What to upgrade my M1 Air to - Air or Pro?

[jafico1]

Hi all,

I've had my M1 Air for four and a half years now - it's the 8GB/512GB model that I bought on the launch of Apple Silicon laptops. It's absolutely been the best laptop I've ever owned - battery life is great, it's still snappy enough for what I do most of the time etc.

Starting to run into some limitations, though: firstly, I'm running out of RAM, especially if I want to do certain kinds of work such as photo editing or having an IDE open, or if doing some light gaming, which are causing it to stutter. In addition, I have 2 4K displays on my main setup, and only being able to use one of the two is getting very annoying.

Not sure if/what I should replace it with though - Apple's lineup has gotten more confusing for sure . I have a very fast Windows desktop for high-performance work so don't necessarily need the most powerful thing ever - a base M4 should be fine but it doesn't seem to be that much of an upgrade over the M1 speed wise.

I'd get around £400 for trading in my M1 through Currys (Uk's best buy equivalent essentially). I've put a poll up with how much it would cost for me to change - which of the options would you go for in this case? Or are any of these options not necessarily worth it over the M1 and I'm better off keeping what I have and saving my money .

 

[Bigwaff]

Refurb or used M3 MacBook Air w/ 16GB RAM or new base model M4 MacBook Air. Both will serve you use case needs w/out a doubt.

 

[russell_314]

Hi all,

I've had my M1 Air for four and a half years now - it's the 8GB/512GB model that I bought on the launch of Apple Silicon laptops. It's absolutely been the best laptop I've ever owned - battery life is great, it's still snappy enough for what I do most of the time etc.

Starting to run into some limitations, though: firstly, I'm running out of RAM, especially if I want to do certain kinds of work such as photo editing or having an IDE open, or if doing some light gaming, which are causing it to stutter. In addition, I have 2 4K displays on my main setup, and only being able to use one of the two is getting very annoying.

Not sure if/what I should replace it with though - Apple's lineup has gotten more confusing for sure . I have a very fast Windows desktop for high-performance work so don't necessarily need the most powerful thing ever - a base M4 should be fine but it doesn't seem to be that much of an upgrade over the M1 speed wise.

I feel like you’re contradicting yourself in your own post. You mentioned gaming, photo editing, needing three 4K displays. Then you said you have a very fast Windows desktop for the performance work so a base M4 should be fine.

Do you want something for performance oriented tasks or are you going to do that on the Windows desktop? If you’re trying to do performance orientated tasks such as gaming and photo editing then probably the base M4 Air is not for you. Sure it has double the ram but lacks additional graphics cores and active cooling. I would look at the MacBook Pro. Are you using this thing as a portable machine or is it just sitting on your desk? If it’s just sitting on your desk, you could save money and get better performance going with the M4 Mac mini with the M4 Pro chip.

 

[G5isAlive]

Do you have an Apple Store nearby where you could try one out? Because to me the M34 definitely feels faster than an M1, as such I can recommend the 15" air, M4 with 24 gb Ram. Sure the 16 is fine, but one almost has too much Ram. The system will use it if you don't.

But, Russel_314 is right, if you aren't using it as a lap top, but on your desktop all the time, get the m4 MacMini. I might be tempted to get the M4 Pro MacMini in that case.

 

[jafico1]

It's definitely a laptop I want - just something I can use on the couch or take with me to a coffee shop or take travelling with me: I work from home so don't want to be chained to a desk all the time! I'm not using it for work, just personal projects - stuff my M1 can handle apart from the lack of RAM. Benchmarks wise, the M4 doesn't seem that much quicker than M1 though - am I better just holding off and waiting for the M5?

The advantages of the Pro for me are the far nicer screen (120Hz/brighter/exact 2x scaling) plus I/O (HDMI and SD slot) but it is thicker and heavier. Air is probably nicer to travel with plus I do like the fact it is silent. Still unsure whether either is worth it over the M1 for now though considering I can do heavier stuff on the desktop