My trusty Mac Air has been with me for nearly six years. Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 256 SDD. I mostly use it for writing and media consumption, so it's vastly over-powered for my "use case" (as it used to be called).
But one day, it's going to pack up.
And I want to do other things. Like record some of the music I play on guitar and piano. Which means running Garageband and maybe some plug-ins. I'm not sure about making YT videos, or even why I might do it. Also photography, if I have good enough photographs to do things with. The current Air can handle that, except at industrial levels of production, which I'm not going to reach.
But the Intel Airs are no more. Only the M1 machines. Which are:
The minimum 256x8, 8-7-16 cores (CPU-GPU-Neural) Air for £999.
Trade up to 512x8 and it's £1,199.
Add another graphics core to 8-8-16 and it's £1,249.
Add another 8GB RAM and it's £1,449 / £1,399.
The basic Mac Pro is 512x16 and 8-14-16 cores for £1,899. It comes with Magsafe ("it's not a Mac if it's not Magsafe"), an HDMI port and a SDXC card reader (which my Mac Air has and I have NEVER used). Add adapters for all that to the cost of the Air, and it's another £45.
Whichever, I'm going to need USB A -> C adapters for my external CD drive, and Lightning to USB C adapters for my other iDevices. This is not going to be horribly expensive.
I think 512GB SSD is needed for the extra things I want to do. Plug-ins gobble up space. So £1,199 is the baseline.
The extra £700 to the Mac Pro gets me: a slightly bigger, but undeniably better screen; 8GB more RAM, 6 more video cores, plus better speakers, microphone array, and Face Time camera. Also the Mac Pro has fans, and the Air doesn't. Would I really use any of that?
Don't forget that the real upgrade is from my 4GB Intel i5 Air to an 8GB M1 chip. That's the WOW factor right there. The reviewers of the M1 Air said its video editing was easily fast enough unless you were doing really big files in 4K. If I ever do anything, it will be smaller and in 1080p. So I'm covered.
If I ever do need that extra processing power, I will probably buy an iMac. Heaven knows what I'll be doing though.
Is there any improvement in performance in going to 16GB of RAM? The reviewers say there isn't, except at insane loads I would never reach, because the M1 chip accesses the SSD so fast it's almost RAM. Other voices suggest 'future-proofing' with 16GB. Well, when I got my Intel Air, I wondered about getting 8GB because future-proofing, but 4GB has turned out to be just fine - especially when I dumped out Evernote and Dropbox, which had bloated beyond all reasonableness. Both Apple and Microsoft are paying more attention to making their operating systems use less RAM and work faster. Apple even more so. So I'm taking it that 8GB in the new Air will be as future-proof as well.
So is the luxury stuff (speakers, screen, microphones and iSight camera) and the additional ports worth £700?
Nah. The guy (*) did say that if you don't know that you need a Mac Pro, then you don't. And I've convinced myself the baseline Air will have all the oomph my modest needs will need.
Baseline Air with 512GB plus a Magsafe adapter, and the USB A -> C converters for my heritage USB A and Lightning gear.
OMG did I just reach a conclusion?
(*) You know, the guy whose YT video you watched and thought was good, but now you can't remember who it was. He makes a lot of videos.
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