In 2020, Apple announced Apple Silicon and completely revolutionized the laptop industry. For the first time, you could get a laptop that could do everyday office tasks without distracting fan noise, excessive heat, and with multi-day battery life. The M1 chip was revolutionary and the MacBook Air was the perfect chassis for it. The laptop was thin, lightweight, had a high resolution display, great keyboard, best trackpad in the industry, decent webcam, had no fan (and therefore no fan noise), and never got even remotely warm to the touch unless pushing it excessively hard.
This completely shocked the industry because there was no real competitor from the PC market for this laptop. There was literally nothing else on the market other than the MacBook Pro 13 that could compete in all of these areas at once. The best part was that the Air was also really cheap for all that it offered coming in at $999 or $899 for students.
But that was 2020 (basically 2021 since it came out in November) and this is 2024. So how does the laptop stack up today and does the title of this article, that you should buy this laptop today, really ring true? Let’s go over the competition today and why you should buy this laptop in 2024 despite the competition.
The competition (as of now)
Things have really started to get interesting this year because the answer from the PC market has finally arrived in the form of the Snapdragon X Elite (and X Plus) chips from Qualcomm. These chips have good battery life and are able to keep the heat and fan noise to a minimum while doing basic tasks, which is exactly what a good laptop should do.
The surface laptop 7 is of particular note because it is almost as if Microsoft designed that laptop with the M1 MacBook Air in mind. It looks very similar (wedge shape and all), has a haptic touchpad, and has a high resolution display. The surface laptop 7 is superior to the M1 Air from a few years ago in a few ways. Namely, it has a high refresh screen, extra starting RAM, and upgradable SSD, and better performance. However, it is a good deal more expensive than the M1 Air.
The problem with these X-Elite laptops is in the software. Apple did an excellent job with the transition away from Intel to their custom ARM chips. They developed a translation layer that ran almost every single application transparently that was not optimized so that the user didn’t even notice. Because Apple made such a strong commitment to ARM going forward and announced they would stop making x86 machines, developers followed very quickly with optimized ARM versions so that now almost every Mac app is ARM native. Microsoft also made a translation layer called Prism to translate x86 apps to ARM and it works surprisingly well – much better than their previous attempt. But it is not perfect and it is not as good as Rosetta 2 with many applications that do not work. Also, because Microsoft still has to support x86 because the vast majority of Windows installs will still be x86, there is less incentive for developers to optimize for ARM than there was for Apple, making for a slower transition.
The competition from AMD is currently their 8000 series CPUs which are not nearly as efficient as the M1 and simply cannot compete with the battery life and heat output. Their upcoming 300 series CPUs seem to be focusing more on performance and gimmicky AI than battery life and heat output so they are likely to compete on the same level as their ARM competition.
Intel has probably been the worst in terms of performance per watt and have gotten a lot of flack for it in recent years. Their new Core Ultra chips were an attempt to shake that, and although they are much better than previous chips, they are not really competitive in terms of efficiency. They have a very interesting upcoming Lunar Lake series that they claim will compete with Qualcomm and Apple in terms of efficiency so we will see.
Lastly, there is the competition from Apple itself. They now sell an M3 MacBook Air starting at $1099 ($999 education) and a M2 Air starting at $999 ($899 after education). Both of these share the same chassis which has been updated to be thinner and lighter than the M1 Air. They have a brighter screen (with no PWM if that matters to you), slightly better battery life, a better webcam, thinner bezels, an ugly but mostly invisible notch, and better performance.
Where does this leave the M1?
The thing about performance year over year in computing is that, at some point, certain workflows do not get any faster. The vast majority of people spend their day in a web browser with an email client and an office suite. For this kind of workflow, no one will notice the difference between an M1 or an X Elite or any other modern CPU for that matter. Sure, one may be slightly more responsive than the other but the bandwidth is likely to be internet speed rather than CPU speed for most of this.
This year, Walmart began selling the M1 Air for $699 brand new. This is a tremendous value for this laptop as the M1 is still a very respectable chip in terms of performance, particularly in single core where most of the aforementioned office workflow applications will benefit the most. The years have not taken away its excellent design, battery life, and other features that made it so popular.
In 2024, for $699, the M1 Air is still an excellent value and a perfect choice for students, office workers, and those who simply want a laptop for doing things better suited for a computer.
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