Walmart resurrects the M1 MacBook Air as an entry-level $699 laptop
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I am a professional iOS developer. I can get by fine on a m1 air with 8gb ram if i wanted (although my work machine is M2 Pro). Compile times may take longer, but its a fantastic machine that can do a hell of a lot more than just web browsing.
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Thank you Ars. I pulled the trigger on it, main reason is I want to toy around with building applications for IOS and MacOS, but it's going to be a shared family laptop as well.
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I have flirted with the thought of getting a low end MacBook. But, I think I'm going to wait to see what happens with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. It might trigger discounts by Apple, Intel, or AMD. It might not trigger a pricewar, but maybe the likes of Dell, Acer, Lenovo, etc might release some systems based on SXE that are cheaper than similarly specced systems from Apple.
I think I can wait awhile to get a new laptop, and if I can wait 6 months to a year, there might be some hot competition in this space. Maybe I can get something somewhat better than this M1 MBA for the same or lower price point.
I think I can wait awhile to get a new laptop, and if I can wait 6 months to a year, there might be some hot competition in this space. Maybe I can get something somewhat better than this M1 MBA for the same or lower price point.
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I'm still not holding my breath that ARM PC laptops are going to take off. That said at least intel and amd are turning their attention to efficiency cores and such to make PC laptops better
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Sold out online. It may be available in a warehouse but don't bet on it.
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Mine had none, unfortunately. Thankfully I kept my Walmart order. My wife wanted a gold one anyway.
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The difference between you and me is that I swap out my tech after 3-4 years. That is the cycle by which increases in productivity offset the increases in cost. I would not dream of trying to work on a 12 year old computer.
That is the logic for my Mac. On Windows and Linux, right now it is go frameworks or go home for me.
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I don't work on a 12 year old laptop. I don't like laptops at all. Since I don't use them much, they last a long time and there's also little reason to upgrade them. As I've said multiple times in their thread, my laptop is a terminal to more powerful machines, or for diagnosing/configuring a network at a family member's house. That's aboit it. If you want to get into a dick measuring contest, I have a full size rack in the basement where the fun shit happens. Or quite a nice gaming desktop for everything else. I prefer to use computers with multiple screens and nice peripherals. My laptop sometimes gets used for planning trips on the couch with my wife. That's probably the most intense thing it does, which means Firefox and a couple dozen tabs. Problem is the low res screen on my current laptop makes it awful for that.
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On PC architecture a video application like a game loads that did into system RAM, then duplicates it in the dedicated Video RAM (whether that's over PCIe into dedicated VRAM or a special chunk of the system RAM). So on a PC a program that needs 4GB of VRAM, on a system with integrated graphics, needs 8GB to store it all. Because of the unified memory an Apple Silicon Mac it just needs 4GB.
Not to mention, simply rendering a basic desktop doesn't take very much VRAM at all, which is where a vast majority of these Macs are going to live.
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Get real. I still use a 2015 11" MacBook Air and actually have no desire to upgrade yet. It's so portable and yet still does everything I want - though I envy the battery life of the M* machines. (I'm holding out for a smaller Mac - hope springs and all that). Anecdotal, but this machine has never required service and it has oh so many miles on it. Macs do have problems, but statistically their reliability is very good. To the article, nobody is forcing you to buy a discount Mac, so your complaint is? Maybe post on a thread for folks who love their old Windows machines?
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People do not understand how powerful the M1 platform is. Even with 8gb of ram the performance meets or exceeds what you can do on most intel laptops sold today with 16 or 32 gb of memory, with far better battery life. You can have 50+ tabs open and it does not even blink. And that’s with no fans.
Performance tests show that unless you are doing professional video editing there are very limited use cases for more than 8gb of memory on the M platform. This architecture simply works differently regarding memory.
Another thing to note is that the performance is nearly identical to m3 in real world use and I can almost guarantee you are looking at 8+ years of OS updates.
For the average person or even power user on a budget this is a solid value.
Performance tests show that unless you are doing professional video editing there are very limited use cases for more than 8gb of memory on the M platform. This architecture simply works differently regarding memory.
Another thing to note is that the performance is nearly identical to m3 in real world use and I can almost guarantee you are looking at 8+ years of OS updates.
