LocalNavy433 Photography

Hello, how the hell are you? If this is your first time here, thanks for stopping by. In today’s blog, I am going to talk about why the M1 MacBook Air is still a beast of a computer. The main reason for this came down to me trying to decide on whether or not I needed to upgrade. The cost of buying a newer laptop is a huge amount of money for people like me that live paycheck to paycheck. Is it even worth it to buy another computer? How does my old computer compare to the newer laptops? These are some of the questions that I asked myself for the last few months.

Cost of buying a newer computer.

So in 2020, I decided to buy a new MacBook, and I wanted the new chip that was hitting the market and causing waves. I spent a good three months researching if it was even worth buying. You see, I had a laptop that was old but still got the job done. The battery swelled up, and I had to remove it. I was still able to use the laptop, but it was turned into a desktop due to not having a better one in it anymore. Yes, I was cheap and not willing to buy a new battery, but I was eyeing the new MacBook Air for my editing needs. I would not spend 150 dollars for a new battery, but I was willing to spend 1000 dollars for a newer computer.

As you can guess, I ended up buying the new MacBook for 1000 dollars. Well, if you think about it, I spent that amount of money, which, by the way, works out to being 200 dollars a year for that amount of money. That to me is a good investment for what it made me. Yes, that computer was a workhorse and helped me edit my images like never before. I was getting colors that matched on every computer screen that I was displaying them on. The edits were fast and perfect for my needs. I still have the laptop to this day, and after getting into astrophotography, I learned that the computer was still good to go.

Newer is better, or so they say.

Apple is getting ready to release a newer version of the same computer that I have. This is where we are going to get a little geeky in the blog, don’t worry it won’t last long. The newer version is supposed to be four to five times faster at the basic tasks. It will also have a M5 processor, which will be a huge jump in processing speeds. The newer chip is supposed to be a GPU powerhouse, so that means running AI models should be a breeze. Then you have the fact that the newer computer is flatter, and the RAM is upgraded to 16GB, which is double what you get with the M1 MacBook Air. With all those upgrades, you would think that it’s an easy choice. This is where I started to realize that my computer is still good even five years on.

Finding out the processing power is still there.

OK, at this point, I was on track to getting a newer computer. I was editing an Astro image, and well, the AI denoise model that I was using was taking me an hour and a half just to render a 2MP image. This is slow and just frustrating to no end. I mean, before the program updated, I was getting that done in 10-15 min, not 90. So this sent me on a spin of thinking that I needed that newer computer just to get my images looking really good. Well, that was until I realized that I had a choice on the AI denoise model that I could use. I found that by using the older version, I was still getting the 10-15 min render times. Life was good, I was back on track. Then I was reading some Reddit forums, and the thing is, they are using Windows computers for their editing.

I was seeing people just stacking images, and it was taking them forever to get them stacked. For example, they were stacking 300-400 images, and it was taking them hours to do that. To put this into perspective, I was stacking 1500 images in 5 mins on the M1 MacBook Air, so check goes to me for having a fast computer. It was at this point that I realized the computer that is five years old is still outprocessing newer Windows laptops.

It was at this moment that I realized my computer is a beast.

Yes, after reading all the accounts of people with newer laptops still struggling to stack, let alone denoise images, I was happy. The time to replace my computer is still going to be a few years out, and the M1 MBA is still a beast and will serve me well for many more years. You see, I think that Apple would be stupid to drop support for this computer; the M1 chip is so good that it really is still setting trends for being a great computer.