MacBook Air with an M2 processor and a completely new design has started being actively sold. And although the new product traditionally attracts more attention, I want to dedicate this article to the previous model – the MacBook Air M1, which I have been using almost since its release, that is, a year and a half, and I still consider it one of the best laptops for everyday tasks. This prompted me to share my experience, especially since the model continues to sell and Apple has no plans to abandon it yet. In fact, the Air M1 has become a new basic model of a laptop from the manufacturer, the cost of which traditionally starts at $999 in the US.

MacBook Air M1 body and material quality

Unlike the new MacBook Air M2, which has become similar to the updated Pro models, the Air M1 has a classic design for the series with a wedge-shaped body. It is, of course, significantly different in detail from the version that Steve Jobs pulled out of a document envelope on stage during the presentation in 2008, but the general concept and appearance of the model has remained the same throughout all these years. MacBook Air M1 is hard not to recognize and can only be confused with previous generations.

The design of the laptop is quite traditional for Apple, the company used a one-piece aluminum topcase with slots for keys and a glass touchpad, as well as a glass panel to protect the screen.

After 1.5 years of use, the hinge of the 13.3-inch screen still works perfectly, opening easily with one hand and locking in place.

The internal design of the laptop does not impress with thin bezels, as on some models with Windows, but you do not pay any attention to them during use, and I would not call them very thick. The bezels do not affect work at the laptop in any way, and the MacBook Air has long been a “workhorse” that should not attract the attention of others.

In general, the quality of the case is quite high, but I can’t help but note that in my case, the right and left edges of the case started to wear off, just where the palms hit them. I don’t know why exactly this happened, but this is far from my first MacBook and not the first generation of Air in active use, and this has never happened before.

Other than that, there are no complaints about the case and design of the MacBook Air M1, the laptop is thin (1.61 cm) and light (1.29 kg), it is comfortable to carry around.

Display

The laptop has a 13.3-inch IPS screen with a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels, a refresh rate of 60 Hz, an aspect ratio of 16:10, a maximum brightness of 400 nits and the ability to display an extended color space DCI-P3. By all accounts, it’s a good display, and it’s really nice to work with it.

I can’t say that the glass cover of the screen with an anti-reflective film and the brightness of 400 nits allow you to comfortably work on the MacBook Air M1 outside on a sunny day, or even with a bright light source behind your back. However, in all other scenarios, the brightness is more than enough for comfortable work. In general, it is automatically adjusted by the sensor, but it can also be done manually using the function keys, which provide as many as 16 gradations of adjustment.

The 13.3-inch diagonal has long been the “golden mean” for users who want a compact laptop that is comfortable to work on. Now, with the reduction of bezels around the display, almost a 14-inch matrix would fit

MacBook Air with an M2 processor and a completely new design has already begun to be actively sold. And although the new product traditionally attracts more attention, I want to dedicate this article to the previous model – the MacBook Air M1, which I have been using almost since its release, that is, a year and a half, and I still consider it one of the best laptops for everyday tasks. This prompted me to share my experience, especially since the model continues to sell and Apple has no plans to abandon it yet. In fact, the Air M1 has become a new basic model of a laptop from the manufacturer, the cost of which traditionally starts at $999 in the US.

MacBook Air M1 body and material quality

Unlike the new MacBook Air M2, which has become similar to the updated Pro models, the Air M1 has a classic design for the series with a wedge-shaped body. It is, of course, significantly different in detail from the version that Steve Jobs pulled out of a document envelope on stage during the presentation in 2008, but the general concept and appearance of the model has remained throughout all these years. MacBook Air M1 is hard not to recognize and can only be confused with previous generations.

The design of the laptop is quite traditional for Apple, the company used a one-piece aluminum topcase with slots for keys and a glass touchpad, as well as a glass panel to protect the screen.

After 1.5 years of use, the hinge of the 13.3-inch screen still works perfectly, opening easily with one hand and locking in place.

The internal design of the laptop does not impress with thin frames, as on some models with Windows, but you do not pay any attention to them during use, and I would not call them very thick. The frames do not affect work at the laptop in any way, and the MacBook Air has long been a “workhorse” that should not attract the attention of others.

In general, the quality of the case is quite high, but I can’t help but note that in my case, the right and left edges of the case started to wear, just where the palms hit them. I don’t know why exactly this happened, but this is far from my first MacBook and not the first generation of Air in active use, but this has never happened before.

