Depends what you mean by 'faster' ... I wouldn't be surprised if the AGC was more responsive (faster response on the screen to user input) than a modern computer. Early computers were often quite snappy.
Considering that a modern Ryzen is 1375 times faster than a VAXstation 4000/60, and a VAXstation 4000/60 is around 1280 times faster, at least in clock, than an AGC, that would mean the M4 would need to be about 5.6 times faster than that modern Ryzen.
Hmmm... The M4 might be ten million times faster than the AGC, depending on the instructions per clock of the AGC and the VAXstation 4000/60 with which we're comparing it.
As someone that migrated to the M1 Macbook Air from a Mid-2014 Macbook Pro... the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target, amusingly.
If they'd just give me onboard mobile connectivity, I'd upgrade to the next Air sooner, otherwise this thing will run until it dies... and maybe some day they'll start comparing performance against their original M1.
The page up to 2x faster than M1, but it's not worth upgrading from for the average person, your laptop should last longer than 4 years hence why they market to Intel Mac users.
Why would you need onboard mobile? It’s 2 clicks to trigger a mobile hotspot from your iPhone and there are very cheap LTE dongles on eBay. Not sure how much service would cost, most of us have reasonable download caps on our mobile plans. The dongles have better data plans than phones.
Convenience, security, and power-savings. I currently also use a Thinkpad X13s with onboard 5G and it's nice to not have to screw with it when you want connectivity.
On my Verizon plan (Unlimited Ultimate), I qualify for two 'connected devices' to be discounted. My Thinkpad is $10/mo extra on my account for unlimited LTE. I'm not a heavy data user by any means and this works out well for me.
Why wouldn’t I want onboard cellular connection instead of having to be dependent on the more finicky and less reliable Hotspot connection, hurting my ability to use my phone freely, and burning both my laptop and my phone’s batteries at the same time.
Besides, having a cellular modem also allows you to tap into both WiFi and Cellular seamlessly like your phone does to make your overall connection much more reliable.
> the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target, amusingly
yeah i just checked mine, it says MacBook Pro 16" 2019 and the cpu is an intel i7. i don't know what to say, it still meets all my requirements, i don't feel any need to upgrade.
My work laptop is a 2019 i7, my personal is a m3. There is a huge - very very noticeable difference. The thing that actually annoys me the worst with the intel though isn't the 'speed' per se but it's the shitty battery life and heat it generates (and the fan noise that causes).
If it works for you... but I had an Intel MacBook Pro (2019, 16", i9) for a work machine and the fans would sound like a jet engine. Installing NPM dependencies was particularly bad, since all the writes would make the corporate file scanning spyware go crazy. It ran like crap.
I have an M1 Pro (which is considered old now) and it's like night and day.
Yeah, I have a personal m2max. The only thing that might get me to upgrade to the m4 is just being able to hand this laptop down to my sister or my parents for whom it is severe overkill for but they will use it for like 10 more years.
I see a lot of people requesting cellular modems in MacBooks, but the integration with iPhone hotspot connectivity is so good that I don’t really see the point of it for most people.
The integration is fine, but it's not perfect. It kicks my wife off her iPhone Hotspot every time she closes the lid on her laptop. It also burns the battery on her iPhone, which is a concern in the exact situation you'd want cellular connection (places with no wifi often don't have outlets either).
Anecdotally, I've also seen her get issues when going from an area with bad connection to an area with good connection (iPhone will disconnect).
The experience with a non-iphone is also not seamless, though that's to be expected.
Point being that reliable and easy cellular access on a MacBook would be a pretty nice improvement. This is especially true given how much of what people do on computers relies on the internet these days.
Battery consumption and antenna efficiency are two major pain points. iPhones suck battery like a horse drinks water when in hotspot mode, and the large surface area of even a small MacBook Air would allow for some pretty interesting antenna design.
And it isn't really ironed out to behave in Germany where on a train you have frequent losses of phone connectivity. Every time it loses signal, the hotspot drops out and disconnects.
This is a weak argument. Qualcomm is charging for iphone and ipad too. They could do it if they wanted.
The real reason is Apple wants you to buy an ipad for on the road. Laptops, according to them, are strictly for office/home usage where wifi is available.
Yeah, they trash idle/sleep battery life—or, at least, used to, back when I had access to lots of differently-configured iPads for my job—so you don’t want it on there unless you really need it.
> the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target
Definitely. I have ZERO rational reasons to upgrade from my lowest-spec first-gen Air M1. I use it everyday and speed and battery life are still way more than I need.
Literally the only material difference between using my M1 Air and my work M1 Pro is the somewhat-better port selection on the Pro. Though even that doesn't have the single-most-useful port it could (aside from USB-C): a USB-A port.
few weeks back a professional ios dev looked at my m1 pro and ask why i had an air instead of pro. i might go air when i finally upgrade bc the new pros are giant compared to the m1
This mimics my experience. I bought the absolute bottom barrel M1 when they launched to replace my 2014 MBP, 8gb RAM and 128gb of space. The HD space is annoying, but otherwise this machine is untouchable. I do game dev work bouncing between the MBA and my gaming rig, which is Ryzen 7 2700, 64gb RAM and a 3070, and with certain benchmarks, the MBA still wins, silently, on battery for hours. Still blows my mind.
Not who you replied to but I’m on a Mid-2014 15 inch MBP retina, bought new and used nearly every day since and taken on dozens of trips.
I had the battery replaced, the tab key replaced, and the screen refinished (anti-glare coating removed) for about $240 a couple years ago and aside from the fact it can’t be updated beyond Big Sur 11.7.10 I have no issues.
I have a Late 2013 MBP still going strong. Original battery, original charger, no repairs whatsoever, hours of battery life still. Wife stopped using it just two months ago when I upgraded her to my M1 Air.
My 2014 got a little screwy around 2022 and eventually wifi stopped working entirely (I suspect battery swelling putting pressure on something) but if not for that I'd still be using it. Hell, I probably could have gotten it fixed, though I'd prefer to put that money toward another machine that'll last me 8+ years.
I'm on a 2020 [edit: I got it as part of comp for a contracting gig, is why the overlap in years with my 2014 MBP ownership, but didn't switch to using it for personal stuff until after that was over and my MPB wifi broke] M1 Air now, so close to or in year 6 for that. No issues yet and battery life still stellar, should get at least 2-3 more years.
(Folks who are like "LOL who even needs 18 hours of battery life?", which is a common sort of post on Apple laptop announcements: well for one thing it's extremely nice to be hunting for outlets even less often, and to maybe go on a whole light-laptop-use 3-day trip and not charge it the whole time and it's still alive at the end of it, or to have that battery as reserve for charging your phone, but also and perhaps most importantly, it means that a 30% degraded battery after several years of ownership still gets you 10+ hours of real-world use)
Same, except my 2009 Mac Pro made for a better space heater, until I replaced it with an MBP M1 that doesn't have the decency to make noise to let me know it's working. Only downside of upgrading is that I had to get off of Mojave.
I think that was around the time when macbooks were "fast enough", especially since that was when SSDs became the default. I remember I got my first macbook around 2011/12 and at the time doing your own upgrade of memory and replacing the hard drive with an SSD was a pretty popular DIY upgrade (N=1).
> the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target, amusingly.
Yeah, particularly for the Air that makes complete sense, though. Consumer laptops tend to get replaced pretty slowly. I'll be upgrading from a _2016_ MBP (though not to the Air, given the lack of the 120hz screen; going to go for the Pro).
1) Apple releases incremental upgrades! Why won't they make huge strides every year so I can upgrade!
2) People who upgrade every year are sheeps!
3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice! (yes, not Windows though).
4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!
Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.
"Hey, you noticed things are slow? Well, this thing is a lot faster" is pretty good marketing if it's true, nobody except the very wealthy are dropping thousands of euros/dollars on a new device for 10% performance gains, however if it's twenty-three times the performance of the Mac I currently own? Maybe it's enough to convince me or someone like my Mum to splurge on a new device.
Maybe my current Mac is not "good enough" anymore when 23x is the number on the box if I buy new.
It's fair to compare with devices that you expect actual people to actually upgrade from, there's a lot of Intel macbook airs in the field.
Since graduating from college in 1993, working in the graphic design industry full-time through 2019, I had two brand-new Macs (a PowerMac G3/800MHz, and a G5), the balance were hand-me-downs from other employees --- the G5 in particular was especially long-lasting, though ultimately it was supplemented by an Intel iMac.
Each year when Apple came out with new machines, we would make a game of putting together a dream machine --- ages ago, that could easily hit 6 figures, these days, well, a fully-configured Mac Studio is $14,099 and a Pro Display w/ stand and nano texture adds $6,998 or so.
> these days, well, a fully-configured Mac Studio is $14,099
Not surprising considering the CPU in the fastest "desktop" Mac before today was slower than an old Intel chips you can buy for ~$350 (e.g. the 14700k).
TBH, for non-tech folks that upgrade cycle has likely stretched a good bit beyond 3-5 years. 3-5 was the norm 10 years ago, but I’d wager needs-driven upgrades, opposed to marketing driven, are closer to 7-10 years outside of obvious niches.
Sample size one: My spouse is using either a 2013 MBA and wants to upgrade, mostly b/c the enshitification of web sites. Basic productivity was okay-ish for her work (document creation, pdfs, spreadsheets, etc), but even Gmail now suffers with more than a tab.
Edit: thinking more, I don’t know if I agree with myself here.
> Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.
It still makes claims like that arbitrary and meaningless. What does "23x faster" even mean, it's not like there are that many people who are upgrading from an Intel MBA yet are also fulltime Cinebench/etc. testers.
> It's fair to compare
Well yes. It's reasonably fair (realistically its not like any of those people this is targeted at would feel a difference between 10x, 15x or 30x) and obviously smart.
Well yeah, I understand that this is based on some specific benchmark. Yet it's still some random arbitrary number effectively picked to mislead consumers.
Especially when for the M1 (2x faster) they decided to use an entirely different Photoshop benchmark YET they they still show it alongside the 23x for the Pixelmator one (presumably the M4 is NOT 2x faster than the M1 there..).
That's just objectively slimy (even if mostly harmless) marketing...
Also presumably Pixelmator's "Super Resolution" and Photoshop's "radial blur, content aware scale, diffuse, find edges" are also mostly GPU bound these days? Which again.. might not be the best indicator for "performance" for most consumers.
Edit: Looking at some more general benchmarks the the i7 (I7-1060NG7) from the last Intel MBA is "only" 4x (Geekbench MT), ~2.7x (Single-Core) or 2x (Cinebench single core) slower than the M4. Picking some highly specific "benchmark" that's several times higher than that is just dishonest.
The point is that benchmark is pretty useless and likely does not line up to what a user that is still running a intel air would expect the word "faster" even means.
When normal users are thinking "faster" they are really thinking about snappiness/responsiveness, not number crunching.
Those benchmarks seem to be more GPU based as well. e.g. something like Geekbench (not that it's necessarily that representative either) is just 2-3x faster.
Haha. Well, I guess it kind of makes sense in some way, Apple doesn’t want to say anything negative about any generation of “M” processor, maybe?
Up to 23x faster. Of course, the fastest Intel MacBook Air is pretty old. But 23X is pretty crazy, right? I wonder what they are comparing against. Int-8 matrix multiplications or something else that’s gotten acceleration lately, maybe?
