It’s a nice looking product and apple silicon is arguably very powerful and light on power consumption.
But the massive anti-repair propaganda put out by this company, abusive business practices that prevent most people from truly accessing their hardware (unless it’s the Apple way); and soft locking devices via disabling features when parts are replaced/repaired by third party shop.
I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds. Trouble is... I don't use it. In fact I just bought a used Thinkpad off ebay to replace it for 99% of my work.
People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac
> I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds.
How have you managed to have so many laptops? Are you a collector? A reviewer who is given a lot of free review units?
Laptops have only been around since about 1980, so even someone who started then and has bought 4 laptops a year on average ever since then would still be a little shy of hundreds, so I'm guessing you must have an interesting story.
Afraid not. I got a job in Uni at a store that refurbished laptops and as a perk we could take a handful to learn about / disassemble every week, on the condition they came back. Later I would provision units for medium sized companies and also developed an expensive habit of buying up every other model on ebay. It's great to have had experience with so many designs but in retrospect I should've just bought one every 3-4 years and stuck with it. I just never could be satisfied with a design but to be fair back then most had serious shortcomings
I guess today I tend to over focus on the laptop as an end where others see it more as a means. Probably won't ever be satisfied until I sit down and design my own. But the MBA 15 is very nice.
Too nice. "manufactured with precision to the micron and delivered to your door straight from the factory in Shenzhen"
So, after trying every laptop possible you chose the Thinkpad as your go-to for work? Why is that? I ask because I've been considering moving off from a Mac and I'm shopping for the best replacement.
There's a few reasons. Thinkpads are reliable and durable. Built around a magnesium alloy "rollcage". They are modular, upgradeable and simple to service and there's a detailed hardware maintenance manual for every model online. There are often a good selection of ports and the keyboards are quite a pleasure to use although not a fan of the latest keycap refresh. I run the latest Ubuntu LTS and for almost all models every device runs out of the box.
You can get a pretty decent machine for 300-500 on ebay but selecting the correct configuration is key. One area Thinkpads fall short since the Lenovo purchase is the screen quality. But the Pantone 4K option is pretty nice if you can find one. I like the T and P series and dislike the E. X is Ok if you have to carry it everywhere especially for network technicians. But Thinkpads generally aren't light and the battery life can be hit and miss. It's nice there are Xeon options but I'd expect the Intel signature hairdryer whirr on load. Most Thinkpads are quiet enough though. It's a good budget option, excellent value. A tool I think everyone should have kicking around.
What you find as a technician is that manufacturers have very different ideas about how to engineer a laptop. The worst of the worst was the Dell Latitude series which looked like it was put together with lego and superglue. I've never seen cost optimization to that degree, perhaps to their credit.
I have never gotten this mindset. A macbook is meant to be used, no matter what you paid for it. It's not some piece of jewelry you have to do touch with velvet gloves. At least from my experience with (modern) thinkpads, the mac last way longer anyway.
Maybe Apple oughta try an ad campaign with people's used machines to disabuse that mindset, then. But their whole brand is about creating spotless luxury icons, almost like collectibles that belong in a museum.
I agree, some campaign around being actually build for real use would be interesting. A whole series of well loved and heavily used machines. Suitably worn and sticker coated.
Not really? HP, Dell, and Lenovo all offer QHD or even 4K screens on the premium business models I usually buy and have done so for awhile. They’re just less common on the used market since they’re not the default spec, 1080p is practically good enough for Windows/Linux, and QHD incurs a minor battery penalty. but an aftermarket QHD panel can go for as low as a hundred.
You can even find panels on new computers that smoke Apples like the 3k 120hz OLED on the Zephyrus g14. Apple’s screens typically lag behind the competition which is natural given they don’t make their own screens, don’t want to sole source, they are anal about QA, and it’s logistically faster & easier to ship a bleeding edge screen on some premium computer that sees a few hundred thousand in sales than the MacBook that sells millions.
> People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac
you have discovered the reason applecare sells well. and frankly the higher the tier of laptop, the more sense it makes - no sense insuring the base-tier model, it's basically disposable, since a non-covered "any other repair" (other than screen) is $700 on (eg) MBP, or $350 (iirc) on a MBA you're basically over halfway to a new unit with a new battery/faster processor/etc. But on a loaded out 64GB/4TB M1 Max MBP ($3k at b+h for a good long while there) then it's worth having it repaired.
arguably on the high-end apple laptops, if you intend to carry them around and actually use them, it's just part of the lifecycle. like, if you have one screen repair in 3 years you break even, if you have one "any other repair" you come out ahead. this is actually constant across all the model lines (MBA screen repairs are cheaper, applecare is still 1/2 of a screen repair).
having insurance on desktops is certainly dumb, but it makes a lot of sense in movable items. people carry around phones and laptops, and they drop them. it happens to wintel PCs too, believe it or not. for the price of prepaying half a screen upfront you basically don't have to worry about your laptop and you also get a 512b memory bus with best-in-class battery life and performance etc.
and I know applecare triggers a lot of haters, "that's a scam, I'm too smart for that!!!", "I won't buy something that I can't repair myself!!!" but like, that generally just speaks to the degree of hostility with which a lot of people approach the apple lifecycle. It's very much designed as a first-party service model, yes of course, but it actually works, and apple laptops actually do achieve long service life with this model. You're not the first person to realize that dropping a $3-4k laptop is gonna feel pretty bad etc, but people tend to systematically dismiss the solutions that have been provided to fix that, because they're not the solutions that the wintel world provides.
And frankly, not having to worry about dropping my laptop is a benefit above and beyond what x86 would provide with the kinds of solutions that are generally quoted, and paying for a premium on-demand business grade warranty on a wintel laptop would probably be roughly as expensive even if it existed on the hardware I'd want (can't get a dell/lenovo/hp business-tier warranty on a redmibook I bought off amazon, right?).
I'm out here carrying my laptop around on a stone patio every evening as I watch the puppy play outside. I'm using it on the toilet above a tile floor. I'm picking it up and moving it every day, and using it on a blanket on the couch. Yesterday I downloaded dolphin-llama3:70b and ran it locally at interactive speeds, I've been doing dolphin-mixtral:8x7b for months now (not full offload so it's not quite as fast). It's a nice laptop and I bought it to use it, $350 up front to simply never worry about it is more than worth it. The same wintel people who told me to get a framework 16 (with no speedstep) are now telling me to wait for strix halo, and I'm out here living the future for almost a full year now, and strix is probably at least a full year from actual real availability (strix halo is coming later than strix point, and AMD paper-launches all their laptop products badly). The $500 I save (maybe) by waiting 2+ years for a comparable x86 solution in 2025 isn't worth it, and I'd still have an expensive laptop with no warranty even if I went PC.
(and that's assuming strix halo is a drop-in replacement - I think people are going to be more disappointed by cost+ battery life than they realize, socketed quad-channel memory with a big stacked cache to improve performance is not cheap in either dollars or watts, those are going to be $3k+ laptops too.)
similarly to how people whine about drop risk and then just ignore the mechanism provided to solve that problem... people do the same thing with turning the parts program into a negative too. Literally apple will sell you the part and the first-party tooling to fix your screen, or even just rent you the tooling... and that's bad because "it comes in three pelican cases!!!" or something. Like people literally insist it's "all for show" or something and it's actually just part of the secret plan to undermine right-to-repair, because Apple will sell you the tools if you want. there is nothing that people can't spin into a negative somehow. There are very few companies with a more real "hater" phenomenon than Apple, and it just colors every discussion on the topic. People forget that there's two sides to every transaction, there is no forced anything, I am making my choices about my own risks and benefits, just not the ones they make. There are scenarios where it makes sense - and probably not as few as the haters want there to be. They just get shouted down by a fairly dedicated/active hater crowd.
