Introduction#

I’ve been looking closely at the laptop market for a while now, and I haven’t been able to find anything thats a better all-rounder than the Macbook lineup. They offer amazing battery life, hardware and performance on battery for fairly competitive prices.

I ended up going with the M3 Macbook Air with 24GB ram and 512GB storage. The ram upgrade was primarily because I planned to do development with Docker which is very memory hungry, and I felt that 512gb storage would give me the best longevity.

These are my thoughts after 2 days of using this laptop for media consumption, light coding, communication and web browsing, I’ll be writing another post about this after another few months of use.

Setup and Unboxing#

The unboxing experience was the usual apple experience, except for it arriving dead but it’s not that big of a deal. With the charger plugged in and after booting it up which took 10 seconds I begin the setup process.

I immediately noticed how amazing the keyboard and trackpad on this thing are, in fact, I’m using it to write the post you’re reading. Haptic touch trackpads are something I’ve always heard to be incredible which I always thought was an overexaggeration but they really do feel like night and day compared to other laptops.

The keyboard obviously isn’t as good as my keychron k8 pro or a proper mechanical keyboard but for a laptop keyboard it’s pretty solid.

Software Experience#

I’ve been using Windows for 5 years now and tried various Linux distros but never used any full time (exlcuding servers) and I’m pretty comfortable with tinkering, changing settings and adapting to new ways to do things so MacOS was a fairly smooth transition.

It’s definitely not perfect, I installed Rectangle for window snapping and AltTab to fix the built in alt+tab behaviour. Another gripe I have is how there’s no clipboard history built in and finder not having an easy way to enter a file path.

While MacBooks definitely aren’t gaming laptops and I didn’t buy one for it, this thing runs Roblox smoothly and Minecraft at 70-80 fps (Sodium, 12 chunk render distance, fabric 1.21.5 on a vanilla server)

Performance#

Everything has been super snappy, apps open quick, installs are fast and overall its been a very solid experience similar to my Desktop PC.

In terms of thermals, it’s only ever heated up significantly once when I ran ollama and played around with some AI models like Deepseek, other than that its been dead silent thanks to being fanless and never really hot to the touch.

Battery Life#

I haven’t been able to properly measure the battery because I haven’t had it for long enough, the next review will have a writeup about my battery life.

Concluding Thoughts#

So far I’m pretty happy with this laptop, It’s what I’m gonna be using for the next few years at school and tafe where its silent operations, great performance and battery life will really get put to the test.

See you in a few months.