Apple completely shocked the tech industry back in 2020 with the release
of their new M1 MacBook Air which instantly became the best value laptop
you could buy thanks to its thousand dollar price tag and the game-changing
M1 chip which is still very powerful to this day now on the flip side in 2023
Apple hit us with the news that their Max sales in the first quarter are down
40 compared to last year the worst drop in 23 years now while there are multiple
reasons for this like a slowing down economy one thing is for certain Apple's
M2 Max are not selling as well as they hoped and I think it's got something to
do with how good the M1 MacBook Air was and still is today so in this video I'm
going to explain what caused the failure of Apple's redesigned M2 MacBook Air as
well as how the M1 model fears in 2023 especially with the news of the new M3
model coming in the fall so let's get started in terms of what made the
original M1 MacBook Air so special there were three fundamental aspects the first
one was the price being only 999 dollars which had a fairly low barrier to entry
for the common student or person needing a reliable and high quality laptop and
the MacBook Air was just that thanks to the switch to an Apple silicon chip
which greatly improved reliability alongside the metal build quality
excellent keyboard trackpad and display the second aspect was the fact that for
only a thousand dollars you're getting a huge jump in performance compared to the
previous Intel chip and both single and multi-core performance impacting
everything from web browser snappiness to productivity work in some apps it
even outperformed the higher end MacBook Pros with Intel chips and it had just
enough performance to actually run professional apps quite well the Third
third aspect was everything else the Apple silicon chip brought to the
MacBook Air specifically features like instant on which is a game changer
compared to previous Intel models that took some time to wake up from sleep
another big one was the fanless design which was mind-blowing considering the
high amount of performance meaning you get a completely silent experience no
matter what and what makes it even better is that no fans means no dust
clogging the fans and heat sinks over time which would lead to unexplained
overheating and Loud fan issues on previous Intel MacBooks but not with the
new M1 MacBook Air basically making it much more reliable over the long term
and then going even further the most impressive upgrade with the M1 chip was
the battery life which was mind-blowing considering everything else that
improved like the performance being over four times faster than the previous
Intel model in terms of gaming performance and over three times fast
faster in terms of the CPU and the crazy thing was that Apple's 13-inch MacBook
Pro was priced 300 higher but only offering a couple of advantages like
better battery life and extra Graphics core a fan for cooling and a touch bar
that nobody liked anyway we even modded our own MacBook Air with a thermal pad
on the heatsink and that made it even faster than the MacBook Pro in some
cases and over the next couple of years every single Windows laptop we compared
to the air failed in terms of performance value and battery life and
now that we're in 2023 the M1 MacBook Air is now on sale on Amazon for only
800 brand new continuing to be the best value laptop you can buy so with all
that said it's easy to see why the M2 MacBook Air didn't sell so well seeing
as it had such large shoes to fill and there's also the fact that anyone who
bought the M1 was so satisfied with it that they saw no reason to upgrade to
the M2 air redesign but it was actually Apple who shot themselves in the foot
for a couple of different reasons the first reason was the fact that they made
the M1 way too good especially in terms of the performance in hindsight Apple
probably should have down clocked the original M1 chip just a little bit so
that they could unleash that power in the M2 Chip to make it look like a
bigger upgrade because to be honest the M2 Chip just wasn't a big upgrade
performance wise compared to M1 at least not enough to get people to feel like
they were missing out the M1 was still more than good enough now the second
reason is that they actually downgraded different components of the M2 MacBook
Air despite raising the price to twelve hundred dollars the biggest one is the
fact that they switched from a dual Nan and SSD chip configuration down to a
single chip which had various impacts to Performance including SSD speeds
becoming up to two times slower that by itself made transfer speed slow down but
the worst part was that the base model only came with eight gigs of RAM which
fills up very quickly so what Mac OS does is it borrows storage space from
the SSD and uses it as temporary Ram which is a method called swap memory
however since the SSD speed was drastically slowed down due to only
having one Nan chip the speed of the swap slows down as well this basically
caused the new empty MacBook Air to be slower than the old M1 air in various
tasks whenever the 8 gigs of RAM is full which only takes about 10 chrome tabs to
be open in the background so whoever made the call at Apple to switch to just
one nand ship May made a bad mistake and they should have paid extra money to
make sure they had two nand chips now on top of that since the MacBook Air is
fanless it heavily relies on the passive heatsink for cooling and the M2 MacBook
Air actually removed the physical large heat seek block entirely compared to the
previous M1 air now relying on a thin graphene sheet for cooling this
basically caused the M2 Chip to overheat faster than the M1 does and then finally
the speakers actually got downgraded on the MCU air compared to the M1 having
toned down tweeters so Apple made all of those downgrades while at the same time
increasing the price by 200 and the worst part is that you can now find an
M1 model on sale for eight hundred dollars and that brings me back to the
question of how the M1 air fares in 2023 and the answer is honestly quite well in
my honest opinion even though I know the M3 MacBook Air is coming around the
corner in the fall I know the price will once again be twelve hundred dollars and
even though the M3 chip will be very fast and it'll improve battery life I
also know that 400 more is a lot to pay over the M1 model so the question is
will those improvements be worth four hundred dollars honestly for regular
people no the M1 is already very efficient and more than fast enough for
the majority of people out there it's very reliable lightweight and it still
works great now for Tech enthusiasts I will definitely recommend they wait for
the M3 air because they're the ones who care about the little details especially
the awesome new redesign but for those who can't wait for the M3 and you're
okay paying a bit more money for the M2 model right now I'll suggest that you
should wait until June for Apple 15-inch M2 MacBook Air Model which will be a
great deal for the display size and it's going to have the best battery life out
of any laptop ever we already have confirmation for multiple sources like
Mark German Ming Chico other Korean leakers and even tsmc that the M3 chip
will not be ready and coming to the 15-inch MacBook Air so keep that in mind
so with all that said even in 2023 the M1 air is still the best bang for the
buck laptop ever made at only 800 and it's an instant recommendation for
anyone looking for a reliable and high quality laptop now if you disagree with
me let me know down in the comment section below but if you enjoyed it
click that Circle above to subscribe for
more videos like this one thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next
video [Music]
all right