M1 MacBook Air Long-Term Review: The Truth after 9 Months!

I know we've made multiple reviews on the M1 MacBook Air that pack a ton of detail, but since then, we've done a lot more testing and a lot of new devices have come out, both from Apple and other manufacturers, so in this extended final long-term review, I want to focus on what's changed, both in my personal experience as well as the market, coming from 9 months ago to now, and talk about if it's still worth buying the M1 MacBook Air now that we're more than halfway through 2021 and with rumors of the M2 models coming out, and if any of my spec recommendations have changed, which they have, and we'll talk about that. It's getting close to 9 months since Apple revealed their M1 Air, and in that time it went from the most underwhelming M1 Mac to one of the best for a few reasons. It started out as a budget laptop for those people who can't afford the MacBook Pro mostly because of the lack of a cooling system, and we didn't really give it much attention until we started putting it side by side against the Pro, and then it started to shock us. Now yes, in synthetic benchmarks it clearly was slower, especially with lower graphics performance because of that 7-core GPU compared to the 8-core, and in our initial tests we found that the MacBook Air thermal throttled very quickly going down from 3.2GHz to 2.7GHz, and then after a few more runs of Cinebench, down to a very low 2.35GHz. And after the full 10 minute run, it lost over 15% of its performance which is disappointing, and that confirmed my speculation that this machine was only made to come in at that low $999 price tag, but as you know, I was wrong. And now after nearly 9 months, Apple's least expensive laptop is now even cheaper and for me and many others, it keeps getting better and better which is insane. In that time I also realized how you can really tell which tech products are the best and are worth spending your money on. Here in the office we have a huge selection of products from Macs to Windows PCs and lots of iPads and smartphones. I also have every M1 product that Apple makes including the Mac Mini, an iMac, an M1 MacBook Pro and even two M1 iPad Pros. I also have Intel Macs like my 16-inch MacBook Pro so I can use any product that I want to, and what is crazy is that after all of this time, I keep picking up and using the M1 MacBook Air, Apple's cheapest Mac, at least from the ones that I own. Yes, the M1 MacBook Pro is technically better with more powerful graphics and other features, so why is everybody, including professionals ignoring the M1 MacBook Pro in favor of the Air if we're judging off of sales, and why does my Pro just sit there collecting dust? Well there are multiple reasons. The first one is definitely the price. Anything priced under $1000 sounds much more reasonable to buy compared to just over $1000 even if the $1200 Pro does offer extra hardware, better battery life, extra features and performance. But with that, the Air didn't stay at that $999 price tag for long. As soon as people started finding out just how good this machine really is, big retailers started dropping the price, at first by $50, and then Amazon dropped it by $100 to $899, and just recently, over the 4th of July weekend, it briefly dropped to $849, which is insane. How is Apple able to make a machine that smokes $1200 to $1400 or even more expensive Windows machines, and then be able to sell it at under $900? That's thanks to the mass manufacturing of the M1 chip and putting it into lots of devices instead of previously having to pay Intel for their pricey processors that kept overheating in their last MacBook Air and had way worse performance on top of that. And although the M1 Air does thermal throttle as I mentioned, it's nothing like the previous Intel models, not only because it's fanless so you don't have a fan that gets loud and annoying, but also because it's so much faster that many tasks don't need as much CPU power to perform, for example video editing or web conferencing, and because many of those tasks have dedicated chips to speed them up. Because of that, in real world use, I never once wished that I grabbed the M1 MacBook Pro. The M1 Air is so fast that I didn't even need my 16-inch MacBook Pro for the extra graphics performance, and I'm not the only one. I know multiple people that ditch their much more expensive, larger MacBooks for these M1's for serious productivity work, which is something we would have never believed we could do just one year ago. You do get a smaller display, which some people prefer, but you also get so many benefits, one huge one being battery life. Over the last 9 months I have thrown almost everything at this fanless machine, even pro photo and video editing, and I have the base $999 model that you can buy for as low as $850 using the link down below in the video description. Now yes, I have had a choke on me multiple times, but it was for one very specific reason that is a very easy fix, which would be my biggest recommendation after using this for 9 months, and we'll talk about that in just a bit. As far as that battery life, it is insane. I went from about 2.5 hours of 4K video editing with my 16-inch MacBook Pro to almost 8 hours with the M1 Air, and unlike Windows laptops, it doesn't slow down when it's unplugged. I have literally never experienced such freedom when video editing on the go. Now sure, my 16-inch MacBook Pro was good since it retained its performance when unplugged, but I still had to worry about battery life and when I would have to plug it in to recharge. But with these new M1 machines, you don't even have to worry about bringing a charger with you. By now you know that we lean very heavily on buying the Air over the Pro, but what about the two biggest reasons that people say it is worth buying the Pro for? Well, the first one is better battery life. Yes it's true, in real world use the Pro can play back video for about 5 extra hours and about 2 extra hours of productivity, but to be honest that has never once been a factor, because once the battery life is good enough and can get you through a full day, the extra hours doesn't really mean