No kidding. I bought a reasonably high end Thinkpad for myself and the entry level M1 MacBook Air for my son to do his schoolwork on. The performance, battery life and screen are much better on the M1 despite being significantly less expensive.
I caved earlier this year and got an M1 MacBook Air, $1000 (for the 16gb of ram model) and it’s significantly faster than my (2 year old but much more expensive) thinkpad, it doesn’t have a touchscreen but meets every other requirement you have, and you can now put Linux on it and it works pretty great, and will only improve as marcan and team keep up their great work
My laptop before I switched to MacBook M1 was a relatively high end ThinkPad Carbon X1. It was okay but the MacBook pro are a lot better despite the lack of a touchscreen.
An M1 Macbook Air is still the best laptop money can buy for general use, and they are easily had under $700. I cannot comprehend who is buying a $2000 laptop at this point outside of gamers and video editors.
Imho M1 airs are the best bang for buck as mid-whatever-range laptops. Especially if one finds a 16gb one. Crazy if you think that before, the base macbook air you could get at the same original price would be a mere i3 one, while m1 actually competes well in raw performance with i7. Unless somebody wants something specific that M2/3 have that M1 does not, M1's price/performance ratio is hard to beat.
I got the M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM for £730 second hand off eBay as a backup laptop shortly after buying an M1 Pro 14”.
Then when I travelled for a few months I only took the Air with me, and it’s incredible how I could pretty much do all of my day to day development on it. The single core performance being pretty much the same is such a huge win.
After having a £3000 Surface Book 2 for a few years which is truly one of the worst devices I’ve ever owned, the M1 Air is by far the laptop I’ve got the most value out of.
I have had the thin quite coolness of an M1 with the ThinkPad X1 series for an entire decade now.
I briefly tried the highest spec MacBook Air, but it was incredibly underpowered compared to my older X1's i7 + 32GB of ram in an equally slim, sleek and quite form factor.
I have an M1 macbook air and it's flipping fast with insane battery life. It's giving my employers 6K US Dollars Intel Macbook Pro a run for its money at a fraction of the cost.
My M1 MacBook Air (8GB RAM) was cheaper than the 16GB Dell Latitude 13 i7 I bought a year and a half previously. I am much happier with my MBA, even at 8GB, than I ever was with my Dell.
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