I love how even fair and justifiable critique of Apple needs to be hedged with the "Apple is great" prefix, such is the terror of the Apple downvote mafia on HN.
/typed from my Macbook Pro M4 — Love Apple — This is great!
As I said in another comment, probably the benchmark is done just using some hardware instruction that didn't exist on those models and gets compiled to several instructions (possibly by a very very old compiler, while we're at it) vs something handwritten in assembly for the purpose of one specific benchmark.
Does this mean it's 23x faster for normal workloads? Nah.
Apple when they were pumping clang were also claiming that binaries produced with clang were much faster than those made with gcc. This was because they used a 15 years old version of gcc that didn't have any vector instructions (because they didn't exist at the time) and benchmarking using some code that was solely doing vector stuff.
You’re making it seem like they’re hiding that information under a footnote. The real text on the page, which is quite visible, is:
> Up to 23x faster than fastest Intel‑based MacBook Air
And right next to it:
> Up to 2x faster than MacBook Air (M1)
The footnotes are there to expand on the conditions of the measurements.
So not exactly misleading. On the contrary, it seems to me they’re quite clearly saying “if you have an Intel or M1 MacBook Air you have reason to upgrade. Otherwise, don’t”.
"Up to" is still doing a lot of work there. What kinds of workloads are we talking that get the big numbers, and what can we realistically expect on real workloads?
I'm reminded of 90s advertisements in which the new G3 processor was supposed to be so many times faster than the Pentium or even Pentium II. Their chosen benchmark: how long it takes to run a Photoshop plugin. On Mac OS pre-X, a Photoshop plugin got 100% of the CPU because there was no preemptive multitasking. Windows 9x versions of Photoshop had to share the CPU with whatever else was running.
> Testing conducted by Apple in January 2025 using preproduction 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and 32GB of RAM, as well as production 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air systems with Intel Iris Plus Graphics and 16GB of RAM, all configured with 2TB SSD. Tested using Super Resolution with Pixelmator Pro 3.6.14 and a 4.4MB image. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Air.
That’s roughly the Air I have still. I hate using it (prior to recently adding the cooler shim mod, it would thermal throttle constantly) but between a Hackintosh and my work Mac I haven’t felt the need to upgrade. I think sometime in this M4/M5 gen is when I’ll pull the trigger and retire the Hackintosh to gaming rig only status.
And the benchmark is probably jut using one hw instruction that didn't exist on that model and now exists, and is not representative of anything at all.
I've got an M1 Air and there's still no really compelling reason to upgrade. MagSafe and a nicer camera don't really justify it, especially when Continuity Camera is better than on the M1 or M4.
People don't upgrade every year. I still have an Intel MacBook Pro (2020 I think?) that I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon because it still works great.
The first thing I noticed in all of these announcements is that every main comparison is against M1. Why are they comparing with hardware 2-3 generations ago? I don't care whether my Intel i9 has 50x the performance of a Pentium processor from the 90s, it seems like a disingenuous attempt to make the numbers as high as possible.
I don't think it's silly to state. That message is probably for intel macbook air users who may be considering an upgrade.
(Anyway, I just ordered one for my wife, a soon-to-be-ex-intel-mac user. She'll probably be pretty happy about this, especially since she doesn't have an intel air as powerful as that one.)
Apple Intelligence is a complete dud in my view, but fortunately it doesn’t bother you if you don’t use it, and it’s all worth it for Apple to start shipping base configurations with a decent amount of RAM.
Anyone can comment on how Apple Silicon (M) MacBook Airs deal with heat?
It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips?
Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice?
UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.
Ran the Mac native copy of No Man’s Sky on a 16GB m3 Air last year. 1080p and on default visual settings
The laptop never got hot, game never stuttered (beyond NMS glitching engine which exists on windows too). Slight bit of increased warmth, but my phones gotten hotter browsing bloated websites.
I don’t blame Microsoft for looking at bailing on consoles. iPhones will be more powerful in a couple more cycles.
Also have an M2. I don't have any issues running multiple web servers, running vite builds etc. Usually 20 tabs open and Affinity Photo or something as well.
I have a 2020 Macbook Air M1, use it for xcode, it struggles to build a basic react native based app with watch-widget, but man it is slick, I love thin laptops. I have a carbon X1 too
Struggle as in the build takes 3+ mins
In general though it's cool, maybe when charging it gets warm but I use it on a desk mostly
A general gripe I have switching devices is the keyboard layout ha cmd+c vs. ctrl+c
Stick to an ext keyboard I guess
Edit: 16GB RAM is what I have I sometimes get the "out of application memory" message
Anyway I use my computer for freelancing/working on multiple platforms, it was a good buy (used), alternatively I could have went with a mini but that screen is so good on a mac (although I develop with an ultrawide external monitor).
you can remap modifier keys if you so inclined in keyboard settings, without additional software, and have separate settings per internal and external keyboard.
I have an M2 air. It gets a bit warm when I compile iOS apps, but otherwise I never notice any heat. If I open a few too many tabs or apps, though, I notice a bit of slowdown since I only have 8 GB ram.
However, it is surprisingly functional and I don’t strictly need any additional ram, which was surprising to me.
I have M2 Air and using it for rails development, sometimes with multiple docker containers, but the most hungry usually is just chrome with 500+ tabs. It usually does not throttle at all and is barely warm. Unless in direct sunlight (it's black) or unless I put it on top of a blanket without an air gap below for half an hour. I'd say that's coolest macbook I ever owned, no burns or anything near it even on bare skin, unlike some older intel macbooks.
The 2011 Intel macbook air I used when visiting home throughout college was downright _dangerous_ on a lap, but performed so much better than my Atom-based Aspire One that I felt compelled to learn to tolerate OSX, as a longtime Linux nerd.
I eventually got the M1 Air for serious ocaml and rust development and found it would get quite toasty (tho never concerning) during big compile/test cycles, but generally only over several dozen seconds of full load.
I upgraded to a 14” pro with an M2 Max and am reasonably happy with it and think it was an important upgrade for my productivity. In daily use, fans kick in rarely but when needed for a speciality job like TLA model checking, they can reject a lot of heat (= performance margin). Of course it would be nice if it weighed less (mine is 1.8kg after including a case), but as a side benefit the machine can play games (even emulated x86 ones inside Parallels!) so it’s hard to say I’m worse off than my previous status quo of VSCode remoting into my big Linux desktop :)
The only time I got my M1 Air to actually somewhat heat up was when I was compiling Node.js from scratch, right after I bought it (prebuilt binaries weren't available yet apparently). So my experience matches yours.
I also do a lot of AI + Audio stuff, and it gets somewhat warm but not as much as when compiling heavy stuff.
it throttles when not limited to bursty tasks; some people mod theirs by simply placing a thermal pad between the bottom of the laptop and the heatspreader to get performance identical to the MBP - but then you can not have it comfortably on your lap
> UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.
Depends on how much you care about the last bit of performance and how often you expect running into throttling. In my experience, it takes the M2 Pro multiple minutes of full load before the fan starts. I do a lot of Rust programming on smaller projects and I think the air would have been fine for me. Compilation takes at most a few minutes on the first run. For doing larger projects like LLVM, the pro is a better option. MLIR took 10 minutes to compile each time I pulled in new commits on main. Then throttling becomes an issue.
When I tested a 15” MBP with an i7 and touch bar vs my M1 Air the Intel Mac throttled down 30% immediately and the M1 barely throttled towards the end. The test was a 4K transcode in handbrake and the M1 air was only 10-15 minutes behind.
I’ll try to replicate the test with an M3 13” vs the 15” touchbar intel. Don’t have my MBPs at work.
I'm a web dev with both a M2 Max (in a Pro) and a M3 (Air).
Never heard the fan come on a single time with either machine while developing. Heat has never been an issue. Battery life is superb on both. Pro has better screen but is way heavier. Air is much nicer to bring to a cafe.
The only time I've ever heard the fan come on is when playing 3d games, especially non-native Apple Silicon games.
If I were getting one only for development, I'd get an Air. If it were meant to be a desktop replacement workstation for work and gaming and movies and such, then the Pro.
Both are easily more than fast enough for web dev. Not sure about other stacks (especially with heavy compiles or virtualization). I have a few services in Docker and that's fine (on both machines).
It's just so so much better than the shitty old Wintel days that I don't even worry about it anymore. Lightyears ahead of any ThinkPad or Latitude, etc.
It never gets hot to the touch either (which wasn't the case with my old ThinkPads, for example, or the Intel MacBook Pro I had immediately prior). Apple Silicon is just incredible and I don't think I can ever go back now.
I can't speak to the Airs, but I went from an Intel Pro to a M3 Pro in a previous job and the battery life improved massively. I used to be able to heat my study by running a linter, but after the switch I remained chilly. I'm now on a M2 and have broadly observed the same.
> - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.
If you are doing normal developer things, the MacBook Air is 100% fine. I use mine daily (M3 Air 13in, 24GB RAM), it handles Rails + Postgres, it handles JS (Next.js + React), it handles Flutter (for desktop and mobile), it handles IntelliJ and RubyMine and DataGrip, it handles Android Studio and Xcode for iOS apps -- including Android/iPhone software emulators. I can load up large Docker projects with 12+ containers, totally fine. I occasionally play with LM Studio, no issues.
Under all of the above, no throttling, no heat issues, works fine on laps, etc. Half the time, it's barely warm to the touch.
---
The only time it gets hot for me, is running the CPU + GPU max'd out hard, for long periods of time. If I try to run FF14 or Warframe via Crossover/Codeweavers for an hour or two, for example, it gets warm and throttles a bit. (Still works, no crashes, no issues, but it does get warm and throttle).
I play Football Manager on my M1 Air and I've never felt heat. This is a game that used to turn my Intel MacBook Pro into a testicle roaster with 2 hour battery life.
I have an M3 Air which I occasionally use for AI (image gen & LLMs), gaming, and light dev work, and it never heated up enough to become uncomfortable, exactly as described in reviews. In fact, this was the main reason why I got Air over Pro - the latter apparently can get uncomfortably hot in some cases (although still far less often than your typical Intel laptop), and I wanted something that would truly be a laptop.
Same. Each year I tell myself I'll get the new one. Each year when the new one comes out I notice that for what I use it for my M1 Air is still completely fine.
I did some research and I'm deferring for a semester but tbh my motivation is pretty low. As per perception it seems decent but depending on circumstances it's def a much better idea to do an on campus programme.
With M1 Air, Apple had to blow us away. People, including me, had hard time believing Apple's claims and many people were coping by looking at the Keynote charts and assuming that Apple must have tricked everyone by not giving proper scale metrics etc.
When people put their hands on the real device, it was slaying almost everything on the market and soon it was clear that this thing is a revolution.
You don't one up this easily. Apple claims 2X performance improvement over M1 Air and I am sure its mostly true but that M1 Air was so ahead that for a lot of people workloads didn't catch up yet.
At this very moment I have 3 Xcode projects open, Safari has 147 tabs open and its consuming 11GB of my 16GB Ram and my SSD lifetime dropped to 98% due to frequent swap hits and yet I'm perfectly fine with the performance at this very moment and I'm not looking for immediate replacement.
I have several hundred open on my M2 MBA and have no problem. Maybe it's because I use Brave? I don't know but have never had to think too much about it. I also don't have much RAM (either the base amount or up a little).
