Planning to buy macbook air m1 base model. My current workflow is: Browser with ~15 tabs, Intellij(for coding), discord, ms to-do app. I'll use FL studio & some graphic designing tools later. Planning to use it for 6-7 years. What do you think?
Is Macbook air m1 base version-8gb ram,256gb ssd enough?
You'll probably be fine.
Are you the sort of person who notices when something takes fractionally longer than it should, or have you been using a decade-old computer happily until now?
Can you be disciplined and manage storage, or do you need an "infinite" SSD to store all your old files?
It all depends what you want to do with it.
IMHO:
- M1 is ok for CPU
- RAM is optimised on M-series ; however I would be more comfortable with 16 GB (note that memory cannot be extended if I remember correctly)
- the most critical is storage: it fills up very rapidly. So, if you plan one day to use either for video or for development (loading Xcode often requires 60 GB or more, at least temporarily). 256 may be too limited, notably if you plan to keep it for several years. Rule of thumb: evaluate your present need, multiply by 2. And if you want to keep for several years, multiply by 2 again. That will probably end up with 512 GB or even 1 TB if you can offer it.
I have one, it's fine for running Xcode and large projects. Though browsers/webpages can take up quite a lot of memory, which maybe can topple things over the edge sometimes if you have lots going on. Nobody can comment on the hard drive space and how much you might need, certainly enough for development, it's what else you're using the MacBook for that is relevant.
EDIT: Also, I don't use Xcode, current Intellij Java project on windows is 2MB in size
@mungbeans My workflow and usage is already mentioned. Confused between MBA M1 base model or MBA M2 with 16GB+256GB(with external ssd's).