I used a Mac mini M1 with 8GB of RAM for a while. It was fine; much better than Intel Macs or any other setup with low RAM.
Likes it
This is exactly what I do with my personal computing. I would prefer to be on linux, but a lot of people still sends me data in excel spreadsheets for processing, and lets be honest: apple hardware is fucking awesome. The feeling of being able to work away from my desk and dont care about battery, is so goooooooood. And I have to admit. Even if I dont like macos, my macbook with m1 and 16gb ram is probably the fastest laptop I ever own.
Likes it
I also am not a huge fan of the 256GB storage, but if someone doesn’t already know what ram is, they really won’t care and won’t notice much. I’m a tech guy. I bought an M1 air with 256GB storage and 8GB RAM. I was able to do development and mobile development fine. I never encountered RAM related slowdowns. I have an iCloud subscription because I don’t want to manage my own NAS. This is a heavier use case than what, say, a normal college student will do with it, and it worked just fine for me. This is by far the best laptop I have seen in this bracket. If I was just heading to college today, and I didn’t have the money for a Pro or Air, I would 100% get this far before a windows laptop.
Likes it
No Apple Intelligence, but my Macbook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM is plenty usable still
Likes it
I'm still using my MacBook Air M1 with 8gb of Ram as my personal workhorse. It runs docker desktop and VSC better than my T14 whatever windows machine with 32gb ram. But that is windows and it has a bunch of enterprise stuff running. I assume it would work better with Linux, or even windows without whatever our IT does to control it. With Nvidia Now I can even play games on it, though I wouldn't recommend it for any serious gamers.
Doesn’t like it
Update: I tried it out. It took about 8 seconds per token, and didn't seem to be using much of my GPU (MPU), but was using a lot of RAM. Not a model that I could use practically on my machine.
Doesn’t like it
M4 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM is doing a "good enough" job of editing 6k raw footage in Premiere for my team. I'm surprised to say I'm content with the 16GB of ram so far. Edit: This is in contrast to my M1 Macbook Air with 16GB of ram which would stutter a lot during color grading. So definitely feeling the improvement.
Likes it
Unlike seemingly everyone making this claim, I have used an M1 Mac mini with 8GB RAM. It's fine, and certainly not useless.
Likes it
In what world is the Air's performance not reasonable? I have an M1 Air with 16GB of RAM and I've never felt like it was lagging behind me. It's my main computer which means it's used for work and every nerdy experiment I might run. The best part is I can do all of that shit all day long on the battery and the laptop is super easy to move/carry around. With no modifications or extra effort any thermal throttling I've ever encountered hasn't been noticeable. When the M1 Air first came out there were the breathless articles about thermal throttling. It's only something that will come up with extended periods of high CPU usage. I've tried to get my Air to thermally throttle and have only been able to do so doing 3D renders or running local LLMs for long periods (over an hour in my testing). Even long compiles don't really stress the CPU so much it throttles noticeably. The simple solution in that case was a $20 laptop stand with a fan off Amazon. If your use case is 100% CPU usage all the time either don't get an Air or get a cheap laptop stand with a built-in fan. If your Air isn't your CI/CD build machine or part of a render farm it'll be just fine.