Apple could dramatically improve performance if they just tasked one Metal engineer on llama.cpp. Like, just to finish up flash attention and quantum KV cache, and optimize the Metal kernels.
I wouldn't be surprised if they could double performance.
I know Apple is pushing MLX, and MLC-LLM is fast too, but in practice most Mac users (I think) are using llama.cpp based stacks.
I'm a senior software dev that is still using the last of the intel macs (granted a maxed out 16" not an air).
These kind of comparisons are still valid for me. There are plenty of others less technical than me that want these too. The youngest intel Airs only just aged out of applecare coverage last year, and for most casual users getting 4 years out of an Apple computer is totally expected.
My personal laptop is 7 years old so these comparisons are relevant to me, too. I’ve operated on my Air a bit to reduce thermal throttling and I don’t use it for anything crazy so it’s still useful, but one of these days I’ll upgrade. I’m sure there are plenty of people like us with these old beasts.
What is the appeal of running this sort of stuff locally though? Its still slower and less memory than a cluster or just a strong server. Just ssh into some horsepower and keep your lap cold.
I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. Corporations have become pros at exploiting our human psychology. Their ads can make you believe that the smallest bump in improvements will make your older computer appear useless in comparison. That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.
Speaking only of the Air here: The newer laptop feels thicker, since it doesn't have the nice tapered front. In general use, outside of only one external display in clamshell mode, the M1 feels similar. If you push things, like for video editing or rendering, the M2 or M3 are markedly better.
However, you quickly hit throttling if you push for more than a couple minutes at a time (like when you export in Handbrake, it will slow down and only run marginally faster than the M1, in my experience).
This is a cool idea, although presumably m3 would be faster even for single thread apps? Also, are there cases where memory bandwidth could leave cpu at less than 100% on m1 but still be faster on m3?
An interesting difference with the new pro models, if you want to pay around $5k,
is that you can have 128Gb unified Ram in them and run inference locally with exciting LLMs.
I suspect LLM performance will be a differentiator for Pro and newer Apple laptops in coming years.
If Apple releases on-device AI, this will be an effective way of getting people to upgrade like they used to, but haven't had to recently. For example, I bought Pro-level computers in my younger years, but now would only consider an MBA, mini, or iMac. But they could get me to go for a Pro if it were the only way to get more RAM for better AI performance. It will also likely shorten upgrade cycles since newer computers would have the latest and greatest performance. When I bought my M2 MBA years ago I suspected it would last me a long time. Now I'm not so sure since I don't have a ton of RAM.
Useless for LLMs. Limited system memory bandwidth kills it. GPU will be mostly idle waiting for memory access. The H200 has 4.8 TB/s bandwidth. System memory is below 90 GB/s
If you have a use case for an h200 class gpu you are probably making enough money off of it to not care about $40k and the 900gb/s bandwidth mentioned in another comment would seem absolutely pedestrian in comparison. If these things were really that compelling of a performance per dollar ratio you wouldn’t be able to buy them. They’d be sold out because people would be filling datacenters with them.
You can only get 2tb of storage max i believe, you are probably bottlenecked elsewhere if you are actually needing to move that much data that fast into memory in practice. I wonder what the temps would even be doing something that maxes that ram bandwidth
It seems like a pretty speculative use. That much money would go a long way on a $20/month subscription, and the field is changing rapidly. Unless you’re an AI researcher, might as well wait a year or two and see what changes?
Using M1/2/3 Max for LLM inference isn't at all "speculative", it's a thing today and high end Apple Silicon being an option for LLM inference is becoming general knowledge among the local inference community. The original author of llama.cpp (one of the leading LLM inference projects) developed it on a Mac and it has full Metal acceleration support.
The $20/month subscription is going to give you access to commercial models, but generally you have to run the open weight models yourself. With the unified RAM you can trivially run the larger 70B+ models.
AI researchers generally have to use CUDA due to how the ecosystem is still mostly CUDA-only for training and fine tuning, but those who need to occasionally use custom/local models for inference will likely find high end Macs being a good fit for their use cases.
Okay, but this is rather low-level. Most users aren’t going to care about “running an LLM.” They want to ask an AI chatbot questions or get code autocompletion or something like that. What applications are there that need a local LLM and who is using them? What do they do with them?
Personally, I’m reasonably happy with GPT4 and Github Copilot, and I’ve sometimes used Midjourney, though I cancelled my subscription since I’m not currently generating any images. Are there important apps that I’m missing?
If you're happy with the commercial offerings there isn't a very compelling reason to use local models. The local ones are not "better" in general. But sometimes people have reasons to use local models, eg. privacy, customization, control, etc.
I personally use it mostly to keep tabs on the latest models released on huggingface. There has been a lot of interesting developments since last year, and models have become more and more powerful.
What a waste. Build a 4090 desktop for that price, sheesh. Or spend the money renting spot 4090 instances whenever you need to via a MB air or whatever other laptop. And you'd probably still not end up spending the full amount.
The M2 and M3 are more evolutions of the M series. If you already have an M1 machine, there's no real need to upgrade. But if you don't, the M3 seems like a great device to get.
Eg: The M3 Max is a substantial improvement over the M2 Max in both CPU and GPU. But the M3 Pro is a moderate improvement at best compared to the M2 Pro.
For sure, capitalism requires a certain level of consumer savvy to remain sane.
For most real-world users, the M3 really is about 30% faster in single-core and 100% faster in multicore. That is really significant for a lot of us, especially software engineers. But the really big speedups mentioned in Apple's marketing are more niche and it takes some savvy to recognize that.
(I'm plenty content with my M1 Max for now and I expect I'll continue to happily use it for a few more years)
> I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro
I don't know why you bought a new one. You can have two ways to look at this, one way is your ultra pessimistic view, my view is I don't need to upgrade my laptop ever 2 years anymore.
Before the M1 Max I was upgrading so often because intel macbooks sucked so much. Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a decade.
As for being "exploited" by ads, just don't be, stop mindless consumption...
As a dev I was getting ~4 years out of Intel MBPs. The old ones still did the job well, but the new ones just did everything fast enough to justify the expense. Now I just realized I have over 3 years on my M1 MBP, and I realize I'm closer to the middle of my upgrade cycle than the end.
I max spec a laptop and ride it as long as I can. Replaced a 2012 MacBook Pro just last year, and will likely be doing the same around 2032 ;)
I’m doing most of my daily driving on whatever computer work gives me anyway, this is just the personal dev/audio machine. I do the same with a gaming computer too though, my gaming laptop from like 7 years ago is still going strong. I turn down shiny graphics settings to get good FPS anyway, I care way more about gameplay than visuals.
> Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a decade.
That's a nice thought but the computer will probably lose security updates in the next 10 years.
And that really annoys me. The press release says that the new computer is "built to last" and I'm sure that's true, physically. I have a 2015 Macbook Pro which works fine (obv. slower than a modern computer but fine for everything I need to do), it does still get security updates (it's two OSs behind the current macOS at the moment), but I think the time until it doesn't is probably measured in months.
As I say, it works perfectly, was indeed "built to last", but I guess I'm going to have to throw it away (bad for the environment) and buy a new one soon?
That also makes me less enthusiastic about dropping huge amounts of money when I do finally buy a new laptop.
My long-term plan is to drop a lot of money on external peripherals (monitor, speakers, etc) and then get the cheapest 16gb MacBook on sale to keep the portability option. Then I can upgrade to another cheap laptop as needed. I should’ve adopted this strategy originally.
> That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.
I wouldn't exactly just avoid them, though most are useless, so it's not a bad idea. You just want to understand what they are... even honest ones will only present information that is a reason to buy.
E.g., when I saw the iPhone 15 ads and the best thing they could say about was that it had some titanium, I knew it was a product I could ignore. (Not that I have an iPhone 14 either, but I already knew that one wasn't worth an upgrade to me).
It doesn't make sense in any world, it only exists to be there so people get to into the checkout flow and throw a few hundred dollars to get it to a usable spec.
The "pro" isn't for work or productivity, its for the appearance of work and productivity. Most people who buy Macs don't really understand what they are getting, developers included.
> I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. Corporations have become pros at exploiting our human psychology. Their ads can make you believe that the smallest bump in improvements will make your older computer appear useless in comparison. That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.
It's also why you should understand your personal use case and do research. I think this is on you, not Apple. Corpos gonna corpo -- you have to do the research to figure out whether the gains from new chips will actually impact your workflow.
Let's put it this way. M1 Max can build some amount of code in 134 seconds. M3 Max can do it in 70 seconds. Does this sound like a small bump? Source: XcodeBenchmark
> I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro
If you bought a M3 Max just to fuck around on Facebook and Hacker News then of course you won't notice a difference. If you are running workloads that actually require that level of performance then you will notice a significant difference. M3 Max is twice as fast at rendering 3D scenes in Cinebench.
It doesn't because the M3 has two dedicated DP outputs. O̶n̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶r̶o̶u̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶T̶h̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶b̶o̶l̶t̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶.̶ ̶O̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶3̶ ̶M̶B̶P̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶D̶P̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶H̶D̶M̶I̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶v̶e̶r̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶n̶e̶c̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶m̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶p̶u̶t̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶p̶l̶a̶y̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶.̶ ̶O̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶B̶A̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶p̶l̶a̶y̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶n̶e̶c̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶o̶u̶t̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶p̶u̶t̶.̶ The M2 also has a routable output, you can connect two USB-C displays to an M2 Mac mini if you don't use the HDMI port. It's unclear why Apple didn't enable that feature on the M2 MBA.
Edit: I had a brainfart and forgot that both ports are routable. It's market segmentation or stupidity like with the M2 MBA.
Can't edit anymore: this also applies to the M2 MBP, and both of them could get this feature in a software update like the M3 MBP. But it's unlikely, because of greed.
So I still need to use Instant View with my docking station, got it. Been using that on my M1 air to drive 2x4K displays (the 30Hz display isn't that useful if I'm mousing around, though)
It's set up as 3 separate displays, from left to right: 4K30 (you can also notice compression in color saturation), 4K60 (main monitor), built-in display. Even at 30Hz, the second 4K monitor is good for keeping up documentation.
Apple Cynic/Windows user here with a genuine question - why is this interesting? I'm currently looking at my wife's old corporate-issued windows laptop, which is running 2 external monitors as well as it's own display - am I missing something here, or is this just a case of Apple being held to different standards to other manufacturers in terms of feature parity?
Which basically means the others could do it (all M1 processors can handle two displays, which is either two for the Mac mini or internal + external for the laptops).
The addition is the ability to have two external when closed; likely this could have mainly been done in software if they cared.
(You can get more than one external on a laptop with the screen open if you go up to the Max or Pro or whatever.)
Well, it's definitely "interesting" because it was a weird and user-unfriendly restriction on previous M1/M2 Airs and now it's gone. So that is interesting for sure.
Perhaps more to the point, you're right -- Apple doesn't deserve to be lauded for removing something that was a dumb restriction in the first place. But it is interesting considering this is the most popular laptop in the world.
I don't think there is anything interesting. Someone on the hardware side thought it would be great to hardwire one of two the display controllers to the internal display. That would explain why M1 and M2 can't be fixed in a software update and why the Mac Mini supports two external displays.
Restriction implies they made the deliberate decision to withhold or break functionally. Limitation is probably more accurate, because they didn't put the extra work to make it work properly.
From a consumer standpoint? Apple sells about six million Macs per year and the Air is their best-selling computer and anecdotally it is popular with the HN crowd. So it is objectively impactful. I would call that therefore "interesting" but at that point we're splitting semantic hairs so whatever.
It's easy to deduce that it's a big deal for macbook air users because it wasn't possible before.
It's easy to deduce both from the article and from other comments here, which presumably you read if you're going through the trouble of responding to someone else's comment.
I typically despise this type of question, where you're obviously trying to make a point but playing dumb and playing it off as if you have no clue what you're talking about.
This type of question is used all over the place and super obnoxious.
I'm not American, genuine question, why is it a big deal that you're getting free healthcare? I've had free healthcare my whole life, shrug.
As a European, genuine question. Why is it a big deal that Biden wants to forgive student loan? I've gotten free education my whole life, shrug.
As an apple user, why is it a big deal that Dell is extending it's warranty to 2 years? My apple device gets updates 4 years later, shrug.
It seems like their question struck a nerve. Did you really feel it necessary to bring up hot political issues to explain why it's interesting that the new apple laptops can drive two external displays?
Just for clarity, it's so far from novel in the world of windows laptops that it's genuinely confusing why that would be an advertised feature.
How is Dell warranty comparable to iOS/MacOS updates? Maybe at least compare that to something related to operating system, like Windows 10/Ubuntu LTS support lifecycle, or Android major version updates, which are usually much longer than the 1 or 2 year warranty that comes with the device? That's too much a rant that is completely meaningless and way too cynical.
It’s interesting because the whole M# line started with a smart phone and built a pc out of that. As a result it has some unfortunate restrictions that aren’t there when you build a machine out of capable yet pretty clunky intel hardware. I don’t doubt there are similar tradeoffs in the WoS world but I’m not aware of what they are specifically.
The restriction I am most annoyed with these days is the lack of external GPU passthrough. I’m not even sure the asahi Linux folks have gotten that working yet.
So folks are probably just happy they’re not having to deal with as many compromises and tradeoffs (they get to have their PC that works almost just like a smartphone but does more things their intel machine could now). That’s totally understandable.
You needed an agp video card of some kind.
You're making a false comparison.
Once again they clearly made tradeoffs to get the best balance for product experience, cost, and their own supply chain considerations (for entry level laptops, tablets, phones).
You needed a video card of some kind. You can stick multiple PCI cards in one PC just fine, alongside one AGP card. And this is the time when the usual gaming video card had a whooping 32-64Mb of RAM. There is absolutely no reason a computer can be limited in amount of displays it can drive. And if 20+ y/o PCs could drive multiple monitors there is no reason the top notch tech company couldn't do that.
> You're making a false comparison
No, you are just trying to justify the greedy corporation habits.
> Once again they clearly made tradeoffs
No, they segmented their products and their fanbois are not only drunk their koolaid but eagerly defend it too.
> No, you are just trying to justify the greedy corporation habits.
You're really showing off your ignorance here, and you're assuming a lot around my defending of greed etc. My view's on Apple's pricing are pretty irrelevant here, and I have nothing to say for or against them because I frankly don't care and don't know the logistics behind them.
All the times I've worked on projects that involve shipping an operating system, hardware, etc I've found that there are a lot of tradeoffs especially when you're doing something a little bit different. This is the case with M# silicon and also the case with Windows on Snapdragon systems.
They aren't starting with expandable hardware built for running desktop PCs, they (apple, Qualcomm) are starting with highly integrated SoCs that have some really narrow goals around power and battery life. Their systems are more designed for running phones and tablets than for entry level laptops.
> No, they segmented their products and their fanbois are not only drunk their koolaid but eagerly defend it too.
Don't like it? Don't buy one. But fact is, their more narrow model for how a PC can be built is selling really well and very few regular people miss their second monitor because of it.
I’d take marcan’s word over yours if I have to be completely frank.
> Yes, but don't sell me "Apple M* is da best" shit, okay?
I never did, once again you’re assuming a lot. I originally chimed in to mention that people like these machines and others (like the newer windows on snapdragon systems) because they strike a good balance between mobile phone and desktop systems.
> Ah, yes, lack of a second monitor is freedom. Koolaid in it's finest.
Once again you’re assuming a lot. What straw-man are you trying to beat up here?
>> Ah, you see, that's a different story. On M1 machines, no, that routing is hardwired as far as we know. On M2 machines, yes, in principle you can route both display controllers to external outputs (and disable the internal panel). That's how it works on desktops.
>> DisplayLink of course works, but it's an ugly virtual screen thing using compressed data over USB3, not a true directly connected external display.
From marcan himself. So yes, they just didn't want.
> I never did
>> get the best balance for product experience
> Once again you’re assuming a lot
Let me remind you of your words, because looks like your forgot what you wrote:
>> their more narrow model for how a PC can be built is selling really well and very few regular people miss their second monitor because of it.
> From marcan himself. So yes, they just didn't want.
They’re not going to ship that, knowing their engineering team they’d probably consider it a huge hack. They probably also have considered how proficiently their gpu can drive two versus 3+ 6K studio displays under varying circumstances.
It’s actually probably possible to get this going on asahi via usb a display link. Good thing no ones forcing anyone to run macOS on this hardware.
> Let me remind you of your words, because looks like your forgot what you wrote:
There’s nothing controversial in what I wrote. They clearly have grown Mac marketshare by building computers using their more restrictive phone hardware.
That’s not my opinion, that can actually be measured from the increase in web traffic from WebKit.
Your post is nonsense. I was talking about the Apple Silicon chips. Which combine all the logic on one chip. That means, they are limited in the capacities by what is put on that corresponding chip. Apple chose to put 2 display outputs on the smaller chips, and more on the larger ones. That is a conscious choice trading off chip area with other capabilities.
Could they have done differently? Sure. Does it make sense? Yes. For the people, who need or want more compute power and more capabilities, they have two different chip offerings in the laptops, the Pro and the Max. And in the Mac Studio the Ultra, which are two Max and consequently raise the IO capability even further.
And I have certainly not talked about any other platform, which usually uses multi-chip approaches.
Exactly right. I think some of my points got garbled in all this back and forth: that their conscious choice makes A LOT of sense when you take into account that they want their smaller chips to share supply chain with iPads, Vision Pro etc.
No ones saying “poor apple.” The pricier models don’t run the same soc. With the air you’re getting the same constraints as an iPad. They made tradeoffs.
It's not interesting in a "wow, Macbooks can finally support two external displays" as much as "this does make this intentionally-small form factor slightly more tolerable."
Comparing the port count/capabilities of the two isn't a fully fair comparison though. The Apple Silicon Macbook Air models are likely 1) much faster than that corporate-issued laptop (even if it's workstation class), and 2) much smaller and quieter (no fan noise even under load).
Though I'm not sure why all the griping about how many monitors an Air can support; users can buy a Macbook Pro if they want more monitors? I don't understand the logic behind buying a tiny, thin laptop only to dock it as a workstation.
The limitation started because the M chip combined the CPU and GPU and combined the RAM with the VRAM. That's why its battery life and power efficiency blows Windows laptops out of the water. So they didn't just limit it for no reason.
it's so clear that they limit it to 24GB to prevent cannibalization of the macbook pro. I personally could go for a M3 base chip with 64GB or 128GB of memory.
And, of course, it starts at 8GB of RAM to nudge you up from $1100 to $1300/$1500.
At which point you might as well spring for the Pro.
I can't fault the business logic but as someone who'd only use a Mac for occasional iOS development, this nudging upward dissuades me from pursuing that idea altogether.
I still want a MacBook Air with 32GB RAM or more. The Air is lighter and more compact than the Pro. (I currently use a MacBook Pro because of the memory limit on the Air.)
If you only use it for occasional ios dev, rather get a mac mini. As a bonus, when your done with it, put asahi linux on it and itd be a great home server.
I've considered that and might end up taking that route but the nice thing about a MacBook is I can take it with me on trips and learn iOS when I get bored.
There's a big server rack at home with multiple servers, so the Linux server part isn't a draw in my case.
"MacBook Air can also run optimized AI models, including large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models for image generation locally with great performance."
Worthless PR. Further down, another selling point is "MacBook Air supports cloud-based solutions, enabling users to run powerful productivity and creative apps that tap into the power of AI, such as Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Canva, and Adobe Firefly."
Wow. Until they support CUDA or more ML/AI implementations on their chips, this is just marketing speak.
I run Mixtral 8x-7B on my M1 max mpb with llamafile, and Stable Diffusion - the backend for both is running via Metal implementations for Pytorch et al...
But "supports cloud-based solutions" is a pretty lame way to sell it.
That's actually funny. My ThinkPad with Arch Linux also supports Microsoft 365, Canva, and Adobe Firefly! Since when are we advertising a list of "supported websites"?
Looking at this list comparing the M3 with M1 doesn't motivate me to want the M3. It seems most gains are GPU related. The M2 was underwhelming, and it seems the M3 isn't much better than the M2 so comparing against M1.
> M3 takes MacBook Air performance even further:
> Game titles like No Man’s Sky run up to 60 percent faster than the 13-inch MacBook Air with the M1 chip.
> Enhancing an image with AI using Photomator’s Super Resolution feature is up to 40 percent faster than the 13-inch model with the M1 chip, and up to 15x faster for customers who haven’t upgraded to a Mac with Apple silicon.
> Working in Excel spreadsheets is up to 35 percent faster than the 13-inch model with the M1 chip, and up to 3x faster for customers who haven’t upgraded to a Mac with Apple silicon.
> Video editing in Final Cut Pro is up to 60 percent faster than the 13-inch model with the M1 chip, and up to 13x faster for customers who haven’t upgraded to a Mac with Apple silicon.
> Compared to a PC laptop with an Intel Core i7 processor, MacBook Air delivers up to 2x faster performance, up to 50 percent faster web browsing, and up to 40 percent longer battery life.
Combining the two datapoints 15x faster than Mac with non-Apple-silicon and 2x faster than PC with i7 makes it seem like Intel parts have improved a lot since Apple stopped using them.
Speaking of video, I’m on my second MacBook Air and have been very happy with them both except for one consistent concern, their unreliability with regard to external displays. It bothers me sufficiently for me to bring my Apple TV with me when delivering training, which is kinda ridiculous. I think my next one will be a Pro. That’s a pity really – I like the Air form factor and I don’t really need the extra power. I do think I need a real HDMI port though.
If you're dependent on the adapter, you need to use the Apple ones, or you need to have multiple. Sometimes HDMI works, sometimes it doesn't, changing the adapter usually fixes it.
Sure, but there are plenty of adapters that drive 4k@60Hz without an issue, such as the latest revision Apple's adapter (old revisions would only do 4k@30).
What do you use to connect the screen to your Air? I've got an M2 air, and recently purchased a 5120x1440 screen with HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. I first connected it through HDMI to one of the USB/HDMI/USB-C Apple adapters, and the result was terrible. But I ordered a DisplayPort->USB-C cable, and it worked perfectly.
I’m sure they know most people aren’t upgrading yearly so it makes more sense to target people two gens or more behind.
Regarding your last point, it’s because of the video accelerators on the M series chips which is why they mention Final Cut. The latter comparison to Intel laptops also has to take into account that it’s been ~4 years since Apple shipped that.
After the big bump with the M1, we are back to the 10-20% generational improvements of old days. The deltas between generations are not impressive, but they do add up after a few years.
I am kind of interested in the M3 Air. I generally prefer MacBook Air over MacBook Pro, since it's lighter and more compact than the Pro, but I am currently still using a MacBook Pro with M1 Pro due to the limitations of the earlier Airs. It seems that these limitations are getting lifted slowly, with the M2 supporting up to 24GB RAM and the M3 supporting two external displays in clamshell. If the MacBook Air M3 supported 32GB RAM, it would pretty much be a no-brainer to go from the M1 Pro to Air M3.
Depends on your use case. What little heavy software I run is all terribly optimized single core stuff, so even going m2 to m3 the single core gains are appreciable to me. Iirc its about a 30% bump worth it for a little bit more in price for me. Then of course much better battery life from more and faster e cores too.
For anyone having issues with only one external display at once, DisplayLink adapters work very well, allowing you to connect much more displays if you need them.
It comes with a bunch of downsides though. It is lossy, requires a third-party driver (and you become dependent on them to provide timely updates for new macOS releases), protected content from iTunes and other players is not visible on the laptop display when DisplayLink adapters are connected, a bunch of HiDPI resolutions are missing on Apple Silicon Macs, etc.
USB-C Alt-Mode and Thunderbolt always trump DisplayLink. So it's best to figure out first what displays you want to connect and then buy the Mac that supports that configuration. But if you already have a Mac that doesn't support the number of displays that you want to hook up, DisplayLink is a solution.
Luckily, these new MacBook Air models support two external 5K@60Hz displays with the lid closed.
DisplayLink can get an LCD to re-engage from sleep which Apple's built in ports often can't. Try switching off your Dell LCD attached directly to an M2 Mini.
Works fine for me across a bunch of LG and Dell displays hooked up with DisplayPort (DP-Alt over Type-C). I only had this issue with a StarTech Thunderbolt hub (used to work fine until it didn’t).
