A (Proper) Day Out With the M1 MacBook Air

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When I opened the lid of my M1 MacBook Air this morning, it had 83% battery left.

This was a surprise.

Yesterday, I removed it from charge at around midday. It hasn’t touched a charger since then, but it did follow me around London – a trip bookmarked by two work-filled train journeys.

I’ve rambled on a lot about the M1 MacBook Air’s stellar battery life and I’m not one to labour a point (stop laughing at the back), but yesterday really did reveal just how right I’ve been about this stunning little laptop.

Let me explain.

What I got up to

Yesterday was my first proper business trip for quite some time. Beyond coffee shop working, I’ve not been anywhere for a meeting in at least eighteen months. It was indeed weird how weird it was to be doing that once again.

The reasons for this are obvious, troubling and, I hope, nearing their end. But such is life.

So, after I’d reminded myself how to use public transport and talk shop in person rather than via a Teams call, I tucked my M1 MacBook Air into a leather sleeve and hit the road.

I worked for a good, solid hour and a half while either waiting for or travelling on my train to London. As we crept into Euston station, the MacBook Air’s battery life had dropped just two percentage points.

Nice.

Following my meeting, I headed somewhere for a bite to eat and continued to work for an hour or so. And I’m afraid I have zero idea what the battery percentage was at that point – but that is the point with this laptop; I wasn’t thinking about it at all.

On the way home, I continued to work on the train for another hour without a shred of concern about the availability of a power outlet. I may even have sniggered when I spotted one waiting expectantly by my left foot.

When I finally reached home at around 21:45, I didn’t even remove the MacBook from its sleeve. I simply placed it on the table and proceeded to chill out. It stayed there all night until this morning when I retrieved it to write this article.

The moral of the story

If you’re still reading – thank you. I appreciate this isn’t the most exciting tale you’ve read all week (or in the last ten years, probably). But if you’re thinking about buying an M1 MacBook Air, it’s actually a pretty big deal.

I didn’t do anything strenuous on that laptop yesterday. The work I undertook while travelling was a mixture of email, chatting on Teams, arranging a PowerPoint presentation, figuring out my content pipeline in Notion and answering some comments within YouTube Studio.

That kinda work ain’t gonna break the M1. But there’s a good dose of third-party software and web apps thrown in there which should put some extra strain on the battery.

They probably did. After all, I didn’t work constantly all day on that laptop; most of my day was spent either using public transport, walking to destinations or chatting with a real, living human being face-to-face.

But that’s the point. I was undertaking a normal day’s work. My laptop just came along for the ride.

This is where a great laptop shines but where so many of them fail. I purposefully placed the MacBook Air in a thin sleeve yesterday morning because I wanted to travel light and without a charging brick in tow. In 2021, I should be able to do that.

Regardless, I was a little nervous about doing so. It’s the first time I’ve left the house to spend an entire day in the city with nothing but a fully charged laptop on which to undertake my work. What if the battery ran out? How would I get to the bottom of my to-do list?

As it turns out, I could probably have stayed out on the road for a couple of days and still had some battery life in change. And this is for one reason I have noted numerous times: the real star of the show is the M1 MacBook Air’s standby time. I don’t know what happens when you close that lid, but it preserves battery life like no other device I’ve owned.

The net result is an ownership experience that is as convenient and worry-free as it should be. This is the laptop I’ve waited for my entire life. The power of the M1, that still-beautiful design and the loveliness of macOS are all tiny little cherries on top.

It’s the simple things in life that make the biggest difference, right?