> Apple lets customers configure the 15-inch MacBook Air with 8, 16, or 24 GB of integrated RAM
I wish Apple wasn’t as stingy with RAM upgrade options considering this can’t be upgraded later. For all the talk on the part of Apple of being more sustainable and green, allowing more competitive memory options would help extend the useful life of these products.
Ah give up the hysterics. Sure they care about the environment. They do a lot based on the materials they use, packaging, power for their factories and campuses etc. but they also care about their bottom line like a successful company does. This sort of hyperbolic comment falls flat because it’s reactionary and lazy.
Words might lie, but deeds do not lie. Look at what they do, not at what they say. Apple is only about bottom line. Look at the Foxconn manufacturing. Look at what chemicals are actually in their computers. Look at their relentless focus on using the cheapest labor and put suicide nets in their facilities instead of giving people a few more dollars per day.
Now, every successful company have to have a great bottom-line and that should be a focus as well yes. Not sure how to balance that for a big company like Apple, and I am happy I am not in that position.
The MacBook Air 15 and XPS 15 both start at $1,299. But the base model MacBook Air only has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage vs the XPS 15's 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Apple has been stingy with RAM for years now.
Whilst I can't speak for the storage part, Mac's have often always had lower RAM than their PC counterparts due to the fact that they had often needed less.
That doesn't mean they can't give more, but it's not an 'apples' to apples comparison.
This all depends on your workload. But I will admit I’ve seen happy memory-full Macs in a state where a swapping Windows laptop would be unusable. I do not think that justifies half the memory for the same price.
However, they aren’t using good-old SODIMMs - or anything like them. There is no way they’d ever be able to give you laptops with 400GB/s of memory bandwidth in that slim package while making it user-serviceable. I would love to see them try but it’s not an easy request.
They won’t really be going with on-device AI, the models require way too much RAM, but maybe they claim on-device AI “pre-processes” and removes personal information before requests are sent to Apple. Apple has a marketing team to spin this better than my description.
I think on-device models would be really useful. Imagine a conversational interface with much less latency so the conversations felt real. I wonder what kind of computing power we will need before we get there (e.g. running an LLM with lots of prompt data + on device speech recognition), maybe 5-10 years?
> Imagine a conversational interface with much less latency
With current models the latency comes from processing, not from the network — going from a high-power remote server to a low-power local phone is likely to increase latency more than it reduces it
24gb is as big as the M3 can be built given the available LPDDR stacks.
The bigger crime is that the 15" can't be configured with the M3 Pro... particularly given the less-ambitious spec compared to M1/M2 Pro. Things like not supporting a second external display make the 15" MBA a non-starter as an 'ultrabook' even with 24GB configurations.
With the M3 Pro, since you get a 192b memory bus, you'd have options up to 36GB as well as dual external display, which is at least adequate for the class of product.
There are priorities apple has when it offers products. The green sustainability initiative is the last of the priorities. The first priority is ensuring good experience. Then comes good options. Then comes green sustainability.
> The MacBook Air is made with over 50 percent recycled content overall, a first for the company. This includes 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100% recycled tin in the solder and gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards, 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets (which is 99% of the rare earth elements in the device), 100% recycled cobalt in the MagSafe connector’s battery and magnets, 100% recycled copper in the main logic board (also a first), 90% recycled steel in the battery tray, keyboard feature plate, and trackpad beam plate, and 35% or more recycled plastic in other components.
> Additionally, over 25 percent of the electricity used to manufacture the device was sourced from supplier clean energy projects. And 100 percent of the wood fiber used in the packaging is recycled, as is 99 percent of the fiber-based plastic.
Don't be fooled, while it is nice they do this, at the end of the day it is just greenwashing.
They design their laptops in such way that they are not (easily) repairable, and the failure of one component could mean replacement of the entire logic board. And echoing the parent comment, if you think 8G/256GB is good enough at the time of purchase but find it unusable because of a change in the way you use your computer, the only option is to trade-in/sell it instead of just upgrading them. (The vast majority ofWindows laptops on the market has a replaceable SSD.)
On the other hand, every Apple device I’ve had has been usable for longer (and mostly with no repair) than the non-Apple laptops or phones I’ve had.
For example, my old MacBook Pro was from mid-2015, I only replaced it with a new M2 Pro early last year - it was my primary machine for almost eight years, with just one battery replacement. The current iPhone I’m writing this on is from late 2020 (12 Pro) and still in fine working condition, I can’t see myself having any reason to upgrade this year.
And I have a HP ZBook G3 purchased in 2016 that I still use and have no need of replacing, it came with 32GB RAM, 512GB nvme SSD, 4k display, 3 year on-site warranty and has been upgraded to 64GB RAM 2TB nvme SSD + 4TB nvme SSD.
I have mid 2020 Samsung Galaxy FE20, inherited from my wife when she upgraded on a work plan, still getting regular firmware updates and again I seen no need to upgrade this phone for another few years.
Oldest computer I use on regular basis is Samsung ATIV Pro 700T from 2013 with upgraded storage (I would have upgraded the RAM if it was possible).
At work I have a 2020 i5 macbook air which is almost useless compared to both of those non-Apple machines and 2022 M2 air which works quite nicely for now but since it is not possible to upgrade it will likely be obsolete in a couple of years (like the 2020 macbook) when Apple decides that you now must have 16GB RAM for Mac OS 14 or 15 or whatever.
So Apple hardware is neither special nor unique nor worth the premium.
This is nice in theory, but to call this greenwashing, you would need to have some idea about how often SSDs in "easily repairable" laptops actually do get replaced. If it is a large percentage, then sure, you're right. But if it is a very small percentage (which I am almost certain it is), then Apple's efforts to use recycled materials / have more power efficient chips / in general make devices that seem to last longer than various competitors is going to have a much larger impact than the repairability.
this isn't really an apple thing. thunderbolt requires the ability to use multiple displays, if you don't then you can't advertise thunderbolt.
since macbook airs don't have multi-display capability, you can't call it thunderbolt. you can call it usb4, or usb-c 40gbps, or whatever, but it's not technically thunderbolt - thunderbolt is the brand for the full-capability standard.
this is not something consumers normally bump up against since x86 laptops generally either have multi-display support or don't exist in a product tier where 40gbps is a thing. Stuff like chromebooks falls into the latter, too cheap to have 40gbps, and the entire x86 space is dominated by literally two companies both of which happen to support multi-display. but you'll probably see this show up more in ARM notebooks once other vendors have a shot at releasing processors besides just those 2.
like idk what you expect anyone to say here - usb standards are kind of a shitty free-for-all and always have been. usb gives you the freedom to make a confusing port that doesn't support everything. The simple fact of the matter is the base-tier Mx processors don't support multi-display without a software-driven dongle, that's all you need to know, it's otherwise a full-capability tb3 port, basically usb4 but without the baggage of being unable to connect to certain tb3 devices like usb4 sometimes does.
there is absolutely a justification for laptops like air to not have multi-display support. not everybody needs it, and those processors cross-over between the tablet and laptop spaces. it's a fancy tablet apu, regardless of how good it performs. the sin is not offering a M3 Pro variant on the 15" MBA, and I'd say offering the M3 on the MBPs at all. But it totally makes sense for ultramobility laptops to cut power and cost, and you'll almost definitely see ultrabooks start doing that as the wintel monopoly crumbles over the next year or two. That will be branded as USB4 and won't necessarily support all the capabilities of TB3... or be compatible with all legacy TB3 devices. USB standard sucks, or rather: USB Implementers Forum is responsive to their customers, who aren't you (at least not directly).
