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

The M1 Macbook air has been out for nearly 10 months now. And it's been my daily driver laptop since then. I use it for everything. Watching youtube videos, editing youtube videos, writing scripts, taking it on travels. You name it. It's seen everything I've seen. So, how well of a job has it done? Well let's find out with a little review.

Affiliate link to product mentioned:
M1 Macbook Air: https://amzn.to/2NQzhsx
M1 Macbook Pro: https://amzn.to/2Mz0JKv

Amazon Affiliate Links to Gear I use:
Sony A7S III: https://amzn.to/3jD0fxC
Vanguard Alta Pro 263AB Tripod: https://amzn.to/2O7V8Yn
M1 Macbook Air: https://amzn.to/3rV5Zru
Philips Hue Light Strip: https://amzn.to/2VZq2EV
Godox SL-60W: https://amzn.to/37LsdT0
Rode VideoMic NTG:https://amzn.to/2RKHVrL
Shure SM7B: https://amzn.to/30Dxji7
Logitech MX Master 3: https://amzn.to/30G1GV2
Logitech MX keys: https://amzn.to/3bHytQ8yo

Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
0:45 How the Body Has Held Up
3:40 How it Performs Almost a Year Later
5:22 Quick Gaming Tests
6:05 Apple Silicon
7:41 Conclusion


For reference, my M1 Macbook air is the cheapest macbook air that starts at $999 US and has occasionally dipped down to as low as $800 in recent weeks. Let's first talk about how the body and features of the machine has held up. For the Macbook air. Despite never putting a case on it. I can say that the body has held up pretty well. The body of the macbook has 3 scuffs on the lid, and the speaker grilles can get tiny little specks of dust in them but despite that the speakers still sound just like the day the box is opened. This happened on my old 2016 macbook pro as well. I originally purchased an M1 macbook pro instead of this macbook air and that had a huge panel gap on the back side, that you could fit a credit card through. I returned that macbook pro for this macbook air.

After using it over 10 months the battery has degraded by 1%. That’s because this thing barely sips any battery when it's in sleep mode. And it's been power cycled 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, I thought I'd keep some footage where it is filled with dirt and grime. The keyboard works just as it has since day 1, with none of the keys ending up stuck. The trackpad and speakers are still great. The webcam, is stiill just ok. The 2 usb-c ports have been a bit of a pain for me. I normally plug everything into the top port first. This could be chargers, external hard drives, whatever. But, this is a bad habit of mine. Sometimes, I let things dangle. Which you definitely shouldn't because sometime over the last 3 or so months, the top port has become really finicky so try to treat that port well.

For day to day tasks, the M1 Macbook air is snappy. This laptop doesn't struggle with opening webpages, answering emails, writing up the script for this video, playing videos, video chatting. Whatever. it does it well and it does it fast. For more intensive tasks, like photo or video editing. It does good here too. For photo editing. I mainly edit smaller images between 1080p and 4k in resolution. For video editing, I got a ton of experience on that. Afterall, my video editing machine of choice is this laptop. I edit mixed 4K footage, some in ProRes 422, Sony's XAVC-S codec, and smartphone footage. It does this smoothly, even with footage stacked on top of each other. The only issue I have with it during video editing, if you cut and trim compressed footage, like that XAVC-S footage I talked about, and try to speed edit. Sometimes the audio just cuts out.

When the Apple M1 chips were released in Apple laptops, there weren't as much software support for them as there is today. Adobe didn't have their line of products updated for Silicon Macs, and the vast majority of Mac Apps still were optimized for Intel processors. But since then, there have 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 still are a ton of software that hasn't been updated for it. Like Discord, Notion, and Steam, just to name a few.

So, conclusion time, how has this machine held up for me overall? 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, we'll see if it does in a few months with all the added features in Mac OS 12 Monterey, and as the Apple Silicon macs continue to get more stable as time goes on. It still does what I need in a laptop, script writing, reading emails, video calling, photo and video editing. It was a good idea 10 months ago, and it's a good idea now, especially with the occasional sales I see on this thing.