Around two months ago, I decided to finally pull the trigger and spend ~£450 on an M1 MacBook Air off eBay. A bit of background: this is the first time that I have ever used macOS - over the years I’ve flip-flopped between Windows (XP, 7, 8.1, 10, and 11), and Linux (Fedora KDE, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Zorin, and a few others).
I would personally say that for most people, the M1 MacBook Air is still pretty capable for most folks, five years later. It’s fast (I’ve barely ever seen a spinning beachball since I got it), it’s pretty light (~1.29kg), the screen is pretty great. But if you’re expecting it to be perfect, then you’ll be disappointed, so it’s best to temper your expectations for this machine. With that in mind, let’s get…
Around two months ago, I decided to finally pull the trigger and spend ~£450 on an M1 MacBook Air off eBay. A bit of background: this is the first time that I have ever used macOS - over the years I’ve flip-flopped between Windows (XP, 7, 8.1, 10, and 11), and Linux (Fedora KDE, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Zorin, and a few others).
I would personally say that for most people, the M1 MacBook Air is still pretty capable for most folks, five years later. It’s fast (I’ve barely ever seen a spinning beachball since I got it), it’s pretty light (~1.29kg), the screen is pretty great. But if you’re expecting it to be perfect, then you’ll be disappointed, so it’s best to temper your expectations for this machine. With that in mind, let’s get into the specifics:
The performance
…is actually quite good!
Even with hundreds of Chrome tabs open, Ghostty in the background, and Slack, VS Code, Apple Mail, and Granola all running, the performance on this machine is still incredible - for watching videos or movies, doing office or school work, or programming and compiling, this laptop still holds up incredibly well in 2026 and will handle pretty much anything you throw at it, so this is an easy win from me.
That being said, I’ve heard stories saying that performance on macOS Tahoe is worse than on Sequoia, which I’m on. I’m still on Sequoia (largely because I don’t like how Liquid Glass looks on the Mac), but the performance impact (if any) seems to vary from person to person. If you’re concerned about Tahoe’s performance then it’s probably best to stay on Sequoia until Apple gets their sh*t together.
Battery
If you aren’t doing coding work, you could easily stretch the battery to 10-12 hours. However, tools like Ghostty, VS Code, and Antigravity love wasting battery, so if you’re doing dev work then you’ll probably get 6-8 hours instead. So if battery life is extremely important to you, then it might be a better option to get a newer Mac instead.
Gaming
macOS is not meant for gaming, but I decided to give it a go anyway to see how it performs.
A lot of games don’t support macOS natively (and only support Windows), but you can use tools like Wine and Whisky to run Windows games on Mac, to varying degrees of success.
Rocket League performs at a steady ~60FPS on Quality Mode and for the most part is very much playable. There are a few micro-stutters when in a match, but they don’t really get in the way of playing the game.
Minecraft with the Fabulously Optimized modpack runs at about 60-80 FPS with the default settings, which isn’t incredible, but it’s still pretty playable.
Games that block Wine, such as Fortnite, Fall Guys, and Destiny 2 will not ever work, unless the devs behind the games enable Wine support for their anti-cheats (and for Epic Games especially, don’t hold your breath). Sites like ProtonDB can help you see if the game you want to play will work.
Also, don’t expect to be playing the latest AAA games on this machine - the M1 GPU is not designed for that kind of workload, so stick to older or less graphically intensive games for the best experience. And get yourself an external mouse or controller - the trackpad is not ideal for gaming, to say the least!
The camera
…is not good.
That’s not to say it’s awful - if you’re like me and only really need to use it for Zoom/Google Meet calls, then it gets the job done. But if you’re looking for super crisp photos, you’re going to be very disappointed - the M1 MBA uses a 720p sensor and despite Apple’s image quality magic, the fact that it’s not using a 1080p sensor is definitely noticeable.
The screen/speaker
These are all really good! No complaints here.
The screen has a native 2560x1600 resolution at 227 pixels per inch (ppi), with P3 colours and 400 nits of brightness. From personal experience, it’s a great screen to watch movies or play games with.
The speaker is also pretty good here too. I’m not an audiophile so this is very much just based off “vibes”, but listening to music on this thing is a great experience.
A word of caution
You will probably need the 16GB/512GB variant for the best performance and longevity (especially if you’re gaming - the RAM in Apple Silicon devices is “unified”, which means that you’ll be using it for VRAM too!)
For lighter workloads (e.g. light office/school work), you can probably get away with the base 8GB/256GB model, but the 16GB/512GB variant (which I have) will probably give you the most longevity in the long run.
Conclusion
It’s good. Great, even! If you need something that’ll work well, then the M1 MacBook Air is still a fantastic choice of laptop in 2026, especially if you can get it at the £350-450 level.