I mean, I don't have any problem with what Apple is doing. I was just adding a correction to the poster I was replying to: that all Apple laptops do not support TB4. Based on their single display support, they're fully-featured TB3, and that's perfectly fine.
What they don't tell you is that all of those recycled metals are both cheaper and greener than freshly mined and almost always have been. Steel and aluminum take less energy to recycle that to mine and extract.
There's more demand for metals like aluminium and iron than gets recycled, so only part of the demand gets satisfied this way and there's still demand for metals produced through mining. This is also why the price stays at the level of the mined metals.
> Recycling scrap aluminium requires only 5% of the energy used to make new aluminium from the raw ore. In 2022, the United States produced 3.86 metric tons of secondary aluminium for every metric ton of primary aluminium produced.
The only reason it's not industry standard to use 100% recycled metals is that it's pointless greenwashing. Everyone already uses as much recycled metal as they can get their hands on because it's cheaper.
what a grievously incompetent take on a company that publishes clearly for decades the removal of toxic materials long before others, which runs its engineering campus off solar, and so on, long before others did the same, as just two examples.
Par for the course on HN to view anything remotely Apple as negative. It is what it is. Best to glaze over such comments and ignore the urge to rebut/comment/counter/flame. Greatly improves the S/N ratio IMHO.
Definitely an interesting emergent bandwagon phenomenon, i find myself thinking. Years ago i didn’t notice such bandwagon attention seeking sorts of derisive nonsense nearly as much if basically ever.
Like you said, it’s sort of just a reality nowadays.
Apple’s silicon is really, really, really powerful. Enough to run Death Stranding on a laptop without a fan. Sucks it runs macOS though. There is an experimental distro of Linux for Apple silicon, but it’s still in development and doesn’t run very much software.
MacOS makes it easy to remap modifier keys. Command can be mapped to Control, with Control put elsewhere. I mention this because this review (and many like it) mention the mental disconnect when frequently switching between Macs and Windows or Linux.
I'm one of those people. Putting Command on Control means that's one less thing I have to think about. Keyboard shortcuts become mostly the same between the different systems.
There's still a disconnect between Windows's ALT and mac's CMD, which impacts what CTRL does. For instance on mac CTRL+A is the emacs binding while windows maps Select All.
I don't think there is any magic bullet, short of remapping all shortcuts on either of the system, it's just tricky.
Keyboard under System Settings should give you options for changing all the modifier keys. I've got Caps Lock modified to be Escape on mine. Though the jokes on me as I just hit ESC all the time and forget about my remapped Caps.
There's similar options on iOS if you use an external keyboard there.
karabiner allows you to make caps lock escape when pressed alone and ctrl when pressed with a letter key (caps lock is where ctrl was on the keyboards vi was designed for)
No because Backspace is not considered a modifier key. The available options for Caps Lock are Control, Option, Command, fn, Escape or just disabling the key entirely.
If you have a workflow that involves RDP to Windows, you also basically have to use Karabiner to swap command and control for RDP only in order to maintain sanity of shortcuts between macOS/Windows.
The price is insane, but I needed a solid dev machine, so that I could run multiple IDEs (GoLand, IntelliJ) + Figma. Additionally, I wanted to dive deeper into AI/ML. Apple's MLX easily competes with Nvidia RTX 4090 [1]. Everything is just instant, and I'm extremely happy with the purchase.
For today’s ai-accelerated workloads, will you use a 14th gen intel + 4090 or Apple M3? The software tooling is not available for Apple, there is no CUDA support basically. This is not an emotional judgment, if an Apple supported cuda on Apple Silicon I’d use it, but it doesn’t.
I use both. Apple’s higher end hardware works well for local LLM inference thanks to its unusually high memory bandwidth and frugal energy consumption. But for serious work you need CUDA, no ifs or buts.
My apologies. The link I provided is not reliable by any means. I actually knew about this, but somehow forgot. Apple can compete with 4090 only for a certain types of tasks (LLMs?), but overall you are correct, 4090 is way faster.
I bit the bullet and went to windows with a discrete GPU. The power envelope is a subpar , but raw performance is definitely there.
With a mobile class 4070 my benchmarks were above the Mr max's and as it's nvidia, tool and framework compatibility are no issue. And price was less than 3K, extended support included.
how do you handle models that are bigger than 16GB on that? my m1 max 64gb whips through dolphin-llama3:70b just fine, that's around 42gb usage. I get partial offload on dolphin-mixtral:8x7b, that's significantly slower but still reasonably usable, whereas even the quantized models chug on my work m1 max 32gb.
everything i've seen is that once you seriously cross the threshold of VRAM usage/gpu offload, the performance collapses. and sure, if you stay within that the 4090 (or even 4070 mobile) is a lot faster, but the most popular current families of models don't generally fit on a 4070 or even 4090.
on a 41.5gb model, would a 4070 mobile/4060 ti 16GB really beat a 64gb m1 max? it seems doubtful but idk.
if there's viable ways to split models across multi-gpus i'm all ears, but afaik there's not (outside NVLink). Other than buying or renting A100s, the only serious option would be bergamo with avx-512 and a bunch of memory, much slower but avx-512 does have inference instructions now, and that gets you into the class of memory you (currently) need for things like snowflake-arctic-instruct:128x3B.
(and of course training is a whole different kettle of fish, but everyone knows that at this point.)
It makes more sense when you think of it "the monitor's top bezel was shrunk to about an inch wide, which allows for the menubar to be pushed up to where the bezel would be, creating more usable vertical screen space."
On my old MBP, the menubar starts below where the camera module is.
That area rarely gets used, so why not put the camera there? It is weird how large the area is, however. The camera is a fraction of the tab's size and there aren't any sensors on either side, I don't think.
You pretty much forget about it after a week or so. The only people who make a giant fuss about it are people who haven't used a system with it for very long, if at all.
No, it's not needed. My theory is that they picked that shape intentionally to match the notch on the iPhones. They could have gone with a much tinier notch, since that notch is only hiding a single web-cam lens. The notch on the iPhones also holds the FaceID cameras and tech, but for some reason Apple refuses to put FaceID on their laptops where it would be much more useful. I suspect they'll make it much smaller in the future or change it to a "dynamic island" notch instead.
I don't think FaceID is a good idea on the computer. On the phone it unlocks when the device is quite close to you, but I suspect someone could sit down at your computer and watch it unlock if you are behind them. Touching the keyboard or just using your watch is more secure.
Of course if you were in the kind of environment where it might be a problem if your computer unlocked as you walked by, you probably wouldn't enable the feature anyway. As it is I am annoyed by iphone and ipad apps that require faceid or other login each time as I'm the only one who uses those devices anyway.
Nevertheless I think faceid on the laptop or imac is an insecure idea.
