A laptop for just €950 is bound to be crappy, have some issues, and not last very long. Or so you’d think.
I bought my M1 MacBook Air — just the base model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage — somewhere in mid 2021 to use as a couch computer for, you read that right, just €950 on sale. I like having a strict separation between work and personal use, and the 15" MacBook Pro we had before was plagued by the dreaded keyboard issue. Also, using a 15" laptop on the couch is far from comfortable.
But back to the MacBook Air — what a machine. Granted, I only use it for light web development, browsing, emails, and occasionally running a small Docker container. But that’s not much different from what I do for work. I could literally do my job on this tiny little laptop. The keyboard is clicky, the webcam is... fine, the screen is Retina and beautiful, the battery lasts forever, and it’s eerily quiet because it doesn’t have any moving parts. It just keeps chugging along, never slows down or gets hot.
For work, I have a 14" MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro, 16GB of RAM, and 500GB of storage. But for my use, I don’t really notice a difference between the two. Yes, the screen on the M2 is much nicer, but does that even matter? I guess if you’re doing a lot of photo or video editing, sure. But for me, it just displays text in Ghostty or VS Code, and almost any monitor can handle that just fine. I guess I’m not a pro user according to Apple’s standards.
The price difference is over €1000! Yes, the M2 is a good laptop — it’s fast and stable, has more ports and it has a lot more performance — but it’s not €1000 better than my M1 Air.
I can already hear you shouting from the rooftops “I could never do my job with just 8GB of RAM!” or “256GB of storage would fill up so quickly!” — and you’d probably be right. But I’ve never hit those limits. With a machine this affordable, you sort of reprogram yourself to live within its boundaries.
I could keep going about specs and how it compares to a MacBook Pro, but here’s the thing: this is by far my favorite laptop ever. It’s cheap, it does the job, it’s light, it’s quiet, and it’s beautiful. I love it, and I can’t see myself replacing it unless the battery dies, I drop it and the screen cracks, or some other terrible thing happens.
I love affordable tech that just does its job and gets out of the way. That’s also why I bought a Garmin FR 255 on sale for just €280. Sure, there are better ones out there, but this does everything I need. The same goes for my Kobo e-reader, which I also got on sale. Again, there were better models available, and the technology has advanced, so there are much nicer ones now. When you buy something afforable, you don’t have to worry about it as much. You can just use it and enjoy it.
I don’t need the latest and greatest. I just need a tool that works. My MacBook Air is exactly that, and it’s the best laptop ever.