I’m quite in love with this machine. If my corporate IT group offered them over our top spec MacBook Pro options, I would take it in a heartbeat — I don’t care about the loss of compute power.
This Air has the exact same chip as that MBP.. If the M2 in the 13" MBP (not the M2 Pro, which is currently unreleased) gets thermally throttled, we'll have to see how it performs in a device without a fan.
I think the main difference (besides storage and peripherals) is active cooling. MBA's are passive cooled now (since the original M1) whereas MBP's have always had fans. The M1 & M2 chips are so cool that they generally don't need any active cooling most of the time. Where it does make a difference is under heavy sustained compute workloads. The passively-cooled MBA's will start to throttle under these workloads whereas the MBP's will maintain full speed indefinitely by spinning up the fans.
> I think the main difference (besides storage and peripherals) is active cooling
Haha, I read your comment, and my first thought was a dismissive, “who cares about active cooling”. Which really says something about how insanely power efficient these chips are. I’ve had the M1 Air since launch and I’ve yet to observe any thermal throttling under my workloads (I’ve yet to feel the machine even get hot)
Same here. I have never seen any throttling on mine, even when playing games (although admittedly I don't play demanding games). I think the target market for the Pro's active cooling is rendering (3D and video). For programmers I see little reason to get a Pro, unless you're running large C++ or Rust builds.
This is quite possibly the absolute most perfect portable laptop ever released. Thin, light, no fan, and looks great with great performance and battery life.
These are not ram sticks, these are difference in the M2 chip itself. I'm not a chip designer, but I imagine there are more manufacturing quality challenges with the ones that have more RAM.
I would imagine so, and I would think that out of 100% of their chips, they would have more which passed the lower RAM standards than the higher ones. So the higher RAM chips (which passed) would be more rare, so to speak.
I don't know much about this topic, but I have read that the RAM in M1/M2 machines is part of the Mx chip itself. Unless I misunderstand, I don't believe it's any kind of separate component - stick or otherwise.
This is incorrect, just looking at the M2 promotional materials the DRAM is quite clearly a separate component[1]. The DRAM modules are combined with the M2 in a single package though, maybe that's what you're thinking of?
Ahh ok, so it's not on the same die, but it's on the same package. Thus, it's not exactly something you can configure after the fact. In advance of configuration and sale, Apple has to decide to commit to some assortment of M2+RAM configurations.
I'm excited to get my hands on one of these. I'm a US citizen living in Hungary, and hoping to get my hands on a US version ASAP. I'm debating if it will be easier to order from Apple in the US and ship it via a third party to the EU, or order in the EU and have the keyboard swapped out after I get it. I'm mostly nervous that if I don't order right away, it will be sold out and hard to get my hands on for a few more months. Hungary doesn't have any physical Apple stores and last time I checked, ordering directly from Apple to Hungary wasn't really possible without going through a partner.
can't speak for op because I don't know what layout his country has. For Germany, vim is not usable beyond basic movements, because for example [ and ] have no dedicated keys. Typing { } on the default german layout is an insult to the typer. I remember a vim-shortcut that would have required to press five keys at the same time.
But that's just about software keyboard layout, isn't it? I've been using US layout since forever (configured in OS), even though my keyboards have Croatian scribbles on some keys.
I do see now that the actual physical layout might be different, having large vs. small enter key and possibly additional key next to the left shift.
The difference is that one keyboard is made for humans who touch type, and the other keyboard is made for people who like to lift up their hand and move it every time they want to hit return... or left shift.
The ones with the shorter left shift and narrower/taller return key are just bad designs. They make keys you use frequently less accessible, and the tradeoff is that keys you rarely use are now in reach.
I'm not in the US, so I'm kinda alone in this, and forgot to tell my work I wanted an international one, so I got an M1 pro from work with the international lay-out.
I've been using US layout since I was ~8. And all my other systems have the US layout. I am having such a hard time to get used to it.
I keep hitting ± when I mean ~ (why would I even need a ±/§ key on my keyboard?). I keep hitting \ when I want to hit Return. I keep hitting ~ when I want to hit shift.
I had this as well with a previous company work laptop, so I had to use a wireless external keyboard always. Using the built-in keyboard was so frustrating that it made me angry enough to almost destroy the laptop a few times.
It should be noted that on older Macbooks, the aluminum case has actual cutouts for keys. So it's not possible to change the layout of keyboard without also changing the case. I discovered this when I had my personal laptop repaired, and it came back with the wrong keyboard! The shop just instinctively ordered keyboard+case of their usual layout, so I had to have the whole thing redone again (at no extra charge, just a loss of time).
Well there must be at least 3 of us, because I'm another one. I've used the US layout ever since you could save something like 28 KBytes from not loading the UK layout, and I used this with UK keyboards for years. (Very useful having a backslash key for every hand.) Then at some point I acquired an actual US keyboard, and I was an immediate convert. I just really liked the fat Return key.
When I bought my first MBP, I wasn't completely wedded to the idea of getting a Mac necessarily - but when I noticed you could order one with a US keyboard, it tipped the balance in favour.
(For any serious work, I use a USB keyboard and mouse, so in a sense it doesn't really matter. But I use the built-in keyboard often enough that I'd be annoyed being stuck with that tiny Return key...)
(This reminded me: if you go to get a battery replacement, make sure the staff member notes that it's got a US keyboard. I took mine to a UK Apple store for a battery replacement a couple of years ago, and when I went to pick it up a few days later, it had had its keyboard replaced with a UK one! The staff member was very apologetic - perhaps they correctly read my expression of speechless shock after opening it - and it got fixed, but it took a couple more days. So in the end I was without my laptop for over a week.)
That's interesting, the one I'm typing on right now seems to be a hybrid, longer left shift (which is indeed better) but tall enter (which I like because I like to just smack it from time to time).
Could get expensive. Past Macbooks hat a top chassis combo of keyboard, chassis and battery. At least the MacBook air battery replacement was only like 150€, including a new keyboard/top plate. Not sure it will be the same with the new design.
My m1 air with us layout was shipped to Germany from Poland within one month, right after M1s were released. The US-layout is faily common in the EU among programmers etc.
In The Netherlands you typically will get US keyboards in your MacBooks. I think keyboards are not easily swappable but I might be mistaken? AFAIK in most European countries (at least in Germany) you can also order macs with US layout.
Ordering in EU is easier especially related to warranty. But the price is steep: it is 1199 USD in the US versus 1519EUR in The Netherlands, including sales tax
No, it's not typical to get US keyboard Macs in NL. All physical stores (and most online stores) including Media Markt and the official Apple store only stock ISO layout.
Fortunately it's simple to order the ANSI (US) layout in the online Apple store these days. (US English, not International English!). Up to maybe 10 years ago or so it was pretty hard to get it with US keyboards in Europe. (I usually imported them from the US via eBay.)
The warranty is really worth considering. I recently had to get a repair on an 18 month old laptop, and even though it was out of Apple warranty, the repair was free under consumer protection laws, and would not have been had I bought it in the US.
I'm honestly not sure why you would ever pay for an extended warranty in Germany.
If you order from Apple in the EU (to a friends place for example) you get a choice of keyboards. Apple generally ships direct from China for online orders. I have a US keyboard Mac purchased in Spain.
Comments like this are so reliable around Apple product releases that we could use them to replace NTP. Over time, machines get slower. New code favors new instructions. But it's not like the machine gets 10% slower the day the new ones start shipping.
I am not denying the existence of planned obsolescence but My 2013 Macbook Air lasted almost until now, better durability than any other machine I have ever owned.
Same situation here. My 2015 is still going, and I've put that little guy through the ringer. Awesome laptop. I caved and bought an M1 Air last year and it's just amazing. I seem to have luckily missed the problem years of the Macs in between.
I bought a Mac Mini in 2018 to replace my 2010 Macbook Pro. So that laptop lasted 8 years. The only reason I didn't buy a laptop instead of the Mini is I refused to buy anything with a touch bar. This is my first new personal laptop in 12 years and I'm so excited.
I had exactly the same experience with my 2013 Macbook Air. It is still perfectly fine, but I wanted something that was actually faster for couch surfing. Which took until now.
I’ve owned a lot of computers and my pre-retina MacBook Air was one of my faves. So much seat time, so many LoC written. I loved the wedge shape of the chassis for actual lap work. Disappointed they moved to the square chassis like other models but it’s so thin it might not be a dealbreaker.
I thought it'd be an issue when my work shipped me the new 14" MacBook Pro, but I found it pretty easy to pick up the laptop thanks to the bigger feet, and the bottom edges of the case that have a rounded shape.
I think with the Air's weight being slightly less than the outgoing model, the shape isn't going to be so much of a concern.
I don't need more than two Thunderbolt ports, but I would have liked to see one of them on the right side of the case.
Yeah, I had a 2012 era MBA, and it was basically the ideal laptop, until it didn't have the power to run XCode (so I bought a 2015 15"). The M1 Air is there again, fast enough, light enough, good enough keyboard, and incredible battery life.
I'm due for a work laptop upgrade soon, and I'm on the fence between a maxed MBA m2 and a 14" M1 Pro with 32G ram. It'll be mainly tethered to one big monitor, but light weight would be nice when commuting, as often as I do that.
I have now had two (work and personal) - my work m1 air was specced with 8GB, and had major memory pressure and issues with an external monitor. My personal 14” MBP has 16GB - same workload, same monitor, never skipped a beat.
Ended up sending the air back and swapping for one of the old dev ex MBP (intel based).
At least 16G, them having a 8G offering is customer hostile.
They pay like $40 for the difference, while making it a $200 upgrade, same with the SSD. - Especially since the SSD is apparently really slow with the 256G model.
Eh. I bought a base model M1 Air on a whim because they were in stock, and I can count on one hand the times I wished for more RAM. I have a Kubernetes cluster at home I can run things in, which also hosts a Jupyter instance.
My next one I'll get 16G simply because those few times (namely, creating Kubernetes labs intended to be ran on Apple Silicon) were annoying to deal with. But for I would wager 90+% of their customer base, 8G is absolutely fine. I've never once had it stutter with heavy Chrome usage, video streaming, or even gaming (not AAA titles, granted) out to an external monitor.
I have the 8GB M1 mini, which I bought as soon as it went on sale, so it's a year and a half old. In general the 8GB thing has been fine, and the notion that it can swap pretty quickly has been fine, but it's definitely noticeable now that the swapping is no longer fine, whether because the flash is wearing out or because there was a software update. These days I regularly reboot the thing just to clear the decks after the machine comes to a crawl. And I don't do anything stressful with it. VS Code, Chrome, and Terminal at the same time is about as extreme as it gets. All the real work is happening on adjacent Linux box.
I can't imagine the SSD having worn out yet; that's very odd. Mine hasn't quite hit a year yet, so I'll definitely keep an eye on it, but I haven't noticed any slowdowns.
Never get less than 16, since you cannot upgrade it later. Yes, it's obviously a sales technique to get you to pay a lot more than the main price they like to put in ads.
I have 8GB on my M1 air and will definitely be paying extra for 16 or 24 GB next time. Memory pressure is real especially because I have a second user on the laptop for my spouse - if both our accounts are logged in with apps open it can slow down and freeze for 30 seconds or more.
It's very tempting, but my MacBook Air M1 has been great and performance wise any improvement is probably barely noticeable in the day to day that I'd end up feeling like I just bought a new chassis. Which could still be nice.. although most of the time it's in clamshell attached to my monitor. I'll have to sleep on this!
maybe I will convince my boss to get me the new one, and I will give the m1 pro to my teammates :)
Other than that I agree (though, as I have stated elsewhere, this is good. less landfill). The m1 pro is just insane - I sold all of my other machines.
As an M1 pro owner, the big non starter for the M2 air is the lack of the high refresh rate screen (pro motion or w/e), I've really gotten spoiled by it.
Don’t worry there will be daily rumor stories posted here about the subject along with daily stories about how great recently announced X is. Your challenge is to sail between Scylla and Charybdis.
I mean to be honest if you have a 16' M1 Max, there is no reason to upgrade for the next 2-3 years..
The performance improvements will be marginal at best and in any case, what good is a machine if you can't keep it more than a year?
I just ordered my 16' Max and am not willing to upgrade for a while.. it's not even worth the wait for the M2 Max pros, since it will be basically the same specs and you'll have to wait more than a moth to get it anyway so why delay further?
If you have cash to burn however, then I guess it doesn't matter..
I did - I believed all the '8 gig is fine' stuff at the beginning, and didn't like how much Apple charged for RAM. But for my work anyway it often starts having stuttering and slowness issues if I have too many things open. Otherwise it's quite fast.
I have the 16 gig version since 2020. Overall its the best machine I have ever owned but even then, maybe in 10% of the cases when too many chrome tabs are opened, VSCode and a bunch of other apps are in, I can sometimes notice the slow down but its not super critical.
I did have severe issues with Kernel Panics, the laptop would just blink a pink pixelated screen and restart but that has been fixed.
I expect M2 pro/max/ultra to be on 3nm. TSMC projects first customer product to be shipping end of the year. That matches Apples update cycle and we know Apple always is the first one to snag the new nodes.
Agree. Apple haven't added support for a second external monitor so the extra features are more performance and more battery. The performance of the M1 is incredible so it is not clear why to update.
I've been using my 2013 MBP for nearly a decade. Finally replaced it with a M1 MBP a few months ago.
Honestly the 2013 still works great for what I do (web, videos, and dev work that doesn't involve spinning up multiple VMs ;) ), I figured it was time to upgrade and the supply chain issues don't seem to be letting up anytime soon. I might replace the battery in the old one. I'm hoping to get at least another decade out of the M1 machine, hopefully more.
Also on the fence. For me the reason to upgrade would be the 24GB RAM option: more tabs. I'll wait and see what the hands-on reviews say. Not sold on flat slab either, the wedge is very practical. The M1 MBA is going to be hard to beat.
I bought an M1 Air the day of the M2 announcement. $780 shipped on ebay for a mint laptop with 3 battery cycles. Battery life will be about the same, screen is good enough, 20% multicore boost is not worth an extra $450. M2 does look great though.
Looks like M1 prices have dropped even more since I bought.
Docker performance isn't great compared to what I'm used to on windows, but it's usable. Experimental docker features that are billed as potentially increasing performance by huge margins completely break my bind mounts. My stack fits very comfortably in the base 8 gigs of RAM. Some of my dependencies have bugs in the ARM builds that make me use docker overrides to x86 containers instead of aarch64.
I also had to troubleshoot some errors where dotenv operates a bit different between macOS and linux.
Overall, feels slower than what I'm used to. Community has a few rough edges to work out in an Apple silicon world, but half my growing pains are just moving to macOS in general. https://captionsearch.io is my "try new tech" project so it's part of the experience.
Just recently bought a 2020 Intel air. It's very powerful and responsive. Would I notice a difference with an M1 or M2? Maybe, but I doubt it would be enough to justify the investment.
If you’re doing anything heavy that will put sustained stress on the machine, active cooling is the important difference. While the laptops may have identical CPUs, with only passive cooling the Air is going to get throttled down after a bit whereas the Pro won’t have to. If you’re going to do something like video rendering you’d notice the difference.
Slightly higher capacity battery is the only strictly better feature I can see in the MBP 13". Usually the MBP is a poor buy anyway. Better the 13" MBA or on the other side the 14" MBP.