BetterDisplay[0] can even change the display mode to just use the display area below the notch (which is the same 16:10 that older MacBooks had). Probably noticeable on a MacBook Air, but on a MacBook Pro, the local dimming makes the unused area look exactly like the bezel.
You don't even need third-party software to do that. In Settings/Displays, under advanced you can enable the full resolution list. In there, choose the resolution with just slightly less vertical resolution than the current selection, boom that is your 16:10 resolution without the notch area.
Not really ugly. It is a clever design solution to allow the screen space to be larger without making the case larger. Pushing the display up into the bezel space. the only limitation is leaving space for the camera and two different sensors plus mounting hardware in an area of the screen that is not often used.
Once you’ve used it for a few days, it tends to fade out of awareness. If you really don’t want to see it, there are utilities that make the menubar black so it blends in.
> on Windows, I can type Alt + F
> But on the Mac, I have to type Cmd + Option + Shift + S, which is … yikes. I feel like a Cirque du Soleil performer every time I try it.
Indeed, keyboard shortcut design as well as physical keyboard design is such a forgotten moulded corner of personal computing (especially bad with Apple given they own both the OS and the device)...
But there are apps for that! (at least the former) You can have Alt-F open your File menu on your Mac as well, the press E with Karabiner+KeyboardMaestro combination
> But I found it problematic to go back and forth between the MacBook Air and my PCs, as I would constantly reach for the wrong keyboard shortcuts. The biggest issue is the Ctrl + C (Windows)/Cmd + C (Mac) divide: Those modifier keys are in very different places.
Well, put then in the same place! (and Mac's place is better since it's a more ergonomic thumb key) This is one of the few benefits of different designs - they might force you to reevaluate your common routines
KE+KM combo is close to the best, KE allows you working around yet another dumb limitation of the OS of treating left and right the same (otherwise Ukelele is nice), KM gives you a more friendly GUI and integration with other apps (like Alt+F)
(the only missing low-level part in KE is stuff like home row mods where you'll need another utility like kanata/kmonad, but not sure how well they integrate with KE)
Thought I would dislike my iPad Pro and eventually would trade it in for this M3 Air but ended up keeping it. Covers the consumption cases the Air would’ve facilitated and Terminus is a pretty good app for SSH’ing into my main machine and working on projects.
Downside is how many apps surprisingly lack iPadOS versions
My 2019 iPad Pro is worth...they said they would recycle it for free for me. It is weird, because I still get a lot of value from it, so I'm not bothering to upgrade, but might have been tempted if they offered one or two hundred bucks for it.
I’m probably not going to be replacing my personal machine soon, but I’ve really been considering ditching my plans for an MBP and just going with the air. It’s thinner, smaller (I don’t like big laptops) and frankly does everything I need it to.
In years past, the common recommendation was save as much as you can and buy the top-of-the-line you can. But now the Air seems reasonable.
I'm thinking this, as my 8 year old MBP is getting slightly long in the tooth. The one thing that gives me pause is the 60hz screen. I have a 120hz one on my work MBP, and once you've tried it it's hard to give up. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be treating it as very much a pro feature...
Just be carefull if you use triple monitor etc because the air doesn't support that out of the box..very annoying. Perhaps they have fixed it on this version (but probably not).
> macOS can be inconsistent and lacks some obvious multitasking features
I bet you don't have to use old windows 10 which is not capable to restore windows on proper displays after I reconnect monitors... perhaps it's something disabled by my organization, but in macOS, at least I don't have to do this once twice a day.
I have an up to date Win11 gaming pc hooked up to my TV and and my monitor, can confirm this behavior is still prevalent and massively frustrating no matter how much you play with the multiple display settings
Windows display hotplugging is pretty dire.
I'm sure there's a good explanation (x86 legacy?) but Windows (Win11, current patch, Thinkpad T14) seemingly having a stroke any time I plug in a new display then having to do the "Advanced Display Settings" rigamarole, is always ugly and frustrating.
I have read in a thread about display ID and CEC that some display manufacturers burnt the same "unique" identity into their monitors. Should this be true, it would admit into the room at least one other player in this space who may be responsible for bad behaviour recognising and dealing with plug-unplug and other issues: If they can mis-understand the spec this badly, imagine what else they got wrong?
It’s a nice looking product and apple silicon is arguably very powerful and light on power consumption.
But the massive anti-repair propaganda put out by this company, abusive business practices that prevent most people from truly accessing their hardware (unless it’s the Apple way); and soft locking devices via disabling features when parts are replaced/repaired by third party shop.
I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds. Trouble is... I don't use it. In fact I just bought a used Thinkpad off ebay to replace it for 99% of my work.
People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac
> I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds.
How have you managed to have so many laptops? Are you a collector? A reviewer who is given a lot of free review units?
Laptops have only been around since about 1980, so even someone who started then and has bought 4 laptops a year on average ever since then would still be a little shy of hundreds, so I'm guessing you must have an interesting story.
Afraid not. I got a job in Uni at a store that refurbished laptops and as a perk we could take a handful to learn about / disassemble every week, on the condition they came back. Later I would provision units for medium sized companies and also developed an expensive habit of buying up every other model on ebay. It's great to have had experience with so many designs but in retrospect I should've just bought one every 3-4 years and stuck with it. I just never could be satisfied with a design but to be fair back then most had serious shortcomings
I guess today I tend to over focus on the laptop as an end where others see it more as a means. Probably won't ever be satisfied until I sit down and design my own. But the MBA 15 is very nice. Too nice. "manufactured with precision to the micron and delivered to your door straight from the factory in Shenzhen"
So, after trying every laptop possible you chose the Thinkpad as your go-to for work? Why is that? I ask because I've been considering moving off from a Mac and I'm shopping for the best replacement.
There's a few reasons. Thinkpads are reliable and durable. Built around a magnesium alloy "rollcage". They are modular, upgradeable and simple to service and there's a detailed hardware maintenance manual for every model online. There are often a good selection of ports and the keyboards are quite a pleasure to use although not a fan of the latest keycap refresh. I run the latest Ubuntu LTS and for almost all models every device runs out of the box.
You can get a pretty decent machine for 300-500 on ebay but selecting the correct configuration is key. One area Thinkpads fall short since the Lenovo purchase is the screen quality. But the Pantone 4K option is pretty nice if you can find one. I like the T and P series and dislike the E. X is Ok if you have to carry it everywhere especially for network technicians. But Thinkpads generally aren't light and the battery life can be hit and miss. It's nice there are Xeon options but I'd expect the Intel signature hairdryer whirr on load. Most Thinkpads are quiet enough though. It's a good budget option, excellent value. A tool I think everyone should have kicking around.
What you find as a technician is that manufacturers have very different ideas about how to engineer a laptop. The worst of the worst was the Dell Latitude series which looked like it was put together with lego and superglue. I've never seen cost optimization to that degree, perhaps to their credit.
Not OP but old thinkpads are usually at the top of the list for good cheap Linux machines
They are durable and ubiquitous no-nonsense work machines. I just picked one up for $300 and can do all the dev work I need
Old as in used or as in a few generations old?
Both, I picked up an eBay certified refurbished Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th Gen for $325
The keyboard has that obvious wear on the home row from lots of use but it’s been rock solid
I have never gotten this mindset. A macbook is meant to be used, no matter what you paid for it. It's not some piece of jewelry you have to do touch with velvet gloves. At least from my experience with (modern) thinkpads, the mac last way longer anyway.