I do restart my browser once a month or so, if things ever feel less snappy than normal.
In Safari, tabs get small up to a point, then they are scrollable. Sure, there are duplicates but it's usually the homepage of HN or Twitter. I close those when encountered.
I can't imagine 147 tabs. I have 9 pinned tabs and maybe ... 6 other tabs open if I'm particularly busy. I also turn off my work laptop at the end of the day, because all of my state is restored when this handful of tabs comes back.
Maybe this is just me managing my ADHD, but when I see people with hundreds of tabs open I just can't imagine how they work. Every tab has been mashed down to its favicon and I watch them struggle to find the right one. It seems insane to me.
There are two kinds of people. <10 open tabs and >100 open tabs. Nothing in between.
I think of the >100 ones as people who have completely lost control of their lives. I'm sure they think of me as someone who needs everything to be just so and can't deal with the messiness of real life.
Do you use it as a laptop, or is it hooked up as a desktop for the most part? If the former, I'd try one of the M series in the same role and see if you notice a difference in ergonomics.
At this time (and historically), I mostly use it as a laptop, but I have also used it as a desktop for long periods with an external monitor. As a laptop, I love that it's so tiny. It’s working very well so far... but I’m afraid that at some point, I’ll have to switch to Linux or OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I’m still on macOS 11 (Big Sur).
MS Office has already stopped updating, along with some other software (though not much, most still updates without issues). As long as Firefox keeps receiving updates for my system, most things will be fine.
If those don't look like a problem for you, I'd definitely suggest giving it a try. MacOS 13 should give you at least 3 more years of use out of it.
Going beyond MacOS 13 I don't think is worth it. MacOS 14 is noticeably slower on my 2010 iMac, and there aren't any new features it can take advantage of anyways.
agreed, which is awesome, the only thing that worries me is that they will drop support for it earlier than they have to when they want to force people to upgrade eventually. I hope to get 10 years out of my M1
Everyone I know that got an M1 cheaped out on the 8gb model and are now struggling to use a browser with heavy sites and multitasking(zoom) at the same time.
But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.
It isn't depending on what "web browsing" someone is doing, which can be a pretty wide range now.
1 persons "web browsing" is no browser extensions, a couple of gmail tabs, some light blog reading, and maybe something as heavy as reddit.
While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.
8gb is quickly becoming unworkable for people that fall closer to the latter group.
> While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.
That's computing, not web browsing. And on not so great platform than that.
Totally an anecdote, but my 8gb M1 runs fine with multiple browsers/tabs, VS Code, and Spotify all open. Usually performance is only an issue for me when working with larger ML models. I wonder why others are getting worse performance? Maybe it's the specific sites they're using?
Nor should you have a reason to replace it. The device is barely 4 years old. There was a time until very recently when laptops would be expected to last 10+ years minimum with minor RAM and SSD updates.
I don’t know when that time was. Hardware and software requirements have been moving fast for just about forever, until actually maybe the past 5 years.
There was never a time when laptops were expected to last 10+ years.
This is where I am, too. I have an M1 Pro and I have never loved a computer more. This thing is a beast and just about anything I throw at it is fine. I can't imagine how much better the M4 is. Unless this computer gets stolen or doused with water, I'll probably have it for at least another 3-4 years. Absolutely amazing value for my money.
I'm still happily using an 8GB M1 running Firefox in OSX + Firefox/VSCode/NodeJS in a Debian VM. Lots of tabs open. Both OSX and Debian can use compressed RAM.
The better screen and better keyboard are probably the most day to day practical reasons to upgrade. But that’s countered by the extra weight and thickness of the Pro, too. So it’s really a choice of mobility versus usage ergonomics.
The Pro is also fan cooled, but with Apple Silicon I’m not sure that matters all that much at this performance band. If you need fan cooled performance you probably want to start thinking about a Pro level SoC, at which point you’re all in on a Pro machine anyway.
It’s not enough of an upgrade from my M2 Air. I’m happy to wait for the next generations. But I wouldn’t consider any other personal laptop than this one.
I have an M1 for reference, with only 8GB RAM which is the real limiter here. I *can* use Jetbrains IDEs and I *can* build/develop software on it. It's a bit sluggish but doable. I try to not code on that machine, but sometimes it's the only machine I have available when I need to look at something.
I use a 13 inch M3 Air (16 GB ram) with goland and pycharm. It's the best dev machine I ever owned, everything is a breeze, and the machine is super lightweight. I don't really notice thermal throttling... but then again i dont run LLMs locally or anything like that.
I used[1] jetbrains tooling quite a bit on my m1 air and never had problems, though I did opt for the 16gb ram version. The newer models are presumably at least as performant if not better?
([1] These days my daily driver is an m1 mbp of some whizzbang 32gb variety, which only replaced the mba because my spouse wanted a travel machine and the mbp came for the low low cost of being caught in the late 2022 startup crash. For day to day ordinary backend dev work there really isn't a noticeable difference in my experience, except I guess the mbp is more awkward when working-from-couch. arm vs x86 was sometimes a little awkward around launch, but I can't remember the last time it was an actual hassle.)
Using Rider on an Macbook Air M2 (24 GB RAM) -- admittedly, pretty small/simple code-bases for the most part. Great performance. Only issues come when I need a lot of docker containers running too, especially if they're not ARM images. With that I don't notice performance issues - but the battery drain is noticeable at that point.
I used to hold the same opinion as you, but since getting a m2 air I’ve really enjoyed how thin and light it is. It really is a noticeable quality of life improvement. Once you have a decent stockpile of usb c cables the port thing isn’t really an issue anyways
The 13” model is only $300 more than the M4 Mac Mini whether comparing the base models or the 32GB RAM options. That’s a pretty good value for a battery, screen, webcam, trackpad, and keyboard. The main thing you give up is the ability to connect a third large display when at your desktop, a few ports, and support for higher than 60Hz refresh rate on an external display.
I think it's highly unlikely that the M4 mac is actually limited to 60Hz for all external displays. I'm running a 1440 ultrawide at 100Hz on an M2 right now. Instead this is likely the maximum px*Hz configuration supported, and smaller or fewer monitors are supported at higher Hz.
I don't know the refresh rate, but my M2 MBA is plugged to a 70" TV with no problem. Perhaps it's not at the highest resolution possible, but I can't see pixels from where I sit.
Active Linux support has grinded to a halt. Hector Martin (the developer of asahi Linux) has ceased development. Umid temper your expectations. M3+ will likely never be supported
https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
What innovation is there from a laptop these days? Apple Silicon chips were the innovation we needed (better performance for better battery).
Last time people cried for Apple to innovate they added the touch bar to laptops. Computers (and phones) are a mature product category where I don't want innovation, I just want them to be functional.
And butterfly keyboards. Don’t forget their innovative trash can MacPro. Hockey puck mouse anyone? Apple has an impressive history of missing the mark.
It's been a while since they made a bold choice. When I bought an iPhone a couple years ago, even the apple store employee kinda shrugged his shoulders when I asked if the new 14 phone was better, besides the camera, than the cheaper 13.
This is me when I go to a state forest 20 minutes away, and about 2.5hrs drive from Manhattan. Anywhere with even a little elevation has abundant cell dead zones.
If you live west of the great plains, you will always hit dead zones if you ever leave the city, even on the major interstates you will hit dead zones. This is an incredibly nice feature to have for tens (hundreds?) of millions of people in the just the US, let alone other countries. (this may hold true in the east as well, I don't live there)
Extrapolating your personal experience to all use cases is generally a bad idea.
I bought a 13 Pro Max on launch day and I am still using it today. I have never kept a phone this long in my life. The cameras and performance are still fantastic. The only thing that would be nice is USB-C and USB 3.0 transfer speeds. But that is not enough for me to upgrade.
what do you mean? they cut prices, improved battery life and improved performance, like they do almost every year. every few years they do something big like a new form factor or a new CPU architecture!
The last time they "innovated" on macbooks we got a touch bar (ignoring M chips). I'm good with incremental improvements if we can avoid those gigantic blunders.
Right and I'm not sure consumers are willing to tolerate innovation.
I recall the amount of hate touch bar got on HN and everyone asking Apple to revert back to building normal machines (which they did with Macbook Pro).
The issue with the touch bar is that it replaced the F keys which are (at least for me) my most used short cuts. I don't use the track pad gestures, never really got the hang of them. So the F keys were used a lot.
They should have added the touch bar, not replacement the F keys with it.
Don't forget this also came with the awful butterfly keyboard, allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness. It had terrible reliability, Apple was forced to do replacements and IIRC required a motherboard replacement to actually replace.
And why did Apple do all this? To increase the Average Selling Price ("ASP") of Macs. That's literally it.
the new M4 Macbook Air for $999 is incredible value and that's what I want the Air to be: a good compromise of power and price. For example, the 12" Macbook made too compromises to be just a little bit thinner.
They should do their "touch bar, delete ports, flat keyboard" innovations on a new Macbook Max or Ultra product line and see how it goes. The Air and Pro can stay traditional and keep the HDMI and headphone jacks etc.
I actually enjoy the Touch Bar on my 2018 MacBook Pro. The screen brightness slider offers more granular control. On my M1 air there is often a brightness gap where the screen is either too bright or too dark when using the keyboard to adjust brightness. Then I have to go to the menu bar to get the brightness level I actually want.
It's even better on the 2019+ models when they brought back the escape key.
I would agree that the added expense of that oled touchscreen isn't worth it tho. The M series Macs often go on sale at pretty large discounts (seemingly even more than the Intel Macs), and removing the oled touchscreen and the T2 chip that controlled it probably contributes to that.
Apple’s innovation strategy is not to take risky moves. They are more of a fast, competent follower company. Even iPods were a slightly conservative implementation of MP3 players, which were already becoming a thing at the time (you could even get mp3 players with solid state, albeit flash, drives while Apple’s iPods were still spinning rust).
Of course iPods became very popular because they put it all in a package that gave it a UX that non-nerds wanted to use. The flash drive style MP3 players… had tiny capacities, they had to be “managed” by the users. iPods, just dump your whole hard drive on the thing. That solid state memory is much better in a mobile device… I mean, my Sandisk player, I’ll give it an A+ on reliability. C- on capacity. Apple always gets a B in every field.
Their next thing was supposed to be VR. But nobody could find an application for VR, so Apple’s gimmick of taking something with a perfect idea and making a copy that is almost as good at the thing it does right, but which doesn’t have any massive downsides, didn’t work.
They are in a tough spot now, the tech sector seems to have lost its dreamers and so nobody is making these A+/C- devices for them to level out.
An odd take. How can you downplay the iPod and then jump over the iPhone? They also got the iPad, Air Pods, Apple Watch, and Face ID just right. Not always as era-defining as the phone, but certainly pushing their own category.
Of course, the VR thing is a remarkably well engineered thing nobody needs.
For me as a professional, that's just fine; I never used the touch bar, but the fingerprint sensor was a great addition. Not worth upgrading for on its own, but a neat upgrade.
I think a macbook with a much better front facing camera would be good, teleconferencing is a multiple times a day use case for us. They did an in-between with the system that allows you to use your iphone camera(s) which do support more wide angles, but that doesn't work on my current work laptop as it's locked down and I'd have to lock down my personal iphone as well if I want the two to connect.