I was cautious about this issue before buying the device, but the fears turned out to be unfounded. Sure it won't be good enough for competitive gaming or something like that, but watching youtube is pretty good, and text rendering is indistinguishable from regular display. The only issue is that refresh rate seems to be about 30fps but for many tasks it is acceptable.
> USB-C Alt-Mode and Thunderbolt always trump DisplayLink.
Yes, but does it allow you to connect 3 displays to your notebook? I actually wanted just 2 external displays, but the DisplayLink device had 2 ports, and I have many HDMI displays laying around, so I connected 3 because I can.
Not to mention, you need to give the DisplayLink driver permission to record your screen. Which is probably fine from a security standpoint, but doesn't feel great.
I've used both and while Displaylink works, native support is definitely snappier. Not by much, but just enough to be able to notice.
Maybe things are better in the Apple Silicon days, but I tried using an external "carry it with you" monitor that used DisplayLink on an old Intel MacBook and it was an endless stream of headaches. Frequently the computer just wouldn't see the monitor at all until I restarted both of them, custom settings like color and rotation would often reset, etc. The DisplayLink drivers seemed like total shit.
For me it works like a charm. I had to change the USB hub though, first one was buggy and would randomly stop working. But on a second one everything is fine.
Depends very much on what you're doing. DisplayLink adds noticeable lag, compression artifacts, and will prevent HDCP video from playing on all monitors including ones not using DisplayLink.
£1,699 for 13" Air with M3 (8/10/16), 24GB RAM, 512GB
vs £2,299 (from Costco) for 14" MBP M3 Pro (11/14/16), 36GB RAM, 512GB
I'm unsure if £600 extra is worth it for average dev use? The main points I know are: better screen, speakers, fans, 12GB extra ram. But not sure about valuing those at £600. Hm
(I'm making this specific comparison because I've just ordered the MBP, but could return it, and get the MBA :D)
Half the reason I'm getting is a Mac is because they're so nice to look at, so I think I really want the better screen. And the extra RAM is always nice. And I know I'll appreciate the decent speakers.
Plus it'll arrive way quicker. I think I'm happy with the MBP...
My personal machine is a 16GB M1 Air. I never wish I had more horsepower. It's simply never an issue.
My work machine is a 16GB M1 Pro. Ditto. Really, I'd probably be fine on an M1 Air for that, too.
[EDIT] Yes I run local docker containers, though not with huge production datasets or for load testing or whatever—all that works fine. And, hell, they run faster than the shitty oversubscribed VMs our K8S cluster hands out anyway—I see way worse performance in prod.
[EDIT EDIT] Oh and I used to compile a fairly big C++ program on my Air pretty regularly, and use it to test/develop a big 3D application. Worked fine. Took a damn beefy server to compile that project much faster than my Air did.
I'm biased that my current laptop is a 2015 MBP (never owned an Air). But I'm still tempted to return it and get a 15" M3 MBA and save £600.
I think I underestimate battery life and over-emphasised performance. I've been running some npm & maven tasks every 1 minute, run a docker container, playing music on the speakers, set battery to power saver, set brightness to 50%. And after 4.5 hours I'm down to 72%, so I think I'm happy with that.
It's not crap, though. I am using the exact config with an M1 and it's really quite usable, even for development. Also I have hundreds of tabs open. You can even watch movies because the speakers are so good - opposed to any PC laptop I ever owned.
It might be usable but the cost difference of 8/256 and 16/512 is negligible. But Apple wants to price gouge you if you want the latter. Computing hardware was always about providing the maximum upfront to give headroom in the future.
Videos, music, photos, all of these add up fast. I have encountered plenty of family and friends needing help when their storage is exhausted.
Then there is the ever increasong bloat of software, web apps, etc. that chew through RAM.
If this isn't a daily driver, sure. It is fine. But for those where this is their only computer, this is a lot of money for an 'entry level' model that can't do as much.
Worse battery life, such weak hardware (you're bringing up $200 models) that they're laggy and shitty even with a few Chrome tabs, bad trackpads, terrible accessibility options compared to Macs (I was very surprised to discover this latter issue when configuring my elderly father's Chromebook, given the market for Chromebooks is basically kids and old people)
$200 Chromebooks are the kind my various teacher friends complain about because they're so shit that they even drive elementary school kids crazy.
But they don't want to. This is what people who are spec chasers miss. They want to use a MacBook because it's a joy to use compared to a shitty $200 Chromebook
I dunno about Chrome but a single YouTube tab in Safari can use over 1GB of RAM these days. It's absolutely insane to sell a computer in 2024 that's gonna struggle to open 10+ browser tabs.
I have found 8GB RAM to be completely unusable on Windows and Linux these days. Once you've got Chrome open with half a dozen tabs and any even slightly memory hungry program (VS Code or Android Studio etc.) you're out of luck. Actually I had to have my last work laptop replaced because 8GB wasn't enough for Chrome and a Teams video call! If I tried to screen share a browser tab of Jira everything would start paging.
I have zero recent experience with MacOS or the M1,2,3 ARM hardware but I doubt even the very fast RAM is going to make that much difference to the above.
8GB of RAM is extremely usable on macOS - until last year I was using that for VSC, Podman, etc. and the only time I noticed it was running x86 Java containers in emulation. Beyond the much leaner base OS, they have hardware memory page compression which seems to make a huge difference. My corporate Dell with 16GB feels slower in every way even running the same apps (Teams, Edge, etc.).
I have been a minimum-16GB-of-RAM guy since 2012 or so, but I got a great deal last year on a base model M1 Air that I mostly just use for web/email while traveling, and as a thin client back to my Linux desktop with 64GB of RAM. I've found it surprisingly adequate, even as someone who is not so good about closing browser tabs.
I can certainly get it to start swapping easily enough, so I don't necessarily agree with all of the people I've seen claiming that these machines are revolutionary and 8GB is the new 16GB, but it does seem to manage better than I would have expected.
Apple's pricing on memory and disk upgrades really aggravates me, though, and was a significant factor in deciding to switch to Linux for my primary computer.
RAM usage even vs Intel Mac was completely different - I did push my M1 Air a while back and it complained about running out of memory but that was once in the past 1.5 years after I'd skipped rebooting for 4/5 weeks. On my Intel with 16GB this happened more often.
For my kids and parents, the M1 Air has been flawless (even for me - it's my travel Mac). But if you know you're a heavy user definitely get more RAM.
I’m writing this from an x230 with Windows and 8GB of RAM. It’s a pretty old machine I’m using for FreeCAD, 3D printer slicers, and simple admin stuff, and it’s pretty usable?
> I have found 8GB RAM to be completely unusable on Windows and Linux these days. Once you've got Chrome open with half a dozen tabs and any even slightly memory hungry program (VS Code or Android Studio etc.) you're out of luck.
Honestly, even 16GB isn't enough if you keep a modest (say, O(100)) number of tabs open. I regularly find my MBP slowed down due to "memory pressure" (swapping) at that point, with closing/restarting the browser to be an instantaneous fix.
8 GB is barely enough for web browsing these days. What will it be like in a couple years? A MacBook will generally run fine for years, it is well worth future-proofing a bit with more memory, since it is not upgradable.
Cloud storage is a thing. I don't run games on my hobby laptop. I also have external storage for sensitive docs (encrypted). I use like 50% of the storage right now.
People always respond with "cloud storage is a thing" as you have, but the point that people are trying to make is: Apple is hella overcharging for memory and storage.
And instead of everyone going "Apple, stop this" and creating change, they'd rather defend the $1T company by spouting "but the cloud".
Everyone going "Apple, stop this" won't do anything. Voting with your wallet might. Otherwise, you have freedom of choice to select a different platform/vendor.
I have tons of complaints about Apple, but this isn't one of them (the 256GB works for my family machines).
In what world is "keep buying Apple hardware but also pay for cloud storage" "voting with your wallet"
If you want the most well integrated cloud storage with these machines you'll be paying for cloud storage from Apple anyway, I'm sure Apple will be fine
my phone has 16gb ram and 512gb storage, if i'm paying 50% more than i spent on it i expect at least those specs on a current, or maybe last gen macbook, not half the storage and memory on a 2 generation old device
But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU. It is probably the best laptop in the $1K price range for laptops that don't have a GPU, but that's basically it.
The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality control that confuse consumers and leave them unhappy. This is the flip side of choice in prioritizing, say, gaming performance over battery life while optimizing price or vice-versa.
Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution.
> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU.
People love to say this without linking to a model. That's because the models in this price range are obviously not in the same weight class as a MacBook.
Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... literal-minded Hacker News commenters will understand what I mean, but let's start there.
I'm not sure it makes sense to compare new laptops with used laptops, especially since the latter generally don't come with any sort of warranty. And when you're buying off ebay (and can't inspect beforehand, like with craigslist/nextdoor), you don't even know for sure if it will work on day 1.
Yeah, I'm kind of 50/50 about comparing them for the purposes of this conversation too.
In practical terms though, when I'm looking for a new laptop I do check both pricing of new and what's on Ebay. Sometimes I'll go with the new thing, and other times I'll get the Ebay thing, depending on the situation.
I always keep an eye on those, but certified refurbished from manufacturers (whether Apple or Dell or HP, etc) are really good deals, quite often, and a known quantity.
I've no problem buying certified refurbished for work, whereas for home eBay off-lease is more acceptable because I know it's me dealing with issues if they crop up.
Yeah, I've bought refurb Apple devices from Apple, partly because they're always in pristine cosmetic condition, but mostly because you can buy AppleCare for them just as if they were new.
I think for the general public this is a reasonable comparison, since the performance is good enough for most things on a 2 year old eng pc for less than half the msrp. I would expect most corporate refurbs on eBay to be moderately reputable, and eBay is know to be consumer friendly.
I would consider buying a used computer from a person, if I could test it in advance. I don't think I'd ever buy a computer sight-unseen off ebay. They may be customer friendly on balance, but they're unpredictable enough that I wouldn't want to spend that kind of cash and risk being completely screwed.
> not sure it makes sense to compare new laptops with used laptops
It of course makes no sense at all. For any given laptop, you can also buy it used. Including MacBooks, believe it or not. It's a way of puffing up a comparison when the person making it knows the comparison doesn't stand on its own.
Which might not be a consideration whatsoever. It isn't for me; I bring my laptop to the office, or from the office, and am never using it where weight makes one bit of difference.
Commutes can be very different, too. Someone who walks and uses public transport will feel differently about the weight of their laptop than someone who just has to lug theirs to their car and across the parking lot. Same with travel: Flying with just a carry-on bag and crossing big airports on foot makes lightweight laptops a lot more attractive.
Again, not for me. I throw it in a backpack and because I'm in the US without good public transport, the distance I carry it is precisely from my house to my car (25'), then from the parking garage to the office.
I "carry" it maybe a total of 3 minutes. The weight is literally not an issue for me.
Are we talking weight class as in weight or performance?
I find the Acer Chromebook Spin 714 'in the weight class' with about the same weight, but with a less performant CPU and not as high res screen. It's also 8/256, has good battery life, and is fine for a lot of workloads. It can be had for $400ish factory recertified, or 100-200 more new brand new depending on sales.
Keep in mind I'm not saying that the two go toe to toe here, I'm just listing a lightweight alternative.
This is an excellent laptop, I've found it to be great. Plenty of people can't stand chromeos, but you can run linux in vm mode, I find the ability to have a safe env but run any x / linux apps natively makes for a very compelling combo. You can run emacs, any x-windows software like dev tools natively. I also like the ability to run android apps - with the limitation that some app disallow running them unless they are on a 'native' phone; over time it seems more and more mainstream apps allow this.
Yep same. I wanted a cheap decent laptop for when I'm traveling, which isn't often, so didn't want or need best of the best. It dawned on me I spend about all my time on the web, in vs code, or on the command line. With their Linux VM setup I can install about anything, and it both installs and runs as if it were a native app. Perfect for my use case, at least.
I'm not a huge fan of the ChromeOS UI and whatnot, but spend very little time interacting with it or Gnome on my main machine, so it's fine enough.
The other issue with linking is that the "best" in the windows market is that it's heavily dependent on current promotions. It's easy to find windows laptops discounted >20% which really throws off the direct comparisons at retail prices.
Lenovo Ideapad 5 Pro 14" 14ACN6. Got one at Costco over a year ago for around $700US. Runs Pop_OS! really well.
Weight is very much light enough for me.
Edit: There is one downside I found. I replaced the 512GB SSD with 1TB and nearly needed stitches because the bottom plate was so sharp. Oh and I just looked it up, it's listed at 3.04lbs
A big factor is how these machines age too, though. 4 years ago the 2020 M1 Macbook Air dropped, and it's still a fantastic computer today. On the other hand, I don't think I would enjoy using a 4 year old Lenovo Ideapad today
I'm just thinking more in terms of hardware. Trackpad, keyboard, display, hinges, ports, support, battery life-- all of those (in my experience) tend to either be poor out of the box or decay rapidly for many machines. I've used an "enterprise" HP laptop that's just a couple years old recently-- the battery is totally cooked and it feels like it's made out of takeout containers.
I'm a year and a half in and everything is running smooth. I still get a full workday out of the battery - and that's using Linux. That's plenty for me. It opens smooth. The keyboard is good - no deck flex. The screen is fine - even at only 300nits I don't need it brighter as I don't work in bright areas.
I really really don't see how this won't last another 2 and half years or even more.
Eh, I've been using a Dell Inspiron (the ones with aluminum chassis) since 2019. I've been using a 13 inch Dell model of the same type since 2016. They're great quality, great track pad (actual clicking, instead of haptic garbage of the MacBook) and quite reliable. I say this as someone who also owns and uses an M1 Air, and uses a 2019 MBP and a 2023 M1 for work.
Apple isn't the only one making great machines that're nice to hold and nice to use.
A 4 year old Lenovo is an eight core Ryzen with 32gb memory. Battery still lasts a day. I'm not sure there's anything significantly better available yet.
I'm still using this beautiful 12 year old Samsung series 9 laptop. Unlike my 9 year old Macbook it still receives official security updates (Win 10) and can run any new application (Xcode refuses to install on the Macbook, too old).
can't you install linux on an older mac? (similar to how you installed win 10 on a 12 yr old laptop) for newer m1+ macs we still don't know the max age support
I probably can install Linux, but I'm fairly certain Xcode would still refuse to install... The upgrade from Win 7 to 10 was seamless, replacing MacOS with Linux would be like replacing the computer.
>I don't think I would enjoy using a 4 year old Lenovo Ideapad today
Why not? I have a M1 Max supplied by my employer, and it's awesome. But guess what I use as my daily driver? An old t450s, running Ubuntu. Does everything I need, I can fix and replace anything in it (including the battery), and the keyboard is awesome. I think it's 10 years old.
I mean, for most of the work I do my computer is just a client anyway.
I have a Thinkpad T480 from 2018, bought it last year for $100. Peoples needs in a laptop are far lower than marketers would have you believe. Where as many M1 macs users are finding their laptops a struggle to do basic tasks. I use it for programming, 7 hours battery life with hot swappable battery. My fan spins up less often than the Apple silicon pros in the office which is nice because I hate fan noise.
Hello, laptop buddy!! Paid more than $700 in euros for it two years ago though. Can totally relate to the sharpness, but otherwise still very happy with it. Had to patch my ACPI to nuke S0 and get decent S3 suspend though. Did they ever patch that with firmware?
Dell Latitude 5400, i5-8265U [0], 14" matte screen. Bought refurbished, self-upgraded to 32GB and 1TB M2 PCI SSD with about 10 mins worth of work.
Currently running Firefox (14 tabs), LibreOffice Calc (spreadsheet), LibreOffice Writer (word processor), 3 WebStorm project windows (JetBrains JavaScript IDE), Kitty (terminal emulator), on Arch Linux w/Gnome (Wayland). No fans running, about 6 hrs battery life on WiFi being productive. Around 3.4 lbs, so maybe a little heavy for a 14" machine. But the extra 0.x lbs is worth it.
Total cost under $600, been using as daily driver and dev machine for about 4 years now. Handles VMs, containers, whatever with no fuss. Parts are easy to source, easy to find repair helf for, and not too bad to replace. Spends about half it's life plugged into an external 42" 4K monitor, I get 30 FPS but that is just fine for everything I do. Point being, it handles fancy external display just fine. And that's with integrated graphics.
It's not a fancy computer. Fellow nerds sneer at it. I have people wonder at the fact that I do so much with like the same Dell that their non-tech acquaintances bought at WalMart or Costco or maybe second hand off Facebook, but this thing just works. I don't care if it breaks, or if I drop it, or if I spill something on it. The cost for replacing or upgrading is easily justified by ease of doing so - plus the money that has been saved by not getting a higher-priced machine. It is silent during web browsing and most day-to-day tasks.
Literal skylake processor is not in the same performance class as M3 no matter what you tell yourself. The battery life alone is literally an order of magnitude different.
Just like OP said, this is not really a comparable machine. It’s fine if it meets your needs, but the apple is also a better machine and you shouldn’t dump on people for acknowledging this reality.
> not in the same performance class...it's fine if it meets your needs...the apple is also a better machine
all responses here have been along the lines of 'i have x many tabs open no problem. i develop y no problem. i use z containers no problem.' i tried to mirror that, in my response. sounds like the same class for most people in this thread by real usage, if not same performance class by benchmarking.
> you shouldn't dump on people for acknowledging this reality
sorry if i burst the bubble a little, if you excuse me i'll get back to being as productive as the other people crowing about the machine - possibly more so because I've spent the remaining $700-$2200 on other things that boost my productivity.
>That's because the models in this price range are obviously not in the same weight class as a MacBook.
Hard to be when other oems need to profit from hardware and pay windows/Intel/Nvidia/etc. For using their parts. But the upside is that those companies want to make repairs/upgrades easy for themselves, which in turn makes them easy for the saavy consumer to do.
Apple just metaphorically throws out a MacBook at the slightest inconvenience, they don't even bother trying to fix their own devices.
> But the upside is that those companies want to make repairs/upgrades easy for themselves, which in turn makes them easy for the saavy consumer to do.
Do they? At least for the slimmer models, I was under the impression most have copied Apple and transitioned to soldering and gluing everything into an unserviceable mess.
>I was under the impression most have copied Apple and transitioned to soldering and gluing everything into an unserviceable mess
ultrabooks, yes. everything is so crammed and specs are relatively low, so you're mostly stuck with what comes in the machine.
Most other laptops (the "pro" competitors) tend to not do that. There's no good reason for an OEM to do that if they aren't optimizing for some sub 4lb laptop.
It's part of the reason Apple has so few SKUs compared to others, because everything is conjoined; Dell will have five SKUs that are identical except two removable pieces (RAM and SSD) are varying sizes.
also, there isn’t even a barrel let alone any sort of rifling? So how could we conceivably measure laptops in terms of barrel length if there’s no diameter or length?
> Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... literal-minded Hacker News commenters will understand what I mean, but let's start there.
Just don't ever use a metaphor on Hacker News. People will always misinterpret it
> Just don't ever use a metaphor on Hacker News. People will always misinterpret it
I've always wondered why that is. No other community I'm active in insists so much on explicitly spelling out everything and very literal language – most will actually reward playing with language, if done well. Writing as if targeting Commander Data seems to work quite well though.
This might come off as projection, but in my experience, HN has a lot of people who pride themselves on their rationality, and part of this is giving off the image of never joking and always being serious. You can see this when people get mass downvoted for making jokes, which is also uncommon in other programming communities. Somehow this often spills over into metaphors as well as jokes. I think that jokes and metaphors are quite similar in that regard, both not to be taken totally seriously and/or literally. The HN insistence of being above jokes inevitably leads to being above metaphors.
Tech is known for being international, and even in the US is staffed with a lot of foreign-born labour. I don't find it surprising that a community with a high amount of non-native speakers sometimes misinterprets metaphors.
It's just not a good metaphor in this case, where weight is an actual determining factor. In boxing, weight class is literally your weight, saying nothing of your power.
League or class would have probably been better here.
People don't think about sports or boxing etc in the context of talking about laptops, and some people here speak English as a second or third or more language.
But no, let's be snarky about HN peeps being literal and misinterpreting things.
I bought a laptop for about $600 with a GPU (RTX 3050).
The display... is not comparable. Sure, it's 144hz compared to the Mac's 60hz... but it's only 74% NTSC at 250 nits with 1080p, so the color accuracy and dim picture is distractingly bad.
And as for sleep, it's just useless. You close it with 70% at night and it's dead by morning. Supposedly the battery is the same size, but even when it's awake, the battery never makes it last more than ~2 hours. Also, that's two hours... when I'm not gaming, as I painfully learned when trying to download a Windows ISO. When I'm gaming, well, then it's shorter.
I might as well mention the thick, heavy, completely plastic construction. Feels like it will shatter from one drop. On the upside I managed to upgrade it from 8GB to 16GB... but then I'm wondering why this laptop even shipped with 8GB in the first place.
Ultimately though, it runs Windows with a basic GPU. Desktop Parametric CAD isn't coming to Mac anytime soon.
As a dissenting example, I got a 14" Lenovo Ideapad with a Ryzen 7 for $250 on Ebay. It's got a nice 1440p HDR display, a great iGPU for gaming at low-power, and an 8-core CPU.
If you want an ultrabook experience, get ultrabook hardware.
I use soldiworks on an M1 Pro 14" macbook pro under parallels and it's fine for professional work (including ~2000 part assemblies). Not fast but on par with my 2019 13" macbook pro and I've never been unable to do anything that I can do on my desktop.
I was initially issued a Lenovo Thinkpad running Windows at my new job last year. I really liked my bottom-tier IBM Thinkpad back in the mid '00s (running a heavily-tuned Gentoo) and WSL exists so it's possible to do real work on a Windows machine without just using it to run a fullscreen Linux VM (... though WSL2 kinda is that) so I decided to give it a real chance.
I was working on getting issued a MacBook within a week. Right back to battery/outlet anxiety that I had escaped years and years ago by switching to Mac. Goddamn thing was losing over half its power over night. Six hours of useful time before you'll be hunting for an outlet at best from a full battery. WTF.
My MacBook that I've been using on battery almost three hours this morning and that hasn't been plugged in since about 5PM Friday is still over 70% charge. I didn't even think about or check the battery level when I opened it this morning, because there's no way it'd be a problem. Ahhh. Relaxing.
> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives
I would pay more for an acceptable alternative - no fan, Windows 11, good battery life, top quality screen, no gimmick features (touchscreen! detachable screen! whatever).
You can tell Windows laptops are general computers, the hardware fires off the gesture recognition and gives the command to the OS, so you swipe, it's recognized, then you get the action.
On Mac, the gesture is registered as it's happening, you can pull the screen, cancel, flick it, etc.
Not to mention the convenience of taking it to any Apple store and the battery life.
I game on Windows, host on Linux, and travel with Apple.
Probably some vendor provides the trackpad, and provides a driver for that trackpad, and it recognizes the gesture and then sends Windows a `GestureHappened()` event.
Versus macOS being fully integrated and effectively generating `GestureProgress(0.31)` events.
I don't notice anything unusual in that sense on MSI laptop with Linux. I start pinching, browser immediately performs gradual zoom. Swiping with 3 fingers immediately starts a "desktop switch" which is controlled by my movement - so I can pause, revert the gesture, and you will see on the screen exactly what you expect, second desktop partially showing, pausing, and then going back.
Can't test on Windows right now but I would expect it to have even less problems than Linux.
Please link to a model, just one in the 500-600 range that is comparable to a 1K Apple model.
I have owned half a dozen Windows laptops in the past, in all kinds of price ranges, cheaper and far more expensive than a Macbook Air.
None were even remotely comparable to the build quality and practicality of a Macbook Air. This was true even in the Intel CPU era. In the M processor era, the gap only increased.
You cannot even do research on a good Windows laptop because the makers constantly change the model numbers to confuse the customer and hide the flaws of these systems.
You buy a Windows laptop then either the screen, the battery life, the touchpad or the keyboard will suck ... maybe all four.
The sole reason to buy a Windows laptop and put up with all these flaws is playing games. If you need that you will put up with all that crap.
The parent isn't saying that there are $500 laptops that are as good as $1k Air. They're saying that there are $500 laptops that are "good enough" for most people's use.