much. And the other reason is performance, both because of thermal throttling and having one less graphics core, so how much has that mattered in the last 9 months? Well, as you saw, thermal throttling is definitely an issue, and the graphics is also weaker, but to me, it didn't matter at all, and that's crazy because I care about performance. That's because when you're looking at benchmarks, you see all of the differences both big and small, and a 15% difference is fairly significant because we were used to seeing between 5-10% improvements year to year, but in real world performance what matters most is if the machine is fast enough or if it isn't. In certain cases, 15% of extra performance can make or break a machine, but with the Air it handles most tasks just as well as the Pro, and even though it does take a bit longer to export your projects, you don't really notice that in the real world, and actual productivity and timeline performance when you're doing the work is just as fast, so because of that, I've never felt like having to grab the Pro over the Air. Not only that, but the MacBook Air has a secret weapon to make it even faster than the Pro for those of you guys that absolutely need the best performance, and here's how you can do it to your MacBook Air as well for only $30. We bought a few thermal pads on Amazon and installed them, which takes less than 20 minutes and this will draw heat from the chip to the aluminum body. Not only does the performance boost significantly, but it's actually better than the Pro which has a fan because Apple keeps the fan running low until the M1 chip is really hot. It also keeps your M1 chip running cooler for most tasks which is great for longevity, and it can't be bad for it since there are temperature limits in place. The only downside is that the bottom can get hotter, but unless you're running tons of constant exports or benchmarks, for most cases you don't actually notice it because the CPU doesn't have to run at 100%. Now we did remove ours to keep testing fair, but even though my performance has dropped back down to stock, it doesn't matter once again because it's still super fast even for heavy use. In fact, I recently had someone ask if they can get by with an M1 Air until the M1X Max came out, and I said yes definitely as I have many times, but the crazy thing is that once he tried the new Air, he said he doesn't even need to wait for the M1X because it handles everything more than good enough, so he just might not even need to buy one. And although I'm super excited about these more powerful chips since the M1 sounds like old news now and everyone always wants newer, bigger and faster things, for most people the M1 chip is fast enough even in a fanless machine and although it might just seem boring to buy something that's been out for a while for $899 or even less, go ahead and give it a try, I think you'll be shocked by how well it works. Yes, the M1X MacBooks will be great, but because of how good the MacBook Air is, it will still be the number one laptop after those come out, just like it is right now after 9 months of being on the market. Usually Amazon's top seller list for laptops is just filled with super cheap laptops, but this thing is number one in the charts, and the other colors are close seconds with other machines being distant from it like the MacBook Pro. So after 9 months, the MacBook Air is still setting record breaking sales records, and premium Windows laptops can't even get close in sales, performance and now even price. What really proves this point is when we compare the Air to two brand new Surface Laptop 4s with powerful AMD processors and also Intel's latest, although the AMD processor had way more raw performance when it came to real world use, the MacBook Air smoked it which is crazy, and it also comes in at a much lower price and has better hardware overall, and that has been the case with every single Windows laptop that has come out ever since this M1 Air hit the market, so it's just getting better compared to the competition. The display is fantastic, beating out Windows laptops that cost much more, and the same thing goes for the speakers, keyboard and trackpad, the build quality is great, and the ports are thunderbolt 4 so they can be split into 3 thunderbolt ports for each one at a fairly low price. And as I mentioned at the start, there were multiple times where I actually had this M1 Air choke up and I was wondering what is going on with it, why is it being so slow, and this seems to be a bigger deal with the M1 chips than with the previous ones, but thankfully this is a fairly easy issue to fix. That was because the M1 chips rely on fast RAM, and when that 8GB in my case with the base model fills up, it uses your SSD which is also very fast, but if your RAM is full and your SSD is close to being full, then what chip really seems to slow down, especially when you're doing heavier tasks. Because of that, if you fill more than 200GB of your SSD, make sure to either get 16GB of RAM or the 512GB SSD model and then you'll have no issues at all. So after 9 months, the M1 MacBook Air is only getting better and better with software being updated and the new competition not really bringing anything else. Windows laptops can't catch up in performance or price, and even Apple's own M1 iPads were a bit of a miss, not only because of the prices that went up, and also you're being forced to pay for 16GB of RAM if you need more storage, but also because of iPadOS 15 which in general everyone says was a miss. And because of that, more people are switching over from Windows computers, other higher end Macs and even iPads to just buying the good old M1 MacBook Air where the value keeps getting better and better. So after all this time, I love this machine and it is the one I pick up even though I have access to so many other Macs and iPads and even Windows machines, it just handles everything even for higher use, and for students or regular people it is just such a fantastic deal, which is something we never thought we'd say would come from Apple where we're used to high prices. It's cheap, it's amazing, and it's going to last a long time.