Thanks for giving a heads up on the 15" Air on the horizon.
This would be the perfect computer for me, and probably most other pros in the current landscape - 13,4 is just too small for a lot of work, but few people need more power than an M1/M2.
I can see it's rumoured for spring next year, so a year is probably realistic.
You mean the lowest-specced M2 model for each? The ones that are $1199 for Air and $1299 for 13" MBP?
I noticed the tech specs for the lower-end air have a slightly lower M2 -- 8 GPU cores vs 10... and in the Air price tool, it's a $100 upgrade to go from 8-core GPU to 10-core.
So I guess that's it -- the low-end Air is a little lower-end and a little cheaper.
Especially with the Mac, Apple has this odd tendency to keep moribund parts of their lineup around while simultaneously going for a take-no-prisoners approach to rebuilding other lines. The bottom of their laptop offering seems to be the part that suffers the most from this — the Air has always sort of see-sawed between being the premium thin-and-light offering or the entry-level offering (with the 12" MacBook carrying the thin-and-light torch for a while).
Looks like right now the Air and the "proper" (14"/16") MBPs are the ones being propelled forward, while the 13" MBP is the moribund one.
M2 is significantly faster than Xeon and Epyc in single core speeds which is what matters the most in web browsing speed. There's also no latency that Mighty has.
I feel Mighty will have to quickly pivot to more value-added features than just streaming browser. I love the founder and I know PG loves them too but I have doubts about their future... I strongly wish I am proved wrong.
I don't really understand why apple feels the need to forgoe articles for their devices, however. For instance, they write "MacBook Air features..." rather than "The MacBook Air features..." as would be grammatically correct in English.
If you think this is changing up English, you may not be speaking English as a first language? Referring to products as a proper noun is very common. E.g. Ford will tell you "Mustang offers a powerful engine... blah blah blah" not "The Mustang offers..."
Maybe it's just that I'm a car guy, and I watch a lot of presentations about cars. They constantly refer to their models like this. Like it's a person, not an object.
> Hear the roar of a Mustang as the ground starts to tremble and your legs start to shake. As always, Mustang draws upon its performance roots with features for enhanced handling, high-powered engine options and a classic Mustang design. For 2022, the soul-stirring Mustang Mach 1 and Mach 1 Premium stand at the pinnacle of 5.0L performance. The personally customizable Mach 1 continues its legacy, engineered specifically for quick turns and spirited drives.
Confusingly, they use Mustang both with an article and without.
This comment makes me sigh. I know you will defend yourself with "what? I'm just stating a fact!" but saying stuff like this makes me really dislike you. I really like Apple products, does that make me a part of a cult? If yes, why? I wouldn't die for them, I wouldn't go through pain for them.
One thing apple does very well is marketing. Just ask an average person what company they think does phones/laptops the best and they would say apple. Most people don't care about the specifications tech details but just the ease of use and looks, which apple (arguably) does well to optimize for.
-- doesn't the imply there are others of similar? maybe what apple is saying is that there is no other iPhone except the iPhone so the is redundant? - just a guess - i agree it's odd --
It's deliberate. I guarantee that it's about building a "brand mindset." They've been playing with text copy for decades.
If you say "iPhone," instead of "The iPhone," you've turned "iPhone" into a pronoun. That has a different "connection" to people that hear it.
Branding seems to be something that a lot of tecchies (including Yours Truly) have difficulty with. There's a lot of subtle psychological games that aren't easy to quantify.
I think of it as a “pronoun.” It makes it into a “person,” or some kind of major deal, like we call localities (usually) by their single pronouns. Sometimes, “The” becomes part of the pronoun, like “The Netherlands,” or “The Bronx.”
Usually, though, we assign pronouns (I’m not an English major, though, so the proper term may be different).
Like, you can’t have “a brooklyn,” or “an amsterdam.”
They want to make it so we can’t have “an iPhone.”
It's already a proper noun (not a pronoun!), but it's being treated almost as though the name of every individual Apple device is the product brand name, which is weird. Using a product brand name without an article is normally only done for uncountable/mass noun things like "gorilla glue" or many food/drink products.
Only if you don't pay much attention to PR. Lots of manufacturers talk this way when referring to their own products. Apple isn't blazing a new trail here.
Even they find it hard to keep up this stupid convention. Ppl who work there of course say “the iPhone” but you even see it slip out frequently on stage at the big events. Even Steve Jobs, the originator of this convention and supposed stickler for detail used to say “the iphone” quite a bit.
They're treating "MacBook Air" as a proper noun. It's to personify their products, presumably with the idea that people will "connect" to them, for some hollow, tech-oriented definition of "connect".
Just like LEGO, which demands that you always capitalize the brand name and never pluralise it, likely so that their trademark doesn't become generic. "I have lots of LEGO bricks", not " I have lots of Legos".
Of course, that's corporate BS and everyone can feel free to use it however they want.
Referring to their products as a proper noun is an old Jobs-ism that he intentionally did. I'm pretty sure it goes all the way back to the original Macintosh, that he wanted to be referred to as just "Macintosh" in all the marketing material, and his on-stage announcement.
Missing "ly" transforms two words from humdrum imperative verb/adjective pairing to action whose object is enigmatic, provocative and whose verb stands strong, without qualification.
(I attempted to write this without articles. I don't really agree with using "whose" but needed a replacement to "for which the")
Heh, my mother was recently alarmed by the following iOS notification:
(password-at-risk-blah-blah)... 'iPad can help you re-secure your account.'
She associates poor grammar with phishing attempts, so assumed this could not have been a genuine notification from Apple. When I checked my own devices, it seems clear that their approach is at least consistent.
Think Differently would also be grammatically correct in English. But Think Different was what Apple went with. When you write, you make the decisions.
Another way to think about this is that when introducing a friend you wouldn't say, "Hi, this is the Kelly." You'd say, "Hi, this is Kelly."
That has always bothered me, and I swear no one ever seems to notice. I see it everywhere, and it clearly must work, since you can even see it being said by owner of devices.
I agree, that's very interesting! I also omit articles when talking about software, except when talking about a particular instantiation of the software; for example "Windows supports Nvidia hardware", but "the Windows installation on this device is broken". (And, indeed, "Windows installation is broken in the presence of NVMe drives" would mean, to me, that _all_ new Windows installers are broken for NVMe drives.)
Does anyone have reviews of any comparable ARM-based (good battery backup and speed) Windows laptops? Seems like there should be a transition of the entire laptop market to ARM, given that Apple has demonstrated that ARM processors are viable on the laptop.
The best Windows experience is to virtualize Windows 11 on M1(or M2) Mac.....although you are still running Windows 11 unfortunately. :/
Still its the snappiest Windows I have used in a long time. Microsoft probably hasn't figured out how to use up all the resources of this chip (for dumb features).
Apple has demonstrated that ARM processors can be viable on the laptop. The ARM processors on their iPhones and iPads were way faster than other ARM processors before they transitioned their macs. Furthermore, only Apple seems to have the hardware and software tech to allow x86 code to run nearly as fast as native code on an ARM CPU.
When it comes to Windows on ARM, so many reasons to pick a Windows laptop over a Mac are thrown out the door by self-sabotaging compatibility in that way. It's just not a good experience in my mind, unless you plan to use your system like a Chromebook and just stick to browsing the web or using other basic apps.
I would also say that 12th generation Intel is more competitive with Apple's current silicon than it gets credit for. It beats Apple on single and multi-threaded performance. No, you won't get 20 hour battery life, but you can find a respectable balance, and to that point I don't think it's worth making the ARM tradeoff on the Windows side of the house.
For Apple, ARM is great because they're betting the farm on it. For Microsoft, ARM still looks like a bit like a side project to me.
This thing is going to sell like hotcakes. The combination of single core CPU and graphics performance, device thinness, battery life in this laptop is unmatched.
It’s funny how Apple came back from the worst the Mac has ever been to the best in a span of few years. Johnny I’ve doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does.
The 2016 MacBook Pro was a turd. The butterfly keyboard would inevitably break. I went through several of these laptops. To add insult to the injury, this model's unique innovations were "Touch Bar" and "no ports"...
I've been buying Macs since 2000, and the 2016 MBP is definitely the worst Mac I ever had. It was enough to drive me to purchase a Surface Book as an alternative.
I refuse to buy a touchbar mac although some have been issued to me by employers. I remember when they came out they raised the price of the MBP for this "feature" that just kinda sucked.
Ended up leaving my MBP closed 95% of the time and using a separate keyboard.
This is why I bought a M1 Air instead of a Pro when it first launched. I don't know how some people can stand the touchbar. "But it can do so much!" Isn't the point of touch typing to never look at the keyboard? It never made sense to me.
The 16" Macbook pro I bought in 2019 has been a source of constant irritation to me - unexpected fan thrashing, overheating, the usual stuff - and the performance and low cost of the new M1-based MacBooks has done nothing to improve my mood.
I don't blame you. That "pinnacle" of hardware design is an Apple poop-bomb.
I have one with 32GB that was provided by my employer. It is bad. I hate using it. The keyboard on it is bad, the performance is bad, and the glitchiness is deeply frustrating.
I loved my 2015 Macbook Pro 15" that it replaced and wondered why I thought it would be any better.
Same situation with mine. Even had to have the battery replaced after showing errors, after a whole ordeal to have it covered under warranty. I suspect this was related to the constant overheating.
I have one of these for work (employer-provided) and it is the worst machine I have ever used. The touchbar is useless. It's heavy and bulky as hell. Just watching a Youtube video or opening a page with some gifs causes the fan to spin up and sound like a jet engine. The dual fan situation was supposed to improve cooling, but it only made it LOUDER.
Incredibly embarrassing to be in a quiet meeting room and accidentally open a slide deck with a gif for 2 minutes and have the machine ramp up its fans to maximum speed. Why?? Meanwhile on my M1 Air I can have the same content open + some Twitch stream + 3D map view open with no fan, no sound at all, and it runs great.
In addition they made the battery smaller despite the CPU not really getting any more efficient so it got less battery life unless literally all you were doing was watching iTunes movies.
I'm grateful for the 'no ports' move. It really helped jump start moving everything on to USB-C. Yes, the implementation details are still being worked out. particularly how the mass manufacturers can cut cost while still the most wanted subset of supported features.
> Yes, the implementation details are still being worked out
We're about 7 years into USB-C and I still had to do a ton of searching to find a dongle that does HDMI at 60 Hz, USB-A and charging (how crazy to want all that, right?!). I also had to buy a shady (AFAIK it violates the spec) extension cable to build a dock setup ("real" docks are in the hundreds of Euros). It cost me about 40€ to get back features I used to get for free and has reliability issues.
USB-C is a blessing for charging, but I'm a bit disappointed by the ecosystem for the rest.
Oh my, the 2018 one I have is a terrible piece of junk, notably the USB subsystem (overheats on one side, prone to interference, regularly resets which kills and connects to some device, may it be mouse, keyboard, or external display) and although I liked the touch of the butterfly keyboard, the arrow keys still trip me up (and of course the reliability)
> "Touch Bar"
The default touch bar UI is terrible, except for a few special cases (e.g Logic Pro / GarageBand sliders/knobs). I did see and try some hacks to customise it but they were quite brittle so I dropped off that train, but it kind of proved to me that there was something to it that could have been really great were it fully programmable for real, and that the actual execution was extremely subpar.
> "no ports"
If by "no ports" you mean USB-C only, I am really enjoying the 4x C port machines, and would rather not go back to mixed ports unless forced to. USB-A/B sockets just need to die.
> except for a few special cases (e.g Logic Pro / GarageBand sliders/knobs).
yeah that .. I enjoy it for quickly setting/sliding brightness and volume. And you can add a screenshot button to it which does not break focus so it allows me to screenshot things the keyboard cmd+shift+3/4 UI can't (ie context menus)
Sheesh, did you skip the MBP 2015? That's the best one they ever made, even to this day. I've been using MBP 2015 since then and just recently "upgraded" to M1. The MBP 2015 is still a better machine, better screen and keyboard.
I can type waayy faster on the 2015 with less errors and the screen is better on the eye strain. The whites on the M1 are BRIGHT. I don't need a flash light shining at my face. Turning down the "brightness" doesn't address the problem. That just makes the whole screen darker or but the whites are still as bright. I'm still learning the laptop, maybe there is a contrast setting.
Oh, and the trackpad on the 2015 doesn't feel like sandpaper. On the M1, the tip of my finger is numb most of the day.
Anyway, for such a fanboi and you skipped the best MBP. Bummer for you. I can't imagine going from 2015 to 2016 and being satisfied with that. I'd have returned it the same day.
I use that. Been toying with night mode, color filters, and even flux. It's still too extreme, though it helps with the whites the other colors look atrocious.
I have just about identical settings on both models and comparing the two laptops side-by-side, the 2015 looks much better. I still have "vivid" colors but the whites are more grey.
Must be a screen thing, some new IPS technology. I don't know. It's terrible.
I'm not really that picky about era of MBP, honestly I'd be happy with any of them save for the era with the bad keyboards. But the 2015 vintage was certainly a good one.
I have a late-2015 rMBP as my daily driver. I'm only now starting to run up against its limitations. USB-C, better 4K support, form factor, battery life, overall speed are things I'm looking forward to when I finally upgrade.
I was hitting memory limits and the disk was starting to fill up. I could have worked around the issues but the M1 marketing got me excited and they fixed the blatant faults introduced in the previous generation. If I were to do it again, I'd hold off another two generations, maybe get M3 or M4. The 2015 is that good.
I swapped the battery on my 2015 for like $150 at local computer repair shop. I was starting to hit memory limits but could have held off by using bare-metal dev box for heavy loads.
Hmm I did exactly the same thing. Apple refreshed my whole laptop after a keyboard break, and I have the Surface to my wife. I think we are both going to get these M2 MBAs next.
I am not generally an Apple user, but I had a 2012 MacBook pro for work for a few years, and it seemed pretty nice. I can't remember any complaints. That's while I was working at Google, though, so all I used it for was a web browser and SSH terminal.
Butterfly keyboard era. I have one as a work machine that sits around until I need VPN access. The keyboard is miserable, and the fans spin up when I open Slack. In contrast, my 14" M1 Pro is the best laptop I've ever used. Fans are inaudible, incredible performance, incredible keyboard/trackpad, battery is not a worry.
Honestly - Pretty much every laptop Apple released from 2018 to 2021 was a complete turd.
I have the 16 inch 2019 model (issued by work, I don't buy apple products) and it's... just not a good machine.
It gets amazingly hot, the fans run ALL the time, the usb-c ports are flakey at best (frequently stop working after a suspend/resume cycle, or if you unplug while the machine is closed).
It's got a shitty touch bar instead of function keys (although at least it reverted to a real esc-key, the touchbar only esc was literally a joke).
It has frequent rendering glitches and artifacts.
The battery life is bad (basically a given for how much power this thing is dumping right into my lap as heat).
----
Before the M line, I was about to go have a real fight with our IT department to get me issued literally anything other than another Mac. The last couple of models they've put out in the intel line are just genuinely bad machines, across both the pro and air lines.
I spent months complaining to them about this laptop. I had an Air for 5 years(!) before this and it was a wonderful machine. For 2k I'd expected a decent machine - but I hate everything about it. Obviously Apple didn't care in the slightest.