Personally for home use I buy pre-owned Thinkpads and then put Linux on them. They're fine for normal use - Internet, Email and light to moderate SW Development. The screens are mediocre, but I pay £300-£400 (UK). Oh and I don't care about battery age because replacements are inexpensive and require sliding one catch to make the replacement.
Yes, for work I want something more performant and I'm considering pushing work to get me a Macbook (instead of the high-spec Thinkpad I currently have), but that's a different use case.
$500 laptops are good enough until they have to call over a tech consultant (me) to work through some issues once every 3 months. At trip charge of $65 each, they aren't saving money with a $500 laptop - and then the battery gives out 2.5 years later.
This isn't theoretical, it happens all the time. I worked with a person who had a 10 year old MacBook Air - it still worked and held a charge! They got their money's worth.
it has all the functionality that you might need it has map, a browser, runs facebook and twitter apps, tiktok what else do you need
can I use that as an argument that why buy an iPhone for 1K if you can get a great phone for $30 - no because when you talk about phones or laptop you are talking about comparable products
what I was saying that you cannot buy the same value you get with a Macbook in any laptop product
Things that matter to me and that all Windows laptops in the same price range or lower as the MBA have shittier speakers, camera, monitor (both brightness and color accuracy). The trackpad feels entirely wrong on those plastic devices and often you have loud fans turning on at random times. Furthermore they're usually heavier despite being made out of plastic rather than metal.
Why has it been so utterly impossible for a single Windows laptop manufacturer to match the build quality? Just matching the body itself would at last be SOMETHING.
I suspect it has to do with the effect of scale. Apple operates with limited number of models and that means they get volume for each mould and assembly lines. If you did 20000 laptops of one model versus 2 million you can definitely can put way more thought into every detail and that translates into higher quality.
The 2023 version is made from magnesium alloy with plastic at the back while the macbook is unibody aluminium.
The 2024 version is aluminium unibody like the macbook and the new speakers are nearly as good as macbook ones from the reviews I have read. However I have only been able to find the 4070 model which is much more expensive than the macbook. There is also the XPS 14 but it is also more expensive than the macbook
If you get the m3 air with 16gb ram and 512gb ssd the g14 is 100 dollars more expensive but the price will probably drop to lower than the macbook in sales
I solve these problems by: 1) only ever buying machines without fans; 2) barely ever touching a mouse; and 3) using my phone for speakers and camera... all three of which I was doing even when I used to use a Mac as fans have always sucked, I am a software developer and don't need or want a mouse, and Apple's laptop cameras have always been much worse than the phones in their phones AND meeting software tends to do dumb things if you screen share and try to just be in the meeting at the same time (and do it is often better to have an external camera device off to the side).
I then just have to buy any laptop that: 1) doesn't weigh much; 2) doesn't have a fan (this is so much more difficult than it should be it is insane); and 3) has a good enough monitor... I care a lot about resolution and brightness but it might be I don't care enough about color accuracy as I am a software developer and so honestly barely have much use for more than 16 colors and mostly look at photos, again, on my phone (which is also my camera and my media device in general as it is simply better at that so this makes sense). If you are a graphics designer, though, I get it... but weren't they always Apple's core market?
> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives,
I don't think this true, unless you have extremely low standards for "acceptable". I've tried a number of $400 laptops and in every single case got fed up with the shittiness within minutes.
> Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution.
Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure this out yet.
Here’s a better way to think about it: whose boss thinks that _they_ need to fix something as opposed to all of those other people? If your MacBook had a problem everyone involved knows that Tim Cook is going to pull their bosses into his office and ask why he’s reading a news story about unhappy users. In the PC or Android world you have coordinate different parties who each have a financial stake in saying that their part is working but the other guys screwed up.
This is an area where I think part of the solution should be regulatory: require manufacturers to take back defective devices within a much longer period of time after the initial sale, for example, or requiring them to cash out advertised features which don’t work reliably.
It's the heterogenous combination of multiple and constantly changing hardware requiring tweaks or adjustments to the sleep modes. It's not satisfactory to write that down but I think that's what's happening.
>Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure this out yet.
Follow the money. How much demand is there for it, Who's incentivized to fix it, how much does it cost to R&D, and will that feature increase profit margins?
The sad workaround is simply SSD's having faster boot times and setting a computer to hibernate instead of sleep when closed (and not on battery). It gets "close enough" for many.
>The sad workaround is simply SSD's having faster boot times and setting a computer to hibernate instead of sleep when closed (and not on battery). It gets "close enough" for many.
That is not a workaround since, as far as I know, only MacBooks have a sufficiently good reputation that when you close the lid, it won’t still be on in your bag.
I assume if this hibernate option was viable, then people would be slamming their Windows laptop shut and stuffing it in their bag at a moment’s notice.
>I assume if this hibernate option was viable, then people would be slamming their Windows laptop shut and stuffing it in their bag at a moment’s notice.
it's viable for me. sleep has never been consistent on any of the 10 devices I had, no matter the cost or build of the laptop. But that's the default settings when you receive a new Windows device and changing this means going deep into the settings (Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options\System Settings in case you're curious). So most people won't ever have that configured. It's probably at best what pops up if you google "how to fix windows sleep issue" or "my laptop not turning off when lid closed" kinds of stuff.
That's one mantra Apple usually lives up to: "it just works". i.e. most of their defauls align with what a consumer expects, and is consistent with behavior. Windows/Linux can do almost everything a mac does, but you may have to spend days figuring out the settings and how they interact with your specific machine.
They became a trillion dollar company by doing that. There was nothing stopping other enormous companies to compete on quality and customer service, but they decided against that. Follow the money indeed...
>There was nothing stopping other enormous companies to compete on quality and customer service, but they decided against that.
I mean, are we pretending that Microsoft also isn't a trillion dollar company? They are the only one with an incentive to do that strategy, but they probably got a good share of money from licensing their platform to other OEMs.
The next closest thing to "full OS vertical integration" are game consoles. Specialized devices focused on entertainment instead of general purpose ones.
Microsoft became a trillion dollar company with another approach, yes, you're right. Walmart became a trillion dollar company doing completely different things. Nobody is pretending anything.
But when somebody says "follow the money" as the explanation to why other brands make crap laptops, I think it is fair to point out that most money goes to the company that makes laptops that aren't crap.
>Microsoft became a trillion dollar company with another approach, yes, you're right. Walmart became a trillion dollar company doing completely different things. Nobody is pretending anything.
your point here more or less argues with your point above and goes back to what I was trying to tell you. "Follow the money" doesn't mean "follow the money of the biggest companies that you only tangentially compete with". It means "understand the business in question and use their motivation for money to figure out their priorities".
Take a look at what makes Microsoft money, then what makes HP/Acer/Lenovo/Razer/etc. money, and even what makes Intel/Nvidia/AMD money. Now ask how much "fixing a proper sleep mode" will make any of these entities. That probably gives some clue on why no one has solved this yet.
>I think it is fair to point out that most money goes to the company that makes laptops that aren't crap.
I think I explained this above, but I should emphasize that we both know the best product doesn't always make the most money.
>I think I explained this above, but I should emphasize that we both know the best product doesn't always make the most money.
Look at the thread title, look at what specific products are being discussed in the thread. There is no dispute that for laptop computers, the best product is making the most money. And I'd argue that it is the case for smart phones as well.
There is a market that is probably in the size of millions of people who would love to buy a non-Apple laptop that was a bit closer to the Macbook in quality. But other manufacturers don't seem to give a damn, even though Apple has demonstrated that it pays off making quality products and caring for the customer. Everybody would benefit from better competition.
This is a lazy troll - for example, note how conspicuously people making that claim are unable to identify specific equivalent hardware at significantly lower prices or any discussion of the total cost of ownership over the service life of the device. Simply repeating a cliche forum comment doesn’t contribute anything like those details could.
> note how conspicuously people making that claim are unable to identify specific equivalent hardware
At this rate, if you show someone a laptop that's genuinely better than a Macbook they'll complain that it's missing a notch. Setting a nebulous standard of "equivalent hardware" is a lazy goalpost intended to waste the time of good-faith commentators. It's an ivory throne in the swamp, if it suits you.
You didn’t, actually. You listed a vague description which could apply to multiple models and years and it would hardly make sense to compare an old used device to any new one.
Now, if we look at Lenovo’s current Ideapad lineup we start to see something interesting: most of them have these crappy low-res displays and once you’re talking similar display quality, you are shockingly looking at similar prices:
Mine's the 5800u model, but the 4800u one has gone as low as $450 new in the past. It supports Linux and Windows out-of-box, it's cheap as chips and it's fast enough to swap spit with whatever my Macbook Air would be running.
I like some Apple hardware; I've got a couple Powerbooks stacked up somewhere, and the early unibody models weren't terribly flawed. Modern Macs though... if you manage to ignore the OS issues, you still have to baby the hardware out of fear of a $700 topcase replacement (or worse). It's investment on top of investment on top of investment, and the returns keep getting smaller after every OS update.
To each their own. I simply don't subscribe to the "one size fits all" mentality towards Apple products, even as "normal people" computers. It's not worth starting a flamewar over though, so I'll leave it at that.
That cost over a grand new according to the reviews at the time and it’s still over $600 now. I’m not saying that Apple is the only company who can make a laptop worth using but rather that when people are saying they can get something as good for far less, their definition of “as good” inevitably has some major caveats like screen or build quality. Once you aren’t making huge compromises, you’re paying similar prices.
Similarly, you mentioned “you still have to baby the hardware out of fear of a $700 topcase replacement” but that’s true of all lightweight laptops, and the metal cases are quite durable so it’s uncommon that you need to do that. Again, my point is simply that this isn’t some big distinction between devices in that class but rather a characteristic of the concept – it’s like going around saying that a Tesla is a ripoff because you can buy a used Camry for less and being surprised when people do not find that insightful.
> The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market
Another way to look at that is "MacOS vs non-MacOS" laptop market.
There is only one manufacturer of MacOS laptops. That helps keeping the number of models down. Same thing for the iOS vs non-iOS phone and tablets market. If you want MacOS or iOS you must buy Apple. Hackintoshes do exist but are a rounding error compared to the number of machines Apple sells. And if you want Apple, you must get MacOS and iOS. You can run something else on that hardware, but again we are writing about rounding errors.
There are non-MacOS laptop manufacturers with even less models than Apple have. Maybe it's very niche but the Framework laptop has been popular on HN lately and it has only two models.
On the other side if you want to buy non-MacOS, then HP, Lenovo or Dell have a zillion of laptops each, ranging from the very low end to the very high end. Some people pick features and look at which models are left with those features (that's me.) Some people pick a price tag instead. Probably the laptop is a commodity to the price tag people, much like gas. Who really cares about the gas company? If you need to fill the tank everything will do.
And about
> the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep
this is something that Microsoft throw at us and we can't dodge it much. My laptop runs Linux and it's from the pre Hybrid Sleep era. I didn't investigate if Linux sleep works well with new laptops.
About a year and a half ago, I was looking to get a new MBPro to replace my existing one. I loved the hardware, but having used Linux since the alphabet floppies, the software was always meh. So I was in Costco one day and they had cheap Lenovo ideapads (Ideapad 5 Pro 14") on sale for something like $700US. I bought one, put Pop_OS! on it and it's been running great since. Has and AMD processor, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. It's really snappy and best of all it's pretty solid with no deck flex.
I'm curious what you can do in Pop_OS that makes MacOS software "meh" in comparison? I have a few friends who are Linux devotees yet watching them do stuff seems so tedious and slow in comparison to my workflows. Like I get that you can setup all sorts of keyboard shortcuts and stuff to do whatever you want, but that's also possible in MacOS, so what is it exactly that you can do better/faster in Pop_OS?
For most of my Linux friends they claim it's because they prefer the customization, but in practice it really seems more like they just dislike the Apple ecosystem in principle. I have yet to find a workflow they have that I can't do more easily and faster in MacOS. Similar experience with working in git in the terminal vs GUI apps. So many devs swear the terminal is "faster and more powerful for git" but in practice I am doing basic git functions faster and with fewer errors than they are just using the GitHub desktop app.
I would very much like to be proven wrong, I think OS competition is a good thing, I just want to see some practical examples.
>I'm curious what you can do in Pop_OS that makes MacOS software "meh" in comparison?
Having used Linux since forever ago, MacOs was "meh" to me because while it is a unix, it was just different enough for me to find it "meh". IOW, I found it to be "meh" for the fact that it just wasn't Linux.
I've got a M2 Max MBP I'm not using yet because there's no way to get sshfs/fuse working with free as in freedom software on macOS, and Asahi doesn't support external displays yet, so it can't take over for my ThinkPad T440p with either OS.
Package management and package availability is much worse in the macOS world. Nix is weirdly broken, at least the ARM macOS packages. Homebrew is okay but not very good, similar to Chocolatey on Windows.
When you need extra software for something on macOS, chances are it's proprietary and may even cost money. This is not the norm at all in the GNU/Linux world, and it comes off as quite disturbing to me. It's like a community of everyone scamming and mistreating each other instead of working together to improve things.
I'm not even a dev, for the record. GNU/Linux is just what works best for me.
Additional software being free by default is definitely an advantage Linux has, although usually not the benefit I see pointed to by most Linux users.
That being said I am a dev and a designer and I can't think of any paid software I use beyond Figma (which is free for basic use) and Texts.app which doesn't have any free or paid equivalent on Linux.
> It's like a community of everyone scamming and mistreating each other instead of working together to improve things.
I was saying this exact thing to a friend of mine who is big into apple products and suggested that you could technically do the things I wanted to do on apple devices.
The general ecosystem between windows/linux/mac is very different. Windows freeware is all packaged and provided on sites last updated in 2002 and look like you'll get a virus despite the site being the defacto source.
Linux software feels a lot more unified(despite n+1 packaging schemes) and feels a lot more like a collective effort where anything is possible.
Mac software wants you to break out your wallet and contribute to the APPL bottom line in order to get some basic custom functionality for some app written by a single developer that will be quietly given up on in a couple years.
It does if your machine has a hdmi port. It just doesn't support displays connected to the USB-C ports.
To comment on the topic, for me the window management on macOS is a deal-breaker, I just never manage to make it do what I want without having to constantly fiddle with the windows to put them where I need them, and focus just works on a weird way.
I tried amethyst (I think) and although it improves things, it really looks like a hack, a constant battle against the native behaviour.
Agreed the built-in window management isn't ideal (although I do like Spaces and Mission Control a lot more than what I've seen in Linux/Windows defaults) but there are a lot of free and simple apps that significantly improve it in just about any way you want. I can arrange my windows in a couple key strokes to whatever layout I desire.
My Asus zenbook 14 is around that price, has a 1TB disk, and 16GB of ram. I'm sure the processor on the M3 is faster, and probably a fair amount more battery out of it, but now I'm comparing a $1000 zenbook to a $1700 13' macbook once I add disk and memory, without the upgraded cpu.
As someone who likes to keep at least one machine dedicated to each major OS around at any given time, the thing that’s frustrating about non-Apple laptops is that just about all of them, including machines costing well in excess of base Macbook models, make big tradeoffs somewhere or another. Very few are good all-rounders, even if many are better than Macbooks in one or two aspects.
I would kill for a version of ThinkPad X1 Nano or X1 Carbon for example that had the battery life, silence, and unplugged performance of a Macbook Air for example, but no such machine exists even if I were to spend twice as much as the cost of a MacBook Air.
> I would kill for a version of ThinkPad X1 Nano or X1 Carbon for example that had the battery life, silence, and unplugged performance of a Macbook Air
Ditto on the Nano. I wind up looking at it every few months and then begrudgingly walking away because it just doesn't make any sense to buy.
I have the first gen and it’s about the perfect size for an ultraportable in my opinion, and its screen, build, and general feel are great but its battery and CPU are underwhelming at best.
The newer gens are even more confusing because they don’t offer the cooler, more efficient U CPU variants, only the hotter more power hungry P variants, which exacerbates heat and battery life issues.
Where would you set that? The only PC I’ve seen that lets you explicitly set a target TDP is the Steam Deck, the most I’ve seen elsewhere is the ability to turn off turboboost and limit clock speed.
Regardless, a default TDP above that of a U chip in a Nano is still an odd choice given that machine’s lack of cooling and battery capacity resulting from its size. It means that a lot of buyers who have no idea how to reduce it are going to have a subpar experience.
I buy myself supposedly overpriced Macs and never have hardware issues, but buy family, that prefer Windows, more affordable $400-800 HP/Toshiba laptops. Over the last decade and a half, the HPs/Toshibas invariably have keyboard failures within a year or two, with ignored keypresses and key labels rubbing off, and internal fans seized, overheating problems. And those cheap plastic cases are never the same once opened. I hate them so much. Although, I suspect if I spent as much on a PC that I do on a Mac, we wouldn't have those issues, but I can't bring myself to spend that much on a Windows laptop.
The reliability issues are real. I have a MacBook Air that is 11 years old now, I haven't done anything but replace the battery, and it still works fine. The only real issue is that the memory is not upgradable, otherwise it would still be a generally useful machine (instead of just light web browsing and Zoom).
Certain vintages of Apple laptops have proven more durable than others in my experience.
My 2007 MBP went through a battery every 11 months for about 3 cycles before I finally missed the boat on getting that 4th battery replaced under warranty.
My 2013 MBA still has a perfectly healthy battery today, though it doesn't see much use and its disk just died yesterday.
My 2017 MBP's battery degraded significantly after about 300 or 400 cycles (within spec, I think). A few keys on the keyboard partially failed due to dust or whatever (common in this vintage). The screen had some sort of damage that gave a subtle color cast to parts of the image. The USB-C ports wear out after like 20 insertions and won't hold a cable in place anymore. A year or two ago I replaced the screen and bottom case (keyboard, battery) and it's still doing fine.
> The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality control that confuse consumers and leave them unhappy. This is the flip side of choice in prioritizing, say, gaming performance over battery life while optimizing price or vice-versa.
This is 100% it, Lenovo has been killing it lately with their Yoga/Slim series, but for every laptop they have that competes with a MacBook, they also have a myriad of other options that are just e-waste. At the end of the day, the average consumer is not going to do the same kind of research that a tech enthusiast might do, and Apple has a somewhat simple catalog (although incredibly overpriced once you step out of the entry configs).
Hybrid sleep being broken is the #1 dealbreaker issue I have with my work-supplied XPS 9570. I know that machine is pretty long in the tooth at this point, but in some ways that actually makes it worse, that it's been all these years and Dell just shrugged and moved on.
It really doesn't make me want to reward them with more money, only to find out what exciting new issues will be present and trivially reproducible for the entire next revision of the hardware.
Depending on your use cases the software environment for the mac has never been worse right as the hardware has gotten so powerful and cool running. Major mac devs have totally abandoned the platform in recent years. Apple needs to rebuild good faith among developers especially game developers, or at the very least get ahead of the software drain and put and end to what factors have been causing it.
Why do you care about filesystem performance in containers? If you're running a DB from it, you surely have <10-20 concurrent users (e.g. other containers) to that DB, so who cares whether a lookup takes 1us or 10ms?
I think performance of Apple silicon is mediocre in many applications. Direct memory access by the GPU is pretty nice, but even with that it doesn't really convince. There are scenarios where it is surprisingly good though and that even includes some applications in x86 mode.
The only thing I really like about MacBooks are their displays. If notebook manufacturers would get their houses in order, they could have more attractive devices again. Perhaps their management suffers from bad eyesight.
Although one strength of Apple is also that Windows is so incredibly terrible right now. And I don't see that improving in the near term, their strategy is anti-user for decades. Apples strategy is too, but to a lesser degree and I don't see Windows getting anything right.
No calendar included in taskbar in OS like Windows has, only a calendar app that you have to launch
Per folder sorting in finder doesn't work in the file dialogue, finder never remembers which folders I want by date, alphabetised, etc.
Everything hidden away and abstracted, finding out what's actually consuming memory and swap can be much more difficult than it should, esp for ppl that got 8gb model bc AAPL want to make 99999% profit on ram and ssd upgrades.
Lots of features that are only available when your other devices are also in the Apple ecosystem. If they could get away with making MBs only connect to special "Apple AirTalk™" (WiFi) APs then they absolutely would.
Memory bandwidth doesn't matter for these types of devices, it is memory latency that matters. But best of all is actually having your application in memory and not having to do disk reads.
Most usual applications (native) runs under 100MB of real memory. If you're insisting on using electron apps from developers that does not care about performance...
Thats great for you I guess. When I work, I want vscode with all the fancy linting and language server bells and whistles. I want to be able to have a ton of chrome tabs for browsing and docs and I want a local version of whatever I am building to run. Im gonna make the bold assumption that this is quite common in the dev community. Given that, 8gb is pushing it, no matter how you spin the "but my memory is fast" or "but native apps"
It does when you have very fast solid state storage beneath it. Most computers make use of swap. If the performance gap between swap and ram is small, you will feel like you have more ram than you actually do.
And what relevance does that have with memory bandwidth? Of course a faster SSD helps if you're swapping, but you said faster memory bandwidth is what's making the tiny amounts of RAM on modern Macs "not as bad"
If you had said "the fast SSDs make these tiny amounts of RAM not feel as bad" I would've agreed
That might be your opinion, but it isn't out of line with their competitors. You don't have to look particularly hard to find other premium thin-and-lights at 8GB and a ~$999 price tag. I think that is ridiculous, because the Air is better than all of them.
On the Surface Pro 9, it is $300 to upgrade from 8 to 16GB. To go to 32GB, they require you to choose a higher tier processor which brings the normal retail price to $2599, but it currently has a $500 discount, so the total is $2099.
Not surprising. Framework has a wildly different business model than mainstream computer manufacturers.
And if we re-address the "999 for a laptop with 8 gbs of ram in 2024" comment above, it is worth noting that the Framework 13 also starts with 8GB of RAM at $1049.
Framework isn’t using LPDDR5/5X like the surface or the macbook. LPDDR adds to the cost quite a bit, as does the advanced packaging apple uses etc.
But it’s the only way to keep pushing bandwidth forward, especially for graphics/iGPU, and keep pushing power down. Socketed memory inherently is much slower and less efficient, same reason consoles don’t come with ram sticks.
AMD’s solution is a package with cache instead, to try and reduce the amount of data they have to push around. But that adds a bunch of cost and still isn’t as efficient - but it lets you keep scaling socketed memory a little farther. Can’t help but feel like the days are numbered though, there isn’t an infinite amount of runway left for socketed memory.
Honestly I don't think it is worth bringing Surface devices into the discussion. Microsoft isn't even trying. They only care about enterprise customers and are not competitive in the consumer market at all.
Maybe look at some high-end Lenovo or Dell laptops.
To me it doesn't really make sense to have the computer spend all those CPU cycles on pixels I don't even see (because of the size of a 13-14" laptop screen).
The CPU isn't the component spending the cycles. Also not seeing pixels is a feature. I am reading text roughly 99% of the time I'm on my computer. Shitty low DPI screens make my eyes ache and my head hurt. My Air's screen I can turn the overall brightness down yet still have great dynamic range. I can also see it from just about any angle unlike the typical shitty 1080p panel on the average PC laptop.
I think it's good to correct some exaggeration, but personally I would still prefer an 8gb M2 with small storage on a laptop that easily gets all day battery life. If it were going to sit on my desk 24/7 connected to a monitor, then I'd take the Asus ExpertBook. But as someone who travels and works from home but works all over the house or out of coffee shops, I would easily prefer the Mac.
>personally I would still prefer an 8gb M2 with small storage
And it would specifically have to be an M2 since they upped it to 256GB minimum. I have the lowest end M1, and the tiny SSD is a constant pain when combined with the lack of RAM.
You're absolutely right that they make a damn fine laptop (the build quality stands out to me) and they do a great job in that market.
Anecdotally, my Framework 13 AMD ran me 1500 and I ended up with 64 GB of ram, 2 TB of storage, and an AMD 7840U. I bought my RAM and storage separately to get that end cost, to be fair.
I wouldn't be surprised if the M3 actually outperforms my processor by a bit, but having way more RAM matters a lot to me. All that on top of being able to repair my own machine is a no brainer to me.
I know most laptop users wouldn't care about this stuff, but I really hope Framework does well and helps bring repairability back to laptops.
Why would you be torn? To me it seems pretty clear cut. Does all your SW run on ARM mac AND do you need that long battery life? Then get a mac. Otherwise get a framework or something else.
