M1 Macbook Air

Despite its laptop-ness, I decided to think harder on the Macbook Air:

• It’s thin, light and particularly low-powered
• It’s fanless
• Although I’ll never prefer it, Apple (/my?) users tend to love the trackpad, so the ability to check out my apps on the M1 Air’s trackpad and make sure everything feels ok might be useful

My issue with the redundant (for me) display being attached?.. this could become an advantage.

People sell these machines cheaply when the displays break (Apple is… not big on right-to-repair). I could buy a Macbook with a broken screen and remove it. I checked whether this was possible (such things are a given with most laptops but with Apple I wasn’t sure what to expect). I found that this was doable, people were out there doing it. Fantastic.

‘BUY IT NOW’

I managed to find a smashed-screen, 8GB M1 Macbook Air in Rose Pink on eBay for £300. Really if I’d waited I could probably have picked one up for less.

But this was a strike while the iron is hot situation… my resistance had been strong for many years, if I waited I might easily end up changing my mind.

8GB RAM? Rose Pink?

I’d ideally want 16GB RAM minimum on a modern laptop, but the price difference between that and 8GB was significant, even on the second-hand market. Everyone seemed to be saying that 8GB on Apple Silicon was like 16GB on AMD64, which sounded distinctly like the reality-distortion-field in effect, but there were architectural realities such as their ‘Unified’ memory architecture to back this up (or at least the idea that you get more bang per GB on Apple Silicon). I’d decided to trust.

I was mainly interested in using this machine for Flutter development, and had found several people saying they were doing that on an M1 with 8GB without issues. [Note from the future: It’s great, no worries and easily snappy enough for me]

This model was Rose Pink, the colour I’d usually be least likely to choose. Considering I was buying it to immediately butcher, this somehow made it all the more perfect.