Walmart Selling MacBook Air with M1 Chip for $649 Starting Today

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/07/08/walmart-m1-macbook-air-for-649/

by haunter • 2 years ago

35 45 2 years ago

jefftk• 2 years ago

This seems to have a slightly shorter support lifetime than you'd normally get with a Mac. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772 is all phrased in terms of "when Apple stopped distributing them for sale", which happened in March.

crooked-v2• 2 years ago

It's still years longer than what you'd get from most other companies, though.

moneywoes• 2 years ago

8gb of ram seems like a poor decision

RockRobotRock• 2 years ago

I regret it. My M1 air is already showing its age and is a bit slow at times. Not sure if the extra RAM would have helped.

I've only had a couple instances during intense hackathons where I get the low memory popup though. but when it happens its annoying af

whalesalad4• 2 years ago

For 649 this machine will run circles around anything in the same price bracket.

tomtomistaken2• 2 years ago

.. until running out of RAM.

31337Logic• 2 years ago

I'm sorry, but for $649 it's not "running circles" around this:

https://www.amazon.com/GEEKOM-IT12-Mini-i9-12900H-Computers/...

I will admit it's pretty decent for a laptop, though... especially if you like living in the gated Apple ecosystem.

prepend3• 2 years ago

I was suspicious of this, and they should really include more. But I have 30 tabs open on my 2017 intel version and this m1 is ever better.

supportengineer• 2 years ago

Is it enough for a teenager to edit video? That's probably one of the most demanding tasks an average teen might need.

TylerE• 2 years ago

Probably not. Only 256GB of storage. Video, even with a bit of compression, will chew that up pretty quick.

crooked-v2• 2 years ago

Yes. It'd be limited more by the disk space taken by 4K footage than anything else, but a decent external drive with USB 3 or Thunderbolt 3+ would cover that.

sva_• 2 years ago

B-but Mac RAM is different than PC ram.

adamomada2• 2 years ago

Isn’t it now though? Soldered in to the SOC and therefore super fast

micheljansen• 2 years ago

We still have a ton of these in use for general office work and they are still more than fine. For light use these should be good plenty longer, but I would not pay full price for them anymore.

modeless2• 2 years ago

It's funny, lots of people complain about it, and I tend to be sensitive to performance issues, but honestly I have zero complaints. I've been using a min spec M1 Air for years and it works great for me. I mostly browse the web and use VSCode remote tunnels and for those purposes it's by far the best laptop I've ever used.

rsynnott• 2 years ago

Well, yes, if you mostly do things which don't require much memory, then the device's low memory won't be an issue.

8GB is not a lot in this day and age, though. I paid for the upgrade to 16GB in my current (2016 13" MBP, now seriously showing its age) and am very glad I did.

walterbell• 2 years ago

Apple Silicon M1 will be supported for many years by Asahi Linux, since it was the original platform for reverse engineering.

prepend3• 2 years ago

This is a great deal. I use a 2017 intel MacBook Air as a daily driver for browsing and light coding (takes about 15 minutes to generate a stable diffusion image).

It only has 8GB of ram, but is still chugging along.

I can’t believe these are cheaper than iPhones.

votepaunchy• 2 years ago

I can’t believe these are cheaper than iPhones.

The iPhone SE is $429.

prepend3• 2 years ago

Is that the only iPhone made? Are there iPhones that cost more than the MBA? Did I comment that it’s cheaper than all iPhones?

ofrzeta• 2 years ago

Same here. It's a great machine and very rarely (like with several hundred tabs open) I get notified about a lack of memory.

shrubble3• 2 years ago

Has anyone used OpenBSD or Asahi Linux on the M1? I have no interest in running MacOS on one but if the battery life is good it might make an excellent laptop for Emacs and light web browsing purposes.

frutiger2• 2 years ago

Has anyone used OpenBSD or Asahi Linux on the M1?

Has anyone tried searching this question on the internet?

shrubble3• 2 years ago

HN has a higher quality community than many other places... which is why I asked here.

politelemon• 2 years ago

Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

Sabinus• 2 years ago

I think it's unlikely Walmart is advertising on HN.

red-iron-pine2• 2 years ago

walmart is the largest company in the world and will have tentacles in bloody everything, likely through 3rd party marketers and a whole lot of automation.

entirely possible that other ad companies flagged HN as a juicy target for selling Apple products, and that ended up on a large, weighted list of marketing targets. awful lot of tech-bro programmers on HN.

lower priority means just a couple of posters / AI bots, instead of a full-court press with dozens of well crafted accounts posting long responses.

stemlord2• 2 years ago

Still doesn't justify going back to usb-hub land for me

tim3332• 2 years ago

I've used one for three years and no usb hub. Depends what you want to plug in I guess.

stemlord2• 2 years ago

Definitely not fan of bluetooth peripherals

iJohnDoe• 2 years ago

Would it be enough to run Xcode to develop a minimal iPhone app for learning purposes?

TrueGeek• 2 years ago

Yes, easily. It's the perfect machine for this and you'll love the experience.

tim3332• 2 years ago

They are good machines if anyone is thinking of one. Used mine three years with few issues. The speakers have gone a bit buzzy, otherwise good.

Walmart Selling MacBook Air with M1 Chip for $649 Starting Today

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