M2 is not a single core CPU, albeit it does have stellar single threaded performance. As for having the worst Mac, it's quite probable they were nerfing their last x86 models on purpose to make the jump to Apple Silicon even more impressive. Remember the models that had inadequate thermals? Now magsafe is making a comeback?
Sure, that's why I mentioned it having stellar single threaded performance -- I figure out what they probably meant, but it's not what is written. And I've been seeing a lot of misinformation lately about many things (in general, and in tech in particular), and people buying that without questioning , which is why I jumped to "correct" this detail.
The point about nerfing their last x86 models stands on its own though.
When you multiply that out it becomes "combination of (single core CPU performance) and (graphics performance)", which seems clear enough and aligns well with your point. It's possible to read it as "combination of (single core CPU) and (graphics performance)", but since the first one isn't much of a benefit (other than possibly power), I think the other is the more natural reading.
I find it very hard to believe that Apple deliberately sabotaged a multi-billion dollar product line for ~5 years in order to (possibly?) boost sales when their incredibly risky and expensive investment into their own silicon came to market.
People have been shitting on MacBooks since they removed MagSafe and brought in the butterfly keyboard in 2016. The i9 Pros with massive thermal issues came out in 2018. That's a lot of money to lose due to everyone and their mother complaining about the decline in quality and poor value for money of your product.
I wouldn't ascribe to malice what can be more easily be ascribed to incompetence - Apple made questionable regarding the design of the MacBooks, and took the complaints to heart in time for release with their much improved chips.
> I wouldn't ascribe to malice what can be more easily be ascribed to incompetence
While I usually agree with the sentiment, it's hard to believe that one of the most successful companies in the world can be subject to such levels of incompetence on one of their flagship products.
The rust belt is littered with the remains of what were at one time or another some of the most successful companies in the US or the world.
Corporations are ran by fallible people and are perfectly capable of running themselves into the ground. I'd argue it's nearly their natural trajectory to become bloated and inefficient over time. General Motors was largest and most successful auto manufacturer in the world right up until it crashed and burned in 2008 and had to be bailed out by the federal government.
I agree with your overall point, but GM was already widely seen as a has-been for years, maybe even decades, before 2008. They still had a lot of sales volume but apart from their trucks and a few SUVs, most of their products had been well behind those of their competitors in terms of both design and quality. So I don’t think they were really comparable to Apple at that point.
Apple took tons of questionable decisions and pissed off a lot of customers (me included) but they're redeeming themselves by bringing ARM to the laptop world (which was long overdue).
Personally I'll run my current Mac to the ground and then I'll just have a (non Mac, hopefully ARM) desktop PC.
Given the turnaround that happened when Ives left, I can definitely ascribe a lot of the problems to his push of form over function. Steve Jobs could set him straight in a way that Tim Cook apparently could not.
The point isn't even lost revenue. That Apple can swallow. That's not going to sink them. But they had sufficiently many really _bad_ generations (like 4 or so) that people _had to_ start thinking about how to move out of the Mac-universe. And that requires significant amounts of investment that you cannot easily recover. And that means that once Apple comes up with a non-sucking Mac, it's by no means clear that they get _back_ that business.
If they did that intentionally, then they took a very risky bet that paid off. But I really don't think anyone would make that kind of bet.
It was one generation, the 'touchbar' machines, not four. The third generation Macbook Pro is widely considered one of the best computers Apple ever built.
I'm typing on one now. It's almost ten years old. Original battery, even (though it really should have gotten a new battery about 2-3 years ago.)
So... the last 3-4 Apple events have had minute long segments with Johny Srouji presenting the Apple Silicon chips. He is Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies.
There is an interview with him in the Wall Street Journal here:
Apple is virtually the only consumer computer company that has had positive YoY computer growth every year in the past 20 years. Apple is selling way more iPhones, but the Mac has been gradually and steadily gaining growth.
Their Mac business is still a Fortune 500 company in terms of revenue by itself. Besides Halo effect, they still make a ton of money off Macs, and now that their chips cross pollinate with the iOS devices, it makes no sense to kill it off.
Not to mention, the Mac platform is effectively the SDK for the iOS/iPadOS platform. And it's a thing which pretty much every single person who works at Apple uses on a daily basis. The Mac is not — I assure you — going anywhere.
Yup. If for some reason Apple didn't make computers, don't think I'd own an iPhone -- the whole ecosystem fitting together is a major part of the appeal for me.
I don't disagree at all. But the context of the comment I was responding to was specifically about whether this would be enough to justify a high conviction bet on AAPL stock.
Even if this model sells like hotcakes (which I'm sure it will), and even if that isn't priced in (which I'm less sure of), don't really see that having a large enough impact on overall earnings to move the needle on the stock. The reality is that small differences in the next Fed announcement probably will move AAPL to a much larger degree than this product.
As others have said, it's about 20% of phone revenue but you need a mac to build an iOS app. THey're also selling a whole ecosystem that needs to be cohesive and technically strong. For a while the mac part of the ecosystem wasn't living up to the quality of the phones, IMHO.
I've brought this up before, and someone responded that they'll move iOS app building and compilation into a web service, and they will no longer need to sell general-purpose computers, and the idea haunts me.
That feels like it cuts against the core of the f what Apple is, but it’s possible if Cook is succeeded by someone with no connection to old leadership.
Even if that's their plan, it will be at least another decade before that service is viable to be a hard requirement, completely replacing local builds.
It's outsourcing a key part of the Apple ecosystem to Google (Chrome), which is why Apple will never do it. Big-tech companies go to extremely great lengths to own every part of the pathway from consumer to developer to hardware. Google first developed a browser, then an OS, then a hardware division just so Microsoft couldn't sit between Search and a microchip. Similarly, Apple has worked extremely hard to develop an App Store, IDE (XCode), and developer machine (Mac) so that neither Google nor Microsoft can come between them and the developer.
Facebook is currently paying the price of not owning their distribution infrastructure - they've been hurt extremely badly by recent privacy changes that Apple and Google have put out, while Apple and Google themselves have been relatively isolated from them.
I don't think Google factors into this plan anywhere. The endpoint is iOS devices able to build iOS apps with full fidelity using Xcode for iPad, not a web based IDE. Total control for Apple.
I would be long AAPL if they didn't have the majority of their production in China. That now poses a significant risk and Apple execs must be sweating bullets right now scrambling to onshore.
Honestly the keyboard prevented me from purchasing a MacBook from 2014 until 2020. I still despise the 2020 keyboard but I’ll reluctantly use it to type a password and then plug in a USB keyboard.
True. In my case I didn't need a laptop for 2015/2016, but I'm typically an "every 2 years" kind of person. When 2016 rolled out I knew I was going to be taking care of that 2013 laptop for a long while.
How in the world do you invent (or at least properly commercialize on a mass scale) a feature like MagSafe and then remove it from your laptops?
Jonny Ive made a lot good decisions in the days when he worked for Jobs, but my theory is that Jobs kept him from being a complete idiot. Tim Cook lost control of him and it went downhill massively after that.
The lure of only having two ports, both of which are identical, and can be used for absolutely everything, is powerful. It’s pretty cool to take the laptop home and plug in one single cable to hook it up to my desk, though it’s really only a few seconds less than separate power, usb, and audio cables once you figure out how to keep them from getting lost under the desk.
Amelio did do three good things:
* replaced Spindler
* failed to buy BeOS
* bought NeXT
Spindler's Apple is responsible for the Performa sub-brand (although Amelio didn't kill it).
> After releasing a total of sixty-four different models [in five years], Apple retired the Performa brand in early 1997, shortly after release of the Power Macintosh 5500, 6500, 8600 and 9600, as well as the return of Steve Jobs to the company.
Yeah, for sure. I'm just grumbling about these kids that don't know how good they have it. Even with unreliable keyboards and Intel failing to deliver, the period leading up to the M1 wasn't even close to "the worst the Mac has ever been". I had to walk to school barefoot!
As one of them, I agree. It's easy to jump to the first thing you notice (something superficially wrong to point out), I often do this. And it's hard to think beyond that and engage with the ideas instead.
But then again, that's why we try to write elegantly so readers don't stumble on the words and instead think about the meaning behind them.
Correcting someone's language is always ok as long as it's done respectfully, which it was. I'm sure people that speak English as a second language really appreciate it, otherwise if nobody tells 'em they're using something incorrectly then they're never get to learn!
Yup - I owe my above-average native fluency to my mother's incessant correcting, and my English proficiency to countless kind strangers on the internet.
> Do you think there is anyone here who didn't understand exactly what they meant?
"Aoccrdrinig to rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be ttaol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
In my grad school AI class I turned in a paper that I ran through a script (that I wrote) that jumbled the letters like this. The topic was related to the power of the human brain. The professor didn’t catch the double meaning and made me resubmit it normally.
> This thing is going to sell like hotcakes. The combination of single core CPU and graphics performance, device thinness, battery life in this laptop is unmatched.
Well, except for the small problem that the M1 air exists and is still on sale. Same single core CPU performance and near enough multicore and GPU performance. And it's cheaper by a not insignificant amount.
Which is pretty much why Linus Tech Tips wasn't a fan. If you want an Air, get the M1 version and save a buck. If you want performance, kinda hard to argue with the huge upgrades you get from the not that much more expensive 14" Pro.
The LTT review I was referring to was by Anthony, not Linus. I don't recall Linus ever saying the M1 was "disappointing performance" anyway, nor how they wouldn't be considered a credible review? Just because a reviewer doesn't give the review you want doesn't mean it's not credible.
Not sure about plugging in two chargers at once, but you can definitely use either MagSafe or USB-C to charge. I do it frequently with my MBP. The MagSafe charges faster, but that may be more down to the power brick than the interface, I don’t know.
mag safe is how to get the 67w, usb c will be slower but possible. This i researched too because wanted a USB-C Exclusive EDC and it looks like thats possible albeit slightly slower charging which is fine if you don't rely on 100% battery dumps then full fast charges to operate.
Wonder how long these M chips were in R&D and meanwhile they were just watching everyone on the internet complain how crappy mac laptops were but they knew this was coming
When Linus Tech tips did a review and tear down of the last Intel MacBook Air the design had no heat pipe and was just passively cooled. The first MacBook Air with the M1 design was equivalent but with an updated motherboard that had an M1.
The A12Z in the DTK is derived from the A12 which came out in 2018 so it probably was earlier than that.
The M series is a continuation of the A series development that's been going since 2008 when they bought PA Semi, maybe earlier. The M1 could have been branded the A14X but for whatever reason they chose not to, probably to make better marketing buzz. I would guess they've been booting macOS on ARM in the lab since the A7 and after that just a long grind to get to a good enough user experience with sufficient app compatibility to switch. You can see stuff like TSO in the CPU showed up in earlier chips at least a couple years before the M1 launched.
Probably a decade or so. I imagine it was always a possibility, with steps being taken towards it over time, even if it wasn't a well defined goal yet. Requirement of uploading App Store apps as LLVM IR instead of machine code comes to mind.
>watching everyone on the internet complain
What's especially amusing in hindsight are the (then justified) complaints about thermal throttling in the last Intel Macbooks. They knew damn well those chassis would not be good enough for Intel CPUs, but they didn't care, it was designed from ground up for Apple silicon.
My M1 Air is a nearly perfect machine, but I continuously find myself looking at the yellow “memory pressure” graph and swap disk writes.
I wish Apple never offered 8gb version, as I was surprised to find that MacOS wants to use more RAM than a Windows machine with the same amount of RAM.
If they gave us a way to actually disable the macOS features, 8GB would be very usable. But everything from regular wifi/bt scanning to photo tagging to adding all interactions to a giant Siri database so that the OS can suggest what it thinks you’re most likely to open at any given moment. These all need RAM and other resources even if you don’t have any open applications.
There aren't third-party ways to shut some of that stuff off? When I used OSX I remember a great app called OnyX [1] that could customize deeper, system-level stuff.
I exchanged my 8gb air for 16gb and it's perfect. Really cannot get it bogged down. Definitely now that most things are Apple Silicon compiled; before that it was a bit more problematic.
I would say, is this Ive's fault or Intel's? What the silicon team is doing is more or less what Ive needed to fulfill his visions.
Honestly, there's a lot of PC nerd pushback against Ive, but I think the industry as a whole needs someone like his asking the (to the lay person) obvious questions - i.e. why can't I have this amount of computing power in a human-friendly form factor, vs. the giant, imposing, and ugly monolithic towers of yore?
My M1 MacBook Air is insanely fast and the battery life is easily the best I've ever experienced. If the M2 is anything like the M1 or better, I agree, these things are going to make Apple a nice chunk of change.
I suspect the best reason for upgrading is access to 24GB of RAM and maybe the hardware video encoders if that's your thing. Otherwise, M2 is a very solid iteration, but probably not worth dropping that much money if you already own an M1 system.
I have no idea why VMware is talking about EL3 access, these chips do not have EL3. They do have nested virtualization but it's not available in the system frameworks yet.
For me the main reason to upgrade would be Magsafe. I'm constantly afraid of someone stumbling on the cable and destroying the USB-C port.
I couldn't find any info on this, is this the same Magsafe as the 2015 devices, i.e. can I use existing old chargers? If so then I might even consider upgrading just due to this (I also have a 12/24V Magsafe charger).
24 GB RAM would be nice compared to 16 GB currently, but it's not something I'd really need.
I wager that 90% of PC buyers don't really look at specs at all and just always buy the latest Mac regardless.
And that 90% of that 90% won't really benefit much from the advanced specs. I had an 11" Chromebook with a Celeron processor for 6 years. Cost less than $200 and weighed almost nothing. If I wasn't coding or gaming, it was the best PC I ever owned.
> It’s funny how Apple came back from the worst the Mac has ever been to the best in a span of few years.
The terrible state of the Mac over the last nine years hardly compares to the dismal state that Apple was in during the 90s. The product line was a mess and they had multiple machines that had common failures (PowerBook 5300c[0] comes to mind as my first laptop). It was so bad that PowerComputing was making better Macs (clones) than Apple.
They've made two incredible comebacks.
[0] > Two early production PowerBook 5300s caught fire, one at an Apple employee's house and another at the factory; it turned out that the Sony-manufactured lithium ion batteries had overheated while recharging. Apple recalled the 5300s sold (around a hundred machines) and replaced the batteries on these and all subsequent 5300s with nickel metal hydride batteries that provided only about 70% the endurance. At the time, the media viewed the problems with the PowerBook 5300 series as yet another example of Apple's decline.
> Johnny Ive doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does
That's not how Apple works. If they still work remotely like they did back under Jobs the hardware teams are not the guys calling the shots for future product cycles.
> If they still work remotely like they did back under Jobs the hardware teams are not the guys calling the shots for future product cycles.
There have been a lot of articles about how it doesn't work remotely like it did under Jobs[1]. Tim Cook has been CEO for 11+ years and isn't at all like Jobs.
I'm sure it's fast coming from previous intel Macs but really the main thing holding me back is seeing how many hurdles my fellow devs run into. There's always talk about something not running or being M1 incompatible.
Well, that and I'd be forced to use OSX.
So far the only real benefit I've seen seems to be for those who code on insanely long train commutes.
I solved it by renting x86 VPS and using docker remotely. It's not ideal, but it worked for me.