The touchbar was a downgrade for me. Turns out my fingers go slightly above the key when typing certain symbols that are [shift]+[number key]. It took me a while to figure out why my laptop kept opening a music player seemingly at random a couple times per day, but it was because the touchbar was so sensitive that slightly brushing it was triggering the "play" button.
I ended up having to disable almost the whole bar to keep it from happening, just fill it with "blank" zones.
I also can't reliably drag-n-drop with force-sensitivity turned on for the touchpad, so there's another "innovation" I have to turn off. I don't even have, like, dexterity issues or a disability or something, but it makes it so damn fiddly that my drag-n-drops drop too early about half the time.
I think the M1 was a pretty huge innovation. It's the first time a laptop felt portable and without compromise. I can get a full day of work out of my laptop without plugging it in. It's pretty wild.
Before this laptops were simply things that were small enough that you could carry one from point A to point B, but they were still effectively tethered to a wall and desk for any non-trivial usecases.
I have considered going back to Mac after about 5-7 years on Windows/WSL, but the storage premium is just too much to swallow. If the $999 was a base 16GB RAM and 512GB storage, I'd consider it. I just added another 32GB of RAM to my 2020 built desktop for $50. You can get a 1TB crucial M.2 drive for $70. I know I'm comparing apples and oranges, but the storage cost is too much, and 256GB is much too little.
Edit: to go to 32GB RAM is $400. To go to 1TB SSD is another $400. That is essentially doubling the $999 cost. $400 buys me between 4 and 6 1TB M.2 drives or 2-3 2TB M.2 drives.
True, I guess they do want to push iCloud. I just can't justify the pricing. Comparing the 15" to System 76, I get a bigger screen, TWO 2TB M.2 drives, and 64 GB RAM for $150 cheaper than a 15" with one 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. And the System 76 comes with a bunch of ports, too.
As someone who’s been laptop shopping recently, the problem with most non-Apple options is that in exchange for RAM and storage been cheap and/or upgradable, they make significant sacrifices in various areas compared to MacBooks. This is insanely frustrating to me, I don’t know why generic PC manufacturers can’t seem to manage to build a small laptop that is as good of an all-rounder as the Air is and not also come with aspects that suck for no good reason.
the fact that a macbook doesn't have storage on an m.2 slot is incredibly frustrating. My m1 drive failed and they had to replace the whole damn motherboard because they soldered the storage in. Just incredibly wasteful practice just to, i guess, shave a mm or two off the things depth.
Since their whole pricing strategy depends on users not being able to do RAM and storage upgrades, you can be sure they'd rather make the integration even more tight in the next models.
My understanding is that the ram is basically in the Mseries die and therefore can't really be upgraded. The storage is pure malice or marketing pushing for 'thinnest laptop'
> The storage is pure malice or marketing pushing for 'thinnest laptop’
Kinda, the SSD controller is integrated into the M-series SoC so even if the storage were slotted (as it is in the Macs mini, Studio, and Pro) you wouldn’t be able to use an off-the-shelf M.2 SSD since the storage is little more than raw flash on a card for those models.
Sure they could make their own new standard slot or whatever. Tossing out a perfectly good motherboard and cpu to replace some flash is god damned ridiculous.
I still occasionally use a 2013 Air when I need a laptop. How no PC manufacturer has been able to get close to Apple's touchpad in two decades is crazy to me.
Near-MacBook trackpads can be found in nicer x86 laptops these days, but as always the monkey’s paw curls and some other aspect(s) of these laptops invariably sucks. Fan runs too often and/or is noisy, heat isn’t effectively managed, battery life is bad, screen becomes a flickery mess at low brightness, build quality is poor, laptop uses off the wall chipsets that Linux doesn’t like… it’s always something.
To add to the litany of failures by laptop PC makers:
Utterly garbage speakers, poor microphones, inferior screen hinges, coil whine, structural flex, light leak from the keyboard backlights, poor keyboard PWM dimming, poor keyboard switches (admittedly, butterfly keyboards were a bad era for Apple), slow or missing sleep management, terrible idle power usage, slow wake time, poor weight distribution, more ports but they're stupidly placed or don't work as you'd expect or want, uneven heat distribution, strange aesthetic choices (like fake vents) and dumb case designs that snags when slipping it into a bag.
In my experience with PC laptops for every hardware spec benchmark that exceeds something Apple does, you'll lose out on three other aspects of the laptop that aren't commonly discussed in reviews. The most frustrating part is that besides buying from Apple, money cannot solve this problem. There just isn't a PC maker that gives a shit.
Fair. A better comparison would be System 76. Comparing the 15" to System 76, I get a bigger screen (16"), TWO 2TB M.2 drives, and 64 GB RAM for $150 cheaper than a 15" with one 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. And the System 76 comes with a bunch of ports, too. For the same specs, it is $550 cheaper.
I've yet to find a non-apple laptop that's as ergonomically comfortable _as a laptop_ as the recent Airs. That's a premium unto itself, I don't know if it's $500 worth, but that's a less tangible part of the equation over raw horsepower.
I don't even necessarily object to paying a premium. If it was $200 to go to 1TB or 32GB RAM I'd probably be annoyed but still pay it. There is a difference between paying a premium and wholly unjustifiable prices.
What comparison are you trying to make? You are not painting a full picture, leaving the weight, CPU and battery life out of the equation. If you personally care about neither, yes the Air will not be the machine for you.
most non-Mac laptops have a spare slot for an SSD (and the original one is likely replaceable), with RAM being replaceable too. Why wouldn't the desktop prices apply here too?
The whole point of Apple's pricing strategy over the past few years is that since they have a monopoly on storage/RAM upgrades, they can price base model computers at margins below what they'd normally be comfortable with, and then gouge users on the upgrade costs to claw back some of those margins. That's how they're able to charge $400 for an extra 16GB of RAM.
I doubt it. In corporate environments I see so many base models being used. Most office workers do everything on SaaS web apps anyway; they only need sufficient RAM to run a browser and browser-based apps. Having small amount of storage is a feature not a bug, because it prevents employees from downloading too much company proprietary information onto their laptops.
> they only need sufficient RAM to run a browser and browser-based apps.
browser-bases apps are notoriously memory hogs, your point doesn't make much sense.
the truth is that apple get away with cheating a lot on their OS as they swap aggressively and do very aggressive swap compression.
the part about swapping aggressively is essentially overlooked by the entire industry: swapping to flash storage will wear it out faster, which is a huge issue when the flash chip is soldered and not replaceable. this will essentially create more e-waste (but they get to (happily) sell you a new laptop). so long for being green.
I do something similar with my personal laptops/PCs too — any actual files are in cloud storage[1], and mounted[2] so that they don't actually sync to the device, therefore not taking up space...
Honestly it feels very freeing having your data just be in server(s) somewhere, not having to worry about moving it between devices, or having to copy it over if you need to format/get rid of the device, or forgetting to copy over a file you need to your phone when going out, etc...
Yes, but it's perceived as abusive when two of the most feared devils come into play against you in a two-flanked attack: Network Effects and Vendor Lock-in.
I feel cornered when my social circle all use iPhones and then they want to Airdrop me something and I just can't receive it. I'm an Android man, I cannot stand the blue pill Apple feels to me.
Peer pressure is a serious threat, presented in the form of... abusive behaviour indeed.
Oh I totally agree that Apple's RAM and storage pricing is egregious, but really, "abusive"?
My point was that we shouldn't be so quick to water down the meaning of the word "abusive". If you've ever known anyone who has actually been abused you might understand better.
"Don't buy it if you don't like it" is a perfectly reasonable thing to point out whenever alternatives exist, and in this case most certainly do. It's just a laptop.
I've been repeatedly abused for big parts of my life, and I have a CPTSD diagnosis from it.
It's not just paying too much, it's one of the world's most valuable mega-corporations asking you to pay too much. If it were a boutique shop I wouldn't call it abusive. It's a combination of the bad behavior and the exercise of raw power that makes it so.
The network effects of Apple devices are really tiny, compared to say: Microsoft, which holds nearly every company in Europe ransom in effect because Excel is a default tool you need to interact with your government in nearly every country as a business.
Sure, your iPhone doesn't connect as seamlessly to your Windows computer as it would a Mac, but those aren't network effects, thats vertical integration.
Nobody is forcing you to buy a Mac, and Apple themselves are intentionally overcharging for upgrades on the basis that: "If you really need it, you'll pay for it". Most people don't need it but will buy the upgrades anyway then complain that they're too expensive.
I'm aware that it limits the longevity of the devices, but that might also be intentional here, not abusive though. Just a bit bare-faced profit seeking. Which seems to be working because, as you point out, it's one of the worlds most valuable mega-corporations.
If someone else comes out with good premium laptops I'll move over happily, but for now the best laptop you can buy is unfortunately a macbook, and they've decided that upgrades are worth this money, if you don't agree then the answer is to simply not upgrade, or avoid the devices entirely.
I think I'd be in much more agreement with you if we were talking about people being forced to buy Apple products, but that's rarely if ever the case.
By and large, the people who buy these products are freely choosing to do so. To claim that, for those people, the price is "too high" is equivalent to telling them "you shouldn't be willing to pay that much for that product".
I think it's perfectly fine for me or any other individual to hold the opinion that their products are overpriced, but I think it would be at best borderline presumptuous for me to attempt to tell someone else what they should or should not value.
I think it is safe to assume that nobody particularly likes being on the cashcow end of price discrimination though, however valuable they perceive the product to be. This sort of pricing strategy cannot be good for consumers overall in some economic sense under certain assumptions, right?
Not to mention that design decisions have surely been made to ensure this segmentation works that destroy repairability - so much for environmental friendliness. It is difficult not to feel Apple's contempt for its customers when it has been actively crippling the usefulness of its devices to squeeze some more profits.
To Apple's credit, it has established an effective monopoly over the market of _decent_ laptops fair and square and OS X seems to be less of a malware than whatever is Windows 10/11. I am not _that_ salty to pay the premium.
I don't believe in free will, so I don't believe anyone freely chooses to do anything. I think genetic and environmental luck determines everything in life.
I'm far more interested in improving our lot by altering the environment (e.g. by promoting memory-safe programming languages, or by pressuring corporations to not be abusive) than in appealing to notions like choice.
I'd be free to not buy from them if they released iMessage and facetime for android so people wouldn't get kicked from groupchats and prevented from being able to video call their grandmother when they switched phones.
Google hangouts / gmail works fine on iOS and android. Same for whatsapp, zoom, signal, etc. Heck, even microsoft teams.
Apple has more money than any of those companies, and yet also has the wildly most anti-competitive restrictive software, ensuring almost all of its services (apple music/books/iMessage/facetime/etc etc) more or less require all your devices to be apple devices.
I don't know if it's abusive, but it's certainly putting more chains on the user than any of the other similar ecosystems.
I'm in another, bizarre camp. I'd pay double whatever they're charging for if I could run linux on it utilizing all of the hardware. Also, if notch went away, but that's another story. Unless someone knows of laptop hardware that comes close to both performance, comfort, and battery which can run linux.
Oddly enough I'd probably accept a much cheaper, shittier laptop if it ran OS X, but, I've been all-in on Apple hardware since 2006, so maybe I don't understand how bad the non-Apple laptops really are. Conceptually I'd be fine with Linux on the desktop -- hell I used to use OpenBSD as a daily driver -- but OS X is in my veins now.
