I've spent most of my time on this forum livening the 2020 Air Heatsink Modification Mega Thread, including making custom shims for the project. Times change and I still have my 2018 MBA retina 16GB/512GB but my wife needed a new machine so we decided a 2020 M1 was the way to go.
Our workflows are similar, plenty of web, office and light photo, I use VMware hence the 16GB to provide a little extra head room to run another Linux or Windows machine in parallel. Setting up the new M1 was a dream, and while I thought my 2018 MBA was still quick, and having owned a MBA 2020 i7 for a period (returned due to heat and fan noise) which didn't feel any quicker than the machine I was moving from, the new M1 is just streets ahead in so many ways.
Boot up time fully installed from power off to use is sub 1min and is buttery smooth, where my 2018 is around 3min and jerky until the applications are all loaded and good to go. Looking at the RAM usage I'm using 10GB used, 5GB cache and nearly zero swap on my 2018. My wife's M1 machine is another story, 6.5GB, 1.5GB and 2GB with just Safari open (3 tabs), word and google backup and sync. Quite high in my opinion considering we only have open facebook, canva and wix, and wix can be a real hog taking 3GB on its own. Is the new M1 coping with this, sure it is but its making the most of the fast SSD to shuffle resources around. We're not power users, nor large media consumers on youtube which is what most people are demonstrating.
I've not seen issues to date on the M1 telling me that Safari is using lots of RAM and the tab should be closed which is something that I regally see with my 2018 Intel. From time to time I have seen memory pressure on the M1/8GB which has never been there on the 2018/16GB. End user experience however is different story, on the Intel, this becomes really laggy when memory usage is high in Safari, there is no difference in user experience on the M1, I just checked usage out of curiosity and was amazed how this little machine was coping with such little memory resource in comparison.
There are plenty of threads on SSD overuse and worries, which was one of my reasons for opting for the 512GB. The 256GB would have been find from a capacity point of view but I wanted to have some additional longevity built in as we keep our machines for while and pass them down through the family when we replace them. I can see quite early on the SSD is going to be used more on this machine to keep things working smoothly.
I didn't think that when I purchased the M1 that 8GB was going to be an issue for my wife, in practice I don't think it will, however as a IT professional you can't help but notice that 8GB in todays world isn't a lot to play with if you're workflow tools are resource hungry. While there are plenty of youtube videos showing the video editing capabilities of these machines, watching youtube, audio creation, lots of tabs open etc there are possible more people who use them as a daily driver doing office type work and using SAAS applications which are rendered in the browser, online meetings etc.
I would suggest that you take a good look at your workflow before purchasing and look at the resources that you may need before purchase.
Have I made the wrong decision in getting an 8GB Air? I don't know truthfully know at this point, we've only been using this for a couple of days and the user experience says no, it was spot on. My wife's face lit up when the box came as this was a total surprise from Amazon and replaced her HP 820 G1 Elitebook (i5/16GB/256GB) which is circa 8 years old. I'm keeping an eye on resource utilisation for now for my own benefit as I'll be swapping my device once I know what the new MacBook M1x lineup is. If 16GB RAM wasn't build to order then I would have selected this from the go. I feel the 512GB is possibly overkill for our use but provides circa double the SSD life span and 'flexible RAM' so there is the compromise, or at least for me anyhow.
I wanted to share some of my thoughts hopefully to address some of the points that others are asking on the forum when looking to purchase, these are really capable machines in their own right. One thing to keep in mind is that this is the start of Apples journey and these are lowest spec'd machines that there will ever be! Working daily on a desktop class laptop i7/32GB HP zBook, the user experience on the entry level devices from Apple is just in another league, fast, smooth, cool and well, highly enjoyable.
Our workflows are similar, plenty of web, office and light photo, I use VMware hence the 16GB to provide a little extra head room to run another Linux or Windows machine in parallel. Setting up the new M1 was a dream, and while I thought my 2018 MBA was still quick, and having owned a MBA 2020 i7 for a period (returned due to heat and fan noise) which didn't feel any quicker than the machine I was moving from, the new M1 is just streets ahead in so many ways.
Boot up time fully installed from power off to use is sub 1min and is buttery smooth, where my 2018 is around 3min and jerky until the applications are all loaded and good to go. Looking at the RAM usage I'm using 10GB used, 5GB cache and nearly zero swap on my 2018. My wife's M1 machine is another story, 6.5GB, 1.5GB and 2GB with just Safari open (3 tabs), word and google backup and sync. Quite high in my opinion considering we only have open facebook, canva and wix, and wix can be a real hog taking 3GB on its own. Is the new M1 coping with this, sure it is but its making the most of the fast SSD to shuffle resources around. We're not power users, nor large media consumers on youtube which is what most people are demonstrating.
I've not seen issues to date on the M1 telling me that Safari is using lots of RAM and the tab should be closed which is something that I regally see with my 2018 Intel. From time to time I have seen memory pressure on the M1/8GB which has never been there on the 2018/16GB. End user experience however is different story, on the Intel, this becomes really laggy when memory usage is high in Safari, there is no difference in user experience on the M1, I just checked usage out of curiosity and was amazed how this little machine was coping with such little memory resource in comparison.
There are plenty of threads on SSD overuse and worries, which was one of my reasons for opting for the 512GB. The 256GB would have been find from a capacity point of view but I wanted to have some additional longevity built in as we keep our machines for while and pass them down through the family when we replace them. I can see quite early on the SSD is going to be used more on this machine to keep things working smoothly.
I didn't think that when I purchased the M1 that 8GB was going to be an issue for my wife, in practice I don't think it will, however as a IT professional you can't help but notice that 8GB in todays world isn't a lot to play with if you're workflow tools are resource hungry. While there are plenty of youtube videos showing the video editing capabilities of these machines, watching youtube, audio creation, lots of tabs open etc there are possible more people who use them as a daily driver doing office type work and using SAAS applications which are rendered in the browser, online meetings etc.
I would suggest that you take a good look at your workflow before purchasing and look at the resources that you may need before purchase.
Have I made the wrong decision in getting an 8GB Air? I don't know truthfully know at this point, we've only been using this for a couple of days and the user experience says no, it was spot on. My wife's face lit up when the box came as this was a total surprise from Amazon and replaced her HP 820 G1 Elitebook (i5/16GB/256GB) which is circa 8 years old. I'm keeping an eye on resource utilisation for now for my own benefit as I'll be swapping my device once I know what the new MacBook M1x lineup is. If 16GB RAM wasn't build to order then I would have selected this from the go. I feel the 512GB is possibly overkill for our use but provides circa double the SSD life span and 'flexible RAM' so there is the compromise, or at least for me anyhow.
I wanted to share some of my thoughts hopefully to address some of the points that others are asking on the forum when looking to purchase, these are really capable machines in their own right. One thing to keep in mind is that this is the start of Apples journey and these are lowest spec'd machines that there will ever be! Working daily on a desktop class laptop i7/32GB HP zBook, the user experience on the entry level devices from Apple is just in another league, fast, smooth, cool and well, highly enjoyable.
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