Open Activity Monitor right now, mid-work, twenty tabs deep.
The chip is asleep between your keystrokes. It has been all day.
So when your Air hangs, it is not short of power. It is short of somewhere to put things. RAM. And the moment RAM fills up, your Mac starts to jitter.
The fix is a memory upgrade, not a second computer.
The real culprit is Chrome
Before you blame the Mac, open Activity Monitor, click the Memory tab, and sort by what is using the most.
It is not Claude Code. It is Chrome.
10 to 20 tabs, each one a separate process, each one holding a few 100 megabytes of memory. Whether you are looking at the tab or not. A Gmail tab alone can sit at 0.5Gb.
Chrome will happily eat 8 GB on its own, which on a base Air is everything you have.
Which makes you think, 'I need a Pro/Max/Ultra or Mac Mini RIGHT NOW'.
Safari, Arc, Orion and Brave do the same job for a fraction of the RAM. Same tabs, half the memory load = no jitter, lag or sluggishness.
So before you spend a dollar, try one week on Safari with the same tabs. Most "my Air is too slow" complaints end there.
What a Second Brain OS actually costs your machine
First, a common confusion: do I need a better Mac to use Claude Code?
Claude Code is harness, a light program. It reads your files, runs your commands and shows you the result.
The AI model itself (the heaviest thing), is NOT on your Mac at all.
It lives in a data centre, and your harness talks to it over the internet, the same way your browser talks to Netlfix. Just like episodes are streamed, so are AI responses. None of the heavy video processing happens on your device.
So running a harness, meaning Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or OpenCode, is light work. Just like watching Netflix. A MacBook Air has plenty of room for it, alongside a browser and a terminal. Your knowledge stays on the Mac. The AI processing happens on the cloud.
The only thing that would ever strain your machine is choosing to run the AI model itself locally, on your own disk, with no internet involved.
Which only makes sense once local models are good enough. Right now even the best of them are a long way from the frontier models, meaning Fable, Opus, Kimi K3 and GPT-6 Astra.
And those DO NOT fit on a Mac Ultra, a Mac Studio and definitely not on a Mac Mini. They are simply too big to live on any machine you can buy.
So the honest position for most people reading this: you talk to a frontier model over the internet, your knowledge stays local, and the Air is more than enough.
The buying guide
Three lines.
- Browser plus terminal (Claude Code): Air.
- Plus video exports and edits at the same time: Pro.
- Plus a small-to-medium local model (LM Studio and OpenCode) at the same time: Max.
Every reviewer on YouTube who runs "real world tests" lands on the same conclusion. Hardly anyone manages to use a MacBook Air to its fullest.
The chip, M1 or M5, is rarely what holds you back. RAM is. A bigger screen and more memory make almost every problem go away.
One more thing. If you can get an M2, M3 or M4 Air with the 15-inch display and 24 GB or more of RAM for the same price as a base M5, buy that.
Stay portable
The reason this matters for the rest of the series is the next post. Your Second Brain OS lives on the Mac, and you are about to learn how to reach it from a device that weighs 300 grams, an iPad Mini.
A 15-inch Air with 24 GB of RAM is something you can leave on table or carry with you.
When you want to work via your iPad mini (it connects to any Mac), leave it at home. When you need to lift heavy, carry your Air and do it from wherever you like.
A Mac Mini makes you home-bound the moment something heavy comes up. And somedays, your home isn't the right place. Somedays, you just need to get out. Even for the heavy stuff.
Like I said earlier, all the CPU power you need to run Claude Code (or any harness) comes with a Macbook Air. The extra CPU from a Pro/Max/Ultra will never get used.
That combination is the whole point of the next post.
A note on prices: every price in this series is the price inside its funnel, where each purchase unlocks the next. Bought on its own, outside the funnel, the same product can cost up to 30% more.
Next up: running Claude Code from an iPad Mini, and the two mistakes every tutorial makes.