Other than that, there are no complaints about the case and design of the MacBook Air M1, the laptop is thin (1.61 cm) and light (1.29 kg), it is comfortable to carry with you.

Display

The 13.3-inch diagonal has long been the “golden ratio” for users who want a compact laptop that is comfortable to work on. Now, with the reduction of bezels around the display, almost a 14-inch matrix would fit the Air M1 body, which is what we see in the new generation. This is probably one of the few innovations in the MacBook Air M2 that would encourage me to upgrade, which is what we see in the new generation. This is probably one of the few innovations in the MacBook Air M2 that would encourage me to upgrade.

Life with an ARM processor in a laptop

I remember how, before the release of the MacBook Air M1, there were quite a lot of concerns among potential buyers about the platform of the laptop, which for the first time for Apple received a processor with ARM architecture, which was previously only used in tablets and laptops of the company. The questions mainly concerned the compatibility of programs, because not all developers update them on time. Two years later, when the entire current line of Apple laptops runs only on M1 and M2 ARM chips, such questions do not even arise. Not least due to the fact that immediately after the launch of MacBook Air M1 sales, there were no particular problems with the software for the majority of laptop users.

Firstly, developers still started to adapt their programs quite quickly, secondly, Apple did a good job on the Rosetta 2 translator, which runs on the company’s ARM processors software that was written for use with Intel chips. In a year and a half of use, to be honest, I have only wondered a few times whether the program I am currently working with is native to the Apple M1 or works through a translator. And that is purely out of technical interest. Over time, this question was completely forgotten, because there was simply no need to mention it.

Of course, not all features were immediately available for Apple M1 processors, such as installing Windows. But now it can be done thanks to Parallels Desktop, which creates a suitable virtual machine. However, I’ve never had a need to install Windows on a Mac, so I wasn’t particularly concerned that this feature was removed out of the box together with Bootcamp. There is probably a lot of specific software that didn’t work or still doesn’t work on the Apple M1, but its users also do specific tasks, so they need to understand the topic and choose the appropriate work tools. For a mass user, all the necessary programs on the Apple M1 work.

It is worth reminding that the Apple M1 is a 5-nanometer 8-core chip built according to the 4+4 scheme. It uses 4 performance cores operating at a frequency of 600 to 3204 MHz and contains 192 KB of instruction cache, 128 KB of data cache, and 12 MB of second-level (L2) cache. The additional 4 energy-efficient cores are much smaller than the main ones, they use 128 KB of instruction cache, 64 KB of data cache, 4 MB of total cache and operate at a frequency of 600 to 2064 MHz.

Since the Apple M1 is a system-on-a-chip, it has integrated graphics cores. My base configuration MacBook Air uses 7-core graphics.

Another feature of the M1 is the use of a unified memory architecture. Previously, the RAM in the MacBook Air was soldered to the motherboard, but with the new processor, there is no need for this, as it is now literally on the same substrate as the chip. This allows it to access the same data without copying it across multiple memory pools, which increases performance and reduces power consumption.

Overall, the MacBook Air M1 is a fast laptop, especially considering its size and positioning. So much so that it is often used for completely atypical tasks for this class of device, for example, for editing video in 4K. It also, in my opinion, played a bad joke with the Air on the M2, the base version of which received a built-in drive with a single controller and correspondingly slower write and read speeds. It is often not even advised to buy it, because the SSD is slower than in the basic Air with M1. Forgetting that for the tasks provided by the manufacturer for this model, a lower storage speed is enough. Anything more serious than office work is at your risk and peril.

Given the MacBook Air M1 a good margin of speed, Apple was able to push users of previous generations of the laptop to upgrade, and they hardly regretted it. Working with this model is really very comfortable. It calmly handles dozens of open programs, you can easily send twenty photos to a graphic editor like Pixelmator, and their import will not take forever. Editing won’t take much time either. It’s just as easy to work with a lot of tabs in the browser, large tables or documents, and it’s all at the same time instead of one after the other.

Honestly, it still amazes me, especially remembering all the previous generations of MacBook Air, how a compact laptop without an active cooling system is capable of all this. Apple has set the bar high, and while manufacturers of x86 chips and Windows notebooks are slowly recovering, offering really good options for competition, the Air M1 still holds its own with high performance, fanless design and good battery life.

