Apple MacBook Air (M1, 2020)

My take

Even now in 2026, this 2020 model kicks butt and is my main development machine. I was able to throw a 7M LLM on it and have it serve itself as an API to another computer on my network. It handles most tasks and has been a really impressive machine for the price. It fits nicely into my Apple ecosystem, and I love that I can text from it. The 256GB of storage is a drawback, and the lack of ports can be annoying, but I have an Anker dock that works perfectly with it, and I use it docked most of the time.