Just remember that those Macbook batteries are glued in and still subject to degradation over cycles/time.
A consumable component designed to be excessively hard to replace, to encourage you to upgrade sooner than necessary. (Not everyone lives near an Apple store, and nobody wants to mail the laptop off for what should be such a basic service, being without it for who-knows-how-long)
Battery life is important, but does 6hr vs 9hr vs 16hr actually matter to you? Do you actually carry your laptop around all day without access to power outlets? If not, I don't see why that should be a factor.
Apple users do - 9hr is short enough that you’re going to want a charger for a full day’s work unless you’re certain you’re only going to do very untaxing activities. People get worried when they start approaching the low battery warning point.
The run time Apple’s ARM systems get is very noticeably better - I don’t even bother packing a charger even knowing that I’ll have a full development environment, containers, etc. running all day because I’ll still arrive home at 60%.
Going to copy/paste from a comment I posted a year or so ago.
I have a 12th gen Framework 13", 13" M1 Air, and a 15" M2 Air.
I use the Framework laptop for work because I need to use Linux.
The Framework laptop is mediocre just like pretty much all PC laptops. The hinges are awful, if you pick up the laptop upright, about 50% of the time the screen falls flat 180 degrees.
The trackpad is arse in Linux.
If you're lucky you can probably get 5 hours battery life, but on a realistic workload you're looking at 2-3 hours.
The keyboard is pretty nice, but I wish ctrl/fn is swapped like Apple and it has the inverted mini-T keyboard arrows (or at least I wish someone would make a swappable keyboard for the Framework).
The speakers are bloody awful.
Display/Webcam/Mic are fine.
I would like more ports over modular ports, but I appreciate the design that went into the modular ports.
Speaking of modular ports, sometimes they abruptly stop working and require removing and reseating.
All these small nits really add up and it just feels like a mediocre experience. It is my work laptop, but I try my best to avoid using it over my PC with WSL2 or either Air laptop, but I try my best not to mix work and personal.
Both the 13" M1 Air and 15" M2 Air are just amazing compared to the Framework, and I suspect PC laptops in general. They have their drawbacks, price (gouging in some ways), less ports, can't drive dual displays, but their trackpad, finish, speakers, etc. are just amazing. I personally prefer MacOS to Linux for a desktop experience as well.
Edit:
For one C++ project I work on I need 32GB of memory to compile as sometimes the oom-killer will kill the compiler. That's one of the only reasons I use my WSL2 desktop or Framework laptop since memory is cheap.
> Anecdotally, my Framework 13 AMD ran me 1500 and I ended up with 64 GB of ram, 2 TB of storage, and an AMD 7840U. I bought my RAM and storage separately to get that end cost, to be fair.
HN used to say that System76 were the best laptops ever, so I bought two of them. They’re an incredible pile of shit, in addition to the battery life or the clunky build, the fans turn on and off like my gamer boyfriend’s PC back in 2001.
System76 said they won’t take them back, after I tried to give it to every intern.
I’m absolutely flaggerblasted at what Linux or Windows users tolerate, it seems fine for them, since all of their laptops is like this! The problem is having low standards, and compared to this, they think their laptop is great.
> HN used to say that System76 were the best laptops ever
Are you sure about this...? Every System76 convo I've ever seen on here has plenty of people chiming in to note that they're simply junk Clevo shells. It's a known issue with them.
Ideologically I love System76 (and I would buy one of their desktops, if I was still a desktop man). I would never buy one of their current laptops.
I've oscillated a lot on "my next" laptop over the years. For a while (at the height of the butterfly-keyboard/touchbar-madness) I thought about going to Linux for my personal machine. I haven't gotten there, but the Framework gives me hope that a really really excellent, serviceable, and understandable laptop can and does exist.
Just out of curiosity, why? I have ~200 tabs open in chrome, and have ~10 different apps open. Mac could handle it perfectly well due to reliance on swap and compressed memory. My swap used is 20 gb but really can't say that even when switching apps fast.
Is all the memory getting used at the same time? Mac has very good swapping of memory and extremely fast SSD. Also I work in ML modelling and I figured out at any rate I need to run(not develop) my code in cloud.
I mean, it makes sense now that they essentially merged their mobile and desktop architecture to be one for all. That plus full vertical integration means they can do a lot of things that'd end up costing double in a windows laptop to have a pale imitation of.
With that said, the specs on a Mac air are extremely modest when you really look at them. Apple is simply optimizing to do more with less.
You can, but you're getting a glorified iPad with a keyboard. Bottom-spec systems have 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage. What is this, 2012? As usual, making it a machine that's useful for light development or other more demanding tasks rapidly run you into Apple's usurious expansion pricing; what should (IMNSHO) be their bottom-end device with 16GB memory and 1TB of storage is $1,699.
That will be a great little machine to use until it starts throttling. You'll need an MBP to keep consistent peformance.
> The degree to which Apple has kinda just “won” laptops is nuts to me.
It's nuts that the entire rest of the industry basically has own-goaled Apple into a dominant position. Apple's playbook:
1. Model-year build stability over faster go-to-market on new components.
2. Better build quality.
3. Better battery life.
4. Better display, especially in value models.
Newer macOS is actually really good about running with less RAM. The only problem is then your SSD will suddenly fill up. If either was upgradable, this would be no problem.
App binaries, sure. But most of what is stored in memory is content, video, image, file cache. These will not differ much from OS to OS, the only difference would be baseline memory usage before I start opening YouTube tabs.
What I will never understand is that the screen options differ depending on which market you're in.
When I was looking at Thinkpads there was never any better options than 1920x1200 but if I switched to the US site I could order with the HiDPI OLED screen.
That sounds very strange. I got my Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen8 (13th gen i7 U-series w/ 32 GB RAM) with a 4K 16:10 OLED display. Best laptop I have ever had, amazingly fast and lasts the whole day. When I did my research before buying, I know the X1 Carbon was available with at least a 2.5K OLED display.
Hotter, heavier, and worse battery life, for sure. Slower is up for debate --- having more ram, more cores, and possibly discrete GPU is great for all sorts of things. The Ryzen 7840HS is not any worse than the M3 in multithreaded things.
Just recently there was a Thinkpad P14S on sale for $999 that blows the Macbooks out of the water in terms of ram and storage, while having a high quality OLED display and a Ryzen CPU that can easily trade blows with Apple silicon. It is hotter and heavier and has very bad battery life, though.
I just find it fascinating that people think Macbooks are faster without even bothering to at least look at some benchmarks as context. Sure, M processors are good, but Intel and AMD aren't really sleeping the past few years, but rather made some significant improvements that are worth acknowledging.
But add the mandatory upsells to a sensible amount of RAM and storage, and the 'bargain' Mac will be rather more expensive.
But yeah, there's still a real lack of Windows laptop competition these days, especially if you want a GPU. 'Gaming laptops' tend to come with severe heat/noise/weight/battery problems.
(And why are competitors touchpads still shit-tier compared to Apple? Even on those bulkier gaming laptops where space isn't at a premium and the price is on the premium side)
In $999 13" M2 Air you get 8GB Unified RAM and 256GB memory. Intel ARC seems to be better than M2 graphics. Weight is exactly the same. Usual downsides remain - fan and smaller battery life, although still pretty good.
My opinion is you can pick two: low cost, high build quality, good specs.
No one matches Apple's build and screen quality. But their base models are pretty underpowered, and it's not until you're spending closer to $2k that you get specs that feel appropriate for 2024. On the Windows side, there are lots of cheaper options, many of which have beefier specs, but the build quality pales in comparison.
The right tradeoff depends on your budget and what you really need out of a device.
Please post links to benchmarks of a windows laptop that costs the same as a base model Apple laptop but is faster, while being similar in weight, battery life and heat.
Underpowered in terms of RAMs, storage, and possibly GPU. Agree that M2/M3 are faster and have better battery life. Weight/heat to me fall under build quality, not specs.
How can a laptop be "underpowered" when in fact it's faster?
Next you're going to tell me the new I6 turbo engines are "underpowered" compared to the V8s they're replacing, even though they have more power, more torque and in the same vehicle produce faster 0-60 and 1/4 mile times.
Your definition of "underpowered" is interesting to say the least.
Lots of worthless criticism. If you want the latest and greatest buy it. If you are upgrading from an Intel macbook air than get the m3 - who wants to buy last years version
Kind of disappointing that they seem to have discontinued the 11” model. I bought one 5 or 6 years ago and it’s still working fine. Compared to the 13” and 15” models, it feels so much more portable and lightweight.
If you want a really compact device all apple offers today is the ipad, and then you have to deal with ipad os. I feel like as long as the ipad exists they will not make a new 11 inch unfortunately.
Outside of pricing, why would one buy Air vs Pro these days? I've had OG Air back in the day and tapered form factor was great. I recently was in an Apple store and looked at pro and airs.. they felt same, and also air seemed heavy (compared to ye olde tapered one). Now with Pro at 14" and Air pushing to 15".. why?
For photo/video editors, the Pro screen alone is worth more than the entire laptop. To be clear, the Pro screen is equal to a professional HDR reference monitor, and the entire laptop costs less than a professional HDR reference monitor.
The weight of the 13" Air vs 15" Air vs 14" Pro is 2.7 > 3.3 > 3.4 lbs. For developers who do development on remote machines, weight and form factor are more important. I would pay top dollar for a 12" Macbook with M processor because I do my focused editing on a big screen. Other people use their laptop for everything so a 15" screen is preferred. Also, different strokes for different folks.
I have an M2 13" air for a personal computer and a 14" pro for work.
The Air is noticeably lighter and much easier to throw in a bag without thinking about managing weight. The Pro is a fine weight for commuting, but for traveling longer distances, the weight definitely makes a difference. To the point where I'm seriously considering setting up a work partition on my personal machine so I don't need to lug the pro around on an upcoming trip.
Probably depends how big and muscular are you. I don't feel 14' PRO in my backpack at all, 16 PRO barely. Its not a flex but it definitely matters if you are a 5'1 female or 6'2 male.
To me the 14" Pro feels like a brick, the 16" is a veritable paving slab. I want something I can toss in a backpack and not feel it's there, which the Air is still just about light enough for. That may be because I live in a very walkable and bike-able area in Europe, and I do lots of both, I'm sure the trade-offs are different if you drive everywhere.
As for the screen, I think "gimped" is not doing it justice. I regularly use both, the Air's is a very nice screen in its own right and while there is a difference, it feels more like a relatively small increment on something already very solid, at least to me (I don't do any pro photo/video work). Same for the other differences, the Air's speakers are already pretty good, connectivity is fine (for me), I like not having a fan, it's way powerful enough for what I do.
Well if you had a fan you could always turn it off too. On the other hand once it is throttling its over. I used an air in the old case without the notch but with the black bezel and I gave it to the parents. Couldn’t stand throttling and how it affects the performance of my use cases. Like every five seconds a stutter like a scratched up CD. Two fan macbook pro for me. Even going all out its quieter than the 2012 era mac fans I am used to, but thats only when I push the cpu. Most of the time the fan is off entirely not even by my own doing.
> For developers who do development on remote machines
Gosh having started program on 286s in the 1980s, my M1 air feels blazingly opulently fast. What sort of local development are people doing that requires heavier compute than an M1 air, but doesn't require a full on cluster?
The only time I have heard the fans on my pro was when running games on ultra. If you hear the fans chances are if you had the air instead it would be throttling. Up to you if that is tolerable. I can’t stand throttling so I got the macbook pro with two fans.
I have owned probably 7 laptops over the past 20 years and every single one with a fan turned into a rattling jet engine mess. Do modern laptops not do this anymore? It was at least half the reason I got the Macbook Air
Macs fans are good, by the time my 2012 kicked the bucket a few months ago the fan still sounded the exact same as it always did. Different story with every other electronic fan I’ve owned of course but I guess thankfully apple doesn’t buy the cheapest fan possible.
AIUI, because the macbook air's fan is contained inside the machine that has no external ventilation ports that means the fan is mostly moving clean air with no particulate in it that will eventually build up on the fan whihc make it perform poorly.
I imaagine that the lubricant in the fan will still age, but that is also going to be less of an issue because of less dust contamination.
Better monitor, better speakers (much better in both cases), HDMI, SD. Fan, meaning less throttling on heavy workloads. Support for high-resolution and multimonitor setups. If any of these are attractive, you get the Pro.
Apple's "Pro" branding has become increasingly meaningless but in the MacBook category, which I believe is where it originated, it's meant to suggest "media professional", a demographic which has reason to care about all of these things.
There are even shades of this in the iPhone and iPads Pro, which have a few features which are mainly of interest to professional media types. For AirPods it just means "the expensive ones", and for Vision Pro it means "this is expensive". That's the main signal for phones and tablets as well, realistically.
exactly, outside of pricing. I see people say Air is noticably lighter, but I may then have a heavy hand because 13 air and 14 feel almost the same in weight to me, unlike OG Air which was light and thin. Hence, why buy Air? it's not even smaller.
Framed differently: it's 37% taller and 25% heavier. In the context of laptops, this is pretty hard not to notice. I have an MBA and my wife has an MBP — the difference is very easy to see/feel.
Its not like killing you lifting a little bit more, its already so light. Its certainly appreciably much lighter than the 15 inch 2012 mac still kicking around my house. It feels easy to hold one handed even.
I wouldn't mind that much, but my petite wife sure wishes that she could swap her MBP for an MBA! She takes her laptop in purses and other bags, so it's both about size and weight.
I just lugged my work-issued MBP through a couple of airports today, and wow, I wish I had my own MBA with me instead. That weight doesn't make a huge difference on your lap. It sure makes a difference in a carryon bag.
For me: price and weight. I frequently travel with my laptop, often with a single backpack or on a bike.
The Air is also way overkill. I had a 12" MacBook before that. It ran the software that I wrote. I write markdown in Sublime Text and run python scripts.
There just isn't a reason to get something beefier.
I could have probably gotten away with the air but there are times when it would be throttling with my uses. The extra io and other hardware upgrades are worth it imo. Especially the screen, its just bright enough on the pro to use the computer outside in full sunlight. I had a 2022 air at one point and that screen was just a bit too dim to use outside without finding shade.
VAT us a big part of it, another is currency exchange rate. Apple tends to use "1$ = 1EUR" for price conversion (to eliminate financial risk for themselves from fluctuating exchange rates), and then adds VAT on top of it.
MBA in the last few releases has just been a gimped macbook pro vs a totally different paradigm of product as it was when steve jobs pulled the first one out of a manilla envelope. The weight difference isn’t even that significant anymore its like a half pound or so. Eat a big burrito for lunch and you’re carrying more than that around all day.
Frankly, Apple is an amazing organization and I am extremely thankful that they've empowered product designers to bring us these amazing creations.
Apple is one reason that I love existing in this era. Sure, there are others. But having Apple... enables me to bring a laptop + a backup battery (anker 737) practically anywhere and work all day without needing a direct electricity connection.
Laptop + Phone + external battery packs = work all day
The light weight, stay-cool-ness ... makes it so easy to work from.
I love you Apple. So glad to not have to use Windows. Sure, Linux desktops distros are decent (despite bugs), but Apple "just works".
It's fascinating they used Excel in the product photos instead of Numbers. I wonder who actually uses Numbers these days? Or any of the Apple "productivity" apps for that matter.
They are much better integrated with the system, their UI is great and they are plain and simple. It's not just Keynote that is good. I used Pages for a lot of private stuff like letters, and Numbers suffices for a lot of simple tables too.
I avoid the MS Office suite wherever I can. Recently went through some lengths to deactive Microsofts intrusive updating background service (nearly as bad in slowing down my system as Adobes).
I would be interested to find out how many individuals and families pay for Microsoft’s software, when apple and google provide free alternatives. (Maybe constrained to families that use mac / iphone, Microsoft might be more popular for Windows families?)
ie: For most people, if you’re not getting free access through work or school, is it actually worth paying for?
I do. They are there and work just fine for my regular bleb use cases. I also edit Word files in Pages and export to Word just fine. Same with Numbers.
I really wanted to love the 13" Air but two things made me switch to the Pro after trying it for a few weeks. One is that the internal speakers suck in comparison to the Pro. I 'm not looking for audiophile quality from laptop speakers, but the Pro speakers are good enough for casually watching youtube videos, TV shows, podcasts, etc, whereas the Air speakers are harsh and tinny. The second is that the default resolution isn't .5x the native resolution, as it is for most Apple desktop/laptop displays. It's some weird in-between resolution that creates aliasing on text and such. If you bump it down to a true .5x, it's 1280x~800, which is borderline unusable for desktop browsing these days.
Lets not gulp down the koolaid. The speakers on the pro are nice for a laptop but thats it, they are nice for a laptop. A basic bluetooth speaker laps it. Honestly they are balanced poorly and very “boomy” where I feel like I need to turn the volume up more than I have to just to start to discern spoken words from a sort of mumbly bassy sound.
I have an Air and I felt like its speakers were pretty decent, but my wife bought a Pro and they're just incredible.
Sometimes I hear her watching some movie or show a few rooms away, and I can never know if she's watching it on the TV or on the Pro just by the audio alone. Those speakers do fill the room, and them some.
Do a lot of folks actively watch media content on laptops these days?
I have never really watched more than short content on that form factor. I like a bigger screen and a remote, watching anything like a movie on a laptop feels klunky.
You’d think it feels small but go ahead and sit in front of your tv and pull out your laptop. In terms of effective size from where I have the tv and the laptop, the laptop screen is bigger in my field of view. 40 inch tv too, no slouch.
I'm curious what your comparison point was for the audio quality of the MacBook Air.
In the Windows world, I rarely if ever come across a laptop where the speakers weren't clearly last in precedence for engineering and BOM consideration. Just astoundingly bad sound quality accepted as normal in the Windows laptop world, even in supposedly premium machines.
In comparison, even the least impressive MacBook Air speakers are good.
But if you were coming from another MacBook Pro when evaluating the Air I can see why you would have come away wanting better. The Pro machines are indeed a clear step up, and the larger 16" models are even better given the extra space they have to work with.
Yep I was coming from an older Intel MBP, so the downgrade to the Air was dramatic enough to be irritating. But I agree, the sound engineering in the Air isn't bad in absolute terms, probably even pretty good... just not close to the Pros.
As an Air user who pretty passionately hates hearing a laptop fan, my wonderment at the quality of the Pro's audio would end the moment I heard that fan whine.
I've had a similar train of thought, based on my experience with earlier Macbooks -- that I would pick the Air over the Pro specifically because it does _not_ have a fan and therefore could never make fan noise. But like spinningarrow, I don't think I've ever heard the fan on my work-issued M1 Pro MBP.
This is also the case with Pro M1 Max. Font is very blurry. It's funny how they turn off "scaling/sharpening filter" when video is watched. I've tried a bunch of things to fix it and none of them worked.
A 4K monitor I use works perfectly fine on Linux, but with Macbook Pro, even though resolution perfectly matches, it still has blurred font (the filter they apply completely changes the look of the font, even though I use the same one), everything just remains blurry and again, watching video disables it.
What are you comparing the font rendering to? Linux/Windows?
That's one of the things that pushed me to Mac from Linux: fonts finally looked nice. (This was around 2010.) I tried everything I could to get Linux to render decently but eventually gave up. I recognize that this is so much down to personal taste. If you prefer Windows-style ClearType to Mac's rendering, Mac (especially on a non-Retina screen) will look awful. If you like Mac's rendering, Windows tends to look awful at any resolution.
So you can get the 0.5 resolution without text aliasing (which I agree is annoying) you just get a smaller viewing area. I keep hearing complaints about aliasing on the Air, and I can respect that since the default resolution causes it, but it is fixable at the expense of reduced viewing area.
Since October, I've replaced my M-series 14" Macbook Pro for a M-series Macbook Air and I'm pretty glad with it. I can do almost anything I could have done with my Pro (Figma, coding, Docker) with so much less weight on my shoulders (commuting to work, working in cafes, etc).
I'm still very bummed with Apple's strategy in using # of supported external displays as a feature to gate laptops.
I had to return a decently spec-ced M3 Macbook PRO 14" because it only supported 1 display (base M3) and pay more for M3 pro even though I don't need the extra horsepower.
And now the base M3 Air's support 2 displays? This is wild
It's on-chip silicon, not a marketing feature. This kind of product design is just really hard. Mask sets get well into the billions of dollars, you can't just assemble a list of features as if they're all free. You need to decide upfront, often years in advance, what feature you think people will want to buy for the market you think you'll find yourself in. There are no easy answers.
But just in general, Intel has always prioritized lots of I/O flexibility on its chips. If you look at the datasheets there have always been dozens and dozens of units on every SKU that are never plumbed out to ports on the device. Three or four display outputs, six or eight USB controllers, stuff like that. Apple is the opposite: they won't include something if they aren't absolutely sure they need it. So after the shift from x86 to Apple silicon, laptop users are feeling a squeeze on I/O that used to seem "free".
In principle I agree. But the M3 chips are similar for the M3 Macbook Pro and M3 Macbook Air. The PRO laptop is the one that only supports 1 display while the AIR supports 2 with the lid closed.
Even if there are technical limitations that prevent Apple from adding more I/O easily, as a consumer it feels like artificial segmentation/limitation.
Apart from the initial M1 MacBook Pro release, it feels like most products Apple has released in the last few years has always been missing one or two features, and the next release happens to have that feature. E.g. the first M1 Air did not have MagSafe even though the Pros did, and then Apple included MagSafe in M2 Air, but it didn't support multiple displays; now Apple is including multiple displays in M3 Air.
It feels awfully convenient that each generation conveniently has a nontrivial feature upgrade.... Apple has less incentive to make each generation "complete" -- by delaying features (more) consumers will feel obligated to upgrade per generation.
It does seem odd, though, to brand a laptop as "PRO" and limit it to 2 displays, then release a non-PRO device that can handle more.
Edit: Better wording, I suppose, that the non-PRO supports two external monitors with the lid closed, the PRO supports 1. Still an odd overall offering/branding.
I had a 2019 cheesegrater Mac Pro. With Catalina, I was able to drive two 4K screens at 144Hz in HDR10, because Catalina apparently supported DSC 1.4.
Then they introduced the ProDisplay XDR with Big Sur which had people agog at "how were they able to drive this 6K display given the bandwidth limitations?"
Well, the answer is because they absolutely nerfed/bastardized DSC 1.4 from Big Sur (and it's maybe only been updated in Monterey? Unsure, I no longer have the screens - ironically I bought an XDR) to make it happen with some proprietary magic: those same screens could now only be driven at 60Hz in HDR10 or 95Hz in SDR.
Proof in the pudding was that my monitors (LG27GN950-B) actually allowed you to change the advertised/supported DSC version, and when I "downgraded" the monitors to DSC 1.2, performance actually improved, and allowed 120Hz SDR and 95Hz HDR.
This happened with many many users, across many screen types.
Apple studiously ignored it, and may still be. They simply don't care if you're not using an Apple display.
I am hoping the limit is just a MacOS thing, like how MST1.2(?) was supported on my old MBA(2015) hardware but not available on MacOS. I could Daisy chain DisplayLink monitors on Linux, but MacOS wouldn’t let me, and I was limited to a single monitor.
I use Asahi Linux on M2 now, and the USBC display support isn’t done yet, but I am hoping it would be better than MacOS.
Unfortunately it isn't. There are only two display controllers in the M1/2/3 and that can't be worked around in software. MST won't work in Asahi Linux because it's not present in the hardware. It worked on x86 Macs because the GPU supported it.
It sucks since the M series laptops have been amazing, with this one glaring problem.
I have a great M2 pro machine, but officially it can only support 2 external monitors. I should be able to close my screen and power 3. I can do this with a dock so it's not a resources problem.
I am curious what is different between the Air and the Pro that the Air can power 2 external monitors (it does say when the lid is closed) and the Pro can only power 1 regardless. Or is this a software update and the Pro page just has not been updated.
I keep hoping that this is a problem that is only temporary and eventually it will be removed or as time goes on each series can run 1 more monitor or something.
I tried a DisplayLink dock once with my M1 Max MBP. It was incredibly laggy, pegged my cpu at 40%, and didn't let me set the correct resolution/scaling level for either of my monitors (horizontal 4k 32" and a vertical 4k 27", nothing exotic).
A TB4 dock fixes most problems, but I have to hack the EDID to disable YCbCr and force RGB, or the colors look like absolute shit. The external monitors still look significantly worse under macOS than either Windows or Linux, and I have no idea why.
