Today, Apple says goodbye to what was the most important MacBook in recent memory. The M1 MacBook Air is now being sold by Apple, having been directly replaced by the M2 MacBook Air, which itself was displaced in the product line by the new M3 models.
Now almost three and a half years old, it was surely time for this laptop to ride off into the sunset. It used an old chassis and a pretty old chip and was no longer competitive at $999.
But let’s take a moment and appreciate just how important a laptop the M1 MacBook Air was—and what it’s represented for Apple over the past few years.
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The M1 MacBook Air was first released in the fall of 2020, a few months after the M1 chip itself was announced at WWDC 2020. Of course, it wasn’t just any chip—it was the start of Apple’s two-year transition from Intel to its own Apple Silicon. You might be thinking that you’d also like to release some dazzling new laptops that show off the chips and highlight the moment. With the M1 in particular, you might want to redesign a MacBook Air, say, to demonstrate the performance of these chips. But no, that wouldn’t happen nearly two years later with the M2 MacBook Air.
For this first M1 MacBook, the focus was squarely on the M1 chip itself. The same goes for the 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini that launched alongside it. All three retained the same chassis as used in the Intel days. In the case of the M1 MacBook Air, this design has been used since 2018. However, the continuity of the design has allowed Apple to emphasize how much of a difference the M1 makes, especially compared to the dual-core Intel chips used before. And man, the difference couldn’t be more drastic.
An apples-to-apples comparison of performance and battery life showed just how far ahead Apple is with the M1. At the time, many applications were not recompiled to run natively on Apple Silicon (since it was based on ARM instead of x86), which in theory would cause performance concerns. But no, everything went incredibly smoothly, allowing developers to adopt the new platform in the coming months. People were still discovering how significant the M1 was, building on it years after its release.
So while the M1 MacBook Air was the perfect vehicle to create Apple Silicon, it also had a long life — which is why it’s still selling many years later. In the past, the MacBook Air was updated with new Intel chips every year, immediately replacing the previous version. But as the M1 MacBook Air will prove, Apple will find room in its lineup to keep older models sold at a discount. The M1 MacBook Air was so good, in fact, that for a while it was at a disadvantage to the M2 MacBook Air when it launched for $1,199. I found myself happy to recommend the cheaper M1 MacBook Air to many, especially since it was often discounted.
That calculation changed after the M2 MacBook Air dropped to $1,099, but the M1 MacBook Air continued to drop to prices as low as $750. That’s an amazing value considering the build quality, battery life and performance of this laptop. A previous era of Apple marketing might have been ashamed to devalue a product to such low prices, but Steve Jobs’ quadrant approach to Macs was abandoned long ago. And you better believe that the M1 MacBook Air will continue to be sold at online retailers at low prices long after it’s officially retired.
The M2 MacBook Air could very well have the same kinds of legs as its predecessor – it’s already about to turn two years old. But the M1 MacBook Air proved it could be done, establishing Apple Silicon in this new era.
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