Base M1 or M2 MBA?

[rdunlap]

Ok so I currently have a base M1 MacBook Air and this past week the base M2 MacBook Air went on sale at Costco for $949 which I thought was a good deal. I liked the addition of the MagSafe charger.

I’ll be doing some light video editing with Final Cut Pro with max 2.7k video. Is there any real advantage in upgrading to the M2 MBA over the M1 or should I just keep the M1 and return the M2?

Would love some input on this. Any opinions or thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

[benmhall]

Both are good. The M2s tend to benchmark ~20% in CPU/GPU better than the M1s.

Watch out, though. If what you are doing is heavily dependent on SSD write speed, the M1 may have an edge, as the 256GB NVME is actually 2x128, allowing two simultaneous writes, where the M2 is a single 256 chip. This can result in slower write speeds.

If someone offered me either for the same price, I’d likely take the M2 for the presumed longer support window, but both are great machines for the money. (For my uses, I wouldn’t notice the NVME write speeds. This was largely overblown in the press back when they were new, as far as I am concerned.)

I own and have owned many M1 MacBook Airs, and my main work machine is a maxed out M2 MacBook Air. It’s been almost three years with the M1 Airs. I still can’t believe how fast and capable they are for the money. The M2 Air is definitely better to use day-to-day, but I am pretty sure I can chalk that up to the extra headroom of 24GB of RAM with my workload. I’d take a base M1 Air over most PC laptops, and I buy and use lots of them as well. It really is good/better/best for whatever Apple Silicon laptop you buy these days.

If you can sell the M1 for close to what you paid for the M2, that is also a consideration. The M3 MBAs are rumoured to be out before the end of the year…

 

[raythompsontn]

I would save your money. Your videos are small and if the M1 is doing the job, then there is little reason to change. Having MagSafe is nice, but how often are both USB-C ports on the M1 in use. The only time I use both ports on my M2 is when charging my watch and iPhone.

But that is just me. Only you can decide and my perspective ain't worth $0.01.

 

[Ben J.]

I went from a Mini M1 16/512, to a Mini M2 16/256 in february. M2 has a bit faster clock speed, but is not much different from the M1. I agree, you can expect maybe 15-20% tops, better raw processing power over the M1. But the M1 was so great by itself that it might not be very easy to notice.

I can measure the speed of the ssd to about half (1500/3000MB/s r/w) of the M1, but it is not ever an issue. In fact the M2 boots in under 10 seconds, down from 15+ on the M1.

I don't know what you could expect to get for your M1 MBA, but if it's like 80% of the cost for the M2, I'd go for it.

 

[ctjack]

2.7K? M1 Air handles 4K up to 4 layers and starts acting bad with around 4-6 layers on top of 4K. M2 - I would buy Air 15 but not 13.
13 M1 to 13 M2 is a wash.

 

[1BadManVan]

If you're not having any issues with the M1 performance for the work you're doing, then you may not feel it was worth the upgrade. I personally prefer the design of the M2 over the M1, the brighter screen and definitely love having the MagSafe charger. So it depends on what you value most on a laptop. For some if may be worth it, others it won't be.

I also didn't trade in an M1 for an M2, I held out for a new design before buying a Mac