MacBook Air M1 Review: It's Too Good! (Long Term Review)

okay so there's a lot of excitement surrounding these new m1 macbooks from apple and it's for good reason uh these computers are fantastic and i'm excited to share in today's review on why i believe the m1 macbook air is the best computer you can buy for your money uh going into 2021. so the most important thing that goes into a laptop purchase is making sure that that laptop can accomplish everything that we needed to do as a buyer the conclusion that i've come to is that the m1 macbook air is able to do just about anything you want it to do and do those tasks very well and that's thanks to apple's new m1 processing chip that's kind of just powering all of these computers to start if you're a casual user so you're somebody that just wants a laptop to browse the internet to watch netflix and other streaming services to browse social media this laptop crushes those tasks it can do those incredibly fast and efficiently and you can do it for a very long time thanks to its amazing battery which we'll get into later in the video for all of my students out there you'll be happy to know that the macbook air is an incredible purchase for school and for studying one of the no things that you'll be doing as a student is typing a lot and thankfully typing on the macbook air is an incredible experience it's smooth it's responsive and you can get a ton of work done in applications like microsoft word google docs or for me i personally use notion for all of my note taking and script making for these videos that you guys are watching one last thing that i do want to mention about the keyboard is that it is backlit so it's incredibly nice to use at night and i'm actually going to run a keyboard test so you can kind of hear what it sounds like the type on the macbook air for people who have like heavier use cases for their laptop like photo editing or video editing that's kind of the camp that i fall in and i've had an amazing experience using the macbook air i actually sold my custom built pc that actually powered and made all of the videos for this channel and i've downsized to just the macbook air laptop my experience in adobe photoshop and final cut pro on the laptop has just been so great that i haven't missed my windows pc and i feel safe recommending uh the macbook air for like content creation and whatnot because all my videos are shot in 4k and i've had no issues creating and editing them on this computer the last category of people that i want to focus on are gamers if you're looking to play video games on the macbook air i'm sorry i as much as i love this laptop i think you should still pass on it for playing video games i think you're much better off getting a windows based machine or getting a game console like the playstation 5 to satisfy your gaming needs moving on from performance a laptop can only be as useful as it is powered on like a dead laptop is a quite useless laptop and an unproductive laptop so battery life is incredibly important i think in the user experience and thankfully apple did a great job the macbook air has an incredible battery life from my experience of like continuous usage i get around 8 to 10 hours of battery life of like photo editing video editing watching 4k netflix youtube so i'm definitely a heavy user and i still get really good battery life if you're more of a casual user or the most of the apps that you use are either within the web browser or like microsoft word or note-taking apps or social media you'll probably get even longer battery life than me like probably 10 plus hours on a single charge i know apple actually has quoted that uh watching a continuous hd video uh the laptop can go up to 18 hours on a single charge so that kind of gives you some perspective of just how long you can stretch this battery so another topic about this laptop that i really wanted to focus on that i think is a huge dilemma with a lot of people is how much storage should they get on their macbook air purchase i think for most people the base storage at 256 gigabytes is the right choice i think generally that's enough storage to cover all of your application needs for me personally i only have gigabytes of like storage on my macbook air and that has been plenty for me i have all the apps i need installed and i have plenty of room to install more apps if my needs expand on this computer i can definitely recognize that a ton of us have a lot of videos and photos that we shoot on our phone that we want to store somewhere and like kind of the most common place people first think of is their laptop but i don't think like a laptop is really the best place to store these big files i'd actually look at cloud services such as icloud or google drive dropbox or google photos i think you're much better off storing all that media in the cloud that way you can access all that from a variety of different devices and not just your macbook air one last thing that i'll say about storage is that i definitely recognize that there's a ton of people where 256 gigabytes of internal memory simply is not enough to let's say complete a project like for me my videos can easily get up to 100 gigabytes supplies of video files and i don't really have enough space locally within the computer to actually output and create the project file so we have two options we can upgrade the storage through apple and pay 226 dollars canadian to increase the storage by 256 gigabytes or we can go on amazon and just pick up an external ssd from samsung for example you can get a 500 gigabyte ssd for about 129 canadian and that's a much better deal and you can just connect it via usbc for me personally that's actually what i did i have an external ssd from samsung that has just been incredibly fast and useful and way cheaper to get more storage if i actually do need it versus paying apple to increase the storage for me let's take a moment now to talk about the design of this laptop i think we can all agree that apple knows how to design beautiful hardware and it's no exception with the macbook air if you're the kind of person who generally needs to be in front of your computer and like just stare at the screen for a very long time you'll be happy to know that apple has an amazing display on the macbook air that they tout as their retina display all you need to know about the retina display is that the colors are gorgeous the text on the screen are very sharp and clear to read and the screen itself actually adapts to the environment you're in so it can go from warm colors or cooler colors depending on the lighting situation and it's supposed to help with eye strain especially when you use your laptop for a very long time and i can attest that that actually does work and i'm very appreciative that that's actually built into this display because i sit in front of my computer for hours on end doing work the last thing that i'll say about design is that this laptop is not a hundred percent durable it is prone to scratches and spots