90K+ Best Value Upgrade from Macbook Air M1 16GB ?

Crazy_Eddy

Crazy_Eddy

Staff member
Luminary
Hi,

If someone has a Macbook Air M1 16GB, what would be the best value upgrade today? (i.e. for roughly the same 1.1 lakh spent on the M1 16GB)

Is more RAM useful or more CPU power?

Thanks!
 
It would probably be a MacBook Air M2 with 16GB RAM. Even that is not worth spending.

There is no reason for someone to upgrade from that config unless they are getting bottled down in some use case.

And 16GB RAM is a bare minimum even for MacBooks. Don’t know why they are not standard. So more RAM would be better than CPU unless doing some CPU intensive development or creative work like transcoding and movie editing. For graphics intensive and AI kinda workload anyway M series is well equipped.
 
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A 2nd hand MacBook Pro 14 is the best value around 90k. Air lags under heavy workload due to throttling ie. no fan and not to forget better screen, camera, keyboard, speakers, promotion etc when someone goes towards pro bandwagon.
 
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Except the fan, everything else is there in a M2 Air as well and better if comparing with M1 MacBook Pro.

MBP also comes with additional weight which should be considered. So if the workload is not heavy and portability is important. I would still recommend a M2 Air.
 
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Use case matters a lot. If you are not sure about why you are upgrading you will most likely not get any benefit from an upgrade, as the M1 is still good enough for most tasks. In which areas is the M1 holding you back??
 
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A brand-new MacBook Air M2 with 16GB of RAM costs around 99k on Apple's official website. From resellers such as iConcept and some bulk buyers, you can find it for as low as 92k if you take advantage of bank offers or other discounts like uni-days (can even get free stuff like airpods etc).

I used to have a MacBook Air M2 with 8GB of RAM. It allowed me to open three different browsers with about a dozen tabs in total before it began to lag. With 16GB of RAM, you could likely open twice that number of tabs. Apple devices also rely on swap memory for performance, and more RAM translates to faster read and write speeds on the SSD, which enhances overall efficiency.

One shortcoming with the M1 model is its screen. The M2 version has a better display, and the Pro model takes it a step further with an excellent screen. The camera is also newer with the m2 and m4 ones (I think).

Hope that helps.
 
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