The Last 11-Inch MacBook Air in 2025 – Is it still worth it?

When you need a cheap Windows laptop there is a no better option than a cheap Macbook with some bootcamp magic sprinkled in. I bought this Early 2015 11inch Macbook air for just £56 shipped and lets just say it’s a hell of a lot of laptop for the money.

The Macbook Air is probably Apples crowning achievement when it comes to the laptop space. Never before did so much come in such a thin and sleek package.

When first revealed it in 2008, in one of Steve jobs greatest on stage moments, it looked and felt like something from the year 2025. Offering no compromises performance and design in the worlds thinnest laptop really did show shake up the industry. In a world before tablets or the iPad, the 2008 macbook air was really the showcase of just how portable computers could be. In 2010, the Macbook Air was redesigned and a 11-inch model was introduced, offering performance the same Macbook air performance and quality in a Netbook sized form factor.

Netbooks were all the rage at the time, the idea of a tiny ultra portable laptop for web browsing seemed brilliant to the average consumer of the time. Although in reality most netbooks were manufactured E-Waste. The 11-Inch Macbook air stayed true to the apple slogan “Think different” and it was different. Although a lot more expensive at $999, that’s roughly $1460 today. For that leap in price it was a hell of a upgrade over anything the big players in the PC world were churning out.

By 2015, the ipad was king of the portable space. Netbooks were dead and buried. The 11inch Macbook air found itself in a awkward position. Too small and with a aging design, it was canned off. Relegated to the history books, with its spiritual successor the relaunched Macbook coming in a 12 inch form factor meeting its demise not too long after.

The Early 2015 Macbook Air is really the end of an era in a way. The last and best of the netbooks. By 2015 the Macbook air contained a duel core 4 thread Broadwell intel i5, 4gb of ram (Optionable up to 8gb)  and a 128gb PCIe SSD. In 2025 the soldered 4gb of ram is its biggest downfall as there isn’t a real way of expanding the ram barring desoldering the chips. While the ram cannot be upgraded, the SSD can. Although it uses a proprietary connector, this can easily be adapted to M.2. Allowing you to expand the storage to your hearts or wallets content.

Once I got received mine, I straight away upgraded the measly 128gb ssd to a 512gb OEM replacement drive from eBay. At  just under £30 this was about the same costs wise as buying a M.2 SSD and the necessary adapter. While I had it open I also swapped out the battery with a new third party replacement. Since after almost ten years and 130 cycles the battery had degraded. Luckily these are still readily and cheaply available. While these definitely aren’t necessary upgrades they do make the laptop a lot more liveable in 2025.

So how does it hold up in 2025?

All things considered… great! The latest MacOS this can run officially is Monterey, what while a few versions out of date, still feels modern and general usage feels quick and snappy. MacOS Sonoma can be shoe horned on to this machine, with Open-core legacy patcher, what some day I may try. But at the moment there isn’t a real need to upgrade from Monterey since it still receives security patches and all the software youd want to run, still supports it.

While this wont stay true and one day the appeal of Sonoma will grow for now, Monterey does the job fine.

Office tasks can be done spotlessly as expected. Although I did write the script for this on a 2004 iBook G4 so id be surprised if this wasn’t the case. Web Browsing works great and while things aren’t quite as snappy or instant as my M1 Macbook Air, for less than a quarter of the price, what can you complain about. The only real hold up is youtube and streaming playback. Due to streaming platforms, especially youtube moving to h.265 encoding to reduce bandwidth and storage costs, the performance heavily suffers as the CPU has to manually decode the video for playback, instead of taking advantage of the iGPUs hardware decoder. Luckily the Chrome plugin h.264ify solves this, forcing youtube and other streaming sites to encode in h.264 what the Intel HD Graphics can handle natively.

It amazes me how MacOS manages to be so efficient as to make a almost ten year old Laptop feel faster than your average Windows laptop after 3 years of Windows updates. 

On that, while MacOS games support has always been far behind Windows, what games do run on MacOS really struggle on the almost ten year old machine. Apart from 2d or light indie games, don’t get your hopes up about gaming on it. Although I have enjoyed a quick game of Minecraft every now and then, getting around 30 FPS with a mix of low settings. Although there are steps to further take, Minecraft wise to boost this FPS number such as the Sodium or Optifine Mod. 

The design of the machine still holds up today, the massive screen bezel being the only real tell tale sign that this machine is from a decade gone by. MagSafe 2 charging, to this day makes the charging experience almost magic. No wonder apple back peddled to MagSafe 3 charging with from the M2 Macbooks onwards. Since even with my love of everything that is USB C, this is nothing truly like blindly aiming your charging lead near the socket and it just snapping through the air into place. This said, the charging lead what was included with mine, was clogged up with gunk when I received it, though this was nothing a old toothbrush and some isopropyl alcohol couldn’t fix.

I still cant get over how thin and light this machine is, even without considering its age. Compared to modern and vintage windows laptops or even other older Macbooks, there is a massive difference. It almost encourages you to take this with you on trips you wouldn’t have otherwise, since it almost gets lost in a backpack. You'd be forgiven for forgetting its even in there.

Although the best part of the design has got to be the light up Apple logo, what gives it that charm what isn’t reflected in modern macs. Now that Apple has grown up and gotten serious, that charm is gone. Ironically this does also show the world that your timelessly designed MacBook isn’t quite so timeless as it once seemed as Apple haven’t sold a MacBook with a light up Apple logo, since this machines bigger 13inch brother stopped sale in 2019.

I.O. wise there is a relatively wide and modern set of ports. Including 2 USB 3 ports and a mini display port. A far cry from the 2 USB C ports, what also double as charging ports, found on the M1 Macbook air.

Being on the x86 CPU architecture, allows you to install any other operating system you could want, from Linux to Windows to FreeBSD, hell even temple OS if your really mad enough. The world really is your oyster OS wise. You can even run VMs on this if your really insane, although with 2 cores and 4gb of ram, your not gonna get far in 2025 running anything more than a single light weight linux install as a your VM.

For my uses though this machine has been great, as a semi disposable machine. Asin if I break it I break it sort of machine. It got me through 3 days in the labour ward with my girlfriend without a hiccup, playing Plex the entire time. I genuinely couldn’t ask for more for what little I put into it money wise. Once they fall in price, ill probably upgrade to the spiritual successor of the 11inch Macbook Air, the 12 Inch Macbook. Although it wouldn’t be much of a upgrade, it would give me some Ram headroom and allow me to charge via USB C.

If your in the market for one of these machines id highly recommend giving one ago, atleast if you can find one cheap enough. They hold up great as long as you limit your expectations. For second machine usage they still have life left to give. Im sure when this was new, id of been harsher on it and dug flaws out but to be honest for £56, you cant complain.