It was about 13 years ago when Steve Jobs famously opened an envelope on stage and pulled a laptop out of it. I was in my first year of college, coming from a small Romanian town and having absolutely no previous interaction with Apple products, besides reading stories about them. Where I was from no one had Macs, or even the newly released iPhone. I had no way of seing an Apple product in real life.
I was rocking a cheap, heavy, 15" Acer laptop back then, which I would soon exchange for a gaming PC, as gaming was the backbone of social life in my all male dorm.
At the time I saw the video of Steve pulling out the MacBook Air, I distinctly remember thinking that that is what a laptop should be. Sure, I knew at that point about netbooks and taught that they would be fitting for on the road media consumption and maybe taking notes during class, but I knew at that point that those weren’t work machine. But the Air looked like a device that would actually be a computer on which I would be able to learn programming.
About 3 years would pass before I was able to afford a used 11" Air, the smaller brother of the one I saw Steve unveil. And it wasn’t a workhorse. It did everything I needed it to do, except gaming. And I didn’t start my career as a dev, so I didn’t even need it for development purposes. But it was what I always taught a notebook computer should be. It was portable. And for day to day use, it was fast, polished and stable.
Fast forward 2 years and I’m starting my development career. I will be an iOS developer, so I need a capable Mac. My precious 11" Air wouldn’t be able to fit my need. Other developers say online that neither does it’s big 13" brother.
Fine. I buy my first 13" MacBook Pro. It’s nice. It’s fast. It’s ALMOST as small. It’s ALMOST as light. It’s ALMOST as sexy. What it isn’t, is my beloved Air. But it does fit my needs and I fall in love with it.
Fast forward another 5 years, it’s 2018 and I feel I need to upgrade my Mac. I Look over the Mac lineup and the Air now has an 1.6Ghz i5 CPU which definitely isn’t a CPU for development, or for my personal hobbies like photo or video editing. Sigh. I’ll have to pass it up again and go for the pro again. It’s not bad by any means but it isn’t my first love.
November 2020. Apple unveils the M1 MacBook Air. I consume review after review and I can’t believe my eyes. I’m now a senior iOS Developer, I’m trying to grow a Youtube channel for one of my hobbies and my Instagram for another hobby. I need processing power for development and photo and video editing, and people are saying that FINALLY the MacBook Air is capable of delivering power for all of them.
It took me about 2 months to decide to drop my 3 year old 13" Pro and order the M1 Air, and about 50 more days until it got delivered. And boy was it worth it.
I’m not going to review it, I only want to mention for anyone reading this that it’s fast enough for iOS development, it’s fast for 4k video editing and it doesn’t skip a beat when editing photos in Lightroom. It has the beautiful retina display and it’s great to be back on a scissor keyboard. Oh, and I charged it only twice during my first week of using it. And I can’t remember how fans sound.
Sure, it has it downsides too. It only comes with two USB-Cs and a headphone jack, but for most of us, we already have adapters bought. And it only supports one external monitor, which for some might not be enough, especially when the main one is just 13". And probably Apple won’t take more than 2 years before they replace it with an even faster one, with a new design and probably a better display.
Sure, you can wait. But for anyone that thinks like me, that a portable computer should be light, small, beautiful and incredibly fast, let me tell you that you shouldn’t.
It took Apple 13 years, but they were finally be able to do it, to create my perfect work machine. And I’m not going back to the Pro.
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March 22, 2021 at 06:14AM
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