You can make the notch go away with third-party apps. On the Pro laptops the screen has miniLED backlighting, so the dark area stays purely black. Removing the notch this way leaves you with a 16:10 screen, so you still have more screen real state than in most other laptops.
The notch has gone away, at least as of Sonoma on a 15" M3 Air, but at the cost of some real estate at the top of the screen. Basically they just don't draw anything at or above the lower edge of the notch, so it looks like the screen ends there even when it doesn't.
I actually wanted to get the notch back so I could have as much vertical screen real estate as possible and was disappointed to find that there doesn't appear to be any reliable way of doing this.
No, from the time I bought it last year I never changed the resolution until I noticed the notch was gone and was trying to get it back, but to no avail. I also don't have anything unusual installed, definitely nothing display-related. It's pretty much as I received it from Apple, modulo whatever updates have been released since then.
Currently it's set to 1710 x 1107, which is labeled "Default", and no notch. When I look closely at the right angle I can clearly see the notch dipping into the screen, but the OS does not use any of the area to either side of the notch--it's completely dark there.
Just now I ticked "Show all resolutions" and tried at least a dozen other available resolutions and none of them use the screen above the notch bottom. Sonoma 14.6.1, 15" M3 Air.
Quite sure. SyncThing and mosh are the two most unusual apps that are installed. And I've spent a fair amount of time researching to find out what setting could cause this. The only thing I've found that could supposedly affect the notch is the display resolution, and changing that makes no difference for the notch.
One thing that did occur to me though is that it was a 'refurbished' MacBook. Bought it from Apple, and it looked brand new, but it does seem possible that someone could have done who-knows-what to it before I got it. Or perhaps there is some defect in the display near the top and Apple did this intentionally to conceal it.
The purpose of a professional machine is that it pays for itself when you make money using it. If that's not your case, then why do you need professional equipment?
I don't think 1TB of storage makes something professional equipment. I have well over 500 GB of photos. I want each of those stored locally where I control the data. Nor do I think 32 GB of RAM makes something professional. I'd prefer to future proof such a large purchase, and because I can't even go back to Apple in 3 years and purchase more RAM I have to decide right now what might be useful in 5-7 years.
That's absolutely professional levels that you are demanding both in storage and RAM.
Apple sells computers in the premium/professional market segment. They're not going to change that. If you're not making money from the equipment or if you can't afford it for consumer use, there's probably nothing that they will do for you, you're not in the intended customer segment.
Charging a 400+% markup for storage and RAM does not suddenly make a laptop professional. Sure, if there was a significant difference between screen size, chip, battery life, etc, you could argue the $999 one is a prosumer device and the $1799 laptop is a professional device. The only difference between a $999 laptop and a $1799 laptop is 768 GB of storage and 16 GB of RAM. I will even be generous and say that is a $700 difference because Apple tosses in two more GPU cores ($100) when you go over a certain amount of RAM. On Amazon, I can get a 1TB M.2 drive and 32 GB of DDR4 SODIMM RAM for $150 total. A premium from Apple on those components would be $300-$400. They are at $700-$800.
If you are buying professional work equipment, a difference of a few hundred dollars does not matter. Professionals in any field usually have equipment worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
And if you're buying a computer as a consumer because it is a premium machine, well then you eat the price if you really want the machine, or you have to go for non-premium competitors.
You're comparing McDonalds to a nice steak in a good restaurant. The good restaurant will charge dearly for a bottle of water while McDonalds gives you free refills, and so on. The business models are different and the market segments are different.
Odd, every steakhouse I have been to gives me as much water as I'd like, free of charge.
I'm not comparing a hamburger from my local go-to to a steak from a steakhouse. I'm comparing the cost of the mash potatoes that comes with my hamburger ($5) and what they cost at a non-Apple steakhouse ($15). I don't go to the Apple steakhouse not because I find their steak unreasonably priced (it is a great value, actually), but because I refuse to pay $60 for mash potatoes, and if I don't get the mash potatoes, the steak has no value to me.
What I'm saying is that you're comparing apples to oranges.
A steak in a nice restaurant and its accessories will always be more expensive than a burger meal at McDonalds.
Apple has invested enormous effort into making high quality software. They offer the only operating system on the market which is any good at all. But their business model is selling hardware, so that's where they have to bake in all their costs. And their hardware is top notch as well. They could change their offerings to charge a high basic price on all their devices and then offer RAM and SSD upgrades for the low prices you are mentioning. But they choose instead to have a lower base price, knowing that the only people who need more RAM or storage (need, not want), are professionals who can pay for it.
It's the same in a nice restaurant. You're not paying for the ingredients, but everything around it including staff, the environment and so on. That's why a beer is so god damned expensive when you go out.
You can always use portable drives, cloud, or a NAS to store photos. In either case you need a backup, storing everything on one laptop is a bit limiting.
I do use portable drives, Dropbox, and Amazon Glacier. I have four copies of my photos. They are, by leaps and bounds, my most irreplaceable data. I want every single one of them on my main machine, which makes automating backups to the external drives and Glacier infinitely easier. It is a dealbreaker for me, and I don't find $400 an acceptable price to pay to get past said dealbreaker. Well, realistically, $800, seeing as my personal Dropbox is at 850 GB, it would be silly of me to buy an un-upgradeable drive that would be teetering on storage space issues from the jump. Apple thinks it is reasonable to pay $199 less than it would cost for an entire second MacBook Air to upgrade drive space to 2TB.
Yeah, but I don't want my hard drive in an external enclosure for my laptop. I'm writing this comment from a macbook air, which is comfortably in my lap, thankfully only plugged into power.
It's true that seeing that number next to $400 next to 16GB is agony, but a 32GB 1TB 15" M4 Air for $2k is a hell of a deal. I have the upgraded M1 Air and after using it for a few years, (1) I still have no reason to upgrade and (2) it's worth more to me than whatever paid.
I’d love to buy that config as my personal laptop, but the problem is that my 512/16 M1 Air still works so well for my use case that I can’t find enough reasons to justify the expense. M6 Air maybe!
Not sure about your use-case, but nowadays i don't do anything fancy with my laptop.
So far I've decided that going forward I'll likely be getting a cheap baseline laptop (curretly eyeing a 16gb/512gb macbook air m4 or the upcoming framework 12) and then get some beefier desktop to remote into. i don't even need a gpu, the heavy stuff i do largely revolves around running virtual machines.
I did most of my work in a screen session running emacs on a 48cpu/192gb ram machine in a previous job, and I did some tests and remote desktop nowadays is pretty good (way above the "usable" threshold).
Side Note: I recently bought a 11T HDD for $120...
You can AT WORST buy the storage OUTRIGHT for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE. But in most cases you can buy more than double what Apple is offering for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE.
I boycotted Apple for years because of these issues, but unfortunately I think this battle is lost. I gave up. I have a macbook Air. It is nice, but it is a glorified SSH machine. They must know this, because I'd prefer to get an iPad pro with a keyboard but run an actual fucking desktop OS. But then again, the fucking iPad isn't even good at the one thing it is supposed to be good at: writing... The 3rd party apps are leagues ahead of Apple Notes.
What I can't figure out is:
- Why are there no good competitors?
- Why are there no good linux laptops with good battery life?
I use Goodnotes, but people really like notability. For me, the most obtuse missing feature from Apple notes is that you can't fucking pinch to zoom...
I think you are crazy. The performance difference between MacOS and WSL is like night and day. I was just shopping for a Linux laptop and I have found that the top end models from Microsoft, Lenovo and Dell to be as or more expensive than Apple (with the exception of having user replaceable SSDs). There is nothing in the PC world that compares to Apple Silicon. If the price is too much, look at the refurb or used market where you can get really significant discounts.
100%! I find that folks like this are comparing specs on paper but have no clue what the real life differences are like in practice, hence missing out. Or maybe they are trying to justify not spending the money but still life is short, go for the best
If I am spending $1700+ on a machine, it is going to be my primary machine. I know exactly what "the real life difference" is between 256 GB storage on my primary machine and 2TB storage on my primary machine. My personal Dropbox sits at 850 GB. It is simple math. It is egregious that going to 2TB storage costs $199 less than buying an entire second laptop. No thanks.
Apple doesn’t have a lightweight laptop with a matte screen. Their MacBook Air is light but has a reflective screen. The Pro has a matte screen (upgrade option) but is pretty heavy.
A true portable laptop, one that can be used not just at home where lighting could perhaps be controlled, needs to by lightweight and have a non-reflective screen.
There are kits to upgrade the mini and studio to max out storage for reasonable prices. I've watched YT videos on the process and it doesn't look too hard.
As for the laptops, probably not feasible.
I will say that unlike laptops/desktops I used to buy before I went Apple, I use them for a really long time. When I ran Windows, I'd upgrade every few years. I had my Mac Pro 2012 for 9 years before upgrading to a Studio. Yes, I maxed out the storage, and it was annoying how expensive, but amortized over 9 years? Not as bad.
EDIT: if I was purchasing a Studio now, I'd likely do the 3rd party upgrade to 8TB (what I saw in a YT video). That's double what my M1 Studio maxed out at.
They completely got rid of the M1 or M2 whatever baseline MacBook Air, and instead having the latest M4 at $999.
That is along with their recent upgrade which bump All Mac model to 16GB Baseline. In Apple's History, the M4 Mac mini and M4 MacBook Air are perhaps the best value for money in the entire History of Mac. I actually dont even record anything that came close.
You can get a good deal on a refurbished or used M* MBP and try it out. My 2021 M1 Max MBP is still going strong; so strong I just can't justify a new one.
Biggest thing to note is how many external displays you want to drive. I got the M1 Max to drive my 2-4.
The biggest difference between this model and the M1 is that ...
All* software now has native Apple Silicon builds.
* Except abandonware**, of course, but Rosetta is so good you need not notice. That said, I personally recommend never triggering Rosetta which helps you avoid accidentally running legacy drivers etc.
** For some reason, including Steam's installer, even though the games it wraps are universal/native ARM.
In summer 2022 I picked up an M2 Air (24GB/1TB/10-core GPU) for 1939USD with edu discount. Today the M4 equivalent is 1479USD, and the M4 (aside from being faster) can go to 32GB RAM instead of 24GB, and has Wifi 6E instead of just 6 (why not 7?).
I said I'd buy the next Air as long as it had 6GHz wifi support (6E, eventually 7) but now that it's out it's just not enough of an upgrade for me (a lot of money for 25% more RAM, CPU performance, and 6GHz wifi).
Been using Airs since 2011, 2012 model lasted me to 2018 upgrade (Retina finally) but now I snagged the m4 pro Mini and it’s so small I brought it to the birthing inn with me and (with the help of a universal remote) just used the room TVs as a monitor. It’s so small that I can just throw it in a bag with a mouse/keyboard/HDMI and even a PS5 controller which I do appreciate my wife tolerating Jedi Cal joining us in the postpartum wing over PS5 streaming from the console at home, quite doable and the Mini’s built in speaker is quite a charmer all things considered! I ran it from inside a drawer under the baby “kiosk” and it definitely outgunned the in-room speakers that were clearly gimped (similar to putting your phone into the right enclosure amplifies the sound).
At home when not at my desk I’ve been using screen share to remote in from the 2018 Air, this is the first time since 2018 I bought a new computer and it’s oddly nice having it not be a laptop, don’t have to worry about the precious built-in screen or keyboard.
