Why I bought an M1 Macbook Air instead of waiting for the new M2 version
tl;dr -- I personally don't think the new design and slight performance boost are worth the extra cost and would rather spend the extra money on memory and storage that I will actually need.
Around the end of May 2022, I began looking into replacing my aging mid-2012 Macbook Pro. A week or so later Apple announced their new M2 Macbook models at WWDC 2022, after which I spent several days considering whether or not to wait for the new machines. Ultimately I opted instead for M1 Macbook Air and put the cost savings towards more memory and storage.
What I’m using it for
I've resisted replacing my old Macbook Pro with a newer model for a long time. The main reason being that I couldn't justify the cost --- Apple hardware is expensive! --- compared with what I was actually using the laptop for. At one point, I switched over to a Windows laptop because it was more affordable and allowed me to do some gaming, and ended up relegating my aging Macbook to being experiment machine and family computer.
Recently however, I made the decision to commit time to deepening my knowledge of coding / app development. I'm also starting my journey to build a Second Brain to manage the random tidbits that I come across through my daily life, after reading about the concept for the first time on Ali Abdal's blog. While these things don't exactly necessitate the use of a Mac or even the latest hardware, I plan to work with Xcode and dig into the fancy new features that were released with iOS / iPadOS 14+ which does require hardware capable of supporting the latest versions of Xcode.
Why I chose the M1 instead of the M2
At WWDC Apple announced that the new M2 chips promise up to 18% more performance than the M1, but I personally don't think this extra boost is going to be noticeable in my everyday usage. Given how well the M1 already performs and based on my own computing needs, I wager the small boost would be negligible unless you use very specific applications or do work that would take full advantage of the chip. For myself, I'm mostly experimenting with code and writing, and will likely not even take full advantage of the M1 chip's performance. That said, from a more simplisic point of view, I am upgrading from a very old Intel based Macbook, so technically any new hardware is going to feel faster comparatively.
On the design end, the new body design of the M2 Macbook Air is very beautiful, and with the inclusion of Magsafe it is a bit more functional now that both USB ports can be used. The icing on the cake for many people may also be the slightly brighter screen and slightly larger display, as well as the inclusion of four speakers to support spatial audio. While these things are all great to have, for myself these bells and whistles aren't justified by the extra cost because they simply are not that important to me. I'm not a graphic designer or photographer, nor do I really consume any media on my laptop --- even if I did I'd normally have earbuds or headphones on --- so the bigger, brighter screen and swanky speaker setup don't add much value for me. And while charging by Magsafe is great, the battery life of the Macbook Air is so long that I don't actually need to keep it plugged in so both my USB ports are already available when I need them. This leaves me with just the new body design as the only major difference that might matter, but it's one that I can't justify paying more for.
Since the minor boost in performance and the new design were not important to me, I instead chose to go with the existing M1 model and to invest my money into more storage and memory. I plan to keep this new laptop for a long time, so maxing the memory and increasing storage only made sense. After pricing out my options and making a decision, I was able to purchase an 8 core GPU M1 Macbook Air equipped with 16GB memory and 1TB of storage from a local retailer for less than the cost of an equivalently spec'd 7 core GPU M1 model which is now the only M1 model available direct from Apple.
At the time of this posting, the M2 Macbook Pro has been out for a few weeks and the M2 Macbook Air is now available to order. I'm looking forward to reading about how they perform, but I'm very happy with my decision to go with the M1. It's a fantastic little machine.