There's hope that docker virtualization for x86 images will be faster with new virtualization framework features. It probably will take some time to implement, but in a year or two I expect most issues with docker to be resolved.
Having a smaller volume and more power consuming chip than M1[0], I wonder if it will match M1 air performance and battery life on heavy tasks. The media engine will definitely provide smoother experience when working with sound and videos but I kind of suspect that on other tasks it will be about the same as M1, thus prolonging the Apple's software support for the original one.
Sure but the thinner design might have reduced the thermal envelope, thus increasing the possibility of throttling earlier than the M1 version. For context, my M1 throttles down about %15 at room temperature after about 10 minutes on very heavy load.
I'm curious about the benchmarks and stress tests. Would be very cool if it is actually significantly better than the M1 on everything.
Am I the only one around here that doesn't like MacBooks? The hardware is fine, yes, except the glossy screen but the software is horrible. Everything is a pain in the a*.
As a software engineer, the software is pleasant. I have a Unix OS for development tooling and the standard set of applications (browser, preview, file management, IDE tooling) just work. It seems far more likely that something works first time than my desktop that runs either Windows or Linux (Windows example: clock somehow ends up 1 hour out of sync every week or two, computer sometimes locks up leaving me no control over mouse, screen flickers whenever my VR headset comes out of sleep moode. Linux example: I now have to enter my password 3 times in order to fully get into the operating system). Mostly I'm disappointed with the hardware - my late-2018 model is extremely slow for what it is.
Pick an operating system—you can be confident that plenty of people on HN hate it. It’s true now, it was true on Slashdot twenty years ago, it was true on Usenet thirty years ago.
If you're coming from Windows or another OS it definitely takes time to get used to the "Apple way" of doing things. Also you need to expect that a lot of the applications you're used to being free in other OS cost $10-35+ each on Apple. Apps like SetApp are great for this and trying new applications out but that's a $10 monthly fee. It'd still take me awhile (a year+) to buy the apps I use at $10/mo so I just pay the monthly.
I still have to look at my (unlabeled) keyboard to figure out what the Apple Cmd Shift Up etc heiroglyphs are and it'll always be weird closing windows on the left instead of right side but beyond that after about 3 months of forcing myself to use OSX 5 years ago OSX is now by far my favorite OS. The continuity and interoperability between my other Apple devices is amazing. Yesterday I was working on my jeep and I just dragged a PDF of instructions over to my Ipad from my Macbook and immediately had it to look at downstairs. You can do that in other systems with pushbullet, dropbox, etc but it's just fluid and built in here.
I've always only owned a MBP through work, the M1 max w/64gb 14" is the first MBP I've ever bought for myself and it just hums. I hope it'll be "fast" for 5+ years for the price I paid.
I come from linux and I feel like I've been given a machine for computer illiterate people who are going to do some office work at Starbucks. Stereotypical, yes, but that's how I feel.
I need this basic software feature. Yeah? Too bad, the OS won't allow you to do that. Maybe you'll find a paid app that does it. I do pay for software but when you have to pay for basic stuff that should come out of the box, it's a no for me. To cover the basics you need to pay a lot of money.
Then there's the weird behaviour. Example. You have 2 Chrome windows on two different monitors. You're focusing one of them and on that same monitor witch to a fullscreen app and then go back. Now it'll raise and focus the Chrome window on the other monitor. In the worst case I just have to manually change the window, on the worst case, I'll use some shortcut on a windows that I'm not supposed to and break something. I wouldn't be the only one breaking/changing something in Jira because of this.
The file manager is a joke. Again, something fancy but useless if you need a bit of functionality. At least the OS has a good shell that you can use instead.
When I'm told to learn to use it "the Apple way" what I understand is, "shut up and get used to it, you have no saying in how your machine or you should work".
If I leave my current job it'll be because of the Macbook.
> When I'm told to learn to use it "the Apple way" what I understand is, "shut up and get used to it, you have no saying in how your machine or you should work".
Well yeah that is kind of the philosophy - a single simple way to do things. Cutting down on customisation makes the system more stable and I think allows them to innovate more quickly. Don't confuse it with lack of power - it's a fully certified UNIX unlike most Linux distributions.
They do have incredible support for accessibility, so they do accommodate people who genuinely need things to work differently, not just a preference.
What they're not keen on is adding knobs and bells and whistles for the sake of it, as it's clutter.
> Well yeah that is kind of the philosophy - a single simple way to do things.
Not being able to do something is very different from what you're saying. Not being able to do something, in fact, makes it more complicated because you need workarounds.
> Cutting down on customisation makes the system more stable and I think allows them to innovate more quickly
Nobody is talking about customization. Missing features does not equal a simple way to do things.
> Cutting down on customisation makes the system more stable and I think allows them to innovate more quickly.
How? How does that allow them to innovate more quickly? There has been no innovation in their UI for ages.
> Don't confuse it with lack of power - it's a fully certified UNIX unlike most Linux distributions.
Don't confuse lacking a POSIX certification with the lack of power. The certification is just a badge you pay money for. Nothing else. It can't even run Docker properly.
I've not really encountered not being able to do something I needed to do with my Mac before that I can recall.
You don't give many concrete examples of things you're unable to do, so I can't help you figure them out. The file manager is a joke? Well it lets you manage files not sure what else you need.
I'd done my whole career doing PhD-level systems research on my Macs - hasn't held me back from doing anything.
> Don't confuse lacking a POSIX certification with the lack of power.
Don't confuse POSIX for UNIX!
> It can't even run Docker properly.
What are you missing with Docker? I use Docker all the time. It's fine what's wrong?
Yeah I've literally got Docker desktop running in the background with multiple containers running seamlessly on my M1 max. I think he's just looking for a place to vent.
You're saying it like you're the only one running docker.
I use it daily too and it sucks. Containers needs rebooting a few times a day or the changes I make in the code won't work. Then there's the massive ram consumption. Emulated crap.
No you've got it the wrong way around - virtualisation is lightweight - it's got very good hardware support - emulation is CPU and memory hungry - it's done in software.
People talk about macOS as being a toy and say it's not a real UNIX like Linux - but it's actually one of very few real UNIX implementations, which only includes a couple of Linux distributions.
I hate Finder and use Forklift, but if you alt-click (or command/ctrl, I can't tell on my keyboard) the top where it says the file name you'll be shown a tree of the path you're in. It's not the full file path in a text window unfortunately.
There’s a toggle to enable a path bar in the View menu, along with an option to enable a status bar and a bunch of other things.
It pays to explore the menus of apps under macOS — it’s not like under GNOME or Windows where menubars are vestigial and paltry if they exist at all, Mac apps actually put a lot of useful things in them.
What are your issues with Finder specifically? I use Windows and Linux on a regular basis in addition to macOS and after a few basics (like enabling the path bar and setting the search field to search the current directory), I don’t find it any worse than Windows Explorer, and in fact preferable to something like Nautilus.
Meh I don't think I've ever really needed to rely on finder, when I do most of my file manipulation I just drop down to a bash shell.
"To cover the basic" --> I think this is a situation where our personal preferences are being conflated with the basics because I've certainly never really had to pay out any significant amount of money to be able to do all the basic things I need from an OS.
I'm a full-time software engineer and the quality control that Apple puts into their new MacBook M1 has easily made it my best and most productive system (before being on Debian, and before that on a windows 10 machine).
Unlike a lot of people, I don't really give a crap about spending tons of time "accessorizing" my OS. To me it's merely a means to launch the applications and tools in which I can get work done (photoshop, blender, Clion, bitwig, vs code, etc).
What kind of functionality do you want from your file manager?
I use Linux most of the time, but the file manager on Linux is so bad that I sometimes manage my files from a Mac using SMB or NFS. I've tried a couple different file managers on Linux, and have settled with the default GNOME file manager (formerly Nautilus), but it lags far behind the file managers on both Mac and Windows in terms of both features and basic usability.
At least Mac and Windows file managers are reasonably easy to navigate by keyboard. If you have a directory open and want to select a file, you can just start typing the name. Easy, intuitive, and fast. This feature used to work in GNOME, but not any more. It's been abandoned. The Mac also has the column view, and I don't understand why other operating systems haven't adopted it.
The GNOME file manager also maintains its own "shadow" set of mount points through GNOME's ill-conceived VFS mechanism. So if you want to mount a file share, you can see it in the browser, but you can't look at the files in a terminal window. It's weird and surprising.
I want it, but I'm not getting it until all the hardware works under Linux.
MacOS is great, but someday they will stop updating MacOS for this. I see it as a device with incredible longevity because of the fanless thermals and how it sips energy. I could see myself using it 10 years later. I want to run MacOS or Fedora Silverblue, with Silverblue being my true love. Immutable OS images <3
HAH, downvoted in seconds. Would not be surprised if there are Apple employees brigading this.
I don't think you're downvoted because of fanboys.
I think you're downvoted because:
1. Linux is coming to Apple Silicon sooner or later. You can buy now, enjoy macOS, and then install Linux later.
2. It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years. Even if Apple stops supporting it, you can still use it. In addition, Macs have insane resale value. So you can sell it in 5 years, and then buy a new one. This is a more reasonable approach than yours.
3. Apple tends to support their laptops for a long time. Usually 7-8 years. And given that this is their own chip and it's extremely powerful, I can see it being supported for 8 years at least.
1) We are now 2 generations in without full Linux support for the hardware.
2) I used my Powerbook G4 for 12 years; this is mostly because I was a kid with no money. When I got something else, my sister used it for another 3 years. With thermals as they are in this device, instead of selling it after 4-5 years I'd rather keep it for one-off projects as a server like a Mac Mini. I know laptops aren't designed for server work, but I love that it's a server with a builtin terminal. Also a device I'd use for hiking, because I could charge it from backpack solar.
3) The worst experience I've had was telling my dad MacOS Catalina couldn't be installed on his $3.5k iMac.
As you said in your other comment, M3 will be 3nm TSMC? Maybe Linux will look good on Apple Silicon then.
This is something I'd be comfortable with maintaining, but I couldn't leave with my dad. (I work on the road for months, and it's unpredictable when I come back. Longest I was out was 2 years..)
You have pretty good support except for the GPU at this point (admittedly I'm waiting for this until I install it on my machine). They've had to write all the drivers from scratch, so it was bound to take a while. But on the plus side the hardware interfaces seem to be stable across generations. M2 parity with M1 was implemented in 48 hours! So I'm pretty confident it will mostly be case of linux support continuously improving rather than resetting with each new generation.
The GPU is important.. afaik the keyboard and trackpad aren't working yet in Asahi Linux.
I don't expect Apple to support the Linux community. It feels like this is trending in one direction. It felt like things stopped being "favorable" to us when they stopped supporting OpenGL and made no effort with Vulkan. The touchbar and some wifi chipsets were poorly supported for years before M1 debuted.
What has been implemented in Asahi is impressive, but it's not ready to be a daily driver. I hope this becomes my mobile device of choice someday. I'd use MacOS for work-work, and I would choose Linux every time for fun-work. So tired of everything having telemetry and vendor lock-in and basic pieces of software moving to subscription models.
Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid.
> Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid.
You could triple boot Windows, MacOS and Linux with Intel Macs. A Mac was a great choice because you could develop for and support all 3 of those platforms (plus Android and iOS). Aside from having bad GPUs, expensive storage, and little modularity, they were great machines for development.
Now, with no Linux or Windows support, not so much (unless you don't need to use anything but MacOS.) Unfortunately, if you need to support MacOS or iOS, you don't have much of a choice. Just really unfortunate that what used to be possible with one machine may soon require two. So long as Apple supports any Intel Mac, many Macs will be able to get OS updates thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. I'm not sure when Apple will drop Intel Macs though. The last Mac to use an Intel processor released in 2020, so there will hopefully still be quite a few years left of support for Intel Macs for the time being.
Windows and linux both work in VMs on Apple Silicon macs. I suspect the support for bare metal will come in time (definitely for linux, windows I guess we'll have to see, but I wouldn't be too surprised).
If you're wanting to use your laptop for development work, you're going to pick the best job for the task. Moving to OSX would not only slow things down due to how slow non-native Docker is (no it is not negligible, yes I have an M1 Mac and I have tested it in a side-by-side comparison), but you have much less control over your environment compared to Linux.
The vast majority of the people I've worked with choose to use Linux laptops over Macs, and I don't think CPU efficiency is something that's going to get them to change. While working from home, I can think of zero scenarios where I need more than 8 hours of battery life, which my x86 Intel laptop already exceeds.
I think we're getting faster at iterating on bringing up dev environments.
Silverblue is my favorite, but it's becoming common for me to develop everything within a docker image. As quickly as we're committing to a project, we're updating the env and rebuilding that image at the same time? I'm new to this.
I have a friend who's really big into k8s and ansible. Right now it feels like I'm toying around in 1 pod. He can bring up a set of services around the thing he's developing in a few minutes. I want his power. :x
It's called docker-compose, and it's really simple compared to even a 1 pod k8s. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by bringing up a set of services.
Yeah seconding the recommendation for docker-compose, it's a great way to start up multiple services and once you know the syntax, pretty straightforward to use in my limited experience. You can essentially declaratively define which other Docker containers you want to start up (in which order), which volumes they can use, and which ports should be exposed.
All of my work goes into (local/alpha/beta) production linux box that's why the mac is technically just a display.
And when I say local, I refer to a linux server, the mac connects to it. the macOS terminal does a nice work doing that, don't think there would be any difference in that regard if the laptop was running linux.
The new mac checks all of the hardware boxes that I wanted. Even occasional gaming if I felt like it.
> 2. It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years. Even if Apple stops supporting it, you can still use it. In addition, Macs have insane resale value. So you can sell it in 5 years, and then buy a new one. This is a more reasonable approach than yours.
Why is that? I still use my 2015 15" MacBook Pro which released 7 years ago, and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. This isn't the 70s, 80s, 90s or early 2000s: the improvements in performance from one year to the next are far more modest and the utility of further improvements are far less impactful than they once were. My 2015 MBP is still as capable of browsing the web, writing code, and video editing as it was back in 2016 when I got it. It's not in any way slow doing any of those tasks.
The performance of an M2 MacBook would undoubtedly be much better, but am I actually going to be able to browse the web faster or write code any faster? Probably not.
A new 16-inch MacBook Pro with 1TB storage emits approximately 620kg of CO2e in its manufacturing process (The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee, 2020 second edition, page 140). Why should someone emit more than half a ton of CO2e for a new laptop unless they really need it?
If you have a Mac that no longer gets OS updates by Apple, as long as it was released within the past decade you should be able to use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to update it to macOS Monterey (and later Ventura when it releases) without much issue. If it's older than that, you might run into some issues, but generally speaking everything from late 2008 and beyond is supported, with everything from late 2012 and beyond being fully supported.
> The performance of an M2 MacBook would undoubtedly be much better, but am I actually going to be able to browse the web faster or write code any faster?
I split my coding time between a 2017 retina MacBook and a 2018 Mac Mini. Code compiles very much faster on the Mini -> faster iterations. So yes, you may literally code faster on a faster computer.
I switched to surface book when mac jumped the shark in '16.
Went through a few generations of that, it was "ok".
Bought the cheapest 13" M1 I could because I had to debug some stuff on the iPhone, I was pretty angry about it.
That day I switched over to it as my daily driver.
The performance absolutely blew my mind.