Maybe Apple oughta try an ad campaign with people's used machines to disabuse that mindset, then. But their whole brand is about creating spotless luxury icons, almost like collectibles that belong in a museum.
Something like: https://www.bikeperfect.com/features/bespoken-word-computer-...
I agree, some campaign around being actually build for real use would be interesting. A whole series of well loved and heavily used machines. Suitably worn and sticker coated.
They had this one a decade ago, but I agree it's not common: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFcwE1L4GHk
Old laptops are great, but it's hard to find a non-Apple laptop with a >= 220 PPI display. I can't stand seeing pixels; it feels like I'm in 1995.
Not really? HP, Dell, and Lenovo all offer QHD or even 4K screens on the premium business models I usually buy and have done so for awhile. They’re just less common on the used market since they’re not the default spec, 1080p is practically good enough for Windows/Linux, and QHD incurs a minor battery penalty. but an aftermarket QHD panel can go for as low as a hundred.
You can even find panels on new computers that smoke Apples like the 3k 120hz OLED on the Zephyrus g14. Apple’s screens typically lag behind the competition which is natural given they don’t make their own screens, don’t want to sole source, they are anal about QA, and it’s logistically faster & easier to ship a bleeding edge screen on some premium computer that sees a few hundred thousand in sales than the MacBook that sells millions.
> People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac
you have discovered the reason applecare sells well. and frankly the higher the tier of laptop, the more sense it makes - no sense insuring the base-tier model, it's basically disposable, since a non-covered "any other repair" (other than screen) is $700 on (eg) MBP, or $350 (iirc) on a MBA you're basically over halfway to a new unit with a new battery/faster processor/etc. But on a loaded out 64GB/4TB M1 Max MBP ($3k at b+h for a good long while there) then it's worth having it repaired.
arguably on the high-end apple laptops, if you intend to carry them around and actually use them, it's just part of the lifecycle. like, if you have one screen repair in 3 years you break even, if you have one "any other repair" you come out ahead. this is actually constant across all the model lines (MBA screen repairs are cheaper, applecare is still 1/2 of a screen repair).
having insurance on desktops is certainly dumb, but it makes a lot of sense in movable items. people carry around phones and laptops, and they drop them. it happens to wintel PCs too, believe it or not. for the price of prepaying half a screen upfront you basically don't have to worry about your laptop and you also get a 512b memory bus with best-in-class battery life and performance etc.
and I know applecare triggers a lot of haters, "that's a scam, I'm too smart for that!!!", "I won't buy something that I can't repair myself!!!" but like, that generally just speaks to the degree of hostility with which a lot of people approach the apple lifecycle. It's very much designed as a first-party service model, yes of course, but it actually works, and apple laptops actually do achieve long service life with this model. You're not the first person to realize that dropping a $3-4k laptop is gonna feel pretty bad etc, but people tend to systematically dismiss the solutions that have been provided to fix that, because they're not the solutions that the wintel world provides.
And frankly, not having to worry about dropping my laptop is a benefit above and beyond what x86 would provide with the kinds of solutions that are generally quoted, and paying for a premium on-demand business grade warranty on a wintel laptop would probably be roughly as expensive even if it existed on the hardware I'd want (can't get a dell/lenovo/hp business-tier warranty on a redmibook I bought off amazon, right?).
I'm out here carrying my laptop around on a stone patio every evening as I watch the puppy play outside. I'm using it on the toilet above a tile floor. I'm picking it up and moving it every day, and using it on a blanket on the couch. Yesterday I downloaded dolphin-llama3:70b and ran it locally at interactive speeds, I've been doing dolphin-mixtral:8x7b for months now (not full offload so it's not quite as fast). It's a nice laptop and I bought it to use it, $350 up front to simply never worry about it is more than worth it. The same wintel people who told me to get a framework 16 (with no speedstep) are now telling me to wait for strix halo, and I'm out here living the future for almost a full year now, and strix is probably at least a full year from actual real availability (strix halo is coming later than strix point, and AMD paper-launches all their laptop products badly). The $500 I save (maybe) by waiting 2+ years for a comparable x86 solution in 2025 isn't worth it, and I'd still have an expensive laptop with no warranty even if I went PC.
(and that's assuming strix halo is a drop-in replacement - I think people are going to be more disappointed by cost+ battery life than they realize, socketed quad-channel memory with a big stacked cache to improve performance is not cheap in either dollars or watts, those are going to be $3k+ laptops too.)
similarly to how people whine about drop risk and then just ignore the mechanism provided to solve that problem... people do the same thing with turning the parts program into a negative too. Literally apple will sell you the part and the first-party tooling to fix your screen, or even just rent you the tooling... and that's bad because "it comes in three pelican cases!!!" or something. Like people literally insist it's "all for show" or something and it's actually just part of the secret plan to undermine right-to-repair, because Apple will sell you the tools if you want. there is nothing that people can't spin into a negative somehow. There are very few companies with a more real "hater" phenomenon than Apple, and it just colors every discussion on the topic. People forget that there's two sides to every transaction, there is no forced anything, I am making my choices about my own risks and benefits, just not the ones they make. There are scenarios where it makes sense - and probably not as few as the haters want there to be. They just get shouted down by a fairly dedicated/active hater crowd.
https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
Dibs
> Apple lets customers configure the 15-inch MacBook Air with 8, 16, or 24 GB of integrated RAM
I wish Apple wasn’t as stingy with RAM upgrade options considering this can’t be upgraded later. For all the talk on the part of Apple of being more sustainable and green, allowing more competitive memory options would help extend the useful life of these products.
Yes, yes, and yes. Unfortunately it is all talk, they don't care a hat about environmental concerns.
All is about the bottom line, and that's why they're stingy with the ram as well.
imagine if there was an official or aftermarket main board upgrade. If framework becomes popular amongst the masses it may happen… a boy can dream :)
It would be amazing, I hope this happens as well :)
This is the sort of thing right to repair will bring us.
Ah give up the hysterics. Sure they care about the environment. They do a lot based on the materials they use, packaging, power for their factories and campuses etc. but they also care about their bottom line like a successful company does. This sort of hyperbolic comment falls flat because it’s reactionary and lazy.
Words might lie, but deeds do not lie. Look at what they do, not at what they say. Apple is only about bottom line. Look at the Foxconn manufacturing. Look at what chemicals are actually in their computers. Look at their relentless focus on using the cheapest labor and put suicide nets in their facilities instead of giving people a few more dollars per day.
Now, every successful company have to have a great bottom-line and that should be a focus as well yes. Not sure how to balance that for a big company like Apple, and I am happy I am not in that position.
The MacBook Air 15 and XPS 15 both start at $1,299. But the base model MacBook Air only has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage vs the XPS 15's 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Apple has been stingy with RAM for years now.
Whilst I can't speak for the storage part, Mac's have often always had lower RAM than their PC counterparts due to the fact that they had often needed less.
That doesn't mean they can't give more, but it's not an 'apples' to apples comparison.
This all depends on your workload. But I will admit I’ve seen happy memory-full Macs in a state where a swapping Windows laptop would be unusable. I do not think that justifies half the memory for the same price.
However, they aren’t using good-old SODIMMs - or anything like them. There is no way they’d ever be able to give you laptops with 400GB/s of memory bandwidth in that slim package while making it user-serviceable. I would love to see them try but it’s not an easy request.
