[ddingus]

I have a first gen M1 and it holds up very nicely even today. I/O is crazy fast and high compute loads get done efficiently.

One can bury the machine and lose very little basic interactivity. That part users really like.

Frankly the only downside of the MacBook Air is the tiny storage. The 8GB RAM is actually enough most of the time. But general system storage with only 1/4 TB is cramped consistently.

Been thinking about sending the machine out to one of those upgrade shops...

[lynguist]

Why did you buy a 256GB device for personal use in the first place? Too good of a deal? Or saving these $400 for upgrades for something else?

[112233]

Not OP, but by booting M1 from external thunderbolt nvme you lose less than 50% of benchmark disk throughput (3GB/s is still ridiculously fast), can buy 8TB drive for less than 1k, plus can boot it on another M1 mac if something happens. If there was "max mem, min disk" model, would def get that.

[ddingus]

Interesting. You know I bought one of those USB 3 port expanders from TEMU and it is excellent! (I know, TEMU right? But it was so cheap!)

I could 3d print a couple of brackets and probably lodge a bigger SSD or the smaller form factor eMMC I think and pack it all into a little package one just plugs in. The port extender is currently shaped such that it fits right under the Air tilting it nicely for general use.

The Air only has external USB... still, I don't need to boot from it. The internal one can continue to do that. Storage is storage for most tasks.

[ddingus]

I got it for a song. Literally a coupla hundred bucks a few months after release.

So yeah, great deal. And I really wanted to run the new CPU.

Frankly, I can do more and generally faster than I would expect running on those limited resources. It has been a quite nice surprise.

For a lot of what I do, the RAM and storage are enough.