External display handling is easily the worst part of using a Mac for me.
i think the fact that so few are supported is part of the issue (not parent commenter, also not a user of apple products so i admittedly do lack experience in this area)
Relying on DisplayLink too. It's neat, but it's a hack. Uses a fair bit of CPU constantly and makes my Mac say "your screen is being observed." Was disappointing coming from my 2009 Mac Pro which could run 5 displays no questions asked.
Keep in mind 2 displays are only supported with the lid closed. So the only change is that now you can use an external monitor in lieu of the internal display.
Lid closed? Depends on the exact Macbook version ... The lid of my MacBook Pro (M1 pro, 16-inch, 2021) is open and actively displays stuff and additionally two external LG 4K monitors are directly connected to it via USB-C. The third USB-C port is in use for external disks, but maybe I should try sometime to connect a third monitor ...?
But nevertheless, Apple's hardware strategy sucks ...
That's so extremely backwards in relation to everything else it's mind boggling. 16 gb being considered and priced at premium, where I had a single chrome tab eating 3gb easily few time's recently.
What about colima vm for docker? Intellij, gradle daemon, android studio, xcode, electron apps, android virtual device, slack, spring boot apps, iMovie, Davinci Resolve, python notebooks?
Do you use everything together? My opinion is that if you'd use any of that seriously you buy the device that let it run correctly. Opening a multi-module project in Android Studio that requires something like 6GB or ram for the index, then running it inside a 3GB emulator on an 8GB laptop is just asking for problem. Be mindful of your RAM usage and select the suitable amount for your use cases.
I believe we are now in the 9th year of 8GB being the baseline Mac laptop RAM config.
It’s incredibly stingy. For a while you could make the argument that a lot of Air purchasers wouldn’t need it, but I don’t think that’s the case any more. My wife has an M1 Air with 8GB and between Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack she quite regularly gets beachballs and weird performance hitches.
My wife has been complaining to me about how she regularly gets the "choose which application to terminate" dialog on her Air. I knew in my heart that 8GB wouldn't be future proof, but I underestimated how fast it would be a problem. She pretty much just runs Safari and Libreoffice Calc too, nothing that should really tax the machine.
Any browser can use massive amounts of RAM if you open a lot of tabs. Especially if they are running a lot of JS that doesn't release its memory properly. There are some sites I can go to that just continue to chew away at the RAM as long as the tab is open.
In any case, it's pretty easy for the OS to swap out browser data as it is chunkable by tab. Just because it had allocated 22GB doesn't mean that it was all active. Must was certainly swapped to SSD.
Since a person cannot look at 1000 tabs at the same time, most of the tabs can be frozen. I'm writing to you from Firefox which has 826 tabs right now.
Firefox is just really good for handling huge amounts of tabs because you can install alternative tab UIs like Tree Style Tabs and scroll/search tabs like they are bookmarks.
That is interesting, I run Firefox, VSCode, containers and whatever code I'm working on. I never even need to look at RAM usage. It would be interesting to know what triggers the RAM limit in your case.
The only application I ever need to terminate is Notes, which for some reason is extremely crash prone on the mac.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted -- macOS uses available disk space as swap, and if your disk is full (and thus has no more room for swap) then it will pop up this dialog.
I get this on an M1 Pro with 16GB. It's astounding. It claims to use swap but the trust is broken. I keep the Activity Monitor around and try to guess when it'll go flaky on me, but I never guess it right. I just restarted my machine now to reset whatever stupidity it has going on.
Never had it with Windows. Or iPad, or iPhone. Why does the pro computer do this? My guess is 5k external monitor and a few desktops, but...really. I'm not running multiple layers of VM's, it'll crash it with a few VS code windows, browsers, command lines.
So what you're saying is you're running multiple browsers (VS Code is a browser), each of which takes anywhere from 1 to several GB of memory, and you're surprised that you're running out of RAM...
Correct. I often have hundreds of browser tabs open on my iPhone, but it knows how to manage resources by unloading the ones I'm not looking at right now. The Mac can also swap tabs or apps to disk. Or warn me when I hit 90%. The only wrong option is to start freezing when it's too late. I'm a software developer who has been coding for decades, and I'm surprised by this failure mode. What would a random non-techie need to learn to reason about this? It's not like Macs are marketed only to technical professionals who keep an eye on resources.
Look, at least the Apple is smart enough to wake up basically in the same window state after having refreshed the resources. That's fantastic. But even better to fix it without going through the whole "have you turned it off and on again" routine.
> I often have hundreds of browser tabs open on my iPhone, but it knows how to manage resources by unloading the ones I'm not looking at right now. The Mac can also swap tabs or apps to disk.
Different models of computing. The iPhone only displays one tab inside one application at a time. And switching is slow enough that the OS can prefetch the swapped memory for the new view. A desktop app usually keeps everything alive as switching is very random and instantaneous. And you don't go open things that require a lot of RAM when you don't have that many (Each electron app is a whole new browser which is already a resource hog)
There is an intermitted and basically unacknowleged memory leak in M1, which is supposedly addressed in M2. It also depends what app you're using - Logitech Options was somehow hogging top to 12gb on occasion, but was fixed sometime in the past few months.
> between Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack she quite regularly gets beachballs and weird performance hitches
Considering how bad all of that is about "weird performance hitches" (read: running an entire browser for every single app) are you sure that has anything to do with the memory?
I have a 14 MBP M1 16/512. It’s… not great. The other day photoshop was running super slow so I opened up process manager and discovered that not only had it eaten all 16gb of ram, it was also using up ~30gb of swap space. Even just general day to day safari use will give me random lags and slowdowns that I don’t get on my desktop which is running an i5.
This is why for my Mac needs I have a cheaper Mini. If I'm going to have to be stuck with 8GB or pay insane markups for 16gb, I'll get the 8GB Mini, and only do the purely Mac-centric stuff on it to minimize pain.
I had a Macbook Pro 2015 with 256GB SSD. (Base model was 128GB). It was a very painful experience even back then. Yet almost ten years later, we are here, still paying $200 to upgrade to 512GB, when almost every Windows laptop comes with 512GB. FYI a 1TB NVMe gen 4 drive costs less than $100.
No, what’s worse is Apple, or is it random self-styled influencers, spreading the false narrative that Apple Silicon magically requires less RAM and people actually believing that.
> macOS tends to have a better memory compression algorithm
Compared to what? Linux? Windows?
Are there any published benchmarks anywhere, otherwise this just proves my point above.
> Apple tends to have faster RAM (way more bandwidth), faster SSDs
Yes, sure, due to its integrated nature, but that does not reduce the RAM requirement. My 8GB M1 MBA, which is used as a home browsing-only laptop, is almost always in yellow on memory pressure once we have a few tabs open.
But that’s what I said: My post starts with “no”. The other points in the “but” are all still true.
The RAM or SSD are specifically not faster because of its “integrated nature”. The RAM is faster because Apple engineered an actually wide bus + multiple channels for memory access. The fatter Macs have the equivalent of up to 8-channel memory, which not even server CPUs of the competition provide. The SSD gets easily 7 GB/s reads in my testing. Both Windows and Mac have a working memory compression algorithm and a sister post claims that it works better due to hardware acceleration, which I’m inclined to believe. Memory compression on Linux is a mess as you cannot keep compressed memory pages in physical RAM, instead forcing you to partition the memory and manually handling how much and what to put in compressed zram.
Low memory situations are thus handled better than on other operating systems. Memory and memory pressure are neglected concepts in the competition, both the hardware providers and operating system providers.
> The fatter Macs have the equivalent of up to 8-channel memory, which not even server CPUs of the competition provide.
8 channels has been standard in Epyc chips since they released in 2017, the latest Epyc Genoa does 12 channels. They're also not splitting that memory bandwidth with a bandwidth hungry GPU.
SSD performance scales somewhat linearly with capacity, and modern 1TB drives are capable of 6+GB/s reads. The 256GB M2 does a measly 1.4GB/s, and from what I've seen the 1TB is also lackluster at ~5GB/s.
I disagree, and I always upgrade the RAM even though I don’t like paying more. Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control.
Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced into a treadmill of computer upgrades like we haven’t seen since the 90’s when CPUs were skyrocketing in performance every year.
For anyone who forgets what the 90’s was like, here’s an example with Mac models:
1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020
1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
That’s a 31-fold increase in clock rate (and several times that in overall performance) in the same timespan we’re discussing. Software that was written for the G4 had no chance of running on the LC (ignoring CPU architecture differences).
MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).
> It puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control
If you are talking about "native" apps, maybe. Otherwise, nah. Cross-platform apps based on web like Teams and Spotify won't put too much effort on performance as long as it is not too slow. And if you haven't realized, most of the stuff you interact with is online. People just shove an entire website.
As for professional apps -- if you can't run a heavy audio/video editing application smoothly, I'm pretty sure that's your problem. Developers can put more effort into optimizing for 8GB RAM, but at the end of the day these workflows require large amount of memory, and after a certain point it is not worth to optimize for this segment of users
I'm talking specifically about native, non-professional apps targeted at regular consumers (such as grandma, aunt Suzie, little Billy working on his science project). These are the kinds of apps that are published on the Mac App Store. Apple specifically includes Performance as a section under its App Store review guidelines. I bet if you submit an app that gobbles up more than 8GB of RAM and starts swapping like crazy on a baseline Mac, you'll get rejected by the review team.
> I disagree, and I always upgrade the RAM even though I don’t like paying more. Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control.
Shouldn't you be doing the opposite then? Keeping the baseline amount so you can know what it's like for people without a large budget and stop patronizing the applications without acceptable footprints in that circumstance?
> In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound.
We already live in that world. In the 90s you could run Netscape Navigator on a machine with 8 megabytes of memory. I've seen individual browser tabs use more gigabytes than that.
And not all of this is Electron bloat. The Stable Diffusion XL model is ~13GB. In general the quality is going to be proportional to the model size. So for the thing to get better, people need machines with more memory. And 8GB is already too small.
Shouldn't you be doing the opposite then? Keeping the baseline amount so you can know what it's like for people without a large budget and stop patronizing the applications without acceptable footprints in that circumstance?
I'm not a developer of native Mac apps. If I were, I would definitely have a baseline machine for testing.
The Stable Diffusion XL model is ~13GB
That's not a baseline consumer application. See my other reply (re: grandma and little Billy). If you're developing a native Mac app for grandma and little Billy, Apple probably doesn't want you shipping a 13GB model with it. This is an example of the point I'm trying to make: find a way to compress the model so the end user doesn't have to deal with that kind of bloat (or host it in the cloud).
> I'm not a developer of native Mac apps. If I were, I would definitely have a baseline machine for testing.
You expect every developer to buy a second Mac? They're all doing what you're doing and paying more for the machine with more memory because other applications need it, and then their application runs fine on that machine so they don't even notice the problem for the people with 8GB.
> That's not a baseline consumer application.
It will be before any of these new machines go out of support.
It's very easy to check the memory usage of your project (it's kinda in your face on XCode). If you do a few minutes test or let the app stay open for a few hours and usage has ballooned to a few GBs, that usually means you have a leak somewhere to fix.
There’s a lot of profiling tools. There’s even one in the browser’s inspector. It’s not something exclusive to XCode. You can even use Task Manager/Activity Monitor/System Monitor in a pinch.
And is there any wonder Electron has such a terrible reputation?
The thing that really bothers me is that if you look at what regular home and office users were doing on their computers in the 90's it's almost identical to what those users are doing right now, except in the 90's they had orders of magnitude slower computers with orders of magnitude less memory. Yet in many cases those 90's computers were MORE RESPONSIVE than what they have today.
All of those countless billions of investment in technology hasn't done a damn thing for the productivity of Sally the office worker or Billy the 6th grader. Arguably, it's made their lives worse (viz. social media's deleterious effects on mental health). Now everyone's pushing the heck out of AI and all I see is high schoolers using ChatGPT to cheat themselves out of an education. They can't read (critically), they can't write, they can't even spell!
So in light of all that, why should we be pushing more and more computing power (and memory, the original issue) on regular users who aren't getting any benefit (broadly, to their way of life) out of it?
> And is there any wonder Electron has such a terrible reputation?
Certainly not, but you can't fix it by putting less RAM in the machines of people with budget constraints. The developers will just pay for more themselves and then not care about those people because people who can't afford RAM generally aren't lucrative customers.
And it's also worth considering what actually causes this.
Developers want their code to work on every platform. They don't want to write different code for each platform. But each platform wants them to have to, because that makes it more likely there will be software that only works on their platform, or that doesn't work on some new competing platform. So they refuse to develop or implement cross-platform standards.
Then someone else has to do it, but that's rather a lot of work, and it turns out the easiest way to do it is to piggyback on the work already done for browsers to make them work on every platform. That's Electron. It's terribly inefficient but it saves the developer a lot of porting work, so it's widely used.
If Apple doesn't like this, they should provide cross-platform native APIs for developing applications.
If Apple doesn't like this, they should provide cross-platform native APIs for developing applications.
It’s not in Apple’s interest to do that. It would cost a lot of money to develop and only benefit the competition. It would also slow down Apple’s own ability to innovate on the APIs until the competitors catch up.
Or are you saying Apple should develop the APIs for Windows and Linux as well? Why would they do that?
RAM usage has barely budged for years. Taking the '90s as baseline again: In 1991, you could get a brand new PowerBook 100 with 2 MB of RAM. In 2001, you'd get a new PowerBook G4 with 128 MB of RAM, a 64-fold increase. But in 2013, a MacBook Air came standard with 4GB, and we're looking at only 8GB in 2024.
You're taking as your example the thing people are complaining about. 8GB of DDR5 is ~$24 retail, and that's the amount Apple is putting in their $1000 laptop. PCs of the same price typically have 32-64GB.
You're also using a time period that includes COVID and when the DRAM manufacturers got busted for price fixing.
It kind of is, e.g. Steam hardware survey has more than 80% of people with at least 16GB of RAM and almost a third with 32GB, and that's a measure of installed base rather than new computers.
In the second case it started only 3 years into your measurement period instead of 7, and then right after that was COVID. It's only now that the prices are starting to resume their historical downward trend and they're still slightly above where they were when the price fixing started in 2016.
But that explains why it's not a factor of 64 during this period. It's still the case that 8GB of DDR5 is ~$24. What reason is there to not include $100 worth on a $1000 machine? Or, if some excuse for that could be generated, why isn't there a $1100 machine with four times as much?
> But in 2013, a MacBook Air came standard with 4GB, and we're looking at only 8GB in 2024.
You're saying "RAM usage", but your evidence is "RAM provisioning", which is the entire basis for the criticism. The reality is that RAM usage has increased significantly, but Apple has been stuck by the addressable memory limits they've baked into their architecture.
As another point of comparison, a 2013 iPhone 5c (technically not released until the last quarter of 2013, but we're being generous here) had 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, though you could upgrade that to 32GB. A modern iPhone has 6GB of RAM, and comes with storage from 128GB to 1TB.
>As another point of comparison, a 2013 iPhone 5c (technically not released until the last quarter of 2013, but we're being generous here) had 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, though you could upgrade that to 32GB. A modern iPhone has 6GB of RAM
Fine, take that as your reference. It still shows that growth in memory was 1000% faster not too long ago.
No, it doesn't. It shows that Apple's RAM offerings have grown at widely different rates depending on their product. Apple has been stingy on memory compared to the broader industry. The biggest EC2 instance you could get in 2013 had 244GB of memory, but today you can get one with over 24TB of memory.
...and that still proves nothing about the growth of RAM usage in that time period, because the size of the offerings in individual products are largely independent of the increases in RAM usage.
Seriously? A 9 year gap and you go from that to not wanting users to feel like they need to upgrade every year? Mighty slippery straws you're grasping there.
> Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control.
I've yet to notice the impact on getting web sites to stop using incredibly bloated JavaScript that leak memory, video conferencing & streaming apps from using codecs that redline the CPU, or game developers from writing games that make the GPU cry uncle, or...
> 1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020.
You got lucky, because we got the Mac II Si back then, but they were both kneecapped on the factory floor by the 16-bit memory bus that crippled the 68020's 32-bit memory bus. 2 year old PCs ran circles around it. Planned obsolescence was was one of Apple's crowning achievements back then.
> 1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
The Macbook Air from ten years ago would be Retina I had: a 2-core i7 that could go up to 3.5 GHz. Ask me how well that runs software written for the new M3's. ;-)
> MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).
You might have missed this bit from Apple's blurb on the new MacBook Airs: "13x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air". The fastest Intel-based Macbook Air was produced [checks notes], 4 years ago. It's hard not to read that like they aren't trying to convey a need to upgrade.
If you're wondering why people are saying what they're saying, it's because Apple is saying what they're saying.
The RAM being so low is confusing. Given RAM is one of the cheaper components. I guess they do some smart swap memory using SSD - but my Air laptop struggles to run PowerPoint, few browser tabs and video calling at the same time.
Obviously a planned obsolescence tactic. If the base models were 16GB there's a fine chance Apple wouldn't see another dollar from those customers for another 10+ years at minimum. The average customer doesn't understand their memory requirements and cannot be expected to predict how they may change in the future. It's the only thing they got left they can use to trick customers into buying a machine that will need to be replaced sooner.
Look, I'm not happy about the base ram situation either, I really do think they should put in 12/16GB at minimum.
But at the same time, I've never seen non-techies complain that they can't open a few tabs, reply to a few emails, watch youtube, listen to music, and study on their base laptops. They're amazing for that.
If we need more memory to accomplish the above tasks any time soon, we're in a sad state of software development and bloat.
We are in a sad state of bloat. 99% of what people do on their computers now goes through a web browser, and opening lots of tabs chews through RAM like nothing else.
I use my M1/8GB Air pretty much exclusively for web browsing and run into 'out of application memory' errors on a regular basis. Relaunching Safari generally solves the problem. It's just such a bad look for Apple to be selling premium priced products that can't do the most basic task people want them for without throwing errors.
If we're going by anecdotes, none of the people in my circle with base machines have ever complained about their computer running out of memory for their basic tasks. I'm sure Apple is looking at their telemetry data and they aren't seeing it either.
Again, I'm personally not happy about shelling out $400 for 24GB of memory on my next Macbook, but I gave away one of my base machines with 8GB to a family member, and they simply did not notice.
We're already in a sad state of software development and bloat, once upon a time you needed around 1/32nd the RAM to do all the same things you can do today (1/128th if you count the 90s state of the web as "the same").
A web browser adds a significant amount of memory usage to any task, even with basic static webpages, and then almost every other app you use is secretly also a web browser but none of the RAM usage from it can be shared with the web browser you're already running.
Agree it is crazy, I am writing this from my M1 Air with 8GB of RAM and I am yet to ever have a real issue with a RAM limitation... the OS does an amazing job juggling RAM.
This comes up often, but it's honestly totally fine for a non-technical user who only occasionally uses anything other than Safari and Photos.
The vast majority of their market would not fit into the developer, content creator, or just plain power-user category. There's people who just log on to do internet banking and email when they're not on Reddit or Facebook.
For some anecdata, 16/512+ would be a waste on my parents, in-laws and my whole extended family for that matter. They would benefit from it, but they're not screaming at spinning wheels, and are probably a bit more patient and accustomed to 'slowness', which is pretty subjective.
Seems like a borderline conspiracy to fry the internal SSD over time, adding a wear-point to the product family, and making sure consumers keep consuming. I'm talking about system paging: virtual memory on the disk.
Even worse, if one plots the (price, unified memory amount, chip type), and looks at it from right-to-left, then the dollars per system capability is disgusting when you order a lesser system. You get the most value for your money when you buy the maximum unified memory configuration (on those three points).
Better yet, with a maxed out unified memory configuration, one can further save on SSD writes by using (and loading/storing) RAM disks for their projects!
Most people buying a MacBook for work are likely getting a higher unified memory, so their workstations live longer. Meanwhile consumers will have to keep consuming as they fry their internal SSD's on their airs...
I was also wondering if a 1TB apple fabric device is simply an 8TB fabric device with 8x the write life...
The way Apple has always had e-waste laptops at the bottom of the line is pretty disgusting with their environmental posturing. MacOS barely works on 128GB space and 8GB ram yet for many years that was the baseline, it was particularly bad because the ram gets full just browsing then your baseline OS and a few files is enough that the swap disk would get full soon after.
Have a crate with about 40+ of those machines at work, essentially useless from the era where the person in charge of buying laptops just bought the bottom end for every employee and considered it a job done.
I can do 4 monitors with my lid closed with my Dell XPS 13. It is crazy to see an Apple Laptop that costs $2000+ cannot do a laptop that costs $1000. People with money really don't know how to shop.
Really? I just recently tried out (and took a photo of) an m2 macbook pro with 2k displays attached, lid open and screen mirroring on. 4 screens with 60“ tv in the distance. Would that really not work on an m3 mac?
Stuff like this is why I can not switch to Apple, I would not expect or even think to look up which Macbooks can support at least 2 displays if they otherwise had decent enough specs for them. Who knows what else I am failing to consider?
I don't want to waste time migrating to a new system, only to find out I need to return/resell it, or later down the road find out another arbitrary/artificial limitation Apple has set that I either have to find a work around for or suck up until I can switch machines again if none exist.
This is unfortunate since there are some features that have made it very tempting to switch.
I feel like I accidentally discovered a huge hack for this by upgrading to a 49" DQHD monitor. It's the exact same resolution as two 27" 1440p monitors so it's like any Apple silicon chip has always supported dual external displays. And it was a much better overall value compared to buying 2 displays + over-specced macbook.
Do you mind sharing the monitor model? Found the Samsung LC49G97TSSNXDC for $999[1], but also a reddit thread about some issues with it and a 2019 MacBook Pro[2] (which is admittedly Intel rather than Apple silicon-based).
Samsung CRG9 (previous sale at Costco for $749, currently $849) connected through HP USB-C Dock G5 (models are confusing, exact one I bought was https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RGC9QSL/). I'm using original base M1 Macbook (currently $749 at Costco) and have had zero issues with the monitor. Without the dock you might need a USB-C to DisplayPort adapter like mentioned in reddit comments you linked to, but I already had the dock from a previous workstation and everything just worked when I plugged it in.
Considering minor Macbook upgrades can get you into >$1500 price territory pretty easily I think this a fantastic value. If you wanted to buy my full setup right now it would be $849 + $749 + $145 = $1745 but you're getting “dual” monitors and dock that can be reused with any modern machine, making it easy to switch between work and play. I can even plug my Steam Deck into it. :) (No affiliation with any of these products!)
I have two Samsung Ultrawides, one at home, one at work. They both work perfectly fine with my M2 Max MBP, including at 120Hz. I have connected them directly and via a Lenovo TB4 docking station. No issues either way.
One thing you should be aware of is that having two seperate monitors can be an advantage for Window management on macOS. With two monitors, I can swap spaces on one of them and keep everything as is on the other. With only one it's not that easy.
If it can identify something people will pay more for, while not quite putting off most people, it'll do it, no matter how mad.
So if most people think 8GB is fine for a laptop, they'll buy it, and everyone else pays through the nose for more.
Most people only want one extra screen? That's what you get on the base machine and you must pay (alot) for more. If one day most people need two, then you'll get two.
Apple seem to spend a lot of design time on how to extract the most money out of those willing to pay, no matter how annoying it is.
You can use more external displays using a dock and DisplayLink Manager though. I got three extra monitors to run on my M1 Air with no problems that way.
So, the cheapest configuration with 16 GB of RAM (and still with a measly 256GB of SSD) begins at €1479 (previously incorrectly stated as €1700) in the EU with VAT and that's with the older M2 chip. As for the external display thing, you basically have to "sacrifice" the laptop's screen and built in keyboard and trackpad in order to use a 2nd display. Jesus wept.
CORRECTION: The price for 16/256 is at €1479.
You can get open box macs from some retailers a few months after the sku releases for huge savings sometimes almost 20%. I got a mbp for like over $400 off iirc from best buy with three cycles on the battery. At that price it didn’t even make sense to go with apple refurbished.