For the average person or even power user on a budget this is a solid value.
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Add me to that list. The only time I really need to use my studio is for vm work and some local AI stuff I occasionally run.
The m1 air is fantastic. Anyone saying it was slow when it launched are either trolls, or were trying to run very high end computations on them that are completely inappropriate for a fanless ultrabook. The early reviews showed the m1 airs running x86 binaries faster than the outgoing intel airs they replaced.
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I couldn't find anything on that different VRAM use, do you have a source ? I did find that Mac RAM is regular POP not on-die which I didn't know, and that there's a setting for how much of it you want to set as VRAM which seems to contradict what you're saying....
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The vast majority of people buy a computer and then use it until it no longer meets their needs or fails. They then get a new one. Hardly anybody replaces the SSD or RAM.
"But I do!" Yes, Ars readers are outliers who build their own PCs from a box of loose components (or SCRAPS!). That's not what the average person buying a laptop does. Apple just doesn't serve the build-your-own-PC market.
"But I do!" Yes, Ars readers are outliers who build their own PCs from a box of loose components (or SCRAPS!). That's not what the average person buying a laptop does. Apple just doesn't serve the build-your-own-PC market.
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And I'm looking forward to the day when I feel like I can buy an Apple Silicon secure in the knowledge there's lots of choices of OS that work as well or better than Mac OS on the hardware! But that day is not today. I'm sure it will come, though.
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What kind of content creation? I have run windows in a vm (so 4GB for both host and guest OS) and it was perfectly fine. Tight, but not “sluggish” in the slightest.
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That's the same thing that Amazon has been selling for $750 off and on for almost the last 4 years. I wish Apple would make a nice plastic clamshell for closer to $300 so that the actual low end market could be served. It's still a nice deal and I hope it's supported for a long time.
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I’ve run a vm while also coding (python, nothing crazy) with a bunch of browser tabs open. You’re full of shit.
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I think 8gb is probably fine if you use Linux on it and don't do anything too heavy.
I just checked memory usage on my 16GB Linux laptop, and a total of only 4GB was used.
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Tim Cook is a supply chain wizard and throughout his time at Apple has pushed to keep insanely low inventory. I'm betting these are new and Apple is still manufacturing them. They do also sometimes keep older models manufactured for the K12 market too.
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This is incorrect. I'm sorry, but it is. And the Unified Memory architecture of Apple Silicon has been written about extensively, including on Apple.com
There is a single pool of RAM, and all of the various processors (ANE, CPU, GPU, etc.) can access the entire pool of RAM. This is different than the PC architecture. Even with an integrated gpu in the traditional PC architecture, the video data is replicated from the portion of the RAM assigned to video RAM and to system RAM.
I'm on an M1 air right now, please share the specific setting you are talking about, and confirm you aren't talking about an older intel model.
ETA: I've been informed down below that my understanding of unified memory in PC-land is not fully accurate, read further down in the comments for some added context.
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Huh? I've literally run a Linux VM on top of Mac OS and been fine on my M1 Air 8GB.
It's really bizarre having all these people absolutely sure that the laptop I use daily is worse than what every single experience I've actually had with it indicates. Colour me confused...
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As I pointed out in my comment above, the memory architecture absolutely does work differently, and I provided several links explaining it.
I think people often exaggerate the Unified Memory architecture benefits, and I think MacOS' great memory compression and fast SSD swap is what boosts performance as well... but it is patently incorrect to say the memory architecture is not different. For any VRAM heavy application, the memory is not duplicated like it is on an AMD or Intel integrated GPU (also on a discrete GPU, but that is less of an issue given the discrete GPU has its own RAM).
Please reference the links I posted in a comment further up the thread to educate yourself, thanks.
ETA: The unified memory also prevents wasting memory when you allocate X GB of RAM to video memory on an integrated GPU, and then use < X GB of video RAM afterwards (such as when you close your game or VRAM heavy app). Given it is a single pool of RAM and the CPU and GPU can access the same memory addresses, there is no need to arbitrarily divide the RAM into video and system memory. Once the VRAM heavy app is closed, those same memory addresses can immediately be used for ANE tasks, GPU tasks, CPU tasks, etc.
