That battery life is impressive! Thunderbolt 4 and a better selection of ports than the MacBook Air M1, also.
But, as great as the screen is, looks like it falls short of the 12" MacBook screen. Same 8GB of RAM in the base model as the M1, but memory bandwidth not the same. And the processor isn't going to keep up.
I mean, it's nice, but I picked the base model M1 Air about a year ago for $750 - still seems like the laptop to beat, if you can live with MacOS.
I quite like my work M1 Pro, but (to help coworkers with Mac problems while I was using a ThinkPad) I had an M1 Air 8GB from work for a while and I honestly found it really pretty bad because of the RAM limits. It seems like there's a floor against which MacOS bumps pretty hard if you want to use the machine for development-ish stuff and it reacts really poorly to memory starvation if you get ahead of yourself.
Having 16GB and up, though, an M1's fantastic. If I had to be resource constrained, though, I think I'd prefer something that handled Linux well.
Agreed, 8 GB is just not enough even for basic needs in the era of remote work and electron apps. I don’t know why they are continuing that as the base in this year’s MacBook Air M2, because it is just a worse user experience. These are already premium computers, even at the base models. I wish Apple would be a little bit more forward thinking about keeping users happy rather than saving a few pennies in the short term.
But, as great as the screen is, looks like it falls short of the 12" MacBook screen. Same 8GB of RAM in the base model as the M1, but memory bandwidth not the same. And the processor isn't going to keep up.
I mean, it's nice, but I picked the base model M1 Air about a year ago for $750 - still seems like the laptop to beat, if you can live with MacOS.