Stuff I'd wait for one to two minutes to build on the SB would build in a few seconds on the M1.
Debugging + video call + building went from crushing my laptop to being not really noticable.
I was using it heavily for two days and realized I forgot to plug it in. Was only down to 50% battery.
I'm very far from being an apple fan boy, but this little laptop has completely blown my mind. Simply the best hardware I've ever owned, and makes me easily 2x as productive.
And that's all with the cheapest 8 gig of memory model.
I just checked several online auction sites and my 10 year old 2012 quad core Mac Mini can be sold for about $300 while my 5 year old 2017 retina MacBook can be sold for around $500.
That is insane.
* values converted to USD. Prices may differ in countries actually using USD.
> It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years.
Why ever not? I have 14 year old laptops that run fully up to date Linux just fine. Why can unpaid volunteers do better than one of the most profitable companies on earth?
> So you can sell it in 5 years
That just makes the looming end of support someone else's problem, it doesn't actually solve anything.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I'm a current Linux Desktop (plasma) user, who is really tempted by this machine, given my 6 year old thinkpad is showing it's age. I'm not sure I can get used to MacOS's window management, even though the rest of the OS looks great. I'm definitely not a power user on linux (mostly sticking to defaults), but things like not being able to adjust the green button to maximize a window? Ugh.
I use rectangle (app) for snapping windows around. I think CMD F will full screen just about every app, if not it’s another keyboard shortcut. You can also assign your own shortcuts in the keyboard preferences.
There are a number of utilities to improve window management on MacOS. I find rectangle[0] works reliably, without trying to do too much. Easy keyboard shortcuts to maximize, snap to 50% left/right, or quadrants.
Very excited about the new Air. The size (& weight!) to performance and battery life is unmatched as far as I can tell. It's literally the laptop I dreamed they would make after I stopped daily-driving my 2012 retina pro in favour of a desktop a few years ago. It's going to be great for traveling.
No samples have made it to reviewers hands, so no. But perhaps it will mimic the M2 Macbook Pro 13", whose SSD performance scaled with size (meh at 256GB, blazing when bigger).
Apple has discontinued the 128 GB NAND chip, so it's very unlikely. The first increase in storage (from 256 GB to 512 GB) also costs twice as much as subsequent increases.
If the M2 Air supported two displays, I’d have no reason whatsoever to buy the expensive MacBook Pro. The M1/M2 Air is already so ridiculously overpowered for my needs. Which is probably why the Air doesn’t support two displays. Sigh.
Genuinely curious: can I hook up the Air with a single ultra-wide monitor that's exactly as large as two regular monitors side by side, or is the screen resolution limited, too? I'm thinking of something like [1], though it will probably make more sense to get a MacBook Pro instead at that kind of price.
> Which is probably why the Air doesn’t support two displays
I recall reading at least with the M1 that it's actually a physical hardware limitation with the architecture inherited from the fact that the base M1 is pretty close to the A15 which never needed to pump out to more displays.
The irony being that they then made the M1 Pro and M1 Max/Ultra that support more displays. In fact, I would be okay with it running dual displays like the mac mini where the internal display is disabled when two externals are connected. The M2, made after the M1 Pro still does not support multiple displays. It's an odd omission.
It is a fair question. I've been doing this, with a maxed out 2018 mac mini through the blackmagic eGPU to the XDR Pro display as my main workstation.
I have the 2018 macbook air as my portable. It's abysmal, but I can use it to work on the couch if I have to.
I am going to try the M2 air to replace both the laptop, the mini and the eGPU. Quite a lot of hardware traded out for one single solution.
I don't like keeping multiple machines up to date and spending time doing the same updates or having to go back to one to push some branch I forgot about.
That said, I'm counting on the MBA M2 to deliver graphics to the XDR on par with the blackmagic and if it can't I may return it, get a cheaper M1 MBA and either wait out the M2 mini or pick up a studio.
I do have a second 4k monitor that I'd prefer to be able to drive--I can with the Intel box and eGPU. But I don't really use it and with the XDR it isn't really necessary.
I have a hub that lets me use two external monitors. The big downside is that one of them is limited to 30Hz and moving my mouse around it feels wrong compared to the 60Hz main display.
The notched area of the screen isn’t used in full screen mode. The remaining non-notched area of the screen is a standard size and ratio.
The notch is a total non-issue during normal use because it only exists in the menu bar area. It basically looks like another item occupying your menu bar. If you go full screen you still have a notch-free experience.
They probably show it that way in promotional materials because people wrongly assume that it’s a bigger deal than it actually is. Virtually nobody actually cares about it when they start using the laptop.
Does anyone know how well this works with the M2 Air specifically? My understanding with the M1 Pros was that the notch working seamlessly was dependent on Mini-LED.
Without the ability to produce perfect black around the notch, is the notch not going to be an eyesore even in fullscreen mode? Or is the "Liquid Retina" display close enough that it's basically a non-issue?
How does the notch deal with programs with enough menus to hit that midpoint? Which includes the one I do pretty much all my paying work in. Or people who have enough stuff squatting in the right side of the menu bar to cross the midpoint from the other direction. Which is also me when I'm not hiding most of them with Bartender. So many things just want to plop an icon up there.
I guess I'll find out soon, because one of these M2 Airs will be replacing the 2016 Pro I've been using as soon as I scrape the funds together.
I'm guessing, since the OS handles those menu items and the OS knows about the notch, it'll just skip the notch and continue the menu items to the right.
Apps that have been updated to work with the notch will flow around it.
If you have an old app that hasn't been updated, you can enable the "Scale to fit below built-in camera" option on the executable and it will show the full menu bar under the notch, exactly like it worked before the notch existed.
Best way to think about the notch is that it's not subtracting from your 16:10 screen, it's just pushing the menu bar up into the area on either side of the camera. It's previously wasted space that now takes your menu bar so you get the full 16:10 screen for content.
Even weirder is that according to the rumor mill the notch is already on it's way out in the iPhone, to be replaced with a pill shaped cutout this year, and under-screen cameras in a few years.
However the cat (inflation) got the laptop, in Europe it's now 1500€ instead of the 1050€ previous gen with same specs. I think it's unjustifiable for a normal consumer.
Beyond just the storage constraints, there are performance concerns with the 256GB model [1]. At least with the 13" M2 MBP Apple has switched to using 256GB SSD NAND chips which means that anything less than 512GB has only a single channel of flash to read and write from. It's unclear if the new Air will have this same constraint but it's something to consider.
It's almost half the speed of the old base model. I think most consumers don't understand how much drive speed effects performance. The cpu is waiting around for the drive most of the time. So this feels like a major downgrade for the base model.
You’re taking about the entry-level consumer notebook model.
For entry-level consumers, they don’t need extra storage. So many kids are online-based nowadays. Younger people are routinely using iCloud/One Drive/Google Drive/Box/Dropbox and other services.
But sure, if you’re working with more and larger files, then you aren’t the target for the entry-level model with 256, and spend extra for more storage.
Better webcam? With every model they claim the webcam is better, but once I start Photo Booth I am thoroughly disappointed. In recent years webcam quality has even gone down -- the webcam in the M1 Macbook Air and the M1 Max Macbook Pro from 2020 and 2021 is worse than the webcam from the 2015 Macbook Pro!
I think the camera in my 14" M1 Pro is much, much better than the camera in my 2015 MPB. Also, people on the other end of Zoom etc commented on the improved picture quality.
Have you done side-by-side comparisons? I have compared the picture quality of 2015 MBP vs 2020 MBA vs 2021 MBP (16").
The 2020 MBA and 2021 MBP are pretty similar.
The new cameras have better low light performance and less noise due to pretty agressive smoothing. The consequence is that the picture lacks any detail whatsoever. The image from the 2015 MBP is sharper than the alleged 1080p image from the 2021 MBP.
With the smoothing my girlfriends face looks like she is wearing heavy makeup. My beard looks like it was painted on. In low light there are weird artefacts and glitches (especially in the area around my eyes, probably due to the ML algorithm).
Now maybe on a Zoom call this doesn't matter, if your face is just in a little matchbox-sized box on the screen. But on full screen Facetime calls the lack of detail and low resolution of the MBP webcam is very noticeable.
Pretty sure that Apple isn't manufacturing NAND chips. Now it might be hard to procure the 128GB chips, so Apple may be at the mercy of suppliers, or it might just be cheaper to buy a 256GB chip (and suffer slower perf).
Apple may not manufacture them, but they don't look to be off the shelf components either. So maybe I should be writing "Apple has stopped ordering the 128 GB chips and removed them from all current designs".
This has been coming for some time, the refreshed 14" and 16" Pro models already had their base capacity bumped to 512.
I disagree. The colorful consumer oriented mac ibook clamshell g3 was USD $1,599 when it came out in 1999. That's $2,800 in today's dollars and it was orders of magnitude less powerful than this Macbook Air. The value per dollar you are getting is simply staggering.
The base model Macbook Air in 2010 was $1299 which means that you get compute and product improvements following Moore's law at deflationary prices. Humans have a hard time understanding the value of power laws. What Apple has done has given us something nothing short of superpowers and we've gotten complacent and feeling entitled to these continuous improvements despite the unbelievable amount of human ingenuity required to make it all work out.
After growing up on a Mac SE and going off to college with a Centris 650, I went through a string of windows PCs until the 2013 MacBook Air brought me back into the fold.
I still use the 2013 MBA almost daily—mostly as an external keyboard and screen for my iPhone notes, but it really slowed down with Mojave, so I’m trying to decide whether to pick up a cheap replacement M1 model now, or wait for sales on the M2. I think I can hold out a little, but won’t quite make the 10 year mark.
BTW, the c. 1993 Mac Centris was able to boot up last year (at 28 years old!), and thanks to an Ethernet adapter I dumpster-dived from work in the early 2000s, I was even able to get online with it without any extra configuration. Netscape Navigator doesn’t do too well with modern websites (and probably made for a baffling entry in some server logs), but I could at least load the Dole/Kemp ‘96 site.
It's not just inflation, the Euro has been getting crushed as decades of negligence by the ECB show up. That's not stopping any time soon and the ECB looks like it will be in the position to either destroy the Euro or destroy the bond market.
He might be being hyperbolic, but the euro is definitely not doing too hot right now - it's gone from $1.18 to the euro a year ago to $1.02.
The Air in the UK is £1,249, up from £999 - a 25% increase.
The EU price is €1,500, up from €1,050 - a 43% increase.
At least some of that has to be explained by the euro dropping ~14% against the dollar. Take away 14% from the EU price and you get €1,290 - pretty close to the UK price.
You just listed a bunch of things which have not changed between the last model and this one, to brush off the new model being much more expensive.
The parsimonious explanation is that the Euro went from 120¢ to 98¢ in the intervening time. I have no opinion on why that happened, I will pretend I don't even know what the ECB is.
Compared to the M1 Macbook Air, the M2 Macbook Air has:
a £50 premium in the UK vs US.
A €200 Euro premium in Ireland (for example) vs US.
So, you are right. Apple raised prices. I suspect exchange rates. It is easier to account for unfavorable exchange rates in new products than in raising prices of existing products.
On Apple.co.uk M1 is listed at £999.00 and M2 at £1,249.00 (respectively € 1,168 and € 1,460, not far from the actual prices in Europe)
The same difference exists in European Apple stores (~+25%).
They simply kept lower prices in US in my opinion, but obviously comparing US prices with non-US prices for a US manufacturer it's not going to work in favor of the non-US market.
I'm pretty sure that's EUR/USD exchange rate, not inflation. I bought the first gen when it came out, base model, for $1199. The price today, for 2nd gen base model, is $1199.
MacBook Air M2 will most probably replace my current 2018 MacBook Pro. My only gripe with MacBook Air M1 was crappy RAM which they addressed (24GB). It's still less than what I have (32GB) I expect M2 will make up for that.
This is the real problem right here and why I was ready to upgrade day one. Not interested in the M2 Air now. I'm sure it's all very nice but the only thing missing from my Air that I really wanted was multiple display output.
You can have multiple display support with Display Link. It's not ideal because it consumes CPU, but it's working fine with my M1 MBA. If I had to do it again, I'd likely just purchase a real nice single monitor.
I maybe being dumb here - but why can you not plugin a USB-C dock that has dual HDMI output ? I get you cannot dual monitor direct from laptop > screens. I would always use a dock with single cable. e.g https://www.belkin.com/uk/docks-hubs/connect-pro-thunderbolt...
MY only gripe with the M1 and M2 Air the lack of support for more than a single external screen.
I feel like it's just a pure marketing play to only support more than one external screen on the 14" pro. They have Magsafe and two thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 ports, they could totally support 2 Apple studio displays, at least on the 24GB model.
I switched to a single ultra wide 38 from LG and it was a huge improvement over my dual monitor setup. I’m on M1 Air, and switched my work pc to the same.
The other reason I enjoy my ultrawide is that there are fewer cables to deal with and less hardware needed to mount the monitors. I bought a 34" UW a couple of years back. But I reckon my next upgrade I'm going to the superwides.
I've been really considering an ultra-wide and have heard extremely polarized opinions on it. Is there anything specific that you prefer over two widescreen monitors?
The lack of a center bar was a bigger deal than I expected. Being able to extend my SQL window to the full screen seeing all columns for example, beyond 'just nice'.
Same with code, not always but sometimes I need a wider view.
There are a lot of subtle gains that I'm probably forgetting about and really only one negative that I've run into - games don't play super nice on the ultra-wide, but that's not really what I use this machine for.
Oh another bonus I forgot - watching shows / movies on it is really nice. I have very rarely considered this but with an 18 month old, you find you have to squeeze in time here/there, we had to stop the new batman movie on HBO with 20 minutes left... I probably would not have ever watched the ending (it was pretty good!) if I didn't have that display, it was a nice way to spend 20 minutes during lunch and I've been watching movies/shows on it randomly during lunch since. It's pretty great for this use too.
There's a lot that goes into this and it's not Apples (heh) to Oranges.
a normal Intel machine has some kind of southbridge, this means a traditional CPU that has 16 PCIe lanes total (this is actually the standard for intel) can have more than just 16x lanes, usually a PCH can add another 20 with an internal PCI switch.
Great in theory, but it does mean you can be constrained in bandwidth since that switch is limited to 16x on the upstream, in fact usually there's only 4! upstream PCIe connections to the CPU and there's some natively attached items (like the USB controller and some lanes of a GPU).
Apple's M-series CPUs do not have any southbridge or PCI switch, you get the full bandwidth of the lanes; this is why Apple M1 can run all of its ports at native speed at the same time, (where most laptops can't).
It also means that when you dedicate PCIe lanes for graphics, they can't just take away bandwidth from inactive ports.
It's only when they increase the die area and add more lanes that they dedicate more lanes to attachable graphics.
It's not a soft limitation, it's a trade-off.
They're banking on the fact that casual consumers won't use more than 2 displays (1 internal, 1 external); and that casual consumers would prefer more ports.
As someone who upgraded from an Intel Mac to an M1 mac, the memory is a non-issue. Three years ago I would have laughed if you said I would be happy with "only" 8GB, but now I am.
I thought I'd be happy with 8GB based on benchmarks and sensationalistic videos (thanks, Max Tech), but I absolutely wasn't. Apple silicon Macs or maybe Macs in general handle high memory pressure (graph in the red) terribly. The system will get extremely slow and laggy, develop audio issues and eventually lock up.
I ran into that all the time on the 8GB model (admittedly with multiple RAM-intensive apps and lots of tabs open), while it now happens very rarely on my 16GB model.
Is that high memory pressure slowness issue the same when there is lots of HD space left? Apple devices have had issues with “low” amounts of HD space for a long time, and I’m curious if the M* continue the trend.
Also: this makes a red flag of the recent shift to half-speed drive performance
> MY only gripe with the M1 and M2 Air the lack of support for more than a single external screen.
Officially Apple specs out a single external screen, but using DisplayPort you can do more. The video below shows how to connect an unreasonable number of external monitors to an Apple Silicon laptop, but a two-external-monitor configuration doesn't seem too crazy.
I don't have any personal preference (I'm fine with a big single monitor/ultrawide) but from reading around and listening to other experience you're likely to hit performance/compatibility issues with that since it's a software solution.
Small correction; it’s DisplayLink, not DisplayPort. You have to use DisplayLink because they do some part in software as a part of their driver (which you must download and install) whereas the native Apple stuff has some internal hardware limitation.
I run three 1080p monitors off of my M1Pro, and I don’t notice any heavy CPU load from whatever software load the driver may be adding.
Displaylink is lossy software compression of your video stream, and when I last explored using it with Macs in a professional setting ~3 years ago the software was borderline unsupported by the vendor on the Mac platform and absolutely unreliable.
Displaylink doesn't support hidpi monitors on macOS with fractional scaling (unless they fixed it in last month or so).
For me this is a deal breaker since I have 27" 4k monitors which IMO work best at 125%-150% scaling
Might you or someone else be able to say why the state of the art Macbook is not capable of driving two monitors? Does this apply to all model or is this only an issue on the 14" MBPs and Airs?
The M1 and M2 have the hardware to drive two displays (the internal counts as one). The M1 Pro and M1 Max support four displays and the M1 Ultra probably supports eight.
> I feel like it's just a pure marketing play to only support more than one external screen on the 14" pro.
I'm convinced it's exactly this. I gave them the benefit of the doubt with the M1 that it's just a first-gen quirk, something that they managed to address with the Pro and Max and would become a non-issue going forward.
But now that M2 has been introduced with the same limitation, it's become crystal clear that this is yet another classic Apple anti-consumer profit-seeking tactic.
Hoping the rest of the industry can eventually catch up to and hopefully overtake Apple silicon in performance/watt and discourage this kind of behavior, but given the sheer amount of resources they have available compared to every other player, I'm not holding my breath.
> MY only gripe with the M1 and M2 Air the lack of support for more than a single external screen.
Definitely the most valid complaint about it. Apple always seems to heavily encourage customers to spend "just a little" more.
It's really hard to justify the M2 Air if you want more than 8/256GB; by the time you upgrade to 16/512GB, you're approaching 14" M1 pro price territory which has a better screen (with MiniLED backlighting & local dimming) and better sound too. I'm very happy with mine and have zero regrets.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadHaha, I read your comment, and my first thought was a dismissive, “who cares about active cooling”. Which really says something about how insanely power efficient these chips are. I’ve had the M1 Air since launch and I’ve yet to observe any thermal throttling under my workloads (I’ve yet to feel the machine even get hot)
How long can my compile be, before throttling begins? Say using 4 cores? 2 minutes? 5 minutes?
TSMC fabs don't make DRAM. Apple buys DRAM chips from the same handful of manufacturers that everyone else sources DRAM from.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...
$1,800 / (3 * 365) = $1.64 a day
In reality you could still probably sell it for at least $500 at the end of the term bringing the cost down to $1.19 a day.
And with inflation where it is, you're locking in the current price with today's dollars.
If it's something you'll use every day adding the RAM you need I think is an easy decision.
US keyboards have the narrow enter key and different placements for many symbols
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Spanish.svg
I do see now that the actual physical layout might be different, having large vs. small enter key and possibly additional key next to the left shift.
The difference is that one keyboard is made for humans who touch type, and the other keyboard is made for people who like to lift up their hand and move it every time they want to hit return... or left shift.
The ones with the shorter left shift and narrower/taller return key are just bad designs. They make keys you use frequently less accessible, and the tradeoff is that keys you rarely use are now in reach.
I've been using US layout since I was ~8. And all my other systems have the US layout. I am having such a hard time to get used to it.
I keep hitting ± when I mean ~ (why would I even need a ±/§ key on my keyboard?). I keep hitting \ when I want to hit Return. I keep hitting ~ when I want to hit shift.
Frustrating. Agreed with the "bad design" point.
It should be noted that on older Macbooks, the aluminum case has actual cutouts for keys. So it's not possible to change the layout of keyboard without also changing the case. I discovered this when I had my personal laptop repaired, and it came back with the wrong keyboard! The shop just instinctively ordered keyboard+case of their usual layout, so I had to have the whole thing redone again (at no extra charge, just a loss of time).
When I bought my first MBP, I wasn't completely wedded to the idea of getting a Mac necessarily - but when I noticed you could order one with a US keyboard, it tipped the balance in favour.
(For any serious work, I use a USB keyboard and mouse, so in a sense it doesn't really matter. But I use the built-in keyboard often enough that I'd be annoyed being stuck with that tiny Return key...)
(This reminded me: if you go to get a battery replacement, make sure the staff member notes that it's got a US keyboard. I took mine to a UK Apple store for a battery replacement a couple of years ago, and when I went to pick it up a few days later, it had had its keyboard replaced with a UK one! The staff member was very apologetic - perhaps they correctly read my expression of speechless shock after opening it - and it got fixed, but it took a couple more days. So in the end I was without my laptop for over a week.)
Ordering in EU is easier especially related to warranty. But the price is steep: it is 1199 USD in the US versus 1519EUR in The Netherlands, including sales tax
Fortunately it's simple to order the ANSI (US) layout in the online Apple store these days. (US English, not International English!). Up to maybe 10 years ago or so it was pretty hard to get it with US keyboards in Europe. (I usually imported them from the US via eBay.)
I'm honestly not sure why you would ever pay for an extended warranty in Germany.
I think with the Air's weight being slightly less than the outgoing model, the shape isn't going to be so much of a concern.
I don't need more than two Thunderbolt ports, but I would have liked to see one of them on the right side of the case.
I'm due for a work laptop upgrade soon, and I'm on the fence between a maxed MBA m2 and a 14" M1 Pro with 32G ram. It'll be mainly tethered to one big monitor, but light weight would be nice when commuting, as often as I do that.
I have now had two (work and personal) - my work m1 air was specced with 8GB, and had major memory pressure and issues with an external monitor. My personal 14” MBP has 16GB - same workload, same monitor, never skipped a beat.
Ended up sending the air back and swapping for one of the old dev ex MBP (intel based).
They pay like $40 for the difference, while making it a $200 upgrade, same with the SSD. - Especially since the SSD is apparently really slow with the 256G model.
My next one I'll get 16G simply because those few times (namely, creating Kubernetes labs intended to be ran on Apple Silicon) were annoying to deal with. But for I would wager 90+% of their customer base, 8G is absolutely fine. I've never once had it stutter with heavy Chrome usage, video streaming, or even gaming (not AAA titles, granted) out to an external monitor.
Once you start swapping, you easily get multi-second delays where a system is totally unresponsive.
A 24 GB M2 Air would be great, but I expect my current M1 to last gracefully for years.
Other than that I agree (though, as I have stated elsewhere, this is good. less landfill). The m1 pro is just insane - I sold all of my other machines.
I have a 16" with the Max chip, and yet . . .
The performance improvements will be marginal at best and in any case, what good is a machine if you can't keep it more than a year?
I just ordered my 16' Max and am not willing to upgrade for a while.. it's not even worth the wait for the M2 Max pros, since it will be basically the same specs and you'll have to wait more than a moth to get it anyway so why delay further?
If you have cash to burn however, then I guess it doesn't matter..
I'm tempted.
I also think 3nm is going to beset with production problems, I don't think it's coming around anytime near.
I did have severe issues with Kernel Panics, the laptop would just blink a pink pixelated screen and restart but that has been fixed.
I am glad to see a class of device meant to last upwards of 5 years.
Honestly the 2013 still works great for what I do (web, videos, and dev work that doesn't involve spinning up multiple VMs ;) ), I figured it was time to upgrade and the supply chain issues don't seem to be letting up anytime soon. I might replace the battery in the old one. I'm hoping to get at least another decade out of the M1 machine, hopefully more.
Looks like M1 prices have dropped even more since I bought.
I also had to troubleshoot some errors where dotenv operates a bit different between macOS and linux.
Overall, feels slower than what I'm used to. Community has a few rough edges to work out in an Apple silicon world, but half my growing pains are just moving to macOS in general. https://captionsearch.io is my "try new tech" project so it's part of the experience.
Is it the (in my opinion negative UX) touchbar?
It’s an old sales trick. Show the customer three products in different price ranges to get them to buy the middle one.
1. They don't have something to slot between the Air and the 14" Pro. The much rumored 15" Macbook Air isn't ready yet.
2. With how wacky supply chains are, it makes sense to rely on a supply chain that has been working since 2016, the year the 13" MBP came out.
3. Apple needed a device with active cooling to show off the power of the M2.
This would be the perfect computer for me, and probably most other pros in the current landscape - 13,4 is just too small for a lot of work, but few people need more power than an M1/M2.
I can see it's rumoured for spring next year, so a year is probably realistic.
I noticed the tech specs for the lower-end air have a slightly lower M2 -- 8 GPU cores vs 10... and in the Air price tool, it's a $100 upgrade to go from 8-core GPU to 10-core.
So I guess that's it -- the low-end Air is a little lower-end and a little cheaper.
Looks like right now the Air and the "proper" (14"/16") MBPs are the ones being propelled forward, while the 13" MBP is the moribund one.
M2 is significantly faster than Xeon and Epyc in single core speeds which is what matters the most in web browsing speed. There's also no latency that Mighty has.
Just get yourself a 24GB M2 Macbook.
If you're willing to pay for Mighty, I presume that you're willing to upgrade your laptop as well.
I don't really understand why apple feels the need to forgoe articles for their devices, however. For instance, they write "MacBook Air features..." rather than "The MacBook Air features..." as would be grammatically correct in English.
I think it is very strange.
> Hear the roar of a Mustang as the ground starts to tremble and your legs start to shake. As always, Mustang draws upon its performance roots with features for enhanced handling, high-powered engine options and a classic Mustang design. For 2022, the soul-stirring Mustang Mach 1 and Mach 1 Premium stand at the pinnacle of 5.0L performance. The personally customizable Mach 1 continues its legacy, engineered specifically for quick turns and spirited drives.
Confusingly, they use Mustang both with an article and without.
This comment sent from my iPhone SE 2016.
If you say "iPhone," instead of "The iPhone," you've turned "iPhone" into a pronoun. That has a different "connection" to people that hear it.
Branding seems to be something that a lot of tecchies (including Yours Truly) have difficulty with. There's a lot of subtle psychological games that aren't easy to quantify.
Usually, though, we assign pronouns (I’m not an English major, though, so the proper term may be different).
Like, you can’t have “a brooklyn,” or “an amsterdam.”
They want to make it so we can’t have “an iPhone.”
Good luck with that…
Thanks!
Every Brooklyn outside of the one in NYC is just "a Brooklyn" and not "THE Brookyln"
Then you also have Brookline, in Bastin.
I’m not a native speaker so I’m genuinely curious.
"The MacBook Air" is a thing. How mundane.
Or something like that.
Apple needs to speak out on this issue. Why the coverup?
https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/30/11541268/apple-grammar-is...
https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/725791354769399808
https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/725937759022514176
https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/725938369826414592
Of course, that's corporate BS and everyone can feel free to use it however they want.
edit: What @grumple said further below.
It's nearly as bad as people referring to a baby as just "baby" rather than "the baby" or "your baby".
Missing "ly" transforms two words from humdrum imperative verb/adjective pairing to action whose object is enigmatic, provocative and whose verb stands strong, without qualification.
(I attempted to write this without articles. I don't really agree with using "whose" but needed a replacement to "for which the")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)
[1] https://youtu.be/pZ0PzRuAv0Y?t=108
[1]: https://youtu.be/2B-XwPjn9YY?t=23
(password-at-risk-blah-blah)... 'iPad can help you re-secure your account.'
She associates poor grammar with phishing attempts, so assumed this could not have been a genuine notification from Apple. When I checked my own devices, it seems clear that their approach is at least consistent.
Another way to think about this is that when introducing a friend you wouldn't say, "Hi, this is the Kelly." You'd say, "Hi, this is Kelly."
Or here for the original Macintosh: https://www.flickr.com/photos/peterme/1253692391/
I do not say “The Windows” etc. when talking about software, but I definitely say “The iPad” etc. when talking about hardware.
Still its the snappiest Windows I have used in a long time. Microsoft probably hasn't figured out how to use up all the resources of this chip (for dumb features).
I would also say that 12th generation Intel is more competitive with Apple's current silicon than it gets credit for. It beats Apple on single and multi-threaded performance. No, you won't get 20 hour battery life, but you can find a respectable balance, and to that point I don't think it's worth making the ARM tradeoff on the Windows side of the house.
For Apple, ARM is great because they're betting the farm on it. For Microsoft, ARM still looks like a bit like a side project to me.
It’s funny how Apple came back from the worst the Mac has ever been to the best in a span of few years. Johnny I’ve doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does.
Which one was that?
I've been buying Macs since 2000, and the 2016 MBP is definitely the worst Mac I ever had. It was enough to drive me to purchase a Surface Book as an alternative.
Ended up leaving my MBP closed 95% of the time and using a separate keyboard.
I have one with 32GB that was provided by my employer. It is bad. I hate using it. The keyboard on it is bad, the performance is bad, and the glitchiness is deeply frustrating.
I loved my 2015 Macbook Pro 15" that it replaced and wondered why I thought it would be any better.
My M1 Macbook Pro 16 is a joy to me.
This. Worst Mac I've ever had to use.
Incredibly embarrassing to be in a quiet meeting room and accidentally open a slide deck with a gif for 2 minutes and have the machine ramp up its fans to maximum speed. Why?? Meanwhile on my M1 Air I can have the same content open + some Twitch stream + 3D map view open with no fan, no sound at all, and it runs great.
We're about 7 years into USB-C and I still had to do a ton of searching to find a dongle that does HDMI at 60 Hz, USB-A and charging (how crazy to want all that, right?!). I also had to buy a shady (AFAIK it violates the spec) extension cable to build a dock setup ("real" docks are in the hundreds of Euros). It cost me about 40€ to get back features I used to get for free and has reliability issues.
USB-C is a blessing for charging, but I'm a bit disappointed by the ecosystem for the rest.
> "Touch Bar"
The default touch bar UI is terrible, except for a few special cases (e.g Logic Pro / GarageBand sliders/knobs). I did see and try some hacks to customise it but they were quite brittle so I dropped off that train, but it kind of proved to me that there was something to it that could have been really great were it fully programmable for real, and that the actual execution was extremely subpar.
> "no ports"
If by "no ports" you mean USB-C only, I am really enjoying the 4x C port machines, and would rather not go back to mixed ports unless forced to. USB-A/B sockets just need to die.
yeah that .. I enjoy it for quickly setting/sliding brightness and volume. And you can add a screenshot button to it which does not break focus so it allows me to screenshot things the keyboard cmd+shift+3/4 UI can't (ie context menus)
I can type waayy faster on the 2015 with less errors and the screen is better on the eye strain. The whites on the M1 are BRIGHT. I don't need a flash light shining at my face. Turning down the "brightness" doesn't address the problem. That just makes the whole screen darker or but the whites are still as bright. I'm still learning the laptop, maybe there is a contrast setting.
Oh, and the trackpad on the 2015 doesn't feel like sandpaper. On the M1, the tip of my finger is numb most of the day.
Anyway, for such a fanboi and you skipped the best MBP. Bummer for you. I can't imagine going from 2015 to 2016 and being satisfied with that. I'd have returned it the same day.
I have just about identical settings on both models and comparing the two laptops side-by-side, the 2015 looks much better. I still have "vivid" colors but the whites are more grey.
Must be a screen thing, some new IPS technology. I don't know. It's terrible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlAsAuBtmps
I have a late-2015 rMBP as my daily driver. I'm only now starting to run up against its limitations. USB-C, better 4K support, form factor, battery life, overall speed are things I'm looking forward to when I finally upgrade.
I swapped the battery on my 2015 for like $150 at local computer repair shop. I was starting to hit memory limits but could have held off by using bare-metal dev box for heavy loads.
I have the 16 inch 2019 model (issued by work, I don't buy apple products) and it's... just not a good machine.
It gets amazingly hot, the fans run ALL the time, the usb-c ports are flakey at best (frequently stop working after a suspend/resume cycle, or if you unplug while the machine is closed).
It's got a shitty touch bar instead of function keys (although at least it reverted to a real esc-key, the touchbar only esc was literally a joke).
It has frequent rendering glitches and artifacts.
The battery life is bad (basically a given for how much power this thing is dumping right into my lap as heat).
----
Before the M line, I was about to go have a real fight with our IT department to get me issued literally anything other than another Mac. The last couple of models they've put out in the intel line are just genuinely bad machines, across both the pro and air lines.
The point about nerfing their last x86 models stands on its own though.
And the Apple Silicon Macbook Air has no fan at all.
This is what Apple wanted out of their laptops, and was clearly struggling to achieve it with Intel’s offerings in 2015-2020.
People have been shitting on MacBooks since they removed MagSafe and brought in the butterfly keyboard in 2016. The i9 Pros with massive thermal issues came out in 2018. That's a lot of money to lose due to everyone and their mother complaining about the decline in quality and poor value for money of your product.
I wouldn't ascribe to malice what can be more easily be ascribed to incompetence - Apple made questionable regarding the design of the MacBooks, and took the complaints to heart in time for release with their much improved chips.
While I usually agree with the sentiment, it's hard to believe that one of the most successful companies in the world can be subject to such levels of incompetence on one of their flagship products.
Corporations are ran by fallible people and are perfectly capable of running themselves into the ground. I'd argue it's nearly their natural trajectory to become bloated and inefficient over time. General Motors was largest and most successful auto manufacturer in the world right up until it crashed and burned in 2008 and had to be bailed out by the federal government.
There is plenty of good and bad, like everywhere.
Apple took tons of questionable decisions and pissed off a lot of customers (me included) but they're redeeming themselves by bringing ARM to the laptop world (which was long overdue).
Personally I'll run my current Mac to the ground and then I'll just have a (non Mac, hopefully ARM) desktop PC.
If they did that intentionally, then they took a very risky bet that paid off. But I really don't think anyone would make that kind of bet.
I'm typing on one now. It's almost ten years old. Original battery, even (though it really should have gotten a new battery about 2-3 years ago.)
Then how come we never read about those hardware devs, and get only story after story about Ive?
My guess: those hardware devs are just faceless pawns that get replaced as soon as they start having opinions about product design.
There is an interview with him in the Wall Street Journal here:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-chips-that-rebooted-the-mac...
I agree that Ive's influence will not be missed.
Still a formidable company don't get me wrong.
Even if this model sells like hotcakes (which I'm sure it will), and even if that isn't priced in (which I'm less sure of), don't really see that having a large enough impact on overall earnings to move the needle on the stock. The reality is that small differences in the next Fed announcement probably will move AAPL to a much larger degree than this product.
I'm not personally very excited about living inside that sealed of a bubble.
Facebook is currently paying the price of not owning their distribution infrastructure - they've been hurt extremely badly by recent privacy changes that Apple and Google have put out, while Apple and Google themselves have been relatively isolated from them.
What’s going on in Ukraine is alteady horrible, add this scenario to the equation and we’re looking at ultimate doom.
There. I said it.
I figure whatever I can get at that time will serve me well for the next 10 years.
The 2022 is a dream come true for me.
A guy I worked with bought one and complained about it relentlessly.
Jonny Ive made a lot good decisions in the days when he worked for Jobs, but my theory is that Jobs kept him from being a complete idiot. Tim Cook lost control of him and it went downhill massively after that.
I wasn't missing HDMI at all.
No. No no no. The worst was the Amelio era.
Spindler's Apple is responsible for the Performa sub-brand (although Amelio didn't kill it).
> After releasing a total of sixty-four different models [in five years], Apple retired the Performa brand in early 1997, shortly after release of the Power Macintosh 5500, 6500, 8600 and 9600, as well as the return of Steve Jobs to the company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa
You mean silicon. Silicone means something else.
https://www.livescience.com/37598-silicon-or-silicone-chips-...
But then again, that's why we try to write elegantly so readers don't stumble on the words and instead think about the meaning behind them.
"Aoccrdrinig to rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be ttaol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
Well, except for the small problem that the M1 air exists and is still on sale. Same single core CPU performance and near enough multicore and GPU performance. And it's cheaper by a not insignificant amount.
Which is pretty much why Linus Tech Tips wasn't a fan. If you want an Air, get the M1 version and save a buck. If you want performance, kinda hard to argue with the huge upgrades you get from the not that much more expensive 14" Pro.
Honestly curious.
I've personally charged my 14" off a 100W USB-C, and it does fast charge, faster than the stock 67W adapter.
It’s a lot of work to design one of these parts.
https://anysilicon.com/asic-design-flow-ultimate-guide/
Intel - 4 years.
The A12Z in the DTK is derived from the A12 which came out in 2018 so it probably was earlier than that.
- Detail image: https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2020/11/19115445/MBA_M...
- iFixit Teardown feature article: https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet...
The architecture is basically frozen 2 years before tapeout, which itself is a year before they go on sale.
>watching everyone on the internet complain
What's especially amusing in hindsight are the (then justified) complaints about thermal throttling in the last Intel Macbooks. They knew damn well those chassis would not be good enough for Intel CPUs, but they didn't care, it was designed from ground up for Apple silicon.
I wish Apple never offered 8gb version, as I was surprised to find that MacOS wants to use more RAM than a Windows machine with the same amount of RAM.
[1] https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/index.html
Honestly, there's a lot of PC nerd pushback against Ive, but I think the industry as a whole needs someone like his asking the (to the lay person) obvious questions - i.e. why can't I have this amount of computing power in a human-friendly form factor, vs. the giant, imposing, and ugly monolithic towers of yore?
I couldn't find any info on this, is this the same Magsafe as the 2015 devices, i.e. can I use existing old chargers? If so then I might even consider upgrading just due to this (I also have a 12/24V Magsafe charger).
24 GB RAM would be nice compared to 16 GB currently, but it's not something I'd really need.
Ah-ha! I knew they were implants!
And that 90% of that 90% won't really benefit much from the advanced specs. I had an 11" Chromebook with a Celeron processor for 6 years. Cost less than $200 and weighed almost nothing. If I wasn't coding or gaming, it was the best PC I ever owned.
The terrible state of the Mac over the last nine years hardly compares to the dismal state that Apple was in during the 90s. The product line was a mess and they had multiple machines that had common failures (PowerBook 5300c[0] comes to mind as my first laptop). It was so bad that PowerComputing was making better Macs (clones) than Apple.
They've made two incredible comebacks.
[0] > Two early production PowerBook 5300s caught fire, one at an Apple employee's house and another at the factory; it turned out that the Sony-manufactured lithium ion batteries had overheated while recharging. Apple recalled the 5300s sold (around a hundred machines) and replaced the batteries on these and all subsequent 5300s with nickel metal hydride batteries that provided only about 70% the endurance. At the time, the media viewed the problems with the PowerBook 5300 series as yet another example of Apple's decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_5300#Batteries
That's not how Apple works. If they still work remotely like they did back under Jobs the hardware teams are not the guys calling the shots for future product cycles.
There have been a lot of articles about how it doesn't work remotely like it did under Jobs[1]. Tim Cook has been CEO for 11+ years and isn't at all like Jobs.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/technology/jony-ive-apple...
Well, that and I'd be forced to use OSX.
So far the only real benefit I've seen seems to be for those who code on insanely long train commutes.
macOS is much better to write code on due to its native *nix style terminal and it's far more usable for everything else than Linux.
To me, macOS is the best platform for writing code in 2022.
Being close but slightly off is a negative for MacOS imo.
The hardware is for sure the best though. I'd run windows/WSL on one of these if I could
There's hope that docker virtualization for x86 images will be faster with new virtualization framework features. It probably will take some time to implement, but in a year or two I expect most issues with docker to be resolved.
[0] Early reviews of M2 Macbook Pro indicate that the M2 chip heats up more than the M1 and consumes a more power. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVIknUcCjiQ
M2 is also just more efficient than M1 because the A15 is much more efficient than the A14.
Anandtech showed this in their A15 review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...
So even if the chip heats up more, it's still going to be more efficient.
I'm curious about the benchmarks and stress tests. Would be very cool if it is actually significantly better than the M1 on everything.
I still have to look at my (unlabeled) keyboard to figure out what the Apple Cmd Shift Up etc heiroglyphs are and it'll always be weird closing windows on the left instead of right side but beyond that after about 3 months of forcing myself to use OSX 5 years ago OSX is now by far my favorite OS. The continuity and interoperability between my other Apple devices is amazing. Yesterday I was working on my jeep and I just dragged a PDF of instructions over to my Ipad from my Macbook and immediately had it to look at downstairs. You can do that in other systems with pushbullet, dropbox, etc but it's just fluid and built in here.
I've always only owned a MBP through work, the M1 max w/64gb 14" is the first MBP I've ever bought for myself and it just hums. I hope it'll be "fast" for 5+ years for the price I paid.
I need this basic software feature. Yeah? Too bad, the OS won't allow you to do that. Maybe you'll find a paid app that does it. I do pay for software but when you have to pay for basic stuff that should come out of the box, it's a no for me. To cover the basics you need to pay a lot of money.
Then there's the weird behaviour. Example. You have 2 Chrome windows on two different monitors. You're focusing one of them and on that same monitor witch to a fullscreen app and then go back. Now it'll raise and focus the Chrome window on the other monitor. In the worst case I just have to manually change the window, on the worst case, I'll use some shortcut on a windows that I'm not supposed to and break something. I wouldn't be the only one breaking/changing something in Jira because of this.
The file manager is a joke. Again, something fancy but useless if you need a bit of functionality. At least the OS has a good shell that you can use instead.
When I'm told to learn to use it "the Apple way" what I understand is, "shut up and get used to it, you have no saying in how your machine or you should work".
If I leave my current job it'll be because of the Macbook.
Well yeah that is kind of the philosophy - a single simple way to do things. Cutting down on customisation makes the system more stable and I think allows them to innovate more quickly. Don't confuse it with lack of power - it's a fully certified UNIX unlike most Linux distributions.
They do have incredible support for accessibility, so they do accommodate people who genuinely need things to work differently, not just a preference.
What they're not keen on is adding knobs and bells and whistles for the sake of it, as it's clutter.
You don't give many concrete examples of things you're unable to do, so I can't help you figure them out. The file manager is a joke? Well it lets you manage files not sure what else you need.
I'd done my whole career doing PhD-level systems research on my Macs - hasn't held me back from doing anything.
> Don't confuse lacking a POSIX certification with the lack of power.
Don't confuse POSIX for UNIX!
> It can't even run Docker properly.
What are you missing with Docker? I use Docker all the time. It's fine what's wrong?
I use it daily too and it sucks. Containers needs rebooting a few times a day or the changes I make in the code won't work. Then there's the massive ram consumption. Emulated crap.
Sorry if I hurt you feelings.
Docker is virtualisation, not emulation.
Slower and more RAM hungry.
I certainly think it is a "real UNIX", but I also think it's very much a toy. It doesn't even have a good tiling wm (yabai is janky af).
It pays to explore the menus of apps under macOS — it’s not like under GNOME or Windows where menubars are vestigial and paltry if they exist at all, Mac apps actually put a lot of useful things in them.
"To cover the basic" --> I think this is a situation where our personal preferences are being conflated with the basics because I've certainly never really had to pay out any significant amount of money to be able to do all the basic things I need from an OS.
I'm a full-time software engineer and the quality control that Apple puts into their new MacBook M1 has easily made it my best and most productive system (before being on Debian, and before that on a windows 10 machine).
Unlike a lot of people, I don't really give a crap about spending tons of time "accessorizing" my OS. To me it's merely a means to launch the applications and tools in which I can get work done (photoshop, blender, Clion, bitwig, vs code, etc).
I use Linux most of the time, but the file manager on Linux is so bad that I sometimes manage my files from a Mac using SMB or NFS. I've tried a couple different file managers on Linux, and have settled with the default GNOME file manager (formerly Nautilus), but it lags far behind the file managers on both Mac and Windows in terms of both features and basic usability.
At least Mac and Windows file managers are reasonably easy to navigate by keyboard. If you have a directory open and want to select a file, you can just start typing the name. Easy, intuitive, and fast. This feature used to work in GNOME, but not any more. It's been abandoned. The Mac also has the column view, and I don't understand why other operating systems haven't adopted it.
The GNOME file manager also maintains its own "shadow" set of mount points through GNOME's ill-conceived VFS mechanism. So if you want to mount a file share, you can see it in the browser, but you can't look at the files in a terminal window. It's weird and surprising.
I'd love to use Apple hardware again, but I cannot stand the Apple software and UX, so need my laptops and desktops to run Linux.
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1544408695295328256
Apparently so.
> At this point, it's pretty likely that M2 will be at feature parity with M1 with <24h of actual work.
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1542957901651685376
MacOS is great, but someday they will stop updating MacOS for this. I see it as a device with incredible longevity because of the fanless thermals and how it sips energy. I could see myself using it 10 years later. I want to run MacOS or Fedora Silverblue, with Silverblue being my true love. Immutable OS images <3
HAH, downvoted in seconds. Would not be surprised if there are Apple employees brigading this.
I think you're downvoted because:
1. Linux is coming to Apple Silicon sooner or later. You can buy now, enjoy macOS, and then install Linux later.
2. It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years. Even if Apple stops supporting it, you can still use it. In addition, Macs have insane resale value. So you can sell it in 5 years, and then buy a new one. This is a more reasonable approach than yours.
3. Apple tends to support their laptops for a long time. Usually 7-8 years. And given that this is their own chip and it's extremely powerful, I can see it being supported for 8 years at least.
2) I used my Powerbook G4 for 12 years; this is mostly because I was a kid with no money. When I got something else, my sister used it for another 3 years. With thermals as they are in this device, instead of selling it after 4-5 years I'd rather keep it for one-off projects as a server like a Mac Mini. I know laptops aren't designed for server work, but I love that it's a server with a builtin terminal. Also a device I'd use for hiking, because I could charge it from backpack solar.
3) The worst experience I've had was telling my dad MacOS Catalina couldn't be installed on his $3.5k iMac.
As you said in your other comment, M3 will be 3nm TSMC? Maybe Linux will look good on Apple Silicon then.
Just in case you'd be ok with unofficial way - there are patchers to enable macOS install on older machines:
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/install-macos-catalina-unsu...
I don't expect Apple to support the Linux community. It feels like this is trending in one direction. It felt like things stopped being "favorable" to us when they stopped supporting OpenGL and made no effort with Vulkan. The touchbar and some wifi chipsets were poorly supported for years before M1 debuted.
What has been implemented in Asahi is impressive, but it's not ready to be a daily driver. I hope this becomes my mobile device of choice someday. I'd use MacOS for work-work, and I would choose Linux every time for fun-work. So tired of everything having telemetry and vendor lock-in and basic pieces of software moving to subscription models.
Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid.
I might have missed a trackpad update but I don't think it will take them long.
You could triple boot Windows, MacOS and Linux with Intel Macs. A Mac was a great choice because you could develop for and support all 3 of those platforms (plus Android and iOS). Aside from having bad GPUs, expensive storage, and little modularity, they were great machines for development.
Now, with no Linux or Windows support, not so much (unless you don't need to use anything but MacOS.) Unfortunately, if you need to support MacOS or iOS, you don't have much of a choice. Just really unfortunate that what used to be possible with one machine may soon require two. So long as Apple supports any Intel Mac, many Macs will be able to get OS updates thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. I'm not sure when Apple will drop Intel Macs though. The last Mac to use an Intel processor released in 2020, so there will hopefully still be quite a few years left of support for Intel Macs for the time being.
1. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/START.htm...
Plus there is no guarantee that Apple will ever allow Linux again.
If you're wanting to use your laptop for development work, you're going to pick the best job for the task. Moving to OSX would not only slow things down due to how slow non-native Docker is (no it is not negligible, yes I have an M1 Mac and I have tested it in a side-by-side comparison), but you have much less control over your environment compared to Linux.
The vast majority of the people I've worked with choose to use Linux laptops over Macs, and I don't think CPU efficiency is something that's going to get them to change. While working from home, I can think of zero scenarios where I need more than 8 hours of battery life, which my x86 Intel laptop already exceeds.
Silverblue is my favorite, but it's becoming common for me to develop everything within a docker image. As quickly as we're committing to a project, we're updating the env and rebuilding that image at the same time? I'm new to this.
I have a friend who's really big into k8s and ansible. Right now it feels like I'm toying around in 1 pod. He can bring up a set of services around the thing he's developing in a few minutes. I want his power. :x
Are you running arm64 containers? Is x86 a requirement for you?
All of my work goes into (local/alpha/beta) production linux box that's why the mac is technically just a display.
And when I say local, I refer to a linux server, the mac connects to it. the macOS terminal does a nice work doing that, don't think there would be any difference in that regard if the laptop was running linux.
The new mac checks all of the hardware boxes that I wanted. Even occasional gaming if I felt like it.
Why is that? I still use my 2015 15" MacBook Pro which released 7 years ago, and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. This isn't the 70s, 80s, 90s or early 2000s: the improvements in performance from one year to the next are far more modest and the utility of further improvements are far less impactful than they once were. My 2015 MBP is still as capable of browsing the web, writing code, and video editing as it was back in 2016 when I got it. It's not in any way slow doing any of those tasks.
The performance of an M2 MacBook would undoubtedly be much better, but am I actually going to be able to browse the web faster or write code any faster? Probably not.
A new 16-inch MacBook Pro with 1TB storage emits approximately 620kg of CO2e in its manufacturing process (The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee, 2020 second edition, page 140). Why should someone emit more than half a ton of CO2e for a new laptop unless they really need it?
If you have a Mac that no longer gets OS updates by Apple, as long as it was released within the past decade you should be able to use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to update it to macOS Monterey (and later Ventura when it releases) without much issue. If it's older than that, you might run into some issues, but generally speaking everything from late 2008 and beyond is supported, with everything from late 2012 and beyond being fully supported.
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/START.htm...
If this is a serious concern for anyone, it looks like carbon capture runs around $22/ton. So this is an $11 problem.
I split my coding time between a 2017 retina MacBook and a 2018 Mac Mini. Code compiles very much faster on the Mini -> faster iterations. So yes, you may literally code faster on a faster computer.
Went through a few generations of that, it was "ok".
Bought the cheapest 13" M1 I could because I had to debug some stuff on the iPhone, I was pretty angry about it.
That day I switched over to it as my daily driver.
The performance absolutely blew my mind.
Stuff I'd wait for one to two minutes to build on the SB would build in a few seconds on the M1.
Debugging + video call + building went from crushing my laptop to being not really noticable.
I was using it heavily for two days and realized I forgot to plug it in. Was only down to 50% battery.
I'm very far from being an apple fan boy, but this little laptop has completely blown my mind. Simply the best hardware I've ever owned, and makes me easily 2x as productive.
And that's all with the cheapest 8 gig of memory model.
Understandable. Great vintage year!
That is insane.
* values converted to USD. Prices may differ in countries actually using USD.
If it is not reasonable why can you resell it for a large amount after 5 years?
Why ever not? I have 14 year old laptops that run fully up to date Linux just fine. Why can unpaid volunteers do better than one of the most profitable companies on earth?
> So you can sell it in 5 years
That just makes the looming end of support someone else's problem, it doesn't actually solve anything.
This is not something, a person that wants Linux, will enjoy.
> It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years. Even if Apple stops supporting it, you can still use it
I'm not sure, my friend has M1 Macbook Air and he complains that it looses performance after a year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[0]: https://rectangleapp.com/
You broke more than one site guideline with this. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? We'd appreciate it.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/LG-49WL95C-W-49-Inch-Curved-Ultrawide...
I recall reading at least with the M1 that it's actually a physical hardware limitation with the architecture inherited from the fact that the base M1 is pretty close to the A15 which never needed to pump out to more displays.
I assume the same for just about anyone in my position.
(I'd have two Studios and an Air if it were a utopia scenario, but... that's expensive!)
I have the 2018 macbook air as my portable. It's abysmal, but I can use it to work on the couch if I have to.
I am going to try the M2 air to replace both the laptop, the mini and the eGPU. Quite a lot of hardware traded out for one single solution.
I don't like keeping multiple machines up to date and spending time doing the same updates or having to go back to one to push some branch I forgot about.
That said, I'm counting on the MBA M2 to deliver graphics to the XDR on par with the blackmagic and if it can't I may return it, get a cheaper M1 MBA and either wait out the M2 mini or pick up a studio.
I do have a second 4k monitor that I'd prefer to be able to drive--I can with the Intel box and eGPU. But I don't really use it and with the XDR it isn't really necessary.
-apple
If the notch is such an obvious eye-sore, why aren't they abondoning it?
The notch is a total non-issue during normal use because it only exists in the menu bar area. It basically looks like another item occupying your menu bar. If you go full screen you still have a notch-free experience.
They probably show it that way in promotional materials because people wrongly assume that it’s a bigger deal than it actually is. Virtually nobody actually cares about it when they start using the laptop.
That’s the default setting. You can choose to have the menu bar there as well in full screen.
Without the ability to produce perfect black around the notch, is the notch not going to be an eyesore even in fullscreen mode? Or is the "Liquid Retina" display close enough that it's basically a non-issue?
I guess I'll find out soon, because one of these M2 Airs will be replacing the 2016 Pro I've been using as soon as I scrape the funds together.
If you have an old app that hasn't been updated, you can enable the "Scale to fit below built-in camera" option on the executable and it will show the full menu bar under the notch, exactly like it worked before the notch existed.
Best way to think about the notch is that it's not subtracting from your 16:10 screen, it's just pushing the menu bar up into the area on either side of the camera. It's previously wasted space that now takes your menu bar so you get the full 16:10 screen for content.
A bit disappointed to see them sticking with 256GB SSD as the base, feel like 512GB should really be the standard nowadays.
[0]https://www.apple.com/uk/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-...
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/01/m2-macbook-pro-slower-t...
For entry-level consumers, they don’t need extra storage. So many kids are online-based nowadays. Younger people are routinely using iCloud/One Drive/Google Drive/Box/Dropbox and other services.
But sure, if you’re working with more and larger files, then you aren’t the target for the entry-level model with 256, and spend extra for more storage.
The 2020 MBA and 2021 MBP are pretty similar.
The new cameras have better low light performance and less noise due to pretty agressive smoothing. The consequence is that the picture lacks any detail whatsoever. The image from the 2015 MBP is sharper than the alleged 1080p image from the 2021 MBP.
With the smoothing my girlfriends face looks like she is wearing heavy makeup. My beard looks like it was painted on. In low light there are weird artefacts and glitches (especially in the area around my eyes, probably due to the ML algorithm).
Now maybe on a Zoom call this doesn't matter, if your face is just in a little matchbox-sized box on the screen. But on full screen Facetime calls the lack of detail and low resolution of the MBP webcam is very noticeable.
This has been coming for some time, the refreshed 14" and 16" Pro models already had their base capacity bumped to 512.
Is there some reason to assume that Apple isn't just facing the supply chain issues that have been plaguing the other laptop makers?
I still use the 2013 MBA almost daily—mostly as an external keyboard and screen for my iPhone notes, but it really slowed down with Mojave, so I’m trying to decide whether to pick up a cheap replacement M1 model now, or wait for sales on the M2. I think I can hold out a little, but won’t quite make the 10 year mark.
BTW, the c. 1993 Mac Centris was able to boot up last year (at 28 years old!), and thanks to an Ethernet adapter I dumpster-dived from work in the early 2000s, I was even able to get online with it without any extra configuration. Netscape Navigator doesn’t do too well with modern websites (and probably made for a baffling entry in some server logs), but I could at least load the Dole/Kemp ‘96 site.
the stream of anti ECB drones is frankly ridiculous
the price has gone up in pounds as well.
Does the ECB controls them too?
Prices in Europe are taxes included, in US are before taxes.
In Europe you have to add VAT, not only sales taxes, which are much lower in US anyway.
Last but not least, custom duties are a thing.
a strong Euro doesn't automatically makes for a stronger EU economy.
The Air in the UK is £1,249, up from £999 - a 25% increase.
The EU price is €1,500, up from €1,050 - a 43% increase.
At least some of that has to be explained by the euro dropping ~14% against the dollar. Take away 14% from the EU price and you get €1,290 - pretty close to the UK price.
You are comparing 2 different products' prices.
The M2 Air is up £49 compared to its US counterpart. A ~5% increase. And its up €200 compared to its US counterpart. An ~18% increase.
Exchange rates explain this easily.
> The EU price is €1,500, up from €1,050 - a 43% increase.
where did you get these prices?
From Apple store Italy
€ 1.529 from € 1.229 it's a ~25% increaseThe parsimonious explanation is that the Euro went from 120¢ to 98¢ in the intervening time. I have no opinion on why that happened, I will pretend I don't even know what the ECB is.
I'm never going to buy an Apple M* at actual price points.
I was merely pointing out that ECB has nothing to do with the prices of Apple products, compared to equivalent in the US.
Apple raised the prices outside the USA and kept the same prices in the US.
That's all.
So, you are right. Apple raised prices. I suspect exchange rates. It is easier to account for unfavorable exchange rates in new products than in raising prices of existing products.
The same difference exists in European Apple stores (~+25%).
They simply kept lower prices in US in my opinion, but obviously comparing US prices with non-US prices for a US manufacturer it's not going to work in favor of the non-US market.
We must destroy Europe before it’s too late!
“Is Tim Apple a billionaire?”
EDIT: not sure why this was downvoted. All DisplayLink devices need to be granted screen recording permission to work on macOS.
Same with code, not always but sometimes I need a wider view.
There are a lot of subtle gains that I'm probably forgetting about and really only one negative that I've run into - games don't play super nice on the ultra-wide, but that's not really what I use this machine for.
Oh another bonus I forgot - watching shows / movies on it is really nice. I have very rarely considered this but with an 18 month old, you find you have to squeeze in time here/there, we had to stop the new batman movie on HBO with 20 minutes left... I probably would not have ever watched the ending (it was pretty good!) if I didn't have that display, it was a nice way to spend 20 minutes during lunch and I've been watching movies/shows on it randomly during lunch since. It's pretty great for this use too.
It would solve the “center bar” issue, for example
What are you basing this assumption on?
a normal Intel machine has some kind of southbridge, this means a traditional CPU that has 16 PCIe lanes total (this is actually the standard for intel) can have more than just 16x lanes, usually a PCH can add another 20 with an internal PCI switch.
Great in theory, but it does mean you can be constrained in bandwidth since that switch is limited to 16x on the upstream, in fact usually there's only 4! upstream PCIe connections to the CPU and there's some natively attached items (like the USB controller and some lanes of a GPU).
Apple's M-series CPUs do not have any southbridge or PCI switch, you get the full bandwidth of the lanes; this is why Apple M1 can run all of its ports at native speed at the same time, (where most laptops can't).
It also means that when you dedicate PCIe lanes for graphics, they can't just take away bandwidth from inactive ports.
It's only when they increase the die area and add more lanes that they dedicate more lanes to attachable graphics.
It's not a soft limitation, it's a trade-off.
They're banking on the fact that casual consumers won't use more than 2 displays (1 internal, 1 external); and that casual consumers would prefer more ports.
I ran into that all the time on the 8GB model (admittedly with multiple RAM-intensive apps and lots of tabs open), while it now happens very rarely on my 16GB model.
Also: this makes a red flag of the recent shift to half-speed drive performance
Officially Apple specs out a single external screen, but using DisplayPort you can do more. The video below shows how to connect an unreasonable number of external monitors to an Apple Silicon laptop, but a two-external-monitor configuration doesn't seem too crazy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jLAwSvs7vE
I don't have any personal preference (I'm fine with a big single monitor/ultrawide) but from reading around and listening to other experience you're likely to hit performance/compatibility issues with that since it's a software solution.
I run three 1080p monitors off of my M1Pro, and I don’t notice any heavy CPU load from whatever software load the driver may be adding.
Thanks, staticfloat and ksala_!
I'm convinced it's exactly this. I gave them the benefit of the doubt with the M1 that it's just a first-gen quirk, something that they managed to address with the Pro and Max and would become a non-issue going forward.
But now that M2 has been introduced with the same limitation, it's become crystal clear that this is yet another classic Apple anti-consumer profit-seeking tactic.
Hoping the rest of the industry can eventually catch up to and hopefully overtake Apple silicon in performance/watt and discourage this kind of behavior, but given the sheer amount of resources they have available compared to every other player, I'm not holding my breath.
Definitely the most valid complaint about it. Apple always seems to heavily encourage customers to spend "just a little" more.
It's really hard to justify the M2 Air if you want more than 8/256GB; by the time you upgrade to 16/512GB, you're approaching 14" M1 pro price territory which has a better screen (with MiniLED backlighting & local dimming) and better sound too. I'm very happy with mine and have zero regrets.