The M1 Macbook Air 10 MONTHS Later: Still Worth Your Money?

the m1 macbook air has been out for about 10 months now and it's been my daily driver laptop since then i use it for pretty much everything i watch youtube videos on it i edit my own youtube videos on it i write my video scripts on that thing and i like to take it on travels you name it it's seen it it's seen everything i've seen like everything i've seen so how well of a job has it done well let's find out with a little 10 month review for reference my mlm macbook air is the cheapest macbook air that starts at 999 us and this same laptop has occasionally dipped down to as low as 800 in recent weeks so if you're really interested in this laptop look around you might be able to find a pretty good deal somewhere so let's dig into some of the meat of this video let's first talk about how the body and future of this machine has held up it wouldn't help us to know that the machine still performs great if the laptop is falling apart before it even hits a year old i pretty much baby all of my electronics so you can expect it to be in at least good to great condition for the macbook air despite never putting it in a case i can say that the body itself has held up pretty well of course you have to ignore the fact that i actually nearly dropped this thing literally today like i was preparing myself to record this video and it almost slipped out of my hand it was a very it was a very scary moment anyway back on topic the body of the macbook has three scuffs on the lid that i have no idea how they got there and the speaker grilles while super small can get tiny little specks of dust in them but despite that the speakers themselves still sound just like the day the box is open the little speaker specs also happened on my 2016 macbook pro and do be warned that i originally purchased an m1 macbook pro instead of this m1 macbook air and that macbook pro actually had to get sent back to apple because it had a huge panel gap on the back side that you can fit a credit card through i returned that macbook pro for this macbook air so just be careful inspect your purchases if you buy one because this macbook air has a very similar seam on the bottom as well and you just want to make sure that there's no massive gaps there after using the m1 macbook air over 10 months the battery has degraded by a whopping one percent that's not because i barely use it it's because this thing barely sips any battery when it's in sleep mode and it's been power cycled well less than 100 times usually i like to try and clean products before shoving it in front of a camera but for a long term review like this one i thought i'd keep some footage where it's filled with dirt and grime so that people have an idea of what it looks like a few months down the line without cleaning it and it also lets people see how much of a slob someone could be the keyboard works just as it has since day one these keyboards aren't like the ones on the mid 2010 macbooks with the butterfly keyboard that one was prone to having keys get stuck instead these just look a little bit more slick and shiny due to my own nasty natural finger oils the trackpad and speakers are still great the webcam is still okay the two usbc ports have been a bit of a pain for me i use a top port for chargers external hard drives whatever but this is a bad habit of mine sometimes i let things dangle while being plugged in which you definitely shouldn't because sometime over the last three or so months the top port has become really really finicky and when i plug in external devices like hard drives sometimes work sometimes doesn't work and definitely doesn't work if i move the drive around too much it also sometimes disconnects the drive when i move it around too much so honestly try to treat your two usb type-c ports well so that's my experiences with the physical features of the m1 macbook air so now let's discuss how it performs in day-to-day tasks intensive tasks and like gaming for day-to-day tasks the m1 macbook air is snappy this laptop doesn't struggle with opening web pages answering emails writing up a script for this video playing videos video chatting whatever it does it well and it does it fast i don't see the spinning beach ball of death often for more intensive tasks like photo editing or video editing it does good here too for photo editing i mainly edit smaller images between 1080p and 4k in resolution what i'm really trying to say is that i'm not a pro photographer and really only photo edit to make youtube thumbnails and the occasional 4k image edit for this channel i'm sure photographers and photo editors edit images much larger than that but for me personally making changes to a 24 megapixel image directly out of my mirrorless camera feels smooth and snappy as well for video editing i'd like to think i have decent experience on that after all my video editing machine of choice is this laptop i edit mix 4k footage summon prores 422 sony's xavcs codec and smartphone footage and for the most part it does it all smoothly even with footage stacked on top of each other the only issue i have with it during video editing is something i mentioned in my last m1 macbook video if you cut and trim compressed footage like that x avcs footage in 4k that i just talked about and try to speed at it sometimes the audio just cuts out you then have to open a different window and do something else for a minute until audio functions again it's super annoying but it's something that has happened in the past but has slowly been happening less and less hopefully thanks to software updates right gaming on the mac is a bit more interesting to test because for the most part there aren't as many games on the mac as there are on pc and there definitely aren't a ton of arm mac games out there yet that take the machine's full potential into account but i can't play some ipad and iphone games if you're interested i only tested two games on this machine they're both intel mac games not m1 mac games stardew valley which ran great but again that isn't a hard game to run and shadow of the tomb raider which is a game not made for m1 max at all it's made for running older macs still on intel chips but it still ran at 55 frames per second on the lowest setting you're not going to be the next esports pro in this machine but still pretty fantastic for a completely fanless laptop now let's talk apple silicon as a whole when the apple m1 chips were released in apple laptops there wasn't as much software support for them as there is today adobe didn't have their line of products updated for silicon max and the vast majority of mac apps were still optimized for intel processors but since then there has been plenty of apple silicon optimized apps software vendors like adobe affinity and google have products that work natively off of these apple silicon chips but there are a ton of software out there that haven't been updated for it for example like discord notion and steam these are pretty popular apps to be fair even when software is not written for apple silicon they typically perform as good or better than their older intel version more performance is always appreciated and well that's why an m1 mac is purchased in the first place for better performance and better battery life lastly before i get to my conclusion i said in my previous video i had all these little glitches and weird wonky stuff that would randomly happen i've had random reboots the laptop acting weird when connected to a display and random app crashes and those have gotten less and less frequent as software written for apple silicon has been slowly maturing so i have no complaints there and i'm glad it's getting better so i guess now it's conclusion time how is this machine held up for me overall well it does exactly what i expect out of it and it still does the physical body of the machine has held up with only minor dings the performance of the machine doesn't feel like it's been slowing down even after 10 months we'll see if that changes though in a few months with all the added features in mac os 12 and as the apple silicon max continued to get more stable as time goes on performance could change there too so if i could go back in time now would i tell my past self to buy this laptop again yeah it still does everything i need in a laptop script writing reading emails video calling photo and video editing it was a good idea to purchase this device 10 months ago and i think it's a good idea now especially with all the sales that i see on this thing while the m1 macbook air is currently apple's lightest and cheapest laptop i think the performance in this thing is great for its price and it meets the majority of people's needs so if i were looking at for a laptop within this roughly 1 000 price range i think the first laptop i would recommend to someone looking for a thin and light laptop would be the m1 macbook air unless they don't like mac os anyway what do you think how do you feel about the apple silicon m1 macbooks now that they've matured just a little bit more i know it hasn't been a full year yet but you know new software is coming out has your opinions on it changed at all is it worth looking at now or in your opinion has better laptops come along for this price in the windows world or maybe or maybe mac os just isn't your type of thing what's your ideal laptop right now let me know your thoughts in the comment section below if you enjoy this video give it a thumbs up and well don't forget to subscribe i'll see you all next time bye

Channel: Jimmy Tries World

Views: 325,778

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Id: RG-As8thtic

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021