Everyday use of the MacBook Air M1

My day-to-day work does not require video editing or compilation, it is mainly work with the browser, mail, messengers, text and graphic editors. For those who haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend the Notion notebook, which allows you to very conveniently structure, store information and share it with others. I use it for everything from recipe storage to a technical task for a developer.

I type something on the keyboard almost all day, and this is a very important parameter for me in a laptop. I can’t say that I had a bad experience with Apple’s previous approach to MacBook keyboards when they switched to the butterfly mechanism in 2015. Of course, the buttons in it clicked louder, the stroke was very short, but such a keyboard coped with its task, although it sometimes stuck. However, the switch to the old reliable scissor mechanism, which Apple now calls the Magic Keyboard, benefited the MacBook Air. The key stroke has become longer, they are pressed more softly and have become much quieter. Typing long texts on such a keyboard is comfortable, and finally you don’t have to get used to it when you switch from an external keyboard or from a laptop to Windows.

Fortunately, you don’t have to get used to the touchpad in the MacBook Air M1, because Apple never really experimented with it. Here it is large, with a glass surface, very accurate tracking of finger positions and gestures, and a click simulation thanks to the vibration created by the linear actuator.

Air M1, like its predecessors, has only two USB Type-C ports, they are located side by side on the left side, support Thunderbolt 3 and charging via Power Delivery. To connect peripherals or external drives, I use the Kingston Nucleum adapter, it is far from new, but it still performs its tasks perfectly and also hardly heats up.

In principle, the ports are enough for me, I just wish they were spaced on both sides, it would be more convenient, but of course for Apple it is more complicated and more expensive in terms of design. I don’t often copy or record anything to external drives, and mostly use Google Drive and OneDrive for data transfer. When testing Windows laptops, it would sometimes be faster to transfer files via an external SSD, but macOS can’t write data to the NTFS file system, only read it. You can install a third-party driver, but NTFS for Mac from Paragon Software with Russian roots is, of course, a no. Something like Mounty for NTFS works now, but in macOS 13 Ventura will no longer be there, because the disk mounting system is completely changing there. So it’s easier to do without it, especially since there are alternatives.

The speakers in the MacBook Air are located on both sides of the keyboard and are quite loud. It is, of course, not very voluminous, and I never once found myself thinking that it would be okay to listen to music on a laptop without headphones. Although I use it constantly for YouTube and Netflix.

MacBook Air M1 has a built-in FaceTime HD webcam with a resolution of 720p. When the laptop was first announced, Apple said that the image from the camera is improved by machine learning and other “magical animals”, but it’s a miniature matrix that provides the minimum necessary picture so that you can be seen at least a little during Zoom call. The laptop generally copes with this task, and to be honest, 80% of the time I don’t turn on the camera at all during a call.

Can you still go a day without charging?

One of the undeniable advantages of the Apple M1 processor, apart from performance, is energy efficiency, which together with a 4379 mAh (49.9 Wh) battery provides a decent level of battery life. The manufacturer claims almost 15 hours of browsing through Wi-Fi and 18 hours of watching videos in the Apple TV app. At the beginning of using the laptop in office mode, I even got a little more than 15 hours of battery life. Now, after 1.5 years of use, when the battery capacity has decreased to 94% after 199 discharge-charge cycles, depending on the work tasks, I get 10-12 hours of battery life, so still a very good result.

The MacBook Air M1 is charged from the included power supply unit at only 30 W, so it takes almost 2.5 hours to charge from 0 to 100%. But I’ve never fully discharged the laptop, and from 20-40% it charges much faster, so the need for a faster charger has never arisen.

A 2-meter USB Type-C cable is used to connect the power supply, which is generally enough to avoid sitting directly under the outlet. But the lack of port separation on both sides is a bit annoying when the socket is on the wrong (according to Apple) side.

The power supply itself has a glossy surface and got completely covered with small scratches during use, and the cable, traditionally for Apple, began to turn yellow. It is very gratifying that the company has finally discovered non-rubber cable braiding, and in the Air M2 the cable looks like it can last for more than one year.

In conclusion

MacBook Air M1 was introduced at the end of 2020, but it is safe to say that the model is still relevant. As for the most affordable laptop from Apple, the buyer will not have to make any significant compromises or put up with features. For example, if the model is not $2000, then you should not count on keeping 100 tabs in Chrome. Therefore, this is the case when we have a good price/quality ratio from Apple. If you’re looking for a new laptop for work or study, take a look at the Air M1.