I don't think many people use a laptop with an external display without closing the lid. Laptops are terrible for ergonomics and the only solutions are using a stand with a separate keyboard and mouse or closing the lid and using it like a desktop. In both cases the built-in keyboard and trackpad aren't being used.
my biggest regret of 2023 is buying the MBA with M2 chip. it is so underpowered compared to the MBP - no right hand ports, lower memory, no support for 2 monitors - that it was not worth the few hundred dollars saved and lighter weight which was something i thought I valued.
so just a word of advice to fellow devs - go for the MBP. if you're on here you need it.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadI like M1 Pro so far with models up to 30-70b parameters, but the memory bandwidth is my current limit.
With a large jump in unified memory and bandwidth we could see 120b parameter models running on a laptop.
As a side note, why does Apple continue to reference the Intel MacBook Air... It's over 6 years old now, no shit this new CPU is 16x faster...
I wouldn't be surprised if they could double performance.
I know Apple is pushing MLX, and MLC-LLM is fast too, but in practice most Mac users (I think) are using llama.cpp based stacks.
These kind of comparisons are still valid for me. There are plenty of others less technical than me that want these too. The youngest intel Airs only just aged out of applecare coverage last year, and for most casual users getting 4 years out of an Apple computer is totally expected.
However, you quickly hit throttling if you push for more than a couple minutes at a time (like when you export in Handbrake, it will slow down and only run marginally faster than the M1, in my experience).
I suspect mine would be green almost all the time, even on this almost three year old M1 Max.
If Apple releases on-device AI, this will be an effective way of getting people to upgrade like they used to, but haven't had to recently. For example, I bought Pro-level computers in my younger years, but now would only consider an MBA, mini, or iMac. But they could get me to go for a Pro if it were the only way to get more RAM for better AI performance. It will also likely shorten upgrade cycles since newer computers would have the latest and greatest performance. When I bought my M2 MBA years ago I suspected it would last me a long time. Now I'm not so sure since I don't have a ton of RAM.
I reject this all-or-nothing black and white childish framing of it.
Not comparable. M2 Ultra with 128GB RAM has 800 GB/s bandwidth.
Maximum bandwidth for a DDR5 Intel 14900K system is 89.6 GB/s. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236773/...
The temps will be completely normal since that is normal operation. TDP is only 80 watts for M2 Ultra.
> You can only get 2tb of storage max i believe, you are probably bottlenecked elsewhere
No. Just no. This is not the issue. The models are loaded into GPU memory.
The $20/month subscription is going to give you access to commercial models, but generally you have to run the open weight models yourself. With the unified RAM you can trivially run the larger 70B+ models.
AI researchers generally have to use CUDA due to how the ecosystem is still mostly CUDA-only for training and fine tuning, but those who need to occasionally use custom/local models for inference will likely find high end Macs being a good fit for their use cases.
Personally, I’m reasonably happy with GPT4 and Github Copilot, and I’ve sometimes used Midjourney, though I cancelled my subscription since I’m not currently generating any images. Are there important apps that I’m missing?
I personally use it mostly to keep tabs on the latest models released on huggingface. There has been a lot of interesting developments since last year, and models have become more and more powerful.
Eg: The M3 Max is a substantial improvement over the M2 Max in both CPU and GPU. But the M3 Pro is a moderate improvement at best compared to the M2 Pro.
For most real-world users, the M3 really is about 30% faster in single-core and 100% faster in multicore. That is really significant for a lot of us, especially software engineers. But the really big speedups mentioned in Apple's marketing are more niche and it takes some savvy to recognize that.
(I'm plenty content with my M1 Max for now and I expect I'll continue to happily use it for a few more years)
I don't know why you bought a new one. You can have two ways to look at this, one way is your ultra pessimistic view, my view is I don't need to upgrade my laptop ever 2 years anymore.
Before the M1 Max I was upgrading so often because intel macbooks sucked so much. Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a decade.
As for being "exploited" by ads, just don't be, stop mindless consumption...
I’m doing most of my daily driving on whatever computer work gives me anyway, this is just the personal dev/audio machine. I do the same with a gaming computer too though, my gaming laptop from like 7 years ago is still going strong. I turn down shiny graphics settings to get good FPS anyway, I care way more about gameplay than visuals.
That's a nice thought but the computer will probably lose security updates in the next 10 years.
And that really annoys me. The press release says that the new computer is "built to last" and I'm sure that's true, physically. I have a 2015 Macbook Pro which works fine (obv. slower than a modern computer but fine for everything I need to do), it does still get security updates (it's two OSs behind the current macOS at the moment), but I think the time until it doesn't is probably measured in months.
As I say, it works perfectly, was indeed "built to last", but I guess I'm going to have to throw it away (bad for the environment) and buy a new one soon?
That also makes me less enthusiastic about dropping huge amounts of money when I do finally buy a new laptop.
It's replacing a 2015 MBP I bought used in 2019, which replaced a 2011 MBA I bought used in about 2013.
I wouldn't exactly just avoid them, though most are useless, so it's not a bad idea. You just want to understand what they are... even honest ones will only present information that is a reason to buy.
E.g., when I saw the iPhone 15 ads and the best thing they could say about was that it had some titanium, I knew it was a product I could ignore. (Not that I have an iPhone 14 either, but I already knew that one wasn't worth an upgrade to me).
These "pro" machines have always been known for work and productivity, and 8GB just sounds like a piss poor product decision
It's pure ewaste that it exists.
It's also why you should understand your personal use case and do research. I think this is on you, not Apple. Corpos gonna corpo -- you have to do the research to figure out whether the gains from new chips will actually impact your workflow.
If you bought a M3 Max just to fuck around on Facebook and Hacker News then of course you won't notice a difference. If you are running workloads that actually require that level of performance then you will notice a significant difference. M3 Max is twice as fast at rendering 3D scenes in Cinebench.
> Support for up to two external displays: MacBook Air with M3 now supports up to two external displays when the laptop lid is closed …
Edit: I had a brainfart and forgot that both ports are routable. It's market segmentation or stupidity like with the M2 MBA.
The M3 MacBook Air relaxes this restriction by allowing two external displays.
The addition is the ability to have two external when closed; likely this could have mainly been done in software if they cared.
(You can get more than one external on a laptop with the screen open if you go up to the Max or Pro or whatever.)
Perhaps more to the point, you're right -- Apple doesn't deserve to be lauded for removing something that was a dumb restriction in the first place. But it is interesting considering this is the most popular laptop in the world.
Restriction implies they made the deliberate decision to withhold or break functionally. Limitation is probably more accurate, because they didn't put the extra work to make it work properly.
From a consumer standpoint? Apple sells about six million Macs per year and the Air is their best-selling computer and anecdotally it is popular with the HN crowd. So it is objectively impactful. I would call that therefore "interesting" but at that point we're splitting semantic hairs so whatever.
It's easy to deduce that it's a big deal for macbook air users because it wasn't possible before.
It's easy to deduce both from the article and from other comments here, which presumably you read if you're going through the trouble of responding to someone else's comment.
I typically despise this type of question, where you're obviously trying to make a point but playing dumb and playing it off as if you have no clue what you're talking about.
This type of question is used all over the place and super obnoxious.
I'm not American, genuine question, why is it a big deal that you're getting free healthcare? I've had free healthcare my whole life, shrug.
As a European, genuine question. Why is it a big deal that Biden wants to forgive student loan? I've gotten free education my whole life, shrug.
As an apple user, why is it a big deal that Dell is extending it's warranty to 2 years? My apple device gets updates 4 years later, shrug.
Just for clarity, it's so far from novel in the world of windows laptops that it's genuinely confusing why that would be an advertised feature.
I must have struck a nerve with you after my objection to the format of the question.
My only mistake here was not saying those were oversimplified made up examples, thought it was obvious but apparently not.
The restriction I am most annoyed with these days is the lack of external GPU passthrough. I’m not even sure the asahi Linux folks have gotten that working yet.
So folks are probably just happy they’re not having to deal with as many compromises and tradeoffs (they get to have their PC that works almost just like a smartphone but does more things their intel machine could now). That’s totally understandable.
Ah, yes, "poor Apple couldn't find a way".
Except it did for the more pricey models.
Nonsense, Celeron 600, 1c/1t CPU from 25 years ago could drive multiple monitors just fine.
> more gpus
Nonsense, you just need more VRAM and guess what? DVMT was a thing 15 years ago.
> and more IO hardware on chip.
If you can use the external monitor with the either USB port then you have all the IO needed. Nonsense.
You needed an agp video card of some kind. You're making a false comparison. Once again they clearly made tradeoffs to get the best balance for product experience, cost, and their own supply chain considerations (for entry level laptops, tablets, phones).
You needed a video card of some kind. You can stick multiple PCI cards in one PC just fine, alongside one AGP card. And this is the time when the usual gaming video card had a whooping 32-64Mb of RAM. There is absolutely no reason a computer can be limited in amount of displays it can drive. And if 20+ y/o PCs could drive multiple monitors there is no reason the top notch tech company couldn't do that.
> You're making a false comparison
No, you are just trying to justify the greedy corporation habits.
> Once again they clearly made tradeoffs
No, they segmented their products and their fanbois are not only drunk their koolaid but eagerly defend it too.
You're really showing off your ignorance here, and you're assuming a lot around my defending of greed etc. My view's on Apple's pricing are pretty irrelevant here, and I have nothing to say for or against them because I frankly don't care and don't know the logistics behind them.
All the times I've worked on projects that involve shipping an operating system, hardware, etc I've found that there are a lot of tradeoffs especially when you're doing something a little bit different. This is the case with M# silicon and also the case with Windows on Snapdragon systems.
They aren't starting with expandable hardware built for running desktop PCs, they (apple, Qualcomm) are starting with highly integrated SoCs that have some really narrow goals around power and battery life. Their systems are more designed for running phones and tablets than for entry level laptops.
> No, they segmented their products and their fanbois are not only drunk their koolaid but eagerly defend it too.
Don't like it? Don't buy one. But fact is, their more narrow model for how a PC can be built is selling really well and very few regular people miss their second monitor because of it.
Ah, yes, Mr. Highhorse.
> This is the case with M# silicon
Except there are two Thunderbolt/USB4 ports on M2 Macs which can drive 40Gbit of data and supports DP2.0 Alt Mode.
There is no limitation on what port you should use for external display, each one would work.
Which means that the hardware is fully capable of running whatever amount of the external displas you want.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/109523
> Don't buy one
Yes, but don't sell me "Apple M* is da best" shit, okay?
> and very few regular people miss their second monitor because of it
Ah, yes, lack of a second monitor is freedom. Koolaid in it's finest.
Here’s a good rundown of display controller blocks from marcan: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/w32hjn/comment/...
I’d take marcan’s word over yours if I have to be completely frank.
> Yes, but don't sell me "Apple M* is da best" shit, okay?
I never did, once again you’re assuming a lot. I originally chimed in to mention that people like these machines and others (like the newer windows on snapdragon systems) because they strike a good balance between mobile phone and desktop systems.
> Ah, yes, lack of a second monitor is freedom. Koolaid in it's finest.
Once again you’re assuming a lot. What straw-man are you trying to beat up here?
>> DisplayLink of course works, but it's an ugly virtual screen thing using compressed data over USB3, not a true directly connected external display.
From marcan himself. So yes, they just didn't want.
> I never did
>> get the best balance for product experience
> Once again you’re assuming a lot
Let me remind you of your words, because looks like your forgot what you wrote:
>> their more narrow model for how a PC can be built is selling really well and very few regular people miss their second monitor because of it.
They’re not going to ship that, knowing their engineering team they’d probably consider it a huge hack. They probably also have considered how proficiently their gpu can drive two versus 3+ 6K studio displays under varying circumstances.
It’s actually probably possible to get this going on asahi via usb a display link. Good thing no ones forcing anyone to run macOS on this hardware.
> Let me remind you of your words, because looks like your forgot what you wrote:
There’s nothing controversial in what I wrote. They clearly have grown Mac marketshare by building computers using their more restrictive phone hardware.
That’s not my opinion, that can actually be measured from the increase in web traffic from WebKit.
And I have certainly not talked about any other platform, which usually uses multi-chip approaches.
Comparing the port count/capabilities of the two isn't a fully fair comparison though. The Apple Silicon Macbook Air models are likely 1) much faster than that corporate-issued laptop (even if it's workstation class), and 2) much smaller and quieter (no fan noise even under load).
Though I'm not sure why all the griping about how many monitors an Air can support; users can buy a Macbook Pro if they want more monitors? I don't understand the logic behind buying a tiny, thin laptop only to dock it as a workstation.
as if $500 isn't money to you. Maybe it indeed isn't, but that is a lot of money to many people.
FYI Intel Macbook Air has supported dual external monitors 2018-2020, and same for base Macbook Pro 2012 (Retina) - 2020.
This time, it supports for up to two external displays with the lid closed.
The Macbook Air with M1 is already discontinued. [0].
Can't wait for the Mac mini with M3 Max or Mac Studio with M3 Ultra.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/04/apple-discontinues-m1-m...
At which point you might as well spring for the Pro.
I can't fault the business logic but as someone who'd only use a Mac for occasional iOS development, this nudging upward dissuades me from pursuing that idea altogether.
The Air with 16GB is not too bad, especially if you get the discounts that are everywhere.
There's a big server rack at home with multiple servers, so the Linux server part isn't a draw in my case.
Wow. Until they support CUDA or more ML/AI implementations on their chips, this is just marketing speak.
But "supports cloud-based solutions" is a pretty lame way to sell it.
> M3 takes MacBook Air performance even further:
> Game titles like No Man’s Sky run up to 60 percent faster than the 13-inch MacBook Air with the M1 chip.
> Enhancing an image with AI using Photomator’s Super Resolution feature is up to 40 percent faster than the 13-inch model with the M1 chip, and up to 15x faster for customers who haven’t upgraded to a Mac with Apple silicon.
> Working in Excel spreadsheets is up to 35 percent faster than the 13-inch model with the M1 chip, and up to 3x faster for customers who haven’t upgraded to a Mac with Apple silicon.
> Video editing in Final Cut Pro is up to 60 percent faster than the 13-inch model with the M1 chip, and up to 13x faster for customers who haven’t upgraded to a Mac with Apple silicon.
> Compared to a PC laptop with an Intel Core i7 processor, MacBook Air delivers up to 2x faster performance, up to 50 percent faster web browsing, and up to 40 percent longer battery life.
Combining the two datapoints 15x faster than Mac with non-Apple-silicon and 2x faster than PC with i7 makes it seem like Intel parts have improved a lot since Apple stopped using them.
Regarding your last point, it’s because of the video accelerators on the M series chips which is why they mention Final Cut. The latter comparison to Intel laptops also has to take into account that it’s been ~4 years since Apple shipped that.
I am kind of interested in the M3 Air. I generally prefer MacBook Air over MacBook Pro, since it's lighter and more compact than the Pro, but I am currently still using a MacBook Pro with M1 Pro due to the limitations of the earlier Airs. It seems that these limitations are getting lifted slowly, with the M2 supporting up to 24GB RAM and the M3 supporting two external displays in clamshell. If the MacBook Air M3 supported 32GB RAM, it would pretty much be a no-brainer to go from the M1 Pro to Air M3.
USB-C Alt-Mode and Thunderbolt always trump DisplayLink. So it's best to figure out first what displays you want to connect and then buy the Mac that supports that configuration. But if you already have a Mac that doesn't support the number of displays that you want to hook up, DisplayLink is a solution.
Luckily, these new MacBook Air models support two external 5K@60Hz displays with the lid closed.
I was cautious about this issue before buying the device, but the fears turned out to be unfounded. Sure it won't be good enough for competitive gaming or something like that, but watching youtube is pretty good, and text rendering is indistinguishable from regular display. The only issue is that refresh rate seems to be about 30fps but for many tasks it is acceptable.
> USB-C Alt-Mode and Thunderbolt always trump DisplayLink.
Yes, but does it allow you to connect 3 displays to your notebook? I actually wanted just 2 external displays, but the DisplayLink device had 2 ports, and I have many HDMI displays laying around, so I connected 3 because I can.
I've used both and while Displaylink works, native support is definitely snappier. Not by much, but just enough to be able to notice.
vs £2,299 (from Costco) for 14" MBP M3 Pro (11/14/16), 36GB RAM, 512GB
I'm unsure if £600 extra is worth it for average dev use? The main points I know are: better screen, speakers, fans, 12GB extra ram. But not sure about valuing those at £600. Hm
(I'm making this specific comparison because I've just ordered the MBP, but could return it, and get the MBA :D)
Half the reason I'm getting is a Mac is because they're so nice to look at, so I think I really want the better screen. And the extra RAM is always nice. And I know I'll appreciate the decent speakers.
Plus it'll arrive way quicker. I think I'm happy with the MBP...
My personal machine is a 16GB M1 Air. I never wish I had more horsepower. It's simply never an issue.
My work machine is a 16GB M1 Pro. Ditto. Really, I'd probably be fine on an M1 Air for that, too.
[EDIT] Yes I run local docker containers, though not with huge production datasets or for load testing or whatever—all that works fine. And, hell, they run faster than the shitty oversubscribed VMs our K8S cluster hands out anyway—I see way worse performance in prod.
[EDIT EDIT] Oh and I used to compile a fairly big C++ program on my Air pretty regularly, and use it to test/develop a big 3D application. Worked fine. Took a damn beefy server to compile that project much faster than my Air did.
Something between "editing an .html file" and "recompiling huge C++ projects every hour"
A few docker containers, IntelliJ, etc
The MBP arrived. What a machine!
I'm biased that my current laptop is a 2015 MBP (never owned an Air). But I'm still tempted to return it and get a 15" M3 MBA and save £600.
I think I underestimate battery life and over-emphasised performance. I've been running some npm & maven tasks every 1 minute, run a docker container, playing music on the speakers, set battery to power saver, set brightness to 50%. And after 4.5 hours I'm down to 72%, so I think I'm happy with that.
$999 for an 13-inch M2 Air is just bonkers. You can easily pay $1500, even $2000 for Windows laptops that are hotter, heavier, AND slower.
Videos, music, photos, all of these add up fast. I have encountered plenty of family and friends needing help when their storage is exhausted.
Then there is the ever increasong bloat of software, web apps, etc. that chew through RAM.
If this isn't a daily driver, sure. It is fine. But for those where this is their only computer, this is a lot of money for an 'entry level' model that can't do as much.
And I bet I use my computer more strenuously than 90% of the population.
Those times are over when you swim in the mainstream.
$200 Chromebooks are the kind my various teacher friends complain about because they're so shit that they even drive elementary school kids crazy.
https://imgur.com/a/VzCQ4zF
I have zero recent experience with MacOS or the M1,2,3 ARM hardware but I doubt even the very fast RAM is going to make that much difference to the above.
I can certainly get it to start swapping easily enough, so I don't necessarily agree with all of the people I've seen claiming that these machines are revolutionary and 8GB is the new 16GB, but it does seem to manage better than I would have expected.
Apple's pricing on memory and disk upgrades really aggravates me, though, and was a significant factor in deciding to switch to Linux for my primary computer.
For my kids and parents, the M1 Air has been flawless (even for me - it's my travel Mac). But if you know you're a heavy user definitely get more RAM.
Honestly, even 16GB isn't enough if you keep a modest (say, O(100)) number of tabs open. I regularly find my MBP slowed down due to "memory pressure" (swapping) at that point, with closing/restarting the browser to be an instantaneous fix.
And instead of everyone going "Apple, stop this" and creating change, they'd rather defend the $1T company by spouting "but the cloud".
I have tons of complaints about Apple, but this isn't one of them (the 256GB works for my family machines).
If you want the most well integrated cloud storage with these machines you'll be paying for cloud storage from Apple anyway, I'm sure Apple will be fine
The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality control that confuse consumers and leave them unhappy. This is the flip side of choice in prioritizing, say, gaming performance over battery life while optimizing price or vice-versa.
Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution.
People love to say this without linking to a model. That's because the models in this price range are obviously not in the same weight class as a MacBook.
Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... literal-minded Hacker News commenters will understand what I mean, but let's start there.
But a lot of people (especially the less technically inclined) will only buy brand new, which I think is for safety.
Anyway, 2nd hand laptops on Ebay can be both really good and in that price range. :)
In practical terms though, when I'm looking for a new laptop I do check both pricing of new and what's on Ebay. Sometimes I'll go with the new thing, and other times I'll get the Ebay thing, depending on the situation.
I've no problem buying certified refurbished for work, whereas for home eBay off-lease is more acceptable because I know it's me dealing with issues if they crop up.
It of course makes no sense at all. For any given laptop, you can also buy it used. Including MacBooks, believe it or not. It's a way of puffing up a comparison when the person making it knows the comparison doesn't stand on its own.
Except that there are plenty? As long as you avoid Dell it's easy to find a good deal.
Oh, and I prefer plastic. Aluminum adds weight for nothing.
Which might not be a consideration whatsoever. It isn't for me; I bring my laptop to the office, or from the office, and am never using it where weight makes one bit of difference.
I mainly use a desktop if I'm at home or the office.
I only use a laptop occasionally in bed or heavily when traveling.
I "carry" it maybe a total of 3 minutes. The weight is literally not an issue for me.
I get it can be for others, but not EVERYONE.
I find the Acer Chromebook Spin 714 'in the weight class' with about the same weight, but with a less performant CPU and not as high res screen. It's also 8/256, has good battery life, and is fine for a lot of workloads. It can be had for $400ish factory recertified, or 100-200 more new brand new depending on sales.
Keep in mind I'm not saying that the two go toe to toe here, I'm just listing a lightweight alternative.
I'm not a huge fan of the ChromeOS UI and whatnot, but spend very little time interacting with it or Gnome on my main machine, so it's fine enough.
Weight is very much light enough for me.
Edit: There is one downside I found. I replaced the 512GB SSD with 1TB and nearly needed stitches because the bottom plate was so sharp. Oh and I just looked it up, it's listed at 3.04lbs
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+5600U&i...
Here's the M1:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+320...
I really really don't see how this won't last another 2 and half years or even more.
Apple isn't the only one making great machines that're nice to hold and nice to use.
Ymmv. I got the low power screen instead of a touch screen and it spends most of the day rendering Emacs from a server elsewhere.
Browsers and local compile&run probably comes in around six hours. Some very cheap external monitors bring the runtime down to a couple of hours.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/16/3160289/samsung-series-9-...
Why not? I have a M1 Max supplied by my employer, and it's awesome. But guess what I use as my daily driver? An old t450s, running Ubuntu. Does everything I need, I can fix and replace anything in it (including the battery), and the keyboard is awesome. I think it's 10 years old.
I mean, for most of the work I do my computer is just a client anyway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Lenovo/comments/zq3tc5/how_to_disab...
And it worked for me.
Currently running Firefox (14 tabs), LibreOffice Calc (spreadsheet), LibreOffice Writer (word processor), 3 WebStorm project windows (JetBrains JavaScript IDE), Kitty (terminal emulator), on Arch Linux w/Gnome (Wayland). No fans running, about 6 hrs battery life on WiFi being productive. Around 3.4 lbs, so maybe a little heavy for a 14" machine. But the extra 0.x lbs is worth it.
Total cost under $600, been using as daily driver and dev machine for about 4 years now. Handles VMs, containers, whatever with no fuss. Parts are easy to source, easy to find repair helf for, and not too bad to replace. Spends about half it's life plugged into an external 42" 4K monitor, I get 30 FPS but that is just fine for everything I do. Point being, it handles fancy external display just fine. And that's with integrated graphics.
It's not a fancy computer. Fellow nerds sneer at it. I have people wonder at the fact that I do so much with like the same Dell that their non-tech acquaintances bought at WalMart or Costco or maybe second hand off Facebook, but this thing just works. I don't care if it breaks, or if I drop it, or if I spill something on it. The cost for replacing or upgrading is easily justified by ease of doing so - plus the money that has been saved by not getting a higher-priced machine. It is silent during web browsing and most day-to-day tasks.
Just like OP said, this is not really a comparable machine. It’s fine if it meets your needs, but the apple is also a better machine and you shouldn’t dump on people for acknowledging this reality.
all responses here have been along the lines of 'i have x many tabs open no problem. i develop y no problem. i use z containers no problem.' i tried to mirror that, in my response. sounds like the same class for most people in this thread by real usage, if not same performance class by benchmarking.
> you shouldn't dump on people for acknowledging this reality
sorry if i burst the bubble a little, if you excuse me i'll get back to being as productive as the other people crowing about the machine - possibly more so because I've spent the remaining $700-$2200 on other things that boost my productivity.
