# I Still love my Mackbook Air M1 and will not upgrade it for now



## pcarrilho (Nov 24, 2021)

With the launch of the new Macbook M1 PRO/MAX I have been wondering if it would be worth it to upgrade my Macbook Air M1 (16Gb) to one of the new ones. And the answer is: it depends. I remain in awe of my Macbook Air M1 and have been testing using only it in all of my work. So far it hasn't let me down at all. The only reason I would upgrade would be the possibility of having 32Gb of RAM, but the truth is that I haven't felt the need yet. It's true that I'm not a guy who uses huge templates with everything loaded in memory (my template has 200 tracks, but with Purged memory, or even disabled). With the new M1 PRO/MAX you'd get twice as many tracks as possible without needing to use the freeze function (but I must mention that freezing a track is so fast on this M1 computer that it's no longer a problem). In this example I'm building a mockup of the star wars theme, using OPUS (diamond, with 2 mics in each instrument), each instrument is in one single opus instance (i dont use multitimbral at all). I have 4 instances of a convolution reverb (cinematic rooms from Liquid Sonics) and add compressors, eqs...).

EDIT: I forgot to mention i am using OPUS on a external normal ssd drive (not M2) on a Usb 3.1 enclosure.


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## pcarrilho (Nov 24, 2021)

BTW, this is a real world test... my world ... (not a benchmark test)


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## SomeGuy (Jan 2, 2022)

Thank you for posting! Do you use an external SSD for your sample streaming? If so which one? I’m thinking the air makes much more sense than a MacBook Pro. Though tempting for the additional RAM, you are paying much more for graphics capabilities that will not be utilized by audio production. For the amount of extra money spent on a MacBook Pro, you could add a Mac mini if you really needed more ram and use it as a sample slave. Really makes me wonder if I should just hold out for the next Macbook Air which should be released sometime this year?


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## PeterN (May 15, 2022)

Been using MacBook Air for two months now, and would definitely not recommend it to anyone doing more than basic sketching. Or, say, if you use only Logic stock plugins and do instruments to count on one hand - at most, two. And I got the most expensive M1 MacBook Air.

Do you really get that project running that many tracks, and smoothly with OPUS and third party plugins?

Seriously? How many tracks are frozen? Is it not crashing?

Its great if you do - just hard to believe after playing with this toy for two months.


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