Yeah I don't think the Air is really the premium Apple laptop by any stretch.
Not to be an evangelist; but on my M1 Air I found VS Code to be a pig (plus I had to run both universal and native M1 versions) so much that it was finally motivation to try neovim like I kept seeing all these people promoting. Wouldn't say i've gotten as used to it as quickly as others, but I can argue that its at least extremely lightweight in comparison, plus i'm not working under the license VSCode has.
It is more than a little silly that I need 16GB of RAM to make my work windows laptop functional in order to administer a bunch of 4GB linux VMs ;)
PCs are moving towards 32GB now.
Windows PCs.
I'm not going to pretend that more RAM isn't just automagically better, because it is. But 8GB RAM on a 2020 Lenovo Windows build feels and performs much worse than 8GB in a 2020 M1 Macbook Air.
8GB was so unusable in my work* (IT Pro for large corporate) laptop that they eventually agreed that we were "power users" and so could have an upgrade to 16GB RAM. But it still feels a bunch worse than my M1 due to all the additional sludge that gets lumped on top for corp reasons.
*Just to describe what I do, I have browsers open, MS Teams and then spend my day in SSH sessions to linux based servers, so realistically there was nothing "power" user about what I was doing, it was just that our corp Windows build & laptops are that awful. And now we've been 11'd, ugh.
I put a passively cooled GT1030 in mine and its doing the decoding & tensorrt detection for 4x 1080p cameras just fine, based on its current load I expect I could add another 4.
I couldn't tell you if that specific Amcrest camera will work, but I have 2 of the recommended ones on the frigate docs (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B083G9KT4C/) and they work.
A great many people really like OSX; its been a long time since i've daily driven it but there's stuff about the way it works that feels more efficient than windows, and easier than linux. That's not something that appeals to everyone but its obviously worked for a lot of folks.
So back in the day it was about getting to use OSX (and in other cases apps that were OSX only, or just ran better in OSX) but not having to pay so much for the hardware. That's a calculation that to me really only made sense for desktops; as for quite a long time Apple's laptops weren't actually massively more expensive than a similarly spec'd windows laptop.*
Overtime i'd argue that linux desktops have caught up to a lot of what made OSX feel good; but they're not like for like even now. Though take that with a grain of salt as I spend more time in cli/tui nowadays across my macbook, work windows laptop and various linux boxes i've got running :)
*The thing was that the average windows laptop was under-spec compared to a Macbook Pro so the latter always looked way more pricey.
Heh, well yes i'm sure they would have rather I didn't hang on to my last one for 10 years; in fact its still going too - like i'd done with the last two macbooks i'd owned it went as a hand me down to my father who just uses it for email & web browsing. I'm hoping the Air will be around a similar amount of time - it will probably come down to battery & flash degradation over time I suspect.
Ah well that was just me replacing my personal laptop, so the 10 year old machine had been outperforming my 3 different work laptops (typically Lenovo, running Windows, refreshed every couple of years) all the way up until I got the Air.
Yeah me too; I bought it to replace a 2013 MBP. Its so light, the battery life is rediculous, and its far gruntier than I need for the work I do which is mostly in a shell / nvim etc anyway.
I'm still running an iPhone 8; my partner's broke so she upgraded to the 13 mini about 6 months ago, and now I have regrets that I didn't as well.
I used Smultron for yonks as well; very good app.
One thing I like about neovim (and its taking me ages to learn & improve) is being keyboard first and having less time with fingers away on mouse etc, its helped my concentration, as has full screening my terminal session and not having anything pop up in eye lines!