It’s 2025, and I’m buying a 2020 M1 MacBook Air—for development.
Here’s why.
I manage multiple devices and multiple development contexts. Between my full-time job, freelance clients, and a few side projects I like to tinker with, I’m constantly switching between environments. That means juggling dev environments, SSH keys, permissions, and configurations across several machines. It’s a mess.
I’ve always preferred working across form factors: iPad in bed, laptop on the couch, desktop at my desk. But that flexibility comes at a cost. Syncing environments and maintaining context across devices is tedious and fragile. Over the years, I’ve tried every possible setup—remote desktops, containers, shared drives, you name it.
Here’s what I currently own:
- 11” iPad Pro
- 16” MacBook Pro
- M2 Mac mini acting as a home server
I’ve used remote desktops for almost a decade now, and recently I had a realization: Why not simplify everything down to one device?
That’s where the M1 MacBook Air comes in.
Even in 2025, it’s one of the best portable machines ever made. The wedge shape makes it comfortable to carry. It’s silent, never gets hot, and the battery life is absurdly good. And because the M1 is so efficient, it’s perfect as a portable remote desktop thin client. I don’t need local compute power. Just a great screen and reliable battery for connecting to my main development machine.
Ben Thompson described a similar setup in an episode of Dithering, and it clicked for me: Dock the MacBook Pro at home. Use the MacBook Air everywhere else. (with exception of the home server).
The M1 MacBook Air is dirt cheap in 2025, and if I’m only using it to stream my home machine via RDP or SSH, it doesn’t need to be powerful—it just needs to work. Like a Chromebook, but better. There are definitely risks to this setup: bad internet, power surges, but it’s great 95% of the time. If something does go wrong, worst-case scenario, I can still maintain a basic development environment directly on the MacBook Air.
This setup gets me closer to what I’ve always wanted: flexibility without chaos.