Kira Herdman

I recently got an M1 MacBook Air. This is why I chose a five-year-old laptop in 2025, and the reasons behind my decision.

Use case

My use case for a laptop is simple. I want a blogging/script writing machine that can act as a backup for my M4 Mac mini that I have in my office.

I don’t need a lot of processing power, just the ability to work with my iPhone. This way, I can easily use the hotspot feature when I’m in coffee shops. I also need to be able to run the three main apps I use: Obsidian, iWriter Pro, and Typora for writing blog posts and scripts for TransRadio UK. Additionally, I rely on Lire (RSS Reader) and Ground News as my primary sources of information. Lastly, I read eBooks when I don’t have my iPad with me, using Apple Books.

The keyboard is also very important since I will be doing a lot of typing on this machine; a backlit keyboard would also be a nice feature to have.

I would also like Apple Intelligence to be able to run on my laptop. My grammar and spelling are absolutely useless, so something like Grammarly built-in would be perfect, without the need for a subscription.

Why the M1 MacBook Air

Price. You can pick up a M1 MacBook Air fairly cheaply these days. A quick check on eBay shows you can get one for less than £380 in the UK. Unless you need the power of the M4, for tasks like advanced video or photo editing with very large photos, which isn’t recommended on a MacBook Air anyway (as it’s only passively cooled, so a MacBook Pro is better suited to those tasks), there’s absolutely no reason to get a more expensive MacBook Air.

Apple Intelligence. The M1 MacBook Air, being based on Apple Silicon, supports all the features of Apple Intelligence, including, for myself, the all-important proofreader in Writing Tools.

Keyboard/Trackpad. It is well known that modern Apple laptops have some of the best, if not the best, keyboards and trackpads on any laptop. The keyboard is also backlit.

Battery Life. Even though this machine is five years old, the battery life is about 16 hours. On my MacBook Air M1, at 92% health and with 176 cycles, the battery is in good health for its age as well.

Performance. The performance of the M1 chip in the MacBook Air is amazing. I ran a simple benchmark from Affinity Photo on the MacBook and my gaming laptop, a computer with a 13th Gen Core i5 and an RTX 3050 6GB laptop GPU in it. The gaming laptop’s power profile was on high performance, and it was plugged in. The MacBook Air M1 was on battery power. The CPU score was 20% higher on the M1, while the GPU performance was about 20% in favour of the gaming laptop. For context, the Mac Mini M4 I have in my office smashed both machines by at least 50%.

Noise. While this may not sound important, when you are writing, the sound of a machine that sounds like a jet engine can be very distracting. All MacBook Air’s are passively cooled, so they have no fans in them. Unlike the gaming laptop mentioned above, this machine is silent yet cool when doing basic tasks like word processing or web browsing. It will heat up a bit if you are doing a basic video edit or basic photo editing, but not uncomfortably so.

Why not the M1 MacBook Air

RAM. The base model of the M1 MacBook Air only comes with 8Gb while the newer M4 MacBook Air comes with 16Gb as standard.

Storage. Like all MacBook Air’s, the base M1 version only comes with 256GB of storage. You do get Thunderbolt 3 ports, however, so like the newer versions of the MacBook Air, you can use external SSDs, though the newer MacBook Air’s come with Thunderbolt 4.

Ports Talking about ports, you only get a Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 port, Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 port and a headphone jack on the computer. The M4 MacBook Air gets a MagSafe port for charging as well as 2 Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ports along with the headphone jack. To charge the M1 MacBook Air you need to use one of the USB ports, so without a dock you are down to just 1 port for things like External SSD’s.

Conclusion

The M1 MacBook Air is much more powerful than I need for my intended use case. However, it includes all the important features I value, such as long battery life, a comfortable backlit keyboard, Apple Intelligence, and compatible software. It also seamlessly integrates with my other office machines, including the M4 Mac Mini, iPad Pro M4 13”, iPad 10th Gen and my iPhone 15.

It can, thanks to Steam or Sunrise/Moonlight (blog post coming next month about those two amazing pieces of software), stream games from my gaming laptop very well over Wi-Fi.

Overall, for the price you can get these laptops for these days, the M1 MacBook Air is a steal.