I and many others have zero need for more storage, this machine beats any non-oled windows laptop for screen at the pricerange, the CPU/GPU combo beats it on speed. Battery is a non-discussion (although my only windows laptop experience is work laptop, 4 hours on a good day).

Just buy more if you need it or cloud storage or a nas idk man, theres solutions.

Or buy windows, the choice is there.

And this is where “right to repair” dies…

No. Right to repair dies with bad quality laptops windows manufacturers make.

NAS or Cloud storage doesn't help much if your Xcode,node_modules,etc installs for a developer starts filling up the disk.

For what use case? I doubt the target user for the air would need anything more than what USB 4 + external SSD can make up for.

Running Xcode

You can use it as a glorified internet terminal with some light office apps within 256GB.

But it’s a pain in the ass to swap applications constantly, clear caches, delete large files and so on once you exceed those use cases.

512GB is a bit better, but then I shouldn’t have multiple toolchains or other large applications installed, multiple versions of Xcode, etcetera.

I work on it

I work with half of that on a VDI. Unless you are working on a single repo, you can always delete local repos once you have pushed your branch and you very rarely have to work on 50 repos at the same time.

And you can’t make it “workable“ since the hard drive is unplaceable.

On my work laptop I use only 80gb, I just need the corporate software (that is mostly cloud apps) and my dev environment (that is what takes the most space), here I disagree. Now for private use, I do agree.

I code in Rust. I need more space than that :)

My Mac has 256GB. Just checked, I’m using 90GB. I have a 500GB SSD always plugged in for Steam games.

Media goes on my RAID1 NAS. Whose boot drive is running on a 32GB SSD.

As long as I have enough space to install the programs I use I don’t see the need for more boot drive storage. Network and external storage are cheaper and more convenient.

Only for people who need more storage.

Also Apple likes to sell extra iCloud storage.