Help moving on from early 2020 MBA...

[novakjos]

Hello,

So I am usually the person that a lot of my friends come to when they need help picking a Mac and I consider myself pretty adept at being able to recommend the right amount (no more, no less) of what people need. I'm writing because I really don't know what to do for myself.

I was using a 2015 rMBP and last year picked up a 2020 i5, 16GB RAM, MBA. Simply put, I have never been more disappointed with a machine. I had never even considered an MBA previously but all the reviews I saw made this thing seem like a tank. It's not. At all. The fans go non-stop, the performance is laggy. Turbo boost switcher app cripples the performance and now I just let the fans run like jet engines b/c I need the performance.

Even though I will only get around half of what I paid, I am ready to free myself of this disappointment of a computer.

Here is my traditional use - active video conferencing for large parts of the day (Zoom, Google Meet, Blackboard), video recording for webinars, google docs/sheets for large documents. Occasional video editing. Occasional photo editing. Frequent web browsing, YouTube, Netflix.

Recommendations? From what I've read, 16GB on the M1s is more than enough but I do think that future proofing is helpful. So really, it's MBA vs MBP M1 - I know there is a difference in cooling. So my question is, for anyone who does all-day video calling, would the MBA really be sufficient? I don't want to be bitten twice by this product line...

TIA!

- Joe

 

[KaliYoni]

I'd say if you do any editing or encoding of video beyond infrequent personal tinkering, go with the MBP. Among other things, why make the speed of your workflow so dependent on whether or not the processor in a passively cooled computer is throttling for thermal reasons? If a deadline is looming, the last thing you want is something you don't really control holding you back.

 

[mj_]

First of all what webbrowser are you using? If you're running Chrome then that might be one of the reasons why you keep hearing your fans all day long. Chrome is a resource hog on every system it is available on, be it Linux, Windows or macOS. Try switching to a more efficient browser like Safari, that might already help. You should be able to do most of your daily tasks without the fans running, including Google Docs & Sheets, web browsing, YouTube, and NetFlix as long as you stay away from Chrome or any other Chrome-based browser (Chromium, Vivaldi, Microsoft Edge, etc.).

Second, one of your biggest issues that will not get resolved by switching browsers is going to be said video conferencing tools. In my experience, neither of them (Zoom, Teams, WebEx, Jitsi, Skype, etc.) are any good on macOS. Heck, Teams will even spin up the fan on my iMac if I have it in a small window with static content such as for example a shared screen running in the background. The tools are basically hot garbage. Pretty, but sh!tty.

The good news is that with the Air M1 you should be able to do all that without any issues and, most importantly, any noise at all. Yes, it will throttle after 10+ minutes of max load but it's not like it will throttle down to 30% of its initial speed but merely reduce peak performance by around 10% and continue running at 90% peak performance for days on end. That also includes video conferencing - I was on a 4-way Teams conference call using my Air M1 the other day and did not notice any issues at all. It did not get particularly warm, it did not slow down, and it kept chugging along happily.

Keep in mind that the MBP also comes with the Touch Bar. Some like it, some hate it.