Very true, the overly slim form factor has limited them
I remember when I bought my first alu-Macbook in 2009 and I could remove the battery and add additional memory by just flicking a latch
Hopefully them going all in with on-device AI will get them to double their memory offerings.
It is being designed for the iPhone which ships with 6GB RAM.
And the idea seems for it to be more of an LAM with fallback to OpenAI for the LLM.
They won’t really be going with on-device AI, the models require way too much RAM, but maybe they claim on-device AI “pre-processes” and removes personal information before requests are sent to Apple. Apple has a marketing team to spin this better than my description.
I think on-device models would be really useful. Imagine a conversational interface with much less latency so the conversations felt real. I wonder what kind of computing power we will need before we get there (e.g. running an LLM with lots of prompt data + on device speech recognition), maybe 5-10 years?
> Imagine a conversational interface with much less latency
With current models the latency comes from processing, not from the network — going from a high-power remote server to a low-power local phone is likely to increase latency more than it reduces it
It depends on how big the model is. They are using a little LLM to help correct text and that would be dreadful if it took a server round trip.
24gb is as big as the M3 can be built given the available LPDDR stacks.
The bigger crime is that the 15" can't be configured with the M3 Pro... particularly given the less-ambitious spec compared to M1/M2 Pro. Things like not supporting a second external display make the 15" MBA a non-starter as an 'ultrabook' even with 24GB configurations.
With the M3 Pro, since you get a 192b memory bus, you'd have options up to 36GB as well as dual external display, which is at least adequate for the class of product.
They do support two external displays now in clamshell mode.
There are priorities apple has when it offers products. The green sustainability initiative is the last of the priorities. The first priority is ensuring good experience. Then comes good options. Then comes green sustainability.
There are so many M3 SKUs and the memory situation is sad enough that I wonder if there are yield issues.
But you wouldn't have the same performance with discrete memory, so shrug.
> For all the talk on the part of Apple of being more sustainable and green
what ?!!!!??????!!! there is absolutely nothing sustainable or green about apple, it's products, or its business practices.
From the featured article:
> The MacBook Air is made with over 50 percent recycled content overall, a first for the company. This includes 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100% recycled tin in the solder and gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards, 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets (which is 99% of the rare earth elements in the device), 100% recycled cobalt in the MagSafe connector’s battery and magnets, 100% recycled copper in the main logic board (also a first), 90% recycled steel in the battery tray, keyboard feature plate, and trackpad beam plate, and 35% or more recycled plastic in other components.
> Additionally, over 25 percent of the electricity used to manufacture the device was sourced from supplier clean energy projects. And 100 percent of the wood fiber used in the packaging is recycled, as is 99 percent of the fiber-based plastic.
Don't be fooled, while it is nice they do this, at the end of the day it is just greenwashing.
They design their laptops in such way that they are not (easily) repairable, and the failure of one component could mean replacement of the entire logic board. And echoing the parent comment, if you think 8G/256GB is good enough at the time of purchase but find it unusable because of a change in the way you use your computer, the only option is to trade-in/sell it instead of just upgrading them. (The vast majority ofWindows laptops on the market has a replaceable SSD.)
On the other hand, every Apple device I’ve had has been usable for longer (and mostly with no repair) than the non-Apple laptops or phones I’ve had.
For example, my old MacBook Pro was from mid-2015, I only replaced it with a new M2 Pro early last year - it was my primary machine for almost eight years, with just one battery replacement. The current iPhone I’m writing this on is from late 2020 (12 Pro) and still in fine working condition, I can’t see myself having any reason to upgrade this year.
And I have a HP ZBook G3 purchased in 2016 that I still use and have no need of replacing, it came with 32GB RAM, 512GB nvme SSD, 4k display, 3 year on-site warranty and has been upgraded to 64GB RAM 2TB nvme SSD + 4TB nvme SSD. I have mid 2020 Samsung Galaxy FE20, inherited from my wife when she upgraded on a work plan, still getting regular firmware updates and again I seen no need to upgrade this phone for another few years. Oldest computer I use on regular basis is Samsung ATIV Pro 700T from 2013 with upgraded storage (I would have upgraded the RAM if it was possible). At work I have a 2020 i5 macbook air which is almost useless compared to both of those non-Apple machines and 2022 M2 air which works quite nicely for now but since it is not possible to upgrade it will likely be obsolete in a couple of years (like the 2020 macbook) when Apple decides that you now must have 16GB RAM for Mac OS 14 or 15 or whatever. So Apple hardware is neither special nor unique nor worth the premium.
> So Apple hardware is neither special nor unique nor worth the premium.
i always sell my apple products. i usually get at least 50% back on what i paid.
And my niece is still using my 2014 MBP that I gave her a couple of years ago.
This is nice in theory, but to call this greenwashing, you would need to have some idea about how often SSDs in "easily repairable" laptops actually do get replaced. If it is a large percentage, then sure, you're right. But if it is a very small percentage (which I am almost certain it is), then Apple's efforts to use recycled materials / have more power efficient chips / in general make devices that seem to last longer than various competitors is going to have a much larger impact than the repairability.
You can just buy external drives if you need more storage space.
And one of the bonuses of a Mac is that they all come with TB4 so no compromise on performance.
Nitpick: Apple has various recent macs with TB3, or as they call it, "Thunderbolt / USB 4".
In the case of Apple, the primary (and maybe only?) difference is the number of external displays supported: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mh35952/mac
this isn't really an apple thing. thunderbolt requires the ability to use multiple displays, if you don't then you can't advertise thunderbolt.
since macbook airs don't have multi-display capability, you can't call it thunderbolt. you can call it usb4, or usb-c 40gbps, or whatever, but it's not technically thunderbolt - thunderbolt is the brand for the full-capability standard.
this is not something consumers normally bump up against since x86 laptops generally either have multi-display support or don't exist in a product tier where 40gbps is a thing. Stuff like chromebooks falls into the latter, too cheap to have 40gbps, and the entire x86 space is dominated by literally two companies both of which happen to support multi-display. but you'll probably see this show up more in ARM notebooks once other vendors have a shot at releasing processors besides just those 2.
like idk what you expect anyone to say here - usb standards are kind of a shitty free-for-all and always have been. usb gives you the freedom to make a confusing port that doesn't support everything. The simple fact of the matter is the base-tier Mx processors don't support multi-display without a software-driven dongle, that's all you need to know, it's otherwise a full-capability tb3 port, basically usb4 but without the baggage of being unable to connect to certain tb3 devices like usb4 sometimes does.
there is absolutely a justification for laptops like air to not have multi-display support. not everybody needs it, and those processors cross-over between the tablet and laptop spaces. it's a fancy tablet apu, regardless of how good it performs. the sin is not offering a M3 Pro variant on the 15" MBA, and I'd say offering the M3 on the MBPs at all. But it totally makes sense for ultramobility laptops to cut power and cost, and you'll almost definitely see ultrabooks start doing that as the wintel monopoly crumbles over the next year or two. That will be branded as USB4 and won't necessarily support all the capabilities of TB3... or be compatible with all legacy TB3 devices. USB standard sucks, or rather: USB Implementers Forum is responsive to their customers, who aren't you (at least not directly).
I mean, I don't have any problem with what Apple is doing. I was just adding a correction to the poster I was replying to: that all Apple laptops do not support TB4. Based on their single display support, they're fully-featured TB3, and that's perfectly fine.
