MacBook Air SSD speed

[darngooddesign]

...Incidentally, you are generalizing that all high school and college students use computers the same way. Take a high school gamer that plays StarCraft Remastered, Hearthstone, Diablo III, StarCraft II, and possibly WoW Classic who also works on visual art. A 256GB SSD (whether of acceptable read/write speeds or otherwise) will fill that drive. And mind you, that's (a) not that many games and (b) not an uncommon use case.

Yep, this visual arts student who regularly plays graphically intensive games would never buy the base M1 or M2 MBA for these three main reasons.

1. It has the weakest GPU.
2. It will thermally throttle and drop the fps.
3. The 256GB SSD is simply too small to hold all these large games, large visual arts applications, art project files/PSDs, and still provide a lot of empty scratch space.

This student would buy a used 14" MBP with its better GPU and larger base drive.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Yep, this visual arts student who regularly plays graphically intensive games would never buy the base M1 or M2 MBA for these three main reasons.

1. It has the weakest GPU.
2. It will thermally throttle and drop the fps.
3. The 256GB SSD is simply too small to hold all these large games, large visual arts applications, art project files/PSDs, and still provide a lot of empty scratch space.

This student would buy a used 14" MBP with its better GPU and larger base drive.

You clearly say this never having used a base model M1 MacBook Air for these things. It actually does the vast majority of them quite well. The only game I have that chokes is Alien Isolation. My guess is that this will perform better once it's native. Otherwise, you can do any of these things on an M1 Air in ways that you'd never do on an Intel MacBook Air.

 

[Technerd108]

You clearly say this never having used a base model M1 MacBook Air for these things. It actually does the vast majority of them quite well. The only game I have that chokes is Alien Isolation. My guess is that this will perform better once it's native. Otherwise, you can do any of these things on an M1 Air in ways that you'd never do on an Intel MacBook Air.

I think a lot of people who want to buy or have bought the 14" MBP with M1 Pro 8-10 core don't understand how powerful the simple M1 8 core chip is. It was a game changer and still is!