Caveat may be if I wasn’t working remote perhaps it would be different but not sure, using the 2018 Air as a client for the M4 Pro has been pretty solid for my current purposes and it’s nice still having an Intel Mac for the edge case backwards compatibility development needs.
Lunar Lake is pretty good, yeah. But generally, even premium Windows laptops feel less complete. Speakers sound worse, trackpad isn't as nice, usually worse thermal design / fan noise, it's the little things.
I just bought the m4 mac mini at Costco about a month ago. I have been slightly irked I didn't wait for this so I can walk it away from my desk sometimes. I really hate the idea of a return since I'm still in the window but....
I love that the base model starts with 16GB of RAM here. The value of these computers is incredible - I purchased a Macbook Pro in 2021 and it's still powering through every task I throw at it. Before Apple started making their own chips, I felt like I had to upgrade every 2-3 years to prevent my laptop from becoming a hurdle in completing every day tasks (remember when tab management was a thing?). Really happy with these machines.
Is there a particular use case where you'd need the extra (I'm assuming you're wanting this for on the go use cases, otherwise you'd probably use a hub at your "home" location)
Any hub actually worth using (Thunderbolt ports, high enough charging wattage, dual displays, 2.5Gb Ethernet) will run you like $300-$400, which is almost half the price of the Macbook. I'd rather have a couple more ports on the device.
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[ 383 ms ] story [ 1407 ms ] thread[4] against, 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
Hmmm... The M4 might be ten million times faster than the AGC, depending on the instructions per clock of the AGC and the VAXstation 4000/60 with which we're comparing it.
https://zia.io/notice/ApcPNCgTyrYXpUQU2S
If they'd just give me onboard mobile connectivity, I'd upgrade to the next Air sooner, otherwise this thing will run until it dies... and maybe some day they'll start comparing performance against their original M1.
On my Verizon plan (Unlimited Ultimate), I qualify for two 'connected devices' to be discounted. My Thinkpad is $10/mo extra on my account for unlimited LTE. I'm not a heavy data user by any means and this works out well for me.
Besides, having a cellular modem also allows you to tap into both WiFi and Cellular seamlessly like your phone does to make your overall connection much more reliable.
yeah i just checked mine, it says MacBook Pro 16" 2019 and the cpu is an intel i7. i don't know what to say, it still meets all my requirements, i don't feel any need to upgrade.
I have an M1 Pro (which is considered old now) and it's like night and day.
But I am glad that they continue to refine the technology.
Anecdotally, I've also seen her get issues when going from an area with bad connection to an area with good connection (iPhone will disconnect).
The experience with a non-iphone is also not seamless, though that's to be expected.
Point being that reliable and easy cellular access on a MacBook would be a pretty nice improvement. This is especially true given how much of what people do on computers relies on the internet these days.
Dunno about that, I've been using Androids for hotspotting for years, and haven't noticed any issues.
And it isn't really ironed out to behave in Germany where on a train you have frequent losses of phone connectivity. Every time it loses signal, the hotspot drops out and disconnects.
The real reason is Apple wants you to buy an ipad for on the road. Laptops, according to them, are strictly for office/home usage where wifi is available.
It's one of those small things that makes like a bit easier. On Lenovo/HP these have been around for years and they don't cost that much.
I don't even want that on my iPad Pro. I would rather tether it with my phone, mobile hotspot, or some other wifi connection.
Definitely. I have ZERO rational reasons to upgrade from my lowest-spec first-gen Air M1. I use it everyday and speed and battery life are still way more than I need.
I have yet to update beyond Monterey though (even though I really should) in case it slows down a bit or the battery life isn't as good.
I had the battery replaced, the tab key replaced, and the screen refinished (anti-glare coating removed) for about $240 a couple years ago and aside from the fact it can’t be updated beyond Big Sur 11.7.10 I have no issues.
I was riding the 'service battery' indicator all the way to the bloody end. 1148 cycles, max capacity 3735 mAh.
I'm on a 2020 [edit: I got it as part of comp for a contracting gig, is why the overlap in years with my 2014 MBP ownership, but didn't switch to using it for personal stuff until after that was over and my MPB wifi broke] M1 Air now, so close to or in year 6 for that. No issues yet and battery life still stellar, should get at least 2-3 more years.
(Folks who are like "LOL who even needs 18 hours of battery life?", which is a common sort of post on Apple laptop announcements: well for one thing it's extremely nice to be hunting for outlets even less often, and to maybe go on a whole light-laptop-use 3-day trip and not charge it the whole time and it's still alive at the end of it, or to have that battery as reserve for charging your phone, but also and perhaps most importantly, it means that a 30% degraded battery after several years of ownership still gets you 10+ hours of real-world use)
I used my 2011 MBP daily until upgrading to a 2020 M1 air.
I kinda miss the ridiculous heat output on winter mornings.
Yeah, particularly for the Air that makes complete sense, though. Consumer laptops tend to get replaced pretty slowly. I'll be upgrading from a _2016_ MBP (though not to the Air, given the lack of the 120hz screen; going to go for the Pro).
1) Apple releases incremental upgrades! Why won't they make huge strides every year so I can upgrade!
2) People who upgrade every year are sheeps!
3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice! (yes, not Windows though).
4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!
Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.
"Hey, you noticed things are slow? Well, this thing is a lot faster" is pretty good marketing if it's true, nobody except the very wealthy are dropping thousands of euros/dollars on a new device for 10% performance gains, however if it's twenty-three times the performance of the Mac I currently own? Maybe it's enough to convince me or someone like my Mum to splurge on a new device.
Maybe my current Mac is not "good enough" anymore when 23x is the number on the box if I buy new.
It's fair to compare with devices that you expect actual people to actually upgrade from, there's a lot of Intel macbook airs in the field.
Heck, even some professionals are still on Intel macs: https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/25-of-...
> 3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice!
> 4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!
2 and 4 kind of contradict each other.
I wouldn't be surprised that the average upgrade cycle for a lot of folks is in that 3-5 year range, for both personal and corporate buyers.
My personal laptop is a 2014 MacBook Pro. I'll be buying one of these new M4 Airs, and comparing to an 11-year-old computer.
I now have an M2 Air and have zero complaints, it’s the best computing device I’ve ever owned. You’re going to really enjoy the M4.
Each year when Apple came out with new machines, we would make a game of putting together a dream machine --- ages ago, that could easily hit 6 figures, these days, well, a fully-configured Mac Studio is $14,099 and a Pro Display w/ stand and nano texture adds $6,998 or so.
Not surprising considering the CPU in the fastest "desktop" Mac before today was slower than an old Intel chips you can buy for ~$350 (e.g. the 14700k).
Sample size one: My spouse is using either a 2013 MBA and wants to upgrade, mostly b/c the enshitification of web sites. Basic productivity was okay-ish for her work (document creation, pdfs, spreadsheets, etc), but even Gmail now suffers with more than a tab.
Edit: thinking more, I don’t know if I agree with myself here.
It still makes claims like that arbitrary and meaningless. What does "23x faster" even mean, it's not like there are that many people who are upgrading from an Intel MBA yet are also fulltime Cinebench/etc. testers.
> It's fair to compare
Well yes. It's reasonably fair (realistically its not like any of those people this is targeted at would feel a difference between 10x, 15x or 30x) and obviously smart.
The measurements are in the linked footnote, they tested the “Super Resolution” upscaling feature of Pixelmator Pro.
Especially when for the M1 (2x faster) they decided to use an entirely different Photoshop benchmark YET they they still show it alongside the 23x for the Pixelmator one (presumably the M4 is NOT 2x faster than the M1 there..).
That's just objectively slimy (even if mostly harmless) marketing...
Also presumably Pixelmator's "Super Resolution" and Photoshop's "radial blur, content aware scale, diffuse, find edges" are also mostly GPU bound these days? Which again.. might not be the best indicator for "performance" for most consumers.
Edit: Looking at some more general benchmarks the the i7 (I7-1060NG7) from the last Intel MBA is "only" 4x (Geekbench MT), ~2.7x (Single-Core) or 2x (Cinebench single core) slower than the M4. Picking some highly specific "benchmark" that's several times higher than that is just dishonest.
When normal users are thinking "faster" they are really thinking about snappiness/responsiveness, not number crunching.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-intel_...
Up to 23x faster. Of course, the fastest Intel MacBook Air is pretty old. But 23X is pretty crazy, right? I wonder what they are comparing against. Int-8 matrix multiplications or something else that’s gotten acceleration lately, maybe?
/typed from my Macbook Pro M4 — Love Apple — This is great!
M3 1.6x faster than M1 (1 year ago).
= M4 1.2x faster than M3.
not bad, but Moore's law is dead for CPUs.
Does this mean it's 23x faster for normal workloads? Nah.
Apple when they were pumping clang were also claiming that binaries produced with clang were much faster than those made with gcc. This was because they used a 15 years old version of gcc that didn't have any vector instructions (because they didn't exist at the time) and benchmarking using some code that was solely doing vector stuff.
In short, they don't lie, but it's a lie :D
> Up to 23x faster than fastest Intel‑based MacBook Air
And right next to it:
> Up to 2x faster than MacBook Air (M1)
The footnotes are there to expand on the conditions of the measurements.
So not exactly misleading. On the contrary, it seems to me they’re quite clearly saying “if you have an Intel or M1 MacBook Air you have reason to upgrade. Otherwise, don’t”.
https://i.imgur.com/pEWPXzK.png
I'm reminded of 90s advertisements in which the new G3 processor was supposed to be so many times faster than the Pentium or even Pentium II. Their chosen benchmark: how long it takes to run a Photoshop plugin. On Mac OS pre-X, a Photoshop plugin got 100% of the CPU because there was no preemptive multitasking. Windows 9x versions of Photoshop had to share the CPU with whatever else was running.
I've got an M1 Air and there's still no really compelling reason to upgrade. MagSafe and a nicer camera don't really justify it, especially when Continuity Camera is better than on the M1 or M4.
These days, it's an anti-feature. I have USB-C for everything, why would I give that up?
(Anyway, I just ordered one for my wife, a soon-to-be-ex-intel-mac user. She'll probably be pretty happy about this, especially since she doesn't have an intel air as powerful as that one.)
On the other hand, both using ChatGPT myself and the few usage figures they have released are very impressive.
It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips?
Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice?
UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.
The laptop never got hot, game never stuttered (beyond NMS glitching engine which exists on windows too). Slight bit of increased warmth, but my phones gotten hotter browsing bloated websites.
I don’t blame Microsoft for looking at bailing on consoles. iPhones will be more powerful in a couple more cycles.
No complaints whatsoever.
Struggle as in the build takes 3+ mins
In general though it's cool, maybe when charging it gets warm but I use it on a desk mostly
A general gripe I have switching devices is the keyboard layout ha cmd+c vs. ctrl+c
Stick to an ext keyboard I guess
Edit: 16GB RAM is what I have I sometimes get the "out of application memory" message
Anyway I use my computer for freelancing/working on multiple platforms, it was a good buy (used), alternatively I could have went with a mini but that screen is so good on a mac (although I develop with an ultrawide external monitor).
However, it is surprisingly functional and I don’t strictly need any additional ram, which was surprising to me.
I eventually got the M1 Air for serious ocaml and rust development and found it would get quite toasty (tho never concerning) during big compile/test cycles, but generally only over several dozen seconds of full load.