Apple hardware lasts much longer than any PC I’ve ever had.
what’s wrong with trading or selling?
It just pushes the problem to someone else
What problem? Holding onto a device for its lifetime?
The problem of using a device and extending its lifetime (remember, this is a variable, not a constant)
(and Apple holding onto a device that is traded in doesn't help when the device could be used by the original owner with an upgrade)
What they don't tell you is that all of those recycled metals are both cheaper and greener than freshly mined and almost always have been. Steel and aluminum take less energy to recycle that to mine and extract.
If there was any truth to what you are saying, then it would be industry standard to manufacture in this manner, which it is decidedly not.
Perhaps “less energy” is only one input to cost, which is why the rest of the industry doesn’t have near the level of recycled components.
There's more demand for metals like aluminium and iron than gets recycled, so only part of the demand gets satisfied this way and there's still demand for metals produced through mining. This is also why the price stays at the level of the mined metals.
> Recycling scrap aluminium requires only 5% of the energy used to make new aluminium from the raw ore. In 2022, the United States produced 3.86 metric tons of secondary aluminium for every metric ton of primary aluminium produced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling
> 42% of crude steel produced is recycled material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_by_material#Iron_and...
The only reason it's not industry standard to use 100% recycled metals is that it's pointless greenwashing. Everyone already uses as much recycled metal as they can get their hands on because it's cheaper.
What a joke.
what a grievously incompetent take on a company that publishes clearly for decades the removal of toxic materials long before others, which runs its engineering campus off solar, and so on, long before others did the same, as just two examples.
Par for the course on HN to view anything remotely Apple as negative. It is what it is. Best to glaze over such comments and ignore the urge to rebut/comment/counter/flame. Greatly improves the S/N ratio IMHO.
How is it “par for the course” for disagreeing with since an obviously biased and unsupported post like that?
“there is absolutely nothing sustainable or green about apple, it's products, or its business practices.”
I think the par comment is noting anti Apple bandwagons.
It is HN after all with its notable bias against all things Apple. Never figured out why.
My first fews months of my time on HN can be best described by the famous XKCD strip per link below. Foolhardy attempts as I soon realised.
https://xkcd.com/386/
Good point.
Definitely an interesting emergent bandwagon phenomenon, i find myself thinking. Years ago i didn’t notice such bandwagon attention seeking sorts of derisive nonsense nearly as much if basically ever.
Like you said, it’s sort of just a reality nowadays.
Which computing device manufacturer is more sustainable or green?
Apple’s silicon is really, really, really powerful. Enough to run Death Stranding on a laptop without a fan. Sucks it runs macOS though. There is an experimental distro of Linux for Apple silicon, but it’s still in development and doesn’t run very much software.
MacOS makes it easy to remap modifier keys. Command can be mapped to Control, with Control put elsewhere. I mention this because this review (and many like it) mention the mental disconnect when frequently switching between Macs and Windows or Linux.
I'm one of those people. Putting Command on Control means that's one less thing I have to think about. Keyboard shortcuts become mostly the same between the different systems.
There's still a disconnect between Windows's ALT and mac's CMD, which impacts what CTRL does. For instance on mac CTRL+A is the emacs binding while windows maps Select All.
I don't think there is any magic bullet, short of remapping all shortcuts on either of the system, it's just tricky.
Why would you use Ctr-A? You'd still use Cmd-A, but with Cmd moved to the same spot as on your PC (where Mac has Ctrl)
I remap caps lock to backspace and (as far as I know) need Karabiner to do it. Is there a built-in way?
Keyboard under System Settings should give you options for changing all the modifier keys. I've got Caps Lock modified to be Escape on mine. Though the jokes on me as I just hit ESC all the time and forget about my remapped Caps.
There's similar options on iOS if you use an external keyboard there.
karabiner allows you to make caps lock escape when pressed alone and ctrl when pressed with a letter key (caps lock is where ctrl was on the keyboards vi was designed for)
No because Backspace is not considered a modifier key. The available options for Caps Lock are Control, Option, Command, fn, Escape or just disabling the key entirely.
If you have a workflow that involves RDP to Windows, you also basically have to use Karabiner to swap command and control for RDP only in order to maintain sanity of shortcuts between macOS/Windows.
There is a builtin utility for this on Macs with a few ways to configure. This is the commandline arg to remap caps lock to backspace
hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":[{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000039,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x70000002A}]}'
Out of curiosity, is this approach flawless? Does it work always, in every app, including login screen?
Yeah it does. You can create a config file that persists the mapping on reboots (described in depth here https://rakhesh.com/mac/using-hidutil-to-map-macos-keyboard-...)
So many years of Mac OS and I still remap the keyboard to Cmd-Ctrl-Alt.
I just recently got MBP M3 Max (16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 64Gb). This is by far the best purchase I've ever made.
Okay... This review is about the Air though, not the Pro.
$4800?
$4,599.00 + tax = $4,920
The price is insane, but I needed a solid dev machine, so that I could run multiple IDEs (GoLand, IntelliJ) + Figma. Additionally, I wanted to dive deeper into AI/ML. Apple's MLX easily competes with Nvidia RTX 4090 [1]. Everything is just instant, and I'm extremely happy with the purchase.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/12/13/apple-silicon-m3-...
Nah man. A 4090 is way faster, especially per dollar spent. I have nothing against Apple and own an M3 Max MBP as well, but lets be real here.
For today’s ai-accelerated workloads, will you use a 14th gen intel + 4090 or Apple M3? The software tooling is not available for Apple, there is no CUDA support basically. This is not an emotional judgment, if an Apple supported cuda on Apple Silicon I’d use it, but it doesn’t.
I use both. Apple’s higher end hardware works well for local LLM inference thanks to its unusually high memory bandwidth and frugal energy consumption. But for serious work you need CUDA, no ifs or buts.
My apologies. The link I provided is not reliable by any means. I actually knew about this, but somehow forgot. Apple can compete with 4090 only for a certain types of tasks (LLMs?), but overall you are correct, 4090 is way faster.
I bit the bullet and went to windows with a discrete GPU. The power envelope is a subpar , but raw performance is definitely there.
With a mobile class 4070 my benchmarks were above the Mr max's and as it's nvidia, tool and framework compatibility are no issue. And price was less than 3K, extended support included.
how do you handle models that are bigger than 16GB on that? my m1 max 64gb whips through dolphin-llama3:70b just fine, that's around 42gb usage. I get partial offload on dolphin-mixtral:8x7b, that's significantly slower but still reasonably usable, whereas even the quantized models chug on my work m1 max 32gb.
everything i've seen is that once you seriously cross the threshold of VRAM usage/gpu offload, the performance collapses. and sure, if you stay within that the 4090 (or even 4070 mobile) is a lot faster, but the most popular current families of models don't generally fit on a 4070 or even 4090.
on a 41.5gb model, would a 4070 mobile/4060 ti 16GB really beat a 64gb m1 max? it seems doubtful but idk.
if there's viable ways to split models across multi-gpus i'm all ears, but afaik there's not (outside NVLink). Other than buying or renting A100s, the only serious option would be bergamo with avx-512 and a bunch of memory, much slower but avx-512 does have inference instructions now, and that gets you into the class of memory you (currently) need for things like snowflake-arctic-instruct:128x3B.
(and of course training is a whole different kettle of fish, but everyone knows that at this point.)
> how do you handle models that are bigger than 16GB on that
I don't, my setup won't compare in term of memory affected to the GPU part. I actually don't know what the best workaround would be.
My priorities were portability, versatility and VR capacities above all, so yes it wont hold 40G in GPU RAM.
That notch looks ugly. Is it really needed?
It makes more sense when you think of it "the monitor's top bezel was shrunk to about an inch wide, which allows for the menubar to be pushed up to where the bezel would be, creating more usable vertical screen space."
On my old MBP, the menubar starts below where the camera module is.
That area rarely gets used, so why not put the camera there? It is weird how large the area is, however. The camera is a fraction of the tab's size and there aren't any sensors on either side, I don't think.
You pretty much forget about it after a week or so. The only people who make a giant fuss about it are people who haven't used a system with it for very long, if at all.
No, it's not needed. My theory is that they picked that shape intentionally to match the notch on the iPhones. They could have gone with a much tinier notch, since that notch is only hiding a single web-cam lens. The notch on the iPhones also holds the FaceID cameras and tech, but for some reason Apple refuses to put FaceID on their laptops where it would be much more useful. I suspect they'll make it much smaller in the future or change it to a "dynamic island" notch instead.
I don't think FaceID is a good idea on the computer. On the phone it unlocks when the device is quite close to you, but I suspect someone could sit down at your computer and watch it unlock if you are behind them. Touching the keyboard or just using your watch is more secure.
Of course if you were in the kind of environment where it might be a problem if your computer unlocked as you walked by, you probably wouldn't enable the feature anyway. As it is I am annoyed by iphone and ipad apps that require faceid or other login each time as I'm the only one who uses those devices anyway.
Nevertheless I think faceid on the laptop or imac is an insecure idea.
Hello on Windows is fantastic. I’m logged in before my monitor has woken up. It’s never unlocked when I’m further away than seated distance.
I wish I had it on my Mac.
It's not really a notch, think of it as two extra tabs instead. They are extra above the 16:10 screen and move the menu and clock off it.
I'm staring at it right now on my new MBA and indeed it is ugly. Fortunately I don't use the menu bar all that much.
You'll stop noticing it within a week, few weeks tops.
When you change the menubar to black, it’s completely hidden and you totally forget it’s there
… especially when your mouse hides behind it and it takes a few milliseconds to remember the notch
BetterDisplay[0] can even change the display mode to just use the display area below the notch (which is the same 16:10 that older MacBooks had). Probably noticeable on a MacBook Air, but on a MacBook Pro, the local dimming makes the unused area look exactly like the bezel.
[0]: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay
You don't even need third-party software to do that. In Settings/Displays, under advanced you can enable the full resolution list. In there, choose the resolution with just slightly less vertical resolution than the current selection, boom that is your 16:10 resolution without the notch area.
Reducing your total vertical usable screen space just because you don't like that a small area of your menubar isn't screen...is ridiculous.
I don't use it myself (I don't mind the notch personally), though it would give more space for menu bar items.
Sure, if you want a smaller display, just to avoid having the menu be in the bezel area.
Not really ugly. It is a clever design solution to allow the screen space to be larger without making the case larger. Pushing the display up into the bezel space. the only limitation is leaving space for the camera and two different sensors plus mounting hardware in an area of the screen that is not often used.
Once you’ve used it for a few days, it tends to fade out of awareness. If you really don’t want to see it, there are utilities that make the menubar black so it blends in.
> on Windows, I can type Alt + F > But on the Mac, I have to type Cmd + Option + Shift + S, which is … yikes. I feel like a Cirque du Soleil performer every time I try it.
Indeed, keyboard shortcut design as well as physical keyboard design is such a forgotten moulded corner of personal computing (especially bad with Apple given they own both the OS and the device)...
But there are apps for that! (at least the former) You can have Alt-F open your File menu on your Mac as well, the press E with Karabiner+KeyboardMaestro combination
> But I found it problematic to go back and forth between the MacBook Air and my PCs, as I would constantly reach for the wrong keyboard shortcuts. The biggest issue is the Ctrl + C (Windows)/Cmd + C (Mac) divide: Those modifier keys are in very different places.
Well, put then in the same place! (and Mac's place is better since it's a more ergonomic thumb key) This is one of the few benefits of different designs - they might force you to reevaluate your common routines
What's the best software for remapping keys on a Mac these days?
I'm currently using Ukelele, but it's not ideal. And I would really really like to remap Right Alt different to Left Alt, to get a proper ISO layout!
KE+KM combo is close to the best, KE allows you working around yet another dumb limitation of the OS of treating left and right the same (otherwise Ukelele is nice), KM gives you a more friendly GUI and integration with other apps (like Alt+F)
(the only missing low-level part in KE is stuff like home row mods where you'll need another utility like kanata/kmonad, but not sure how well they integrate with KE)
Thought I would dislike my iPad Pro and eventually would trade it in for this M3 Air but ended up keeping it. Covers the consumption cases the Air would’ve facilitated and Terminus is a pretty good app for SSH’ing into my main machine and working on projects.
Downside is how many apps surprisingly lack iPadOS versions
I quite like BlinkSSH as well.
"It’s also worth pointing out that Apple offers terrific trade-in values for its old products"
Every time I look up what Apple's trade-in will be, I have to compare it to eBay to make sure I've not gone crazy.
My 2019 iPad Pro is worth...they said they would recycle it for free for me. It is weird, because I still get a lot of value from it, so I'm not bothering to upgrade, but might have been tempted if they offered one or two hundred bucks for it.
I'm glad to hear that they have gone up. They were criminally low for the longest time.
I’m probably not going to be replacing my personal machine soon, but I’ve really been considering ditching my plans for an MBP and just going with the air. It’s thinner, smaller (I don’t like big laptops) and frankly does everything I need it to.
In years past, the common recommendation was save as much as you can and buy the top-of-the-line you can. But now the Air seems reasonable.
I'm thinking this, as my 8 year old MBP is getting slightly long in the tooth. The one thing that gives me pause is the 60hz screen. I have a 120hz one on my work MBP, and once you've tried it it's hard to give up. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be treating it as very much a pro feature...
Just be carefull if you use triple monitor etc because the air doesn't support that out of the box..very annoying. Perhaps they have fixed it on this version (but probably not).
I have the m2 air and it's the best laptop I've ever owned. Perfect for travel as well, battery is amazing
> macOS can be inconsistent and lacks some obvious multitasking features
I bet you don't have to use old windows 10 which is not capable to restore windows on proper displays after I reconnect monitors... perhaps it's something disabled by my organization, but in macOS, at least I don't have to do this once twice a day.
Weird to compare a brand new Apple computer with an obsolete version of Windows, as if it's some kind of victory lap.
I have an up to date Win11 gaming pc hooked up to my TV and and my monitor, can confirm this behavior is still prevalent and massively frustrating no matter how much you play with the multiple display settings
Windows display hotplugging is pretty dire. I'm sure there's a good explanation (x86 legacy?) but Windows (Win11, current patch, Thinkpad T14) seemingly having a stroke any time I plug in a new display then having to do the "Advanced Display Settings" rigamarole, is always ugly and frustrating.
I have read in a thread about display ID and CEC that some display manufacturers burnt the same "unique" identity into their monitors. Should this be true, it would admit into the room at least one other player in this space who may be responsible for bad behaviour recognising and dealing with plug-unplug and other issues: If they can mis-understand the spec this badly, imagine what else they got wrong?
If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Done