Does anyone here play on the MacBook Air base model (M1 8gb ram 512ssd) or (M1 16gb ram 512 sad) ?
I have all Apple products so I would like my laptop to be as well but on budget and not spending 2grand
I would to know how well the play is on all the latest updates
My advice is not to play WoW or any game on any machine with less than 16GB of RAM. Also that you’d be better off getting a cheaper PC laptop with some solid specs, rather than paying a premium for the Apple brand.
ASUS, MSI, and Acer all make decent entry, mid, and higher-end laptops you can enjoy WoW on and at good speeds, temps, and battery life. If it were my money, I’d look at ASUS first.
Running Classic, you “should” be fine (though 16GB is always nice). I have a MBA (playing retail may be pushing it), and while I’ve not installed WoW on it, can certainly appreciate your needs.
As you’ve suggested, buying another laptop just to play wow on is a bit ridiculous, where finding a solution for you current circumstances is paramount to the discussion.
Expanding on this:
When playing on a laptop regardless of specs, a frequent trouble you’re going to run into when gaming is overheating. This is something that can usually be completely mitigated by tweaking your settings / limiting background processes, or manually setting fan speed / throttling things like your CPU if macs let you do that.
You can also get a cooling pad fairly cheap and clean the dust out of it every few months to help.
Just some pre-emptive advice for what feels like a “Sooner or later you’ll run into it” problem.
It does not play particularly well on the M1 Air. You can get by in a pinch with NO addons of any type and graphics turned down.
It does run well on the Mac Studio Ultra, however.
I play on a potato 
At my old job I played on a regular windows 10 asus laptop, 11th gen i3, 8 gb ram, 128 gb ssd 14 in screen, it was totally fine for dailies with addons enabled. Never did bgs or raids because I was focused on work, so I can’t say how those would be.
This is for classic. Back in the day I played through Cata on an i3 with 4gb ram and some hdd so you’d be fine I’d imagine.