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Comment by embedded3 | Hacker News Reader

I've got the M1 Air with 16GB RAM and honestly, not being a fanboy or anything, it's the best computer I've ever owned. The battery lasts for days for me, it's very lightweight, zero noise (no fan on this model), not too warm, and has not yet struggled with any of the tasks I've thrown at it (I regularly keep open simultaneously Xcode, Slack, multiple browser tabs, PDF viewing, terminal scripts, etc). I also do some Logic Pro music projects, nothing really heavy, but it handles all the VSTs and stuff fine too.

Definitely recommend 16GB though. I have heard that the 8GB Air can be more problematic under these workloads.

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Same for me. This thing is so awesome. I really hope it stays like that for a few years and doesn't slow down with future updates. The only thing missing for me: Multiple Monitor support.

I at least use a 27" monitor with it fine, so dual-monitor works. But I guess if you need more than that, it might not be a good fit.

To add to this: I run a 32' 4k screen as my sole, external monitor. My M1 air runs it like a champ. I dislike the limit of 1 external monitor, but it does perform well regardless.

Thank you! I'm in the same boat, does your machine work hard and make noise when connected to that 4k monitor?

The MacBook Air makes no noise at all because it has no fan.

I was going to post my own reply to this topic, but @stoeckley said literally all the things I was going to.

My ONLY regret about getting an M1 Air was not being able to hold out for the M2 to get that sweet, sweet magsafe charger. Outside of that, I +100 everything @stoeckley said.

Same here, the build quality is incredible, best machine I owned. PyCharm hammers the battery quite a lot that being said.

My daily test and benchmark suites are very cpu-heavy.

Between my gaming laptop’s 11th gen i7 (desktop cpu) with 16 virtual cores and my M1 Pro (16GB) from March this year, the M1 is silent and cool, while the gaming laptop splurts and hisses, and needs to be connected to power always. The performance is incredible, and the drawback is practically none.

Second that. Definitely get the 16GB air version. The 8GB has problems when running more programs.

It's funny that people even forget that their CPU is not x86 and not notice a thing and it's a good thing.

I do web development but I see zero problem with JetBrains, browser, text editor, Photoshop and some other apps.

I have an 8GB M1. It never gets hot but sometimes becomes unusable just using WebEx (and my inSync backup kicking off in the background).

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