and marks and i've done like all of those things to my macbook air like on my macbook i actually scratched it with my keys by mistake i just threw my laptop into the bag and it made these little etch marks on the side that are just going to be there forever so i totally recommend you get a case on your laptop the one that i use is a leather case from a company called andar they actually sent that to me but you guys can just find a case on amazon just make sure you cover this thing up because it will scratch eventually if you don't now i want to talk more about the software the mac os operating system and i think for a lot of people the bulk of your long term experience buying this device and what you're going to remember is the mac os specific features and how it integrates so well with the apple ecosystem i am a new mac os user i just switched over to mac back in january of this year i just bought an iphone november of last year i got an apple watch i bought some airpods so i'm like brand new into the apple ecosystem but i'm very excited to be in it because the level of integration and how all these devices talk to each other is just fantastic to start i love the fact that i can get text messages that come into my iphone right on my laptop i just think that is it's such a tiny thing but it just changes the entire experience for me at least when i use my macbook it generally means that when i'm at home i don't need to grab my phone to really do anything it can just sit on the charger or on my bedside table and i can respond to all my friends on my computer and a lot faster too because you can type faster on a keyboard than you can on a touch screen in my opinion and it's better productivity wise like when i'm doing work i can quickly respond to messages and then get back to focusing on doing work versus grabbing my phone responding to messages and then getting distracted with i don't know an instagram notification or a new youtube video for my favorite creator and then long gone is my productivity and now i'm just completely procrastinating and distracted for people who own the apple watch like myself you can actually unlock the macbook air with your watch so you don't have to type your computer password you don't have to use touch id so i find that to be pretty useful sometimes for people who own airpod pros like myself the integration with that device and the macbook air and the iphone has been incredibly useful so i could be listening to something on my macbook air with my airpods pros in my ears and then grab my iphone and then start playing music on my iphone and then the airpods will vary seamlessly on their own switch over from the macbook air to the iphone without me needing to do anything and i found that to be a nice level of integration as well this next thing is a little bit more niche it's for anybody who owns an apple tv 4k like myself you can actually screen mirror your macbook air to the apple tv 4k on your beautiful big 4k tv display and you can use it as a second screen i personally love doing this and it's an incredibly fast way to launch your macbook air onto the tv without any wires or cables so all the way up into this point of the video the review has been incredibly positive it doesn't mean that i think this is the ultimate perfect laptop it still has its shortcomings and downsides and that's what we're going to kind of dive into very quickly for starters i wish there was just one more usbc port on the macbook i find it frustrating that there's only two i really wish apple put face id on the laptop because that would have been incredibly useful we're so used to doing that on our iphones and ipads it would have been nice to have it on the laptop or at least that's just my opinion something very odd that has been happening during my experience with this laptop is that it sometimes randomly shuts down and it restarts on its own this has only happened maybe two or three times in the past i think three and a half four months that i've owned this computer but something just to point out i don't know why it did it but it has crashed on me a few times i've also had bluetooth issues as well and i know this is actually a common problem across all the m1 macs that people have been experiencing bluetooth problems for me personally my bluetooth issues arise when i'm using an external mouse with this laptop when i want to work from a desk i find that the connection with my mouse bluetooth connected to the macbook air it just isn't that smooth like when i'm using the mouse to navigate with it on the macbook air it's never as smooth as just using the track pad and i really attest that to the fact that there's just something going on with the latency or the connection between my mouse and the laptop itself and i know apple is actually aware of this and they have been releasing patches to improve this and it has gotten a little bit better but it still is an issue that you should be aware of that's kind of the bulk of my issues are these deal breakers definitely not like i'd say 97 98 of the time the laptop works just as intended and i'm incredibly happy with this purchase and i would never turn back or return it but the two percent of the time that i am dealing with some of these issues it is incredibly frustrating but uh it is a new transition for apple so i'm a bit more forgiving with it and generally i've been incredibly happy uh with my experience with the macbook air so overall about two months later from my original review with the macbook air i can confidently say that my conclusion hasn't changed i think the macbook air is pretty much the perfect laptop for just about anybody students businessmen casual users creators like myself you can find a need and get it done on the macbook air and i think for most people the macbook pro just isn't really a good buy from my own personal research and reviewing the test results and benchmarks of between the macbook pro and the macbook air i just generally think it's not worth the extra upsell for the macbook pro just to get a fan i don't think most people would benefit from having a fan built into their computer so there you have it thank you so much for watching today's video make sure to drop a like if you guys did enjoy the video subscribe if you are brand new to the channel more macbook related videos are to come in the future and please comment down below hashtag m1 macbook air if you did finish the video but i'll catch all of you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Terren Rule

Views: 308,338

Keywords: macbook air m1, m1 macbook air, macbook air, macbook air 2020, macbook air m1 review, macbook m1, macbook, m1 macbook air review, macbook m1 air, apple macbook air m1, m1 macbook, macbook air 2021, macbook air review, macbook air m1 review 2021, macbook air m1 review 2020, macbook air m1 review for students, m1, m1 air, mac air m1, macbook m1 review, apple macbook air, apple m1, m1 mac, terren rule

Id: athsLDK9xck

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021