Apple Macbook Air M1

Preamble

I’ve used an Apple Macbook Pro laptop for about a year as my main rig some time ago; overall apple “ecosystem” didn’t impress me much as a developer so I bailed back to Linux. But seeing their announce about arm64 transition made me very curious and it resulted in my beautiful and thoughful wife gifting me this laptop almost on release date.

Hardware (hacks)

Run-off-the-mill m1 air, everyone know it. 8 gigabytes of ram always felt enough to me; imho it holds up its beefy performance even in 2025.

Sadly there isn’t much one can do hacks-wise with that laptop: everything is soldered down and the majority of space inside is actually a battery cells. But one of the things I did is pretty similar to the widespread Pinebook Pro modification: using thermal pads to dissipate heat to the bottom lid of the computer. Since Air is only cooling passively this does a great deal in improving performance and thermals overall, and the only downside is you cannot put it on your lap freely, since it gets quite hot. I even saw benchmarks showing that modded m1 air actually outperforms m1 pro by tiny margin - because Pro version has small lag enabling fan and throttling meanwhile.

Software

Another popular ‘hack’ of sorts was simply using Asahi Linux. This is a wonderful project that makes the m1 shine even more. Marcan and the whole team did an incredible job building the whole thing from ground up. Fun fact: In its early days when the GPU driver wasn’t ready yet and all the rendering was software the m1 managed to render everything while getting scorching hot but with no lags or anything. That shows up how much power that small SoC actually has.

I’ve seen people using OpenBSD on that hardware successfully but for some reason never tried it myself. Using native virtualization api and accelerated qemu though proved to be awesome, the performance of any arm64 guest OS is impeccable.

Photos

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