I upgraded to a 14” pro with an M2 Max and am reasonably happy with it and think it was an important upgrade for my productivity. In daily use, fans kick in rarely but when needed for a speciality job like TLA model checking, they can reject a lot of heat (= performance margin). Of course it would be nice if it weighed less (mine is 1.8kg after including a case), but as a side benefit the machine can play games (even emulated x86 ones inside Parallels!) so it’s hard to say I’m worse off than my previous status quo of VSCode remoting into my big Linux desktop :)
I also do a lot of AI + Audio stuff, and it gets somewhat warm but not as much as when compiling heavy stuff.
It's basically the same without the fan noise, it's a lot cooler, and it seems to handle whatever tasks I throw at it just fine.
I would probably go with the Air if I was a project manager, development manager, or someone that did not have to do much work with code.
Nothing else seems to make it sweat. Just games and presumably mining Bitcoin or other very intensive tasks.
Devs/Gamers should always go for a Pro machine.
Depends on how much you care about the last bit of performance and how often you expect running into throttling. In my experience, it takes the M2 Pro multiple minutes of full load before the fan starts. I do a lot of Rust programming on smaller projects and I think the air would have been fine for me. Compilation takes at most a few minutes on the first run. For doing larger projects like LLVM, the pro is a better option. MLIR took 10 minutes to compile each time I pulled in new commits on main. Then throttling becomes an issue.
I’ll try to replicate the test with an M3 13” vs the 15” touchbar intel. Don’t have my MBPs at work.
Never heard the fan come on a single time with either machine while developing. Heat has never been an issue. Battery life is superb on both. Pro has better screen but is way heavier. Air is much nicer to bring to a cafe.
The only time I've ever heard the fan come on is when playing 3d games, especially non-native Apple Silicon games.
If I were getting one only for development, I'd get an Air. If it were meant to be a desktop replacement workstation for work and gaming and movies and such, then the Pro.
Both are easily more than fast enough for web dev. Not sure about other stacks (especially with heavy compiles or virtualization). I have a few services in Docker and that's fine (on both machines).
It's just so so much better than the shitty old Wintel days that I don't even worry about it anymore. Lightyears ahead of any ThinkPad or Latitude, etc.
It never gets hot to the touch either (which wasn't the case with my old ThinkPads, for example, or the Intel MacBook Pro I had immediately prior). Apple Silicon is just incredible and I don't think I can ever go back now.
Never noticed any thermal issues at all. It barely gets warm for me.
Make sure to get at least 16GB RAM.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/30/24270669/apple-macbook-p...
If you are doing normal developer things, the MacBook Air is 100% fine. I use mine daily (M3 Air 13in, 24GB RAM), it handles Rails + Postgres, it handles JS (Next.js + React), it handles Flutter (for desktop and mobile), it handles IntelliJ and RubyMine and DataGrip, it handles Android Studio and Xcode for iOS apps -- including Android/iPhone software emulators. I can load up large Docker projects with 12+ containers, totally fine. I occasionally play with LM Studio, no issues.
Under all of the above, no throttling, no heat issues, works fine on laps, etc. Half the time, it's barely warm to the touch.
---
The only time it gets hot for me, is running the CPU + GPU max'd out hard, for long periods of time. If I try to run FF14 or Warframe via Crossover/Codeweavers for an hour or two, for example, it gets warm and throttles a bit. (Still works, no crashes, no issues, but it does get warm and throttle).
99%+ of developers are fine with a MacBook Air.
So if you’re not gaming nor have tons of UI windows open (since macOS UI is rendered with GPU) - you’ll never experience your M-series getting hot.
So yea, same.
I did some research and I'm deferring for a semester but tbh my motivation is pretty low. As per perception it seems decent but depending on circumstances it's def a much better idea to do an on campus programme.
When people put their hands on the real device, it was slaying almost everything on the market and soon it was clear that this thing is a revolution.
You don't one up this easily. Apple claims 2X performance improvement over M1 Air and I am sure its mostly true but that M1 Air was so ahead that for a lot of people workloads didn't catch up yet.
At this very moment I have 3 Xcode projects open, Safari has 147 tabs open and its consuming 11GB of my 16GB Ram and my SSD lifetime dropped to 98% due to frequent swap hits and yet I'm perfectly fine with the performance at this very moment and I'm not looking for immediate replacement.
Once I no longer remember the older tabs I create a tab group from the current tabs in case there’s a tab I care about and start fresh.
I do restart my browser once a month or so, if things ever feel less snappy than normal.
It looks like this: https://a.dropoverapp.com/cloud/download/5cda0c76-9398-475a-...
Maybe this is just me managing my ADHD, but when I see people with hundreds of tabs open I just can't imagine how they work. Every tab has been mashed down to its favicon and I watch them struggle to find the right one. It seems insane to me.
I think of the >100 ones as people who have completely lost control of their lives. I'm sure they think of me as someone who needs everything to be just so and can't deal with the messiness of real life.
MS Office has already stopped updating, along with some other software (though not much, most still updates without issues). As long as Firefox keeps receiving updates for my system, most things will be fine.
Looks like the only issue with your MacBook Air is there may be some metal issues. https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/issues/1...
If those don't look like a problem for you, I'd definitely suggest giving it a try. MacOS 13 should give you at least 3 more years of use out of it.
Going beyond MacOS 13 I don't think is worth it. MacOS 14 is noticeably slower on my 2010 iMac, and there aren't any new features it can take advantage of anyways.
But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.
I am fine(ish) with the above setup, I don't know what you are talking about. 8Gb is plenty for website browsing.
1 persons "web browsing" is no browser extensions, a couple of gmail tabs, some light blog reading, and maybe something as heavy as reddit.
While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.
8gb is quickly becoming unworkable for people that fall closer to the latter group.
That's computing, not web browsing. And on not so great platform than that.
There was never a time when laptops were expected to last 10+ years.
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/macbook-air-vs-macbook-pro/
The Pro is also fan cooled, but with Apple Silicon I’m not sure that matters all that much at this performance band. If you need fan cooled performance you probably want to start thinking about a Pro level SoC, at which point you’re all in on a Pro machine anyway.
- Larger display with higher resolution and DPI
- Brighter display (1000nits vs 500nits) with mini-LED backlight, local dimming, and HDR
- 120Hz display
- 24hr battery life vs 18hr
- Active fan cooling vs passive cooling
- 6 speakers vs 4 speakers
- 3 TB4/USB-C ports vs 2
- HDMI port
- SDXC card reader
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-M4,...
This really looks like an amazing computer if it can handle long IDEA hours on medium projects.
That said, the fact that a 5 year old laptop with 8GB RAM is usable even for coding situations is astounding.
([1] These days my daily driver is an m1 mbp of some whizzbang 32gb variety, which only replaced the mba because my spouse wanted a travel machine and the mbp came for the low low cost of being caught in the late 2022 startup crash. For day to day ordinary backend dev work there really isn't a noticeable difference in my experience, except I guess the mbp is more awkward when working-from-couch. arm vs x86 was sometimes a little awkward around launch, but I can't remember the last time it was an actual hassle.)
I am pretty sure almost everyone will gladly trade the "thinness" for a few standard USB and HDMI ports.
I think there’s a lot of people that want something as light and thin as possible to slip into your purse and take to the cafe.
I have never seen any instance where a laptop's thinness ended up factoring in ease of portability.
I know it seems like a champagne problem but the Pro really can get annoyingly heavy when traveling and the Air is dreamy how light it is.
Technology makes progress. Do you want a COM port?
Most 70 inch monitors are 4K, not 8k. The more recent models can do 120 Hz.
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-M3,...
Looks like the only arguments for the M4 Air are:
- 32GB RAM option
- 2 more CPU cores
- 100GB/s vs 120GB/s memory bandwidth
There's a BTO 24GB RAM option.
i need more compute? using a saas solution i need more storage? tiny external ssd or cloud storage
the 8gigs of ram also aren't holding me back, i think most people just cry based on principle and would be fine with it in a double-blind test
Apple Intelligence isn't it - it's just playing catch-up with a market that tries to slap AI onto everything it can think of.
The hardware upgrades are always nice but there's nothing 'out there' like a touch bar or even a 'dynamic island'. Just more safe iterations.
Last time people cried for Apple to innovate they added the touch bar to laptops. Computers (and phones) are a mature product category where I don't want innovation, I just want them to be functional.
That seems like a pretty big deal to me?
Extrapolating your personal experience to all use cases is generally a bad idea.
Ah maybe RISC-V! Wouldn't that be fun
The only thing I'd want is something that'd make it last even longer like waterproofing the top keyboard layer.
I recall the amount of hate touch bar got on HN and everyone asking Apple to revert back to building normal machines (which they did with Macbook Pro).
They should have added the touch bar, not replacement the F keys with it.
And why did Apple do all this? To increase the Average Selling Price ("ASP") of Macs. That's literally it.
the new M4 Macbook Air for $999 is incredible value and that's what I want the Air to be: a good compromise of power and price. For example, the 12" Macbook made too compromises to be just a little bit thinner.
Hence, innovation. Now you just get risk-averse updates that offer little reason to upgrade from previous models.
It's even better on the 2019+ models when they brought back the escape key.
I would agree that the added expense of that oled touchscreen isn't worth it tho. The M series Macs often go on sale at pretty large discounts (seemingly even more than the Intel Macs), and removing the oled touchscreen and the T2 chip that controlled it probably contributes to that.
Of course iPods became very popular because they put it all in a package that gave it a UX that non-nerds wanted to use. The flash drive style MP3 players… had tiny capacities, they had to be “managed” by the users. iPods, just dump your whole hard drive on the thing. That solid state memory is much better in a mobile device… I mean, my Sandisk player, I’ll give it an A+ on reliability. C- on capacity. Apple always gets a B in every field.
Their next thing was supposed to be VR. But nobody could find an application for VR, so Apple’s gimmick of taking something with a perfect idea and making a copy that is almost as good at the thing it does right, but which doesn’t have any massive downsides, didn’t work.
They are in a tough spot now, the tech sector seems to have lost its dreamers and so nobody is making these A+/C- devices for them to level out.
Of course, the VR thing is a remarkably well engineered thing nobody needs.
I think a macbook with a much better front facing camera would be good, teleconferencing is a multiple times a day use case for us. They did an in-between with the system that allows you to use your iphone camera(s) which do support more wide angles, but that doesn't work on my current work laptop as it's locked down and I'd have to lock down my personal iphone as well if I want the two to connect.
I ended up having to disable almost the whole bar to keep it from happening, just fill it with "blank" zones.
I also can't reliably drag-n-drop with force-sensitivity turned on for the touchpad, so there's another "innovation" I have to turn off. I don't even have, like, dexterity issues or a disability or something, but it makes it so damn fiddly that my drag-n-drops drop too early about half the time.
Before this laptops were simply things that were small enough that you could carry one from point A to point B, but they were still effectively tethered to a wall and desk for any non-trivial usecases.
Edit: to go to 32GB RAM is $400. To go to 1TB SSD is another $400. That is essentially doubling the $999 cost. $400 buys me between 4 and 6 1TB M.2 drives or 2-3 2TB M.2 drives.
I just buy lots of storage on my desktop and access it remotely. Tailscale makes it easy to do so.