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That was definitely not my experience using a friend's mostly brand new 8GB M1 Air back in 2021. Plenty of people on the internet have talked about their relatively sluggish experiences with 8GB M1s.
It's possible that it's mostly been ironed out by now, but there are so many ways it can fail. For example, if most of the drive is utilized, filesystem performance tends to fall off a cliff. It's too easy to fill up a 256GB drive.
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Apple Discussions link was a single person, not plenty. They also didn't do any of the troubleshooting steps others in that thread recommended, or at least stopped posting if they did.
I read a few pages on that Reddit thread, and there were more people saying they didn't experience this issue than those saying they did.
Out of curiosity, I just opened Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
Firefox and Safari - buttery smooth animations
Chrome - choppy animations
The video at the top of the Reddit thread showed what I experience today with Chrome only.
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This is not true. Both Intel and AMD have support for zero-copy memory transfers for iGPUs. You start by allocating memory on the GPU, then the code running on the CPU has a pointer to it and can write directly to it.
The Steam Deck, Xbox and PS5 all have unified memory and use that approach.
Try starting a game on the Steam Deck and then quitting it, you'll see the same thing happen.
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That does seem to be the rumor. An earlier comment mentioned that education customers can still order the M1 Air, and I wouldn't be suprised if large corporate clients were also able to still order it. I remember one of my previous employers continuing to get new 2015 MacBook Pros for quite some time after the touch bar version came out. They only switched after a non touchbar version was available and they figured out how they wanted to support USB-C only devices
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Huh, interesting. I'll play around with this later, I do have a steam deck as well as an M1 Air.
PS. I upvoted your response to my comment, as you educated me a bit today.
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And yet this is the configuration of an Air I support and administor. In addition, my own computer, used for professional level photography amongst other things, is an 8GB M2. The native OS is completely usable with 8GB and in my experience, which includes a fairly large local support circle, indicates this was true from Apple Silicon day one. It may be improved, but it is not something that has changed radically..
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I’ve literally run a Windows 11 VM, with 8GB RAM allocated, on top of Mac OS. Same results. Applications under both OS’s work as expected and moving back and forth is seamless. M2 Air 8GB here.
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Would love to hear your experiences.
Also note that the Steam Deck actually has higher memory bandwidth than the M1 Air. The OLED Steam Deck has 102.4 GB/s, and the LCD one has 88 GB/s. The M1 Air has 67 GB/s.
The M-series Pro and Max both have much higher mem bandwidth than the Air though, and higher than the system RAM in most laptop and desktop PCs. It's stunning how good the higher-end M-series chips are.
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I've never tried that! I only allocated 4 GB to my Windows vm (I have used both Linux and Windows VM's, but on my air NOT at the same time...). With that said, same experience when I used to use Parallels to run Windows 11 ARM with 4 GB on MacOS M1 Air 8GB. Both were quite snappy, even when I ran MS Visio (which is not ARM native yet last I checked, so had to run in Microsoft's emulation).
I invested in a Mac Studio and so I moved my Parallels license to that. I only occasionally use a Linux VM (through UTM) these days on my air m1.
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Haha, I am aware, in addition to my M1 Air, I have an M2 Max Mac Studio (base model, 30 GPU cores and 32 GB of Unified memory). I love my studio.
ETA: I'm too much of a geek, I basically have everything. Typical gaming PC, macbook air, mac studio, steam deck, ROG ally and a handful of mini pc's running as a proxmox cluster. Oh, and a cheapo N100 mini pc that is running as my pfSense firewall.
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As for my experiences: I haven't specifically looked at how the Steam Deck handles RAM, as I basically use it as a console. I occasionally hit desktop mode to configure emulators, or to "sideload" Epic Store free games or GOG purchases through Heroic launcher.
With that said, I am always impressed with the Deck's performance. And even more impressed with my ROG Ally's performance. I occasionally use the Ally docked to a TV when I am away from home, and it handles 1080p gaming with relatively recent AAA games with ease (unless I enable Ray tracing). When docked, I put it to 25W mode and it is seriously impressive.
I have a PS5 as well, but I have never looked into how it runs under the hood. It's basically an appliance for me.
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