I was recently buying a Dell laptop for my sister and it boggles my mind how most other companies (maybe Framework is an except) still have dozens or even 100s of SKUs for consumer laptops. I didn't enjoy the process of looking through dozens of various lines that Dell has and then other companies like Lenovo and HP earlier in the process, just to find a "mid-range usable computer with a decent screen".
If you didn't know anything about laptops and wanted to buy your first one, it would be a nightmare to figure out what all those seemingly random numbers mean on most non-Apple laptops.
Apple continues to simplify the laptop naming scheme, we're at a point where it's simply:
Air OR Pro
Small screen OR big screen
All other details can be configured in the buying flow but there's not much to think about if you just want a simple laptop.
I finally made the switch to Apple after being thoroughly frustrated with Windows laptops.
It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them.
Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.
Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway.
Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.
I'm one of those industry long timers who can and will use just about anything, and has occasionally over the years owned macs of various form factors. For the past decade thanks to corporate work I've been entirely Windows and Linux based.
I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery life, a screen that didn't upset my eyes, and importantly the OS just got out of the way during general usage.
I wound up buying myself an m1 air about 6 months later.
My only gripe is that I wish it had more RAM, but even then the unified memory approach has made my expected ram usage vs actual ram usage a bit of an odd thing. It consistently uses less ram than I'd normally anticipate. That said, more ram by default would help fill in those times when I do load it up.
I think ThinkPads are better than MacBooks. You can get P14 with 32gb of RAM, 1TB SSD, very fast and quiet CPU (AMD U series), decent battery, 2.8k OLED screen and it weights 1.34kg (weight between 13 inch and 15inch new Airs).
It also has imo better ports and a track point.
The problem is that Windows sucks more and more with every iteration and there is nothing Lenovo or other manufacturers can do about it. Lenovo also keeps shipping hot and loud Intel CPUs which hurt reputation of the ThinkPad line and may confuse new buyers. Still if you know what to choose you will get more for your money with P14 than Macbook air imo.
>Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them.
They are awesome, but not perfect.
Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.
I'm still using an original M1 Air and the thing is used nearly all day for light casual web usage, and I only plug it in about two times per week -- the energy efficiency is no joke. This kind of battery life really spoils you and when you see other laptops that nearly require the plug charging all the time, tethered, you realize what a big deal these M chips are for true portability.
> Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops.
The plateau of 6 hours is less Microsoft's fault here and more a combination of stinginess by OEMs and their willingness to reduce cost by taking money to have extra installed software out of the gate.
> The trackpads are downright unusable.
This varies wildly by OEM and price point. Below some weird gulf, this is the truth. Above some arbitrary shore, there is a plateau of goodness, of which some rival the historic best from macs.
> The keyboards are a hit or a miss.
Again this comes down to the choices made by the OEM during their costing. I recently picked up a Chromebook from Acer just to have something that was not "very Computer" when I found myself needing An Computer to look something up with. It had surprisingly little flex to the chassis, and I found myself quite enjoying the deck, minus...
well
> And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.
Or 1366x768, the Devil's Resolution. The reasons for this are weird and varied but the short form is that economies of scale have yet to make it more profitable for companies to standardize on higher density panels. It actually makes me insanely mad that the laptop I started college with (a dell c600 hand-me-down I'd been tinkering with since high school) had a better resolution at 1400x1050 and that the 2560x1600 beast that I carried after that... that in 2012 would define the lower side of "retina".
The problem is the storage is not removable in the Apple Macbooks.
It is disturbing it didn't sink the Macbooks. It speaks volumes of how little people care about their own data. About their own privacy. There should've been zero sold. It truly is dismal and a very large systemic problem a laptop like this is sold.
Because when it breaks, are you going to wipe it and restore from backup? No. You will just hand it over to a repair person and even an ethical shop much less Apple doesn't even have a chance to hand the disk back before handling it. An unknown amount of complete strangers will access your everything. Your medical records, your banking, your private photos, everything.
And