Kinda, the SSD controller is integrated into the M-series SoC so even if the storage were slotted (as it is in the Macs mini, Studio, and Pro) you wouldn’t be able to use an off-the-shelf M.2 SSD since the storage is little more than raw flash on a card for those models.
Utterly garbage speakers, poor microphones, inferior screen hinges, coil whine, structural flex, light leak from the keyboard backlights, poor keyboard PWM dimming, poor keyboard switches (admittedly, butterfly keyboards were a bad era for Apple), slow or missing sleep management, terrible idle power usage, slow wake time, poor weight distribution, more ports but they're stupidly placed or don't work as you'd expect or want, uneven heat distribution, strange aesthetic choices (like fake vents) and dumb case designs that snags when slipping it into a bag.
In my experience with PC laptops for every hardware spec benchmark that exceeds something Apple does, you'll lose out on three other aspects of the laptop that aren't commonly discussed in reviews. The most frustrating part is that besides buying from Apple, money cannot solve this problem. There just isn't a PC maker that gives a shit.
I opened my MSI GS66 to install a second M.2280 NVMe and upgrade both DIMMs from 32GB to 64GB RAM. It was easy... I think about six screws or so.
(Typed on my M2 Air)
browser-bases apps are notoriously memory hogs, your point doesn't make much sense.
the truth is that apple get away with cheating a lot on their OS as they swap aggressively and do very aggressive swap compression.
the part about swapping aggressively is essentially overlooked by the entire industry: swapping to flash storage will wear it out faster, which is a huge issue when the flash chip is soldered and not replaceable. this will essentially create more e-waste (but they get to (happily) sell you a new laptop). so long for being green.
I do something similar with my personal laptops/PCs too — any actual files are in cloud storage[1], and mounted[2] so that they don't actually sync to the device, therefore not taking up space...
Honestly it feels very freeing having your data just be in server(s) somewhere, not having to worry about moving it between devices, or having to copy it over if you need to format/get rid of the device, or forgetting to copy over a file you need to your phone when going out, etc...
[1] Nextcloud rented from Hetzner https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/
[2] Nextcloud client has a feature called Virtual Files on Windows, and on Linux I just use the Nextcloud integration which uses WebDAV under the hood
I feel cornered when my social circle all use iPhones and then they want to Airdrop me something and I just can't receive it. I'm an Android man, I cannot stand the blue pill Apple feels to me.
Peer pressure is a serious threat, presented in the form of... abusive behaviour indeed.
My point was that we shouldn't be so quick to water down the meaning of the word "abusive". If you've ever known anyone who has actually been abused you might understand better.
"Don't buy it if you don't like it" is a perfectly reasonable thing to point out whenever alternatives exist, and in this case most certainly do. It's just a laptop.
I know people who have been victims of actual abuse; it's not remotely the same thing as paying too much for a laptop.
It's not just paying too much, it's one of the world's most valuable mega-corporations asking you to pay too much. If it were a boutique shop I wouldn't call it abusive. It's a combination of the bad behavior and the exercise of raw power that makes it so.
Sure, your iPhone doesn't connect as seamlessly to your Windows computer as it would a Mac, but those aren't network effects, thats vertical integration.
Nobody is forcing you to buy a Mac, and Apple themselves are intentionally overcharging for upgrades on the basis that: "If you really need it, you'll pay for it". Most people don't need it but will buy the upgrades anyway then complain that they're too expensive.
I'm aware that it limits the longevity of the devices, but that might also be intentional here, not abusive though. Just a bit bare-faced profit seeking. Which seems to be working because, as you point out, it's one of the worlds most valuable mega-corporations.
If someone else comes out with good premium laptops I'll move over happily, but for now the best laptop you can buy is unfortunately a macbook, and they've decided that upgrades are worth this money, if you don't agree then the answer is to simply not upgrade, or avoid the devices entirely.
Microsoft is also a deeply abusive corporation. The discussion was not about them, though.
The same word we use for raping kids?
Give off.
> If it were a boutique shop I wouldn't call it abusive. It's a combination of the bad behavior and the exercise of raw power that makes it so.
I was raped as a kid, friend. Many times.
and many of my friends were, which is why I would prefer we keep words with strong meaning quite strong.
A company operating as a company, not even unethically in this case is too far away.
By and large, the people who buy these products are freely choosing to do so. To claim that, for those people, the price is "too high" is equivalent to telling them "you shouldn't be willing to pay that much for that product".
I think it's perfectly fine for me or any other individual to hold the opinion that their products are overpriced, but I think it would be at best borderline presumptuous for me to attempt to tell someone else what they should or should not value.
Not to mention that design decisions have surely been made to ensure this segmentation works that destroy repairability - so much for environmental friendliness. It is difficult not to feel Apple's contempt for its customers when it has been actively crippling the usefulness of its devices to squeeze some more profits.
To Apple's credit, it has established an effective monopoly over the market of _decent_ laptops fair and square and OS X seems to be less of a malware than whatever is Windows 10/11. I am not _that_ salty to pay the premium.
I'm far more interested in improving our lot by altering the environment (e.g. by promoting memory-safe programming languages, or by pressuring corporations to not be abusive) than in appealing to notions like choice.
https://sunshowers.io/posts/there-is-no-free-will/
Google hangouts / gmail works fine on iOS and android. Same for whatsapp, zoom, signal, etc. Heck, even microsoft teams.
Apple has more money than any of those companies, and yet also has the wildly most anti-competitive restrictive software, ensuring almost all of its services (apple music/books/iMessage/facetime/etc etc) more or less require all your devices to be apple devices.
I don't know if it's abusive, but it's certainly putting more chains on the user than any of the other similar ecosystems.
I'm running Windows laptops / desktops these days, and drive an iPhone and the sun hasn't exploded.
I actually wanted to get the notch back so I could have as much vertical screen real estate as possible and was disappointed to find that there doesn't appear to be any reliable way of doing this.
The notch is definitely still there by default.
Currently it's set to 1710 x 1107, which is labeled "Default", and no notch. When I look closely at the right angle I can clearly see the notch dipping into the screen, but the OS does not use any of the area to either side of the notch--it's completely dark there.
Just now I ticked "Show all resolutions" and tried at least a dozen other available resolutions and none of them use the screen above the notch bottom. Sonoma 14.6.1, 15" M3 Air.
One thing that did occur to me though is that it was a 'refurbished' MacBook. Bought it from Apple, and it looked brand new, but it does seem possible that someone could have done who-knows-what to it before I got it. Or perhaps there is some defect in the display near the top and Apple did this intentionally to conceal it.
This review says it beats M3 by 2 hours: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/dell-xps-13-9350-review
Apple sells computers in the premium/professional market segment. They're not going to change that. If you're not making money from the equipment or if you can't afford it for consumer use, there's probably nothing that they will do for you, you're not in the intended customer segment.
And if you're buying a computer as a consumer because it is a premium machine, well then you eat the price if you really want the machine, or you have to go for non-premium competitors.
You're comparing McDonalds to a nice steak in a good restaurant. The good restaurant will charge dearly for a bottle of water while McDonalds gives you free refills, and so on. The business models are different and the market segments are different.
I'm not comparing a hamburger from my local go-to to a steak from a steakhouse. I'm comparing the cost of the mash potatoes that comes with my hamburger ($5) and what they cost at a non-Apple steakhouse ($15). I don't go to the Apple steakhouse not because I find their steak unreasonably priced (it is a great value, actually), but because I refuse to pay $60 for mash potatoes, and if I don't get the mash potatoes, the steak has no value to me.
A steak in a nice restaurant and its accessories will always be more expensive than a burger meal at McDonalds.
Apple has invested enormous effort into making high quality software. They offer the only operating system on the market which is any good at all. But their business model is selling hardware, so that's where they have to bake in all their costs. And their hardware is top notch as well. They could change their offerings to charge a high basic price on all their devices and then offer RAM and SSD upgrades for the low prices you are mentioning. But they choose instead to have a lower base price, knowing that the only people who need more RAM or storage (need, not want), are professionals who can pay for it.
It's the same in a nice restaurant. You're not paying for the ingredients, but everything around it including staff, the environment and so on. That's why a beer is so god damned expensive when you go out.
So far I've decided that going forward I'll likely be getting a cheap baseline laptop (curretly eyeing a 16gb/512gb macbook air m4 or the upcoming framework 12) and then get some beefier desktop to remote into. i don't even need a gpu, the heavy stuff i do largely revolves around running virtual machines.
I did most of my work in a screen session running emacs on a 48cpu/192gb ram machine in a previous job, and I did some tests and remote desktop nowadays is pretty good (way above the "usable" threshold).
> That is essentially doubling the $999 cost.
yeah, it sucks.
You can AT WORST buy the storage OUTRIGHT for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE. But in most cases you can buy more than double what Apple is offering for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE.
I boycotted Apple for years because of these issues, but unfortunately I think this battle is lost. I gave up. I have a macbook Air. It is nice, but it is a glorified SSH machine. They must know this, because I'd prefer to get an iPad pro with a keyboard but run an actual fucking desktop OS. But then again, the fucking iPad isn't even good at the one thing it is supposed to be good at: writing... The 3rd party apps are leagues ahead of Apple Notes.
What I can't figure out is:
A true portable laptop, one that can be used not just at home where lighting could perhaps be controlled, needs to by lightweight and have a non-reflective screen.
As for the laptops, probably not feasible.
I will say that unlike laptops/desktops I used to buy before I went Apple, I use them for a really long time. When I ran Windows, I'd upgrade every few years. I had my Mac Pro 2012 for 9 years before upgrading to a Studio. Yes, I maxed out the storage, and it was annoying how expensive, but amortized over 9 years? Not as bad.
EDIT: if I was purchasing a Studio now, I'd likely do the 3rd party upgrade to 8TB (what I saw in a YT video). That's double what my M1 Studio maxed out at.
That is along with their recent upgrade which bump All Mac model to 16GB Baseline. In Apple's History, the M4 Mac mini and M4 MacBook Air are perhaps the best value for money in the entire History of Mac. I actually dont even record anything that came close.
Whether that's worth it for you - hard to say.
You can get a good deal on a refurbished or used M* MBP and try it out. My 2021 M1 Max MBP is still going strong; so strong I just can't justify a new one.
Biggest thing to note is how many external displays you want to drive. I got the M1 Max to drive my 2-4.
All* software now has native Apple Silicon builds.
* Except abandonware**, of course, but Rosetta is so good you need not notice. That said, I personally recommend never triggering Rosetta which helps you avoid accidentally running legacy drivers etc.
** For some reason, including Steam's installer, even though the games it wraps are universal/native ARM.
I said I'd buy the next Air as long as it had 6GHz wifi support (6E, eventually 7) but now that it's out it's just not enough of an upgrade for me (a lot of money for 25% more RAM, CPU performance, and 6GHz wifi).
At home when not at my desk I’ve been using screen share to remote in from the 2018 Air, this is the first time since 2018 I bought a new computer and it’s oddly nice having it not be a laptop, don’t have to worry about the precious built-in screen or keyboard.
Caveat may be if I wasn’t working remote perhaps it would be different but not sure, using the 2018 Air as a client for the M4 Pro has been pretty solid for my current purposes and it’s nice still having an Intel Mac for the edge case backwards compatibility development needs.
Whoops didn’t mean to make a blog post in here…
Also the air physically can't accomodate USB-A, ethernet, hdmi etc.