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I was totally wrong about the M1 MacBook Air for coding. I've received so many questions on this
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topic so let's get started. Here are my thoughts on how the M1 MacBook Pro compares to the M1
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MacBook Air for a computer science student or someone who is trying to learn how to code
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Something to keep in mind is that the feature gap between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro
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is not as large as it used to be. One of the key differences is that the MacBook Air does not have
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the touch bar at the top which is actually really cool because I personally would much prefer to
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just have the keys instead of the touchpad. I really only use the touchpad for adjusting the
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volume and the screen brightness on my laptop anyways and that's something you can do with
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the keys. The form factor of the MacBook Air is definitely thinner and one of the reasons for
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that is the lack of a fan when compared to the MacBook Pro but I'll be honest I push my MacBook
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Pro pretty hard and I've only ever heard the fan come on once for a very short period of time
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and I imagine that unless you're really doing something with very heavy computational tasks
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that go on for a long period of time this probably isn't going to be that big of a deal. Along with
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the smaller size of the MacBook Air comes a smaller battery. You're supposedly get 18 hours instead of
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20 hours but they're both definitely good when it comes to battery life. Both have two USB-C ports
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which is a con because you're going to have to do some peripheral magic if you want to be using
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more than one external monitor and I could understand paying a little bit more for MacBook
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Pro if you were to get extra ports but since you don't that's kind of one of my biggest annoyances
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of the MacBook Pro. Probably one of the most significant differences between the two is when it comes to graphics. With the MacBook Air you're going to have an option of going with a 7-core or
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with an 8-core whereas with the MacBook Pro you only have the 8-core option. But from a practical
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day-to-day perspective I think that the 7-core is probably going to be enough for most people
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If you have more demanding needs like I do for heavy video editing of 4k footage or graphics
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or something like that then why not go for the 8-core and squeeze out every bit of performance
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that you can get. But if I was on a budget I would not hesitate to get the 7-core. So how good is the
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M1 MacBook Air for learning to code or as a laptop for a computer science student? Well compared to
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my MacBook Air of the past the M1's are night and day different, much better performance, and I
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really feel like I don't have to worry about the problems I had with having to manage having too
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many chrome tabs open in the applications that I opened. That's largely gone. I mean there will
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always be ways for you to max out your laptop. For example if you get really heavy into machine
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learning then you're probably going to be wishing for more power than what you're going to get out
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of a laptop and that goes for any laptop not just a MacBook. But for school and learning to code I
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think this is going to be a great option whether you're doing front-end development or back-end
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development. Now that's not something I would have said in the past with previous models but I think
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that you probably aren't going to need a MacBook Pro to learn how to code. The next big question I
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get is about RAM. Should you go for 8 gigabytes of RAM or 16 gigabytes of RAM if you're getting
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started with learning to code? As I've said in other videos I always regret it whenever I do not
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upgrade my RAM to 16 gigabytes. I try to be future-proof here and I definitely have needs
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that could be more taxing but to be honest with the memory swapping of the newer M1 MacBook Airs
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and MacBook Pros I really don't feel like I have been getting that bogged down even when I'm doing
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heavier processing with my photo editing and video editing or heavy computational stuff. I really
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think that the M1 chip integration has been a huge improvement. Prior to the M1s I 100% would
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have said upgrade the RAM. Now I'm leaning more towards it being a luxury and not necessarily
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something that everybody has to have. If I was just starting out in a computer science program
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or even if I was going down the self-taught programming route but I was on a student's
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budget then I would have no problems going with the 7-core MacBook Air with 8 gigabytes of RAM
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I really think it is a great laptop. I can hear you gasping, I can't believe it myself but it's true
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The only other caveat to consider is your computer science program. There are some programs that
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lean very heavily towards Windows so if you do end up going with a MacBook then you might be on
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your own for figuring out some of the assignments but on the other hand that could be a little bit
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more forward-thinking because a lot of jobs are going to give you MacBooks in the future. So if
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you're already working in that ecosystem and are familiar with it it might give you a leg up in
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that regard but that's something that you might want to look into. You might also be interested
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in this video up here on why software developers prefer MacBooks. Thanks for watching and I'll see
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you in the next one. Lates
