

 

[tillsbury]

Quick question — I’m guessing that universal binaries are bigger than intel-only ones. Are they? But when installed do they install all of the code or do they do it selectively like the Apple TV?

What ssd space does an M1 Office install take up compared with an Intel Office install?

 

[ksec]

So once Apple introduce a 12" MacBook Air at $799, it could have an Bulk educational pricing for $599? ( 128GB )

This sounds like very competitive to Chromebook.

 

[4487549]

Can’t believe that a full blown latest high performing Notebook is cheaper than iPhone Mini 128 GB 😳 excellent deal

The other side of that coin is also true.