Pfft. Okay. I wonder if there’s a name for this kind of reaction, “door slamming”?
Normally it behooves you to be in the right when you do it.
Hard to be when other oems need to profit from hardware and pay windows/Intel/Nvidia/etc. For using their parts. But the upside is that those companies want to make repairs/upgrades easy for themselves, which in turn makes them easy for the saavy consumer to do.
Apple just metaphorically throws out a MacBook at the slightest inconvenience, they don't even bother trying to fix their own devices.
Do they? At least for the slimmer models, I was under the impression most have copied Apple and transitioned to soldering and gluing everything into an unserviceable mess.
ultrabooks, yes. everything is so crammed and specs are relatively low, so you're mostly stuck with what comes in the machine.
Most other laptops (the "pro" competitors) tend to not do that. There's no good reason for an OEM to do that if they aren't optimizing for some sub 4lb laptop.
I think “class” is the term you’re looking for. Or ballpark.
What are you talking about? Laptops aren't even round.</literal>
I just don’t see the metaphor here /s
Just don't ever use a metaphor on Hacker News. People will always misinterpret it
I've always wondered why that is. No other community I'm active in insists so much on explicitly spelling out everything and very literal language – most will actually reward playing with language, if done well. Writing as if targeting Commander Data seems to work quite well though.
League or class would have probably been better here.
But no, let's be snarky about HN peeps being literal and misinterpreting things.
Because they all have a crap screens (1920x1080) and bad battery life and we would point it out lol
Can you show me just one of those, please?
I would buy it today.
The display... is not comparable. Sure, it's 144hz compared to the Mac's 60hz... but it's only 74% NTSC at 250 nits with 1080p, so the color accuracy and dim picture is distractingly bad.
And as for sleep, it's just useless. You close it with 70% at night and it's dead by morning. Supposedly the battery is the same size, but even when it's awake, the battery never makes it last more than ~2 hours. Also, that's two hours... when I'm not gaming, as I painfully learned when trying to download a Windows ISO. When I'm gaming, well, then it's shorter.
I might as well mention the thick, heavy, completely plastic construction. Feels like it will shatter from one drop. On the upside I managed to upgrade it from 8GB to 16GB... but then I'm wondering why this laptop even shipped with 8GB in the first place.
Ultimately though, it runs Windows with a basic GPU. Desktop Parametric CAD isn't coming to Mac anytime soon.
If you want an ultrabook experience, get ultrabook hardware.
I had no problems with Fusion360 running under Rosetta 2 and Autodesk recently released an Apple Silicon version of Fusion360.
I was working on getting issued a MacBook within a week. Right back to battery/outlet anxiety that I had escaped years and years ago by switching to Mac. Goddamn thing was losing over half its power over night. Six hours of useful time before you'll be hunting for an outlet at best from a full battery. WTF.
My MacBook that I've been using on battery almost three hours this morning and that hasn't been plugged in since about 5PM Friday is still over 70% charge. I didn't even think about or check the battery level when I opened it this morning, because there's no way it'd be a problem. Ahhh. Relaxing.
I would pay more for an acceptable alternative - no fan, Windows 11, good battery life, top quality screen, no gimmick features (touchscreen! detachable screen! whatever).
No such thing exists, as far as I can tell.
You can tell Windows laptops are general computers, the hardware fires off the gesture recognition and gives the command to the OS, so you swipe, it's recognized, then you get the action.
On Mac, the gesture is registered as it's happening, you can pull the screen, cancel, flick it, etc.
Not to mention the convenience of taking it to any Apple store and the battery life.
I game on Windows, host on Linux, and travel with Apple.
Versus macOS being fully integrated and effectively generating `GestureProgress(0.31)` events.
Can't test on Windows right now but I would expect it to have even less problems than Linux.
Last time I checked on Windows, swiping will result in basically an alt-tab after the swipe.
It was not a fluid motion that could be cancelled.
Please link to a model, just one in the 500-600 range that is comparable to a 1K Apple model.
I have owned half a dozen Windows laptops in the past, in all kinds of price ranges, cheaper and far more expensive than a Macbook Air.
None were even remotely comparable to the build quality and practicality of a Macbook Air. This was true even in the Intel CPU era. In the M processor era, the gap only increased.
You cannot even do research on a good Windows laptop because the makers constantly change the model numbers to confuse the customer and hide the flaws of these systems.
You buy a Windows laptop then either the screen, the battery life, the touchpad or the keyboard will suck ... maybe all four.
The sole reason to buy a Windows laptop and put up with all these flaws is playing games. If you need that you will put up with all that crap.
Personally for home use I buy pre-owned Thinkpads and then put Linux on them. They're fine for normal use - Internet, Email and light to moderate SW Development. The screens are mediocre, but I pay £300-£400 (UK). Oh and I don't care about battery age because replacements are inexpensive and require sliding one catch to make the replacement.
Yes, for work I want something more performant and I'm considering pushing work to get me a Macbook (instead of the high-spec Thinkpad I currently have), but that's a different use case.
This isn't theoretical, it happens all the time. I worked with a person who had a 10 year old MacBook Air - it still worked and held a charge! They got their money's worth.
The other day I bought a 30 dollar phone,
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Walmart-Family-Mobile-BLU-View-4-...
it has all the functionality that you might need it has map, a browser, runs facebook and twitter apps, tiktok what else do you need
can I use that as an argument that why buy an iPhone for 1K if you can get a great phone for $30 - no because when you talk about phones or laptop you are talking about comparable products
what I was saying that you cannot buy the same value you get with a Macbook in any laptop product
Things that matter to me and that all Windows laptops in the same price range or lower as the MBA have shittier speakers, camera, monitor (both brightness and color accuracy). The trackpad feels entirely wrong on those plastic devices and often you have loud fans turning on at random times. Furthermore they're usually heavier despite being made out of plastic rather than metal.
The 2023 version is made from magnesium alloy with plastic at the back while the macbook is unibody aluminium.
The 2024 version is aluminium unibody like the macbook and the new speakers are nearly as good as macbook ones from the reviews I have read. However I have only been able to find the 4070 model which is much more expensive than the macbook. There is also the XPS 14 but it is also more expensive than the macbook
Edit :- Found a 4060 model of the g14 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-rog-zephyrus-g14-2024-14-o...
If you get the m3 air with 16gb ram and 512gb ssd the g14 is 100 dollars more expensive but the price will probably drop to lower than the macbook in sales
I then just have to buy any laptop that: 1) doesn't weigh much; 2) doesn't have a fan (this is so much more difficult than it should be it is insane); and 3) has a good enough monitor... I care a lot about resolution and brightness but it might be I don't care enough about color accuracy as I am a software developer and so honestly barely have much use for more than 16 colors and mostly look at photos, again, on my phone (which is also my camera and my media device in general as it is simply better at that so this makes sense). If you are a graphics designer, though, I get it... but weren't they always Apple's core market?
I don't think this true, unless you have extremely low standards for "acceptable". I've tried a number of $400 laptops and in every single case got fed up with the shittiness within minutes.
Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure this out yet.
This is an area where I think part of the solution should be regulatory: require manufacturers to take back defective devices within a much longer period of time after the initial sale, for example, or requiring them to cash out advertised features which don’t work reliably.
Follow the money. How much demand is there for it, Who's incentivized to fix it, how much does it cost to R&D, and will that feature increase profit margins?
The sad workaround is simply SSD's having faster boot times and setting a computer to hibernate instead of sleep when closed (and not on battery). It gets "close enough" for many.
That is not a workaround since, as far as I know, only MacBooks have a sufficiently good reputation that when you close the lid, it won’t still be on in your bag.
I assume if this hibernate option was viable, then people would be slamming their Windows laptop shut and stuffing it in their bag at a moment’s notice.
it's viable for me. sleep has never been consistent on any of the 10 devices I had, no matter the cost or build of the laptop. But that's the default settings when you receive a new Windows device and changing this means going deep into the settings (Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options\System Settings in case you're curious). So most people won't ever have that configured. It's probably at best what pops up if you google "how to fix windows sleep issue" or "my laptop not turning off when lid closed" kinds of stuff.
That's one mantra Apple usually lives up to: "it just works". i.e. most of their defauls align with what a consumer expects, and is consistent with behavior. Windows/Linux can do almost everything a mac does, but you may have to spend days figuring out the settings and how they interact with your specific machine.
If you follow the money, you can see it flowing in to Apple's bank account from consumers.
But I don't think every other OEM would have the same success even if it ended up being higher quality.
I mean, are we pretending that Microsoft also isn't a trillion dollar company? They are the only one with an incentive to do that strategy, but they probably got a good share of money from licensing their platform to other OEMs.
The next closest thing to "full OS vertical integration" are game consoles. Specialized devices focused on entertainment instead of general purpose ones.
But when somebody says "follow the money" as the explanation to why other brands make crap laptops, I think it is fair to point out that most money goes to the company that makes laptops that aren't crap.
your point here more or less argues with your point above and goes back to what I was trying to tell you. "Follow the money" doesn't mean "follow the money of the biggest companies that you only tangentially compete with". It means "understand the business in question and use their motivation for money to figure out their priorities".
Take a look at what makes Microsoft money, then what makes HP/Acer/Lenovo/Razer/etc. money, and even what makes Intel/Nvidia/AMD money. Now ask how much "fixing a proper sleep mode" will make any of these entities. That probably gives some clue on why no one has solved this yet.
>I think it is fair to point out that most money goes to the company that makes laptops that aren't crap.
I think I explained this above, but I should emphasize that we both know the best product doesn't always make the most money.
Look at the thread title, look at what specific products are being discussed in the thread. There is no dispute that for laptop computers, the best product is making the most money. And I'd argue that it is the case for smart phones as well.
There is a market that is probably in the size of millions of people who would love to buy a non-Apple laptop that was a bit closer to the Macbook in quality. But other manufacturers don't seem to give a damn, even though Apple has demonstrated that it pays off making quality products and caring for the customer. Everybody would benefit from better competition.
At this rate, if you show someone a laptop that's genuinely better than a Macbook they'll complain that it's missing a notch. Setting a nebulous standard of "equivalent hardware" is a lazy goalpost intended to waste the time of good-faith commentators. It's an ivory throne in the swamp, if it suits you.
Okay, let’s test that: try being the first one in the thread to do so and see what responses you get.
Nobody seems to have replied. Do you want the honors of telling me there's no glass trackpad?
Now, if we look at Lenovo’s current Ideapad lineup we start to see something interesting: most of them have these crappy low-res displays and once you’re talking similar display quality, you are shockingly looking at similar prices:
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-i7-1255U-Graphics-Thunderbolt4...
I like some Apple hardware; I've got a couple Powerbooks stacked up somewhere, and the early unibody models weren't terribly flawed. Modern Macs though... if you manage to ignore the OS issues, you still have to baby the hardware out of fear of a $700 topcase replacement (or worse). It's investment on top of investment on top of investment, and the returns keep getting smaller after every OS update.
To each their own. I simply don't subscribe to the "one size fits all" mentality towards Apple products, even as "normal people" computers. It's not worth starting a flamewar over though, so I'll leave it at that.
Similarly, you mentioned “you still have to baby the hardware out of fear of a $700 topcase replacement” but that’s true of all lightweight laptops, and the metal cases are quite durable so it’s uncommon that you need to do that. Again, my point is simply that this isn’t some big distinction between devices in that class but rather a characteristic of the concept – it’s like going around saying that a Tesla is a ripoff because you can buy a used Camry for less and being surprised when people do not find that insightful.
Another way to look at that is "MacOS vs non-MacOS" laptop market.
There is only one manufacturer of MacOS laptops. That helps keeping the number of models down. Same thing for the iOS vs non-iOS phone and tablets market. If you want MacOS or iOS you must buy Apple. Hackintoshes do exist but are a rounding error compared to the number of machines Apple sells. And if you want Apple, you must get MacOS and iOS. You can run something else on that hardware, but again we are writing about rounding errors.
There are non-MacOS laptop manufacturers with even less models than Apple have. Maybe it's very niche but the Framework laptop has been popular on HN lately and it has only two models.
On the other side if you want to buy non-MacOS, then HP, Lenovo or Dell have a zillion of laptops each, ranging from the very low end to the very high end. Some people pick features and look at which models are left with those features (that's me.) Some people pick a price tag instead. Probably the laptop is a commodity to the price tag people, much like gas. Who really cares about the gas company? If you need to fill the tank everything will do.
And about
> the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep
this is something that Microsoft throw at us and we can't dodge it much. My laptop runs Linux and it's from the pre Hybrid Sleep era. I didn't investigate if Linux sleep works well with new laptops.
For most of my Linux friends they claim it's because they prefer the customization, but in practice it really seems more like they just dislike the Apple ecosystem in principle. I have yet to find a workflow they have that I can't do more easily and faster in MacOS. Similar experience with working in git in the terminal vs GUI apps. So many devs swear the terminal is "faster and more powerful for git" but in practice I am doing basic git functions faster and with fewer errors than they are just using the GitHub desktop app.
I would very much like to be proven wrong, I think OS competition is a good thing, I just want to see some practical examples.
Having used Linux since forever ago, MacOs was "meh" to me because while it is a unix, it was just different enough for me to find it "meh". IOW, I found it to be "meh" for the fact that it just wasn't Linux.
You sound offended, don't be.
Genuinely, how did you get offended out of that?
Package management and package availability is much worse in the macOS world. Nix is weirdly broken, at least the ARM macOS packages. Homebrew is okay but not very good, similar to Chocolatey on Windows.
When you need extra software for something on macOS, chances are it's proprietary and may even cost money. This is not the norm at all in the GNU/Linux world, and it comes off as quite disturbing to me. It's like a community of everyone scamming and mistreating each other instead of working together to improve things.
I'm not even a dev, for the record. GNU/Linux is just what works best for me.
That being said I am a dev and a designer and I can't think of any paid software I use beyond Figma (which is free for basic use) and Texts.app which doesn't have any free or paid equivalent on Linux.
I was saying this exact thing to a friend of mine who is big into apple products and suggested that you could technically do the things I wanted to do on apple devices.
The general ecosystem between windows/linux/mac is very different. Windows freeware is all packaged and provided on sites last updated in 2002 and look like you'll get a virus despite the site being the defacto source.
Linux software feels a lot more unified(despite n+1 packaging schemes) and feels a lot more like a collective effort where anything is possible.
Mac software wants you to break out your wallet and contribute to the APPL bottom line in order to get some basic custom functionality for some app written by a single developer that will be quietly given up on in a couple years.
It does if your machine has a hdmi port. It just doesn't support displays connected to the USB-C ports.
To comment on the topic, for me the window management on macOS is a deal-breaker, I just never manage to make it do what I want without having to constantly fiddle with the windows to put them where I need them, and focus just works on a weird way.
I tried amethyst (I think) and although it improves things, it really looks like a hack, a constant battle against the native behaviour.
I would kill for a version of ThinkPad X1 Nano or X1 Carbon for example that had the battery life, silence, and unplugged performance of a Macbook Air for example, but no such machine exists even if I were to spend twice as much as the cost of a MacBook Air.
Ditto on the Nano. I wind up looking at it every few months and then begrudgingly walking away because it just doesn't make any sense to buy.
The newer gens are even more confusing because they don’t offer the cooler, more efficient U CPU variants, only the hotter more power hungry P variants, which exacerbates heat and battery life issues.
is there really anything stopping you from setting a lower cTDP if that’s really what you want?
Regardless, a default TDP above that of a U chip in a Nano is still an odd choice given that machine’s lack of cooling and battery capacity resulting from its size. It means that a lot of buyers who have no idea how to reduce it are going to have a subpar experience.
My 2007 MBP went through a battery every 11 months for about 3 cycles before I finally missed the boat on getting that 4th battery replaced under warranty.
My 2013 MBA still has a perfectly healthy battery today, though it doesn't see much use and its disk just died yesterday.
My 2017 MBP's battery degraded significantly after about 300 or 400 cycles (within spec, I think). A few keys on the keyboard partially failed due to dust or whatever (common in this vintage). The screen had some sort of damage that gave a subtle color cast to parts of the image. The USB-C ports wear out after like 20 insertions and won't hold a cable in place anymore. A year or two ago I replaced the screen and bottom case (keyboard, battery) and it's still doing fine.
This is 100% it, Lenovo has been killing it lately with their Yoga/Slim series, but for every laptop they have that competes with a MacBook, they also have a myriad of other options that are just e-waste. At the end of the day, the average consumer is not going to do the same kind of research that a tech enthusiast might do, and Apple has a somewhat simple catalog (although incredibly overpriced once you step out of the entry configs).
It really doesn't make me want to reward them with more money, only to find out what exciting new issues will be present and trivially reproducible for the entire next revision of the hardware.
Abandoning the (clearly lacking) Mac Store is not these same as abandoning the macOS platform.
The only thing I really like about MacBooks are their displays. If notebook manufacturers would get their houses in order, they could have more attractive devices again. Perhaps their management suffers from bad eyesight.
Although one strength of Apple is also that Windows is so incredibly terrible right now. And I don't see that improving in the near term, their strategy is anti-user for decades. Apples strategy is too, but to a lesser degree and I don't see Windows getting anything right.
No calendar included in taskbar in OS like Windows has, only a calendar app that you have to launch
Per folder sorting in finder doesn't work in the file dialogue, finder never remembers which folders I want by date, alphabetised, etc.
Everything hidden away and abstracted, finding out what's actually consuming memory and swap can be much more difficult than it should, esp for ppl that got 8gb model bc AAPL want to make 99999% profit on ram and ssd upgrades.
Lots of features that are only available when your other devices are also in the Apple ecosystem. If they could get away with making MBs only connect to special "Apple AirTalk™" (WiFi) APs then they absolutely would.
Its Unix-like under the hood, with mostly same syntax for the terminal, but linux and MacOS are very fundamentally different.
If you had said "the fast SSDs make these tiny amounts of RAM not feel as bad" I would've agreed
And if we re-address the "999 for a laptop with 8 gbs of ram in 2024" comment above, it is worth noting that the Framework 13 also starts with 8GB of RAM at $1049.
But it’s the only way to keep pushing bandwidth forward, especially for graphics/iGPU, and keep pushing power down. Socketed memory inherently is much slower and less efficient, same reason consoles don’t come with ram sticks.
AMD’s solution is a package with cache instead, to try and reduce the amount of data they have to push around. But that adds a bunch of cost and still isn’t as efficient - but it lets you keep scaling socketed memory a little farther. Can’t help but feel like the days are numbered though, there isn’t an infinite amount of runway left for socketed memory.
Maybe look at some high-end Lenovo or Dell laptops.
I'll pick the second to the top tier models, since that's what the Air is for Apple:
Dell Latitude 5440 - i5-1345U, 8 GB DDR4, 256 GB PCIe NVMe - $1,099.00
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/latitude-5440-l...
ThinkPad X13 Gen 4 - i5-1335U, 8 GB LPDDR5, 256 GB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe, $959.40 after coupon
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/configurator/cto/index.html?bun...
Prices for premium laptops... are premium, and the strip-down models start with modest specs.
With the size difference between the MBA and MBP almost eliminated, the M2 MBA was a superfluous SKU at launch, much less now.
It boggles my mind people still buy 1080p laptops.
Those who scale up, and aren't photographers... What's the use ?
For $1700 you can get a sub-1kg Asus ExpertBook B9 with 32GB RAM and a 2TB disk and a decent 12th 12 core Gen Intel CPU.
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-ExpertBook-i7-1255U-Military-B94...
Not saying it is better in all respects, but definitely in some, meaning there are definitely alternatives.
And it would specifically have to be an M2 since they upped it to 256GB minimum. I have the lowest end M1, and the tiny SSD is a constant pain when combined with the lack of RAM.
And the screen is 1080p from 15 years ago.
No thanks.
Haven't had an issue with mine, except a bit noisy fan that was fixed with a recent firmware update.
Battery life is stellar as well and I can easily go on for the work day and more with it, from what I've seen.
Anecdotally, my Framework 13 AMD ran me 1500 and I ended up with 64 GB of ram, 2 TB of storage, and an AMD 7840U. I bought my RAM and storage separately to get that end cost, to be fair.
I wouldn't be surprised if the M3 actually outperforms my processor by a bit, but having way more RAM matters a lot to me. All that on top of being able to repair my own machine is a no brainer to me.
I know most laptop users wouldn't care about this stuff, but I really hope Framework does well and helps bring repairability back to laptops.
* Framework is philosophically best, and they make solid machiness. * Macbook Air has just insane battery life and is so small.
A consumable component designed to be excessively hard to replace, to encourage you to upgrade sooner than necessary. (Not everyone lives near an Apple store, and nobody wants to mail the laptop off for what should be such a basic service, being without it for who-knows-how-long)
The run time Apple’s ARM systems get is very noticeably better - I don’t even bother packing a charger even knowing that I’ll have a full development environment, containers, etc. running all day because I’ll still arrive home at 60%.
I have a 12th gen Framework 13", 13" M1 Air, and a 15" M2 Air. I use the Framework laptop for work because I need to use Linux.
The Framework laptop is mediocre just like pretty much all PC laptops. The hinges are awful, if you pick up the laptop upright, about 50% of the time the screen falls flat 180 degrees.
The trackpad is arse in Linux.
If you're lucky you can probably get 5 hours battery life, but on a realistic workload you're looking at 2-3 hours.
The keyboard is pretty nice, but I wish ctrl/fn is swapped like Apple and it has the inverted mini-T keyboard arrows (or at least I wish someone would make a swappable keyboard for the Framework).
The speakers are bloody awful.
Display/Webcam/Mic are fine.
I would like more ports over modular ports, but I appreciate the design that went into the modular ports.
Speaking of modular ports, sometimes they abruptly stop working and require removing and reseating.
All these small nits really add up and it just feels like a mediocre experience. It is my work laptop, but I try my best to avoid using it over my PC with WSL2 or either Air laptop, but I try my best not to mix work and personal.
Both the 13" M1 Air and 15" M2 Air are just amazing compared to the Framework, and I suspect PC laptops in general. They have their drawbacks, price (gouging in some ways), less ports, can't drive dual displays, but their trackpad, finish, speakers, etc. are just amazing. I personally prefer MacOS to Linux for a desktop experience as well.
Edit:
For one C++ project I work on I need 32GB of memory to compile as sometimes the oom-killer will kill the compiler. That's one of the only reasons I use my WSL2 desktop or Framework laptop since memory is cheap.
HN used to say that System76 were the best laptops ever, so I bought two of them. They’re an incredible pile of shit, in addition to the battery life or the clunky build, the fans turn on and off like my gamer boyfriend’s PC back in 2001.
System76 said they won’t take them back, after I tried to give it to every intern.
I’m absolutely flaggerblasted at what Linux or Windows users tolerate, it seems fine for them, since all of their laptops is like this! The problem is having low standards, and compared to this, they think their laptop is great.
Are you sure about this...? Every System76 convo I've ever seen on here has plenty of people chiming in to note that they're simply junk Clevo shells. It's a known issue with them.
Ideologically I love System76 (and I would buy one of their desktops, if I was still a desktop man). I would never buy one of their current laptops.
I would love if I could run macOS on a Framework.
Just out of curiosity, why? I have ~200 tabs open in chrome, and have ~10 different apps open. Mac could handle it perfectly well due to reliance on swap and compressed memory. My swap used is 20 gb but really can't say that even when switching apps fast.
E.g. transit routing software.
With that said, the specs on a Mac air are extremely modest when you really look at them. Apple is simply optimizing to do more with less.
That will be a great little machine to use until it starts throttling. You'll need an MBP to keep consistent peformance.
It's nuts that the entire rest of the industry basically has own-goaled Apple into a dominant position. Apple's playbook:
1. Model-year build stability over faster go-to-market on new components. 2. Better build quality. 3. Better battery life. 4. Better display, especially in value models.
I'm leaving OS and UI out of the discussion.
App binaries, sure. But most of what is stored in memory is content, video, image, file cache. These will not differ much from OS to OS, the only difference would be baseline memory usage before I start opening YouTube tabs.
But my MacBook only has an issue because the SSD is pathetically small. If I had the next tier up, it would be no issue.
My 5 year old Lenovo Carbon X1 14" is 2560x1440 while I can't buy a current X1 with anything above 1920x1200 for any price. WTF?
When I was looking at Thinkpads there was never any better options than 1920x1200 but if I switched to the US site I could order with the HiDPI OLED screen.
Just recently there was a Thinkpad P14S on sale for $999 that blows the Macbooks out of the water in terms of ram and storage, while having a high quality OLED display and a Ryzen CPU that can easily trade blows with Apple silicon. It is hotter and heavier and has very bad battery life, though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/s/7CgJwku18K
But yeah, there's still a real lack of Windows laptop competition these days, especially if you want a GPU. 'Gaming laptops' tend to come with severe heat/noise/weight/battery problems.
(And why are competitors touchpads still shit-tier compared to Apple? Even on those bulkier gaming laptops where space isn't at a premium and the price is on the premium side)
e.g. $1,899.00 for 15'' 16GB ram + 1TB SSD
i just bot a similar aluminum HP with Oled , Ryzen 7, 16GB , 1TB SSD for $700
the build quality is good, just a tick below apple. the fan is mild, not as good as apple.
but $1200 premium for apple ? I had to say no
In $999 13" M2 Air you get 8GB Unified RAM and 256GB memory. Intel ARC seems to be better than M2 graphics. Weight is exactly the same. Usual downsides remain - fan and smaller battery life, although still pretty good.
No one matches Apple's build and screen quality. But their base models are pretty underpowered, and it's not until you're spending closer to $2k that you get specs that feel appropriate for 2024. On the Windows side, there are lots of cheaper options, many of which have beefier specs, but the build quality pales in comparison.
The right tradeoff depends on your budget and what you really need out of a device.
Please post links to benchmarks of a windows laptop that costs the same as a base model Apple laptop but is faster, while being similar in weight, battery life and heat.
Next you're going to tell me the new I6 turbo engines are "underpowered" compared to the V8s they're replacing, even though they have more power, more torque and in the same vehicle produce faster 0-60 and 1/4 mile times.
Your definition of "underpowered" is interesting to say the least.
The Air is noticeably lighter and much easier to throw in a bag without thinking about managing weight. The Pro is a fine weight for commuting, but for traveling longer distances, the weight definitely makes a difference. To the point where I'm seriously considering setting up a work partition on my personal machine so I don't need to lug the pro around on an upcoming trip.
As for the screen, I think "gimped" is not doing it justice. I regularly use both, the Air's is a very nice screen in its own right and while there is a difference, it feels more like a relatively small increment on something already very solid, at least to me (I don't do any pro photo/video work). Same for the other differences, the Air's speakers are already pretty good, connectivity is fine (for me), I like not having a fan, it's way powerful enough for what I do.
Gosh having started program on 286s in the 1980s, my M1 air feels blazingly opulently fast. What sort of local development are people doing that requires heavier compute than an M1 air, but doesn't require a full on cluster?
I imaagine that the lubricant in the fan will still age, but that is also going to be less of an issue because of less dust contamination.
Apple's "Pro" branding has become increasingly meaningless but in the MacBook category, which I believe is where it originated, it's meant to suggest "media professional", a demographic which has reason to care about all of these things.
There are even shades of this in the iPhone and iPads Pro, which have a few features which are mainly of interest to professional media types. For AirPods it just means "the expensive ones", and for Vision Pro it means "this is expensive". That's the main signal for phones and tablets as well, realistically.
Surely you mean “more noise”.
The Air is also way overkill. I had a 12" MacBook before that. It ran the software that I wrote. I write markdown in Sublime Text and run python scripts.
There just isn't a reason to get something beefier.
Frankly, Apple is an amazing organization and I am extremely thankful that they've empowered product designers to bring us these amazing creations.
Apple is one reason that I love existing in this era. Sure, there are others. But having Apple... enables me to bring a laptop + a backup battery (anker 737) practically anywhere and work all day without needing a direct electricity connection.
Laptop + Phone + external battery packs = work all day
The light weight, stay-cool-ness ... makes it so easy to work from.
I love you Apple. So glad to not have to use Windows. Sure, Linux desktops distros are decent (despite bugs), but Apple "just works".
I avoid the MS Office suite wherever I can. Recently went through some lengths to deactive Microsofts intrusive updating background service (nearly as bad in slowing down my system as Adobes).
I would be interested to find out how many individuals and families pay for Microsoft’s software, when apple and google provide free alternatives. (Maybe constrained to families that use mac / iphone, Microsoft might be more popular for Windows families?)
ie: For most people, if you’re not getting free access through work or school, is it actually worth paying for?
12" MacBook despiste its CPU flaws was the perfect size.
MacBook 12” was only 2.03 pounds. Current MacBook Air M3 13” is 2.75 pounds.
Sad times.
Edit: nvm, looks like the Air supports two external displays but the Pro only supports one.
- MacBook Pro with M3 Pro chip = two external displays
- MacBook Pro with M3 Max chip = four external displays
Given that I would personally go for the M3 Pro with 18GB memory, but it depends on your needs of course.
Sometimes I hear her watching some movie or show a few rooms away, and I can never know if she's watching it on the TV or on the Pro just by the audio alone. Those speakers do fill the room, and them some.
I have never really watched more than short content on that form factor. I like a bigger screen and a remote, watching anything like a movie on a laptop feels klunky.
In the Windows world, I rarely if ever come across a laptop where the speakers weren't clearly last in precedence for engineering and BOM consideration. Just astoundingly bad sound quality accepted as normal in the Windows laptop world, even in supposedly premium machines.
In comparison, even the least impressive MacBook Air speakers are good.
But if you were coming from another MacBook Pro when evaluating the Air I can see why you would have come away wanting better. The Pro machines are indeed a clear step up, and the larger 16" models are even better given the extra space they have to work with.
A 4K monitor I use works perfectly fine on Linux, but with Macbook Pro, even though resolution perfectly matches, it still has blurred font (the filter they apply completely changes the look of the font, even though I use the same one), everything just remains blurry and again, watching video disables it.
That's one of the things that pushed me to Mac from Linux: fonts finally looked nice. (This was around 2010.) I tried everything I could to get Linux to render decently but eventually gave up. I recognize that this is so much down to personal taste. If you prefer Windows-style ClearType to Mac's rendering, Mac (especially on a non-Retina screen) will look awful. If you like Mac's rendering, Windows tends to look awful at any resolution.
By any chance, do you have the display preferences to use a different resolution than the hardware's native dimensions?
yeah, the fact that such basics are still broken is the biggest scandal to me in these premium machines with so much tech progress otherwise
I had to return a decently spec-ced M3 Macbook PRO 14" because it only supported 1 display (base M3) and pay more for M3 pro even though I don't need the extra horsepower.
And now the base M3 Air's support 2 displays? This is wild
But just in general, Intel has always prioritized lots of I/O flexibility on its chips. If you look at the datasheets there have always been dozens and dozens of units on every SKU that are never plumbed out to ports on the device. Three or four display outputs, six or eight USB controllers, stuff like that. Apple is the opposite: they won't include something if they aren't absolutely sure they need it. So after the shift from x86 to Apple silicon, laptop users are feeling a squeeze on I/O that used to seem "free".
The M3 Pro has more space and is more ... pro?
Apart from the initial M1 MacBook Pro release, it feels like most products Apple has released in the last few years has always been missing one or two features, and the next release happens to have that feature. E.g. the first M1 Air did not have MagSafe even though the Pros did, and then Apple included MagSafe in M2 Air, but it didn't support multiple displays; now Apple is including multiple displays in M3 Air.
It feels awfully convenient that each generation conveniently has a nontrivial feature upgrade.... Apple has less incentive to make each generation "complete" -- by delaying features (more) consumers will feel obligated to upgrade per generation.
Edit: Better wording, I suppose, that the non-PRO supports two external monitors with the lid closed, the PRO supports 1. Still an odd overall offering/branding.
I had a 2019 cheesegrater Mac Pro. With Catalina, I was able to drive two 4K screens at 144Hz in HDR10, because Catalina apparently supported DSC 1.4.
Then they introduced the ProDisplay XDR with Big Sur which had people agog at "how were they able to drive this 6K display given the bandwidth limitations?"
Well, the answer is because they absolutely nerfed/bastardized DSC 1.4 from Big Sur (and it's maybe only been updated in Monterey? Unsure, I no longer have the screens - ironically I bought an XDR) to make it happen with some proprietary magic: those same screens could now only be driven at 60Hz in HDR10 or 95Hz in SDR.
Proof in the pudding was that my monitors (LG27GN950-B) actually allowed you to change the advertised/supported DSC version, and when I "downgraded" the monitors to DSC 1.2, performance actually improved, and allowed 120Hz SDR and 95Hz HDR.
This happened with many many users, across many screen types.
Apple studiously ignored it, and may still be. They simply don't care if you're not using an Apple display.
More-than-one-display is pretty much the standard on regular (non-apple) computers: you can drive as much as your system can sustain.
I use Asahi Linux on M2 now, and the USBC display support isn’t done yet, but I am hoping it would be better than MacOS.
I have a great M2 pro machine, but officially it can only support 2 external monitors. I should be able to close my screen and power 3. I can do this with a dock so it's not a resources problem.
I am curious what is different between the Air and the Pro that the Air can power 2 external monitors (it does say when the lid is closed) and the Pro can only power 1 regardless. Or is this a software update and the Pro page just has not been updated.
I keep hoping that this is a problem that is only temporary and eventually it will be removed or as time goes on each series can run 1 more monitor or something.
A TB4 dock fixes most problems, but I have to hack the EDID to disable YCbCr and force RGB, or the colors look like absolute shit. The external monitors still look significantly worse under macOS than either Windows or Linux, and I have no idea why.
External display handling is easily the worst part of using a Mac for me.
Using more than is explicitly mentioned that is supported, you mean? I mean yeah, duh.
I've been running three for a while. 2 Thunderbolt 3 + 1 Thunderbolt 2 daisy chained. They work. There are a couple glitches, but they work.
I'm on my work machine now but I believe it also works with the laptop open.
But nevertheless, Apple's hardware strategy sucks ...
where I measured tokens in my requests before sending things to openai API to ballpark the cost
There are other browsers that are far more memory efficient.
What about colima vm for docker? Intellij, gradle daemon, android studio, xcode, electron apps, android virtual device, slack, spring boot apps, iMovie, Davinci Resolve, python notebooks?
Phones now have more than 8gb of RAM
The limiting factor won't be the memory but the thermal throttling.
It is exactly why I haven't bought anything from Apple since the ipod.
Everything sounds amazing/wonderful and then one mind boggling deal breaker that doesn't even seem to make economic sense but just feels petty.
It’s incredibly stingy. For a while you could make the argument that a lot of Air purchasers wouldn’t need it, but I don’t think that’s the case any more. My wife has an M1 Air with 8GB and between Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack she quite regularly gets beachballs and weird performance hitches.
Open 1000tabs and it will kill any machine.
In any case, it's pretty easy for the OS to swap out browser data as it is chunkable by tab. Just because it had allocated 22GB doesn't mean that it was all active. Must was certainly swapped to SSD.
The only application I ever need to terminate is Notes, which for some reason is extremely crash prone on the mac.
What is that?
I've been using macs for decades, and I've never seen or heard of such a dialog.
Never had it with Windows. Or iPad, or iPhone. Why does the pro computer do this? My guess is 5k external monitor and a few desktops, but...really. I'm not running multiple layers of VM's, it'll crash it with a few VS code windows, browsers, command lines.
Look, at least the Apple is smart enough to wake up basically in the same window state after having refreshed the resources. That's fantastic. But even better to fix it without going through the whole "have you turned it off and on again" routine.
Different models of computing. The iPhone only displays one tab inside one application at a time. And switching is slow enough that the OS can prefetch the swapped memory for the new view. A desktop app usually keeps everything alive as switching is very random and instantaneous. And you don't go open things that require a lot of RAM when you don't have that many (Each electron app is a whole new browser which is already a resource hog)
Considering how bad all of that is about "weird performance hitches" (read: running an entire browser for every single app) are you sure that has anything to do with the memory?
Those are like the heavyweights of the app world. And I think the 4 combined is running more code than the OS itself (the last three are 3xChrome).
Using Slack as a web app[1] solved my issues with it. It runs using Webkit instead of Electron, which is far smoother.
1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/104996
I looked at the price for m3 and if it would have 16gig it would literally be perfect for just 1k but nope 8 more gigs cost you an arm and a leg
I had a Macbook Pro 2015 with 256GB SSD. (Base model was 128GB). It was a very painful experience even back then. Yet almost ten years later, we are here, still paying $200 to upgrade to 512GB, when almost every Windows laptop comes with 512GB. FYI a 1TB NVMe gen 4 drive costs less than $100.
Compared to what? Linux? Windows?
Are there any published benchmarks anywhere, otherwise this just proves my point above.
> Apple tends to have faster RAM (way more bandwidth), faster SSDs
Yes, sure, due to its integrated nature, but that does not reduce the RAM requirement. My 8GB M1 MBA, which is used as a home browsing-only laptop, is almost always in yellow on memory pressure once we have a few tabs open.
Got it!
Anyway, sometimes people know what they're talking about.
The RAM or SSD are specifically not faster because of its “integrated nature”. The RAM is faster because Apple engineered an actually wide bus + multiple channels for memory access. The fatter Macs have the equivalent of up to 8-channel memory, which not even server CPUs of the competition provide. The SSD gets easily 7 GB/s reads in my testing. Both Windows and Mac have a working memory compression algorithm and a sister post claims that it works better due to hardware acceleration, which I’m inclined to believe. Memory compression on Linux is a mess as you cannot keep compressed memory pages in physical RAM, instead forcing you to partition the memory and manually handling how much and what to put in compressed zram.
Low memory situations are thus handled better than on other operating systems. Memory and memory pressure are neglected concepts in the competition, both the hardware providers and operating system providers.
8 channels has been standard in Epyc chips since they released in 2017, the latest Epyc Genoa does 12 channels. They're also not splitting that memory bandwidth with a bandwidth hungry GPU.
I am sick of people making claims without quoting any numbers about real-life performance.
Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced into a treadmill of computer upgrades like we haven’t seen since the 90’s when CPUs were skyrocketing in performance every year.
For anyone who forgets what the 90’s was like, here’s an example with Mac models:
1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020
1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
That’s a 31-fold increase in clock rate (and several times that in overall performance) in the same timespan we’re discussing. Software that was written for the G4 had no chance of running on the LC (ignoring CPU architecture differences).
MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).
If you are talking about "native" apps, maybe. Otherwise, nah. Cross-platform apps based on web like Teams and Spotify won't put too much effort on performance as long as it is not too slow. And if you haven't realized, most of the stuff you interact with is online. People just shove an entire website.
As for professional apps -- if you can't run a heavy audio/video editing application smoothly, I'm pretty sure that's your problem. Developers can put more effort into optimizing for 8GB RAM, but at the end of the day these workflows require large amount of memory, and after a certain point it is not worth to optimize for this segment of users
Shouldn't you be doing the opposite then? Keeping the baseline amount so you can know what it's like for people without a large budget and stop patronizing the applications without acceptable footprints in that circumstance?
> In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound.
We already live in that world. In the 90s you could run Netscape Navigator on a machine with 8 megabytes of memory. I've seen individual browser tabs use more gigabytes than that.
And not all of this is Electron bloat. The Stable Diffusion XL model is ~13GB. In general the quality is going to be proportional to the model size. So for the thing to get better, people need machines with more memory. And 8GB is already too small.
I'm not a developer of native Mac apps. If I were, I would definitely have a baseline machine for testing.
The Stable Diffusion XL model is ~13GB
That's not a baseline consumer application. See my other reply (re: grandma and little Billy). If you're developing a native Mac app for grandma and little Billy, Apple probably doesn't want you shipping a 13GB model with it. This is an example of the point I'm trying to make: find a way to compress the model so the end user doesn't have to deal with that kind of bloat (or host it in the cloud).
You expect every developer to buy a second Mac? They're all doing what you're doing and paying more for the machine with more memory because other applications need it, and then their application runs fine on that machine so they don't even notice the problem for the people with 8GB.
> That's not a baseline consumer application.
It will be before any of these new machines go out of support.
It's very easy to check the memory usage of your project (it's kinda in your face on XCode). If you do a few minutes test or let the app stay open for a few hours and usage has ballooned to a few GBs, that usually means you have a leak somewhere to fix.
The thing that really bothers me is that if you look at what regular home and office users were doing on their computers in the 90's it's almost identical to what those users are doing right now, except in the 90's they had orders of magnitude slower computers with orders of magnitude less memory. Yet in many cases those 90's computers were MORE RESPONSIVE than what they have today.
All of those countless billions of investment in technology hasn't done a damn thing for the productivity of Sally the office worker or Billy the 6th grader. Arguably, it's made their lives worse (viz. social media's deleterious effects on mental health). Now everyone's pushing the heck out of AI and all I see is high schoolers using ChatGPT to cheat themselves out of an education. They can't read (critically), they can't write, they can't even spell!
So in light of all that, why should we be pushing more and more computing power (and memory, the original issue) on regular users who aren't getting any benefit (broadly, to their way of life) out of it?
Gosh, now I sound like a luddite!
Certainly not, but you can't fix it by putting less RAM in the machines of people with budget constraints. The developers will just pay for more themselves and then not care about those people because people who can't afford RAM generally aren't lucrative customers.
And it's also worth considering what actually causes this.
Developers want their code to work on every platform. They don't want to write different code for each platform. But each platform wants them to have to, because that makes it more likely there will be software that only works on their platform, or that doesn't work on some new competing platform. So they refuse to develop or implement cross-platform standards.
Then someone else has to do it, but that's rather a lot of work, and it turns out the easiest way to do it is to piggyback on the work already done for browsers to make them work on every platform. That's Electron. It's terribly inefficient but it saves the developer a lot of porting work, so it's widely used.
If Apple doesn't like this, they should provide cross-platform native APIs for developing applications.
It’s not in Apple’s interest to do that. It would cost a lot of money to develop and only benefit the competition. It would also slow down Apple’s own ability to innovate on the APIs until the competitors catch up.
Or are you saying Apple should develop the APIs for Windows and Linux as well? Why would they do that?
What they should do is provide open source implementations of their APIs for Windows and Linux, i.e. make them standards.
> Why would they do that?
Because then people would use them instead of using Electron.
Nah, the treadmill stalled out years ago.
You're also using a time period that includes COVID and when the DRAM manufacturers got busted for price fixing.
That's not a run of the mill consumer set up.
>You're also using a time period that includes COVID and when the DRAM manufacturers got busted for price fixing
No, I'm actually including two separate time periods where they were busted for price fixing. They were doing it in the late '90s too.
It kind of is, e.g. Steam hardware survey has more than 80% of people with at least 16GB of RAM and almost a third with 32GB, and that's a measure of installed base rather than new computers.
You can now find 64GB in <$550 laptops:
https://www.newegg.com/p/1TS-000D-110E6?Item=9SIA7ABJ459240
> No, I'm actually including two separate time periods where they were busted for price fixing. They were doing it in the late '90s too.
They started doing it at the end of the '90s. By then PowerBooks were already coming with 64MB and PowerMacs with 128MB:
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g3/specs/powerb...
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g3/specs/powerma...
In the second case it started only 3 years into your measurement period instead of 7, and then right after that was COVID. It's only now that the prices are starting to resume their historical downward trend and they're still slightly above where they were when the price fixing started in 2016.
But that explains why it's not a factor of 64 during this period. It's still the case that 8GB of DDR5 is ~$24. What reason is there to not include $100 worth on a $1000 machine? Or, if some excuse for that could be generated, why isn't there a $1100 machine with four times as much?
You're saying "RAM usage", but your evidence is "RAM provisioning", which is the entire basis for the criticism. The reality is that RAM usage has increased significantly, but Apple has been stuck by the addressable memory limits they've baked into their architecture.
As another point of comparison, a 2013 iPhone 5c (technically not released until the last quarter of 2013, but we're being generous here) had 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, though you could upgrade that to 32GB. A modern iPhone has 6GB of RAM, and comes with storage from 128GB to 1TB.
Maybe the bytes are growing more on iOS? ;-)
Fine, take that as your reference. It still shows that growth in memory was 1000% faster not too long ago.
...and that still proves nothing about the growth of RAM usage in that time period, because the size of the offerings in individual products are largely independent of the increases in RAM usage.
I've yet to notice the impact on getting web sites to stop using incredibly bloated JavaScript that leak memory, video conferencing & streaming apps from using codecs that redline the CPU, or game developers from writing games that make the GPU cry uncle, or...
> 1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020.
You got lucky, because we got the Mac II Si back then, but they were both kneecapped on the factory floor by the 16-bit memory bus that crippled the 68020's 32-bit memory bus. 2 year old PCs ran circles around it. Planned obsolescence was was one of Apple's crowning achievements back then.
> 1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
The Macbook Air from ten years ago would be Retina I had: a 2-core i7 that could go up to 3.5 GHz. Ask me how well that runs software written for the new M3's. ;-)
> MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).
You might have missed this bit from Apple's blurb on the new MacBook Airs: "13x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air". The fastest Intel-based Macbook Air was produced [checks notes], 4 years ago. It's hard not to read that like they aren't trying to convey a need to upgrade.
If you're wondering why people are saying what they're saying, it's because Apple is saying what they're saying.
But at the same time, I've never seen non-techies complain that they can't open a few tabs, reply to a few emails, watch youtube, listen to music, and study on their base laptops. They're amazing for that.
If we need more memory to accomplish the above tasks any time soon, we're in a sad state of software development and bloat.
Again, I'm personally not happy about shelling out $400 for 24GB of memory on my next Macbook, but I gave away one of my base machines with 8GB to a family member, and they simply did not notice.
A web browser adds a significant amount of memory usage to any task, even with basic static webpages, and then almost every other app you use is secretly also a web browser but none of the RAM usage from it can be shared with the web browser you're already running.
The vast majority of their market would not fit into the developer, content creator, or just plain power-user category. There's people who just log on to do internet banking and email when they're not on Reddit or Facebook.
For some anecdata, 16/512+ would be a waste on my parents, in-laws and my whole extended family for that matter. They would benefit from it, but they're not screaming at spinning wheels, and are probably a bit more patient and accustomed to 'slowness', which is pretty subjective.
Even worse, if one plots the (price, unified memory amount, chip type), and looks at it from right-to-left, then the dollars per system capability is disgusting when you order a lesser system. You get the most value for your money when you buy the maximum unified memory configuration (on those three points).
Better yet, with a maxed out unified memory configuration, one can further save on SSD writes by using (and loading/storing) RAM disks for their projects!
Most people buying a MacBook for work are likely getting a higher unified memory, so their workstations live longer. Meanwhile consumers will have to keep consuming as they fry their internal SSD's on their airs...
I was also wondering if a 1TB apple fabric device is simply an 8TB fabric device with 8x the write life...
Have a crate with about 40+ of those machines at work, essentially useless from the era where the person in charge of buying laptops just bought the bottom end for every employee and considered it a job done.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/04/14-inch-m3-macbook-pro-multi-...
I don't want to waste time migrating to a new system, only to find out I need to return/resell it, or later down the road find out another arbitrary/artificial limitation Apple has set that I either have to find a work around for or suck up until I can switch machines again if none exist.
This is unfortunate since there are some features that have made it very tempting to switch.
[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-odyssey-49-1000r-curved...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace/comments/mb9vnv...
Considering minor Macbook upgrades can get you into >$1500 price territory pretty easily I think this a fantastic value. If you wanted to buy my full setup right now it would be $849 + $749 + $145 = $1745 but you're getting “dual” monitors and dock that can be reused with any modern machine, making it easy to switch between work and play. I can even plug my Steam Deck into it. :) (No affiliation with any of these products!)
One thing you should be aware of is that having two seperate monitors can be an advantage for Window management on macOS. With two monitors, I can swap spaces on one of them and keep everything as is on the other. With only one it's not that easy.
If it can identify something people will pay more for, while not quite putting off most people, it'll do it, no matter how mad.
So if most people think 8GB is fine for a laptop, they'll buy it, and everyone else pays through the nose for more.
Most people only want one extra screen? That's what you get on the base machine and you must pay (alot) for more. If one day most people need two, then you'll get two.
Apple seem to spend a lot of design time on how to extract the most money out of those willing to pay, no matter how annoying it is.
so just a word of advice to fellow devs - go for the MBP. if you're on here you need it.