Costing 9 hundos a piece, Air is not something a regular company would buy for their employees.
They're more likely to buy a budget laptop in the 400-500 range which you can bet will do just fine for office work, and you can always upgrade it if necessary.
If a company really does need their employees to work a Mac, they will have to cough out a lot more for the 16GB version, and this is what the article calls corporate greed.
I happen to think that the enterprise is an untapped market for Macs. Not tech offices. Other industries that run on Lenovos and Dells.
If I'm a small business, I still wouldn't buy $500 Windows laptops for my employees. I'd buy $750 M1 Airs. They last longer, "just work", and have fewer support issues.
As an employee of a company that runs macbook fleets, hell no they don't. Every other year we have had to replace half our inventory because of the 2015 macbooks having faulty batteries that want to explode, and then the next generations being that terrible keyboard, where every single employee needed their entire top cover replaced at least once because the keyboard didn't even last a year.
Meanwhile at my previous company which ran those boring ugly dell "workstation" laptops with the fat ass batteries, Entire generations of older workstations were still in inventory because they just didn't die, and were stupidly easy to repair, and you didn't have to send them away for a month for something like "my N key doesn't work anymore" or "the battery we gave you will burn your house down"
I just don't get how people say "Macs are reliable", because the only laptops less reliable than my work macbooks have been a series of cost reduced dell laptops that screws would literally fall out of, except even when that happened, dell would send someone to come fix it the next day, in your home!
But hey, it's not like Apple has a history of denying problems, right?
IIRC there was a recall/replacement program for those batteries as well as earlier generations of the butterfly keyboard. I'm not a fan of the butterfly keyboard, but Apple did replace it twice for free. The final revision fixed the reliability problems for me at least.
I'd imagine the TCO on those bargain basement laptops is terrible, so I doubt they're really a big sell for corporate buyers.
(B) In my experience corporate machines simply aren't upgraded. You get enough for the job when you order it. If you need more, you get a new machine and the old one is repurposed or retired if it's remaining usable life is short.
Yeah. It would basically be insane for a company for nickel and dime laptop purchases and then pay an IT person to do bespoke upgrades. Like a lot of things that may seem sensible on a personal level where labor is cheap/free, they don't make sense when you're paying someone $50+ an hour to do them.
I remember in a n org I worked a few years ago we got new laptops with SSDs instead of HDDs. Everybody was happy except the people who worked with a lot of data as the first SSDs were very small like 128 GB (still the amount of disk space you would get in an entry-level MBP 2019 I think). So we asked for an upgrade and they replaced our SSDs rather than replacing whole laptops. But I'm sure it's place-dependent.
It is an i3, but still... this is $279! Do some bargain hunting and you can find some pretty decent machines for <$500 now.
Edit: devs get 32G pros though, and we loathe the extra RAM pricing on those. Cheap compared to the cost of a developer, though!
What? NO. 8GB is not enough for browsing and the proliferation of Electron apps these days. The solution shouldn't be constantly swapping, which is what all 8GB Apple devices do. This will lead to early SSD death and since the SSD is soldered on, that means the entire device is useless.
I see it on computers (and phones too) whose owners bought the smallest capacity to avoid spending money on something they didn't think they would use.
On the flip side, the very same laptop has a much better display than competing MacBook Air, and better in a manner that is observable in its entirety in non-professional casual use: visually better scrolling of web pages and documents; easier to see in bright sun; much more superior HDR movie watching experience.
It also has much better laptop speakers - completely irrelevant for professional use (like music production), but very relevant for movie watching.
Base 14" MBP is merely a better Netflix machine than MacBook Air is.
What you said about Pro, and what the article says about Pro, is very fair and quite excellent in fact for, uhm, actual Pro laptops, which is Mx Pro/Max based machines, not the new base 14" MBP on an Mx (small one) chip.
What I indeed find perplexing is the fact that 2 default 14" Mx MBP configurations that do not require any changes (they often ship faster, being default is a tangible difference) aren't 8 GB 512 and 16 GB 512, but 8 GB 512 and 8 GB 1TB. That I find odd, because I think yes, a small subset of office users might find a low core count but bigger RAM version useful in practice (I'm thinking some very heavy spreadsheet hitters kind of office power users, managers probably), but virtually no one in that category would actually care to have 1TB of SSD with everything being web-based and/or stored on company's servers in corporate environment. That is indeed odd. But maybe I'm wrong in my assumptions for this one - it's easy to be lacking any actual stats or data - and it's appropriate as well. I don't know.
Funnily enough, I'm typing this from a 3 year old Thinkpad that I use for work, which has in all likelyhood a slower CPU than even the M1, but it's perfectly usable for dev work, because it has 64GB of RAM.
Of course, 16 GB (or more) is nicer.
That's why I said normal office workers and students. I never said 8GB is enough for devs. It wasn't enough for me. It was still manageable for that 1 year before Apple Silicon MBPs got released. But of course I upgraded to an M1 Pro 16GB as soon as it came out.
I just gifted a family member an M1 Air 8GB in late 2023. I felt very comfortable that it was enough for the work this person does on the computer.
PS. 8GB is perfectly fine for Chrome web browsing. You can have 50 tabs open and it'll still run smoothly. macOS does some magic with paging. Don't know how it does it. But never had an issue with 8GB and Chrome. It was always my IDE, Typescript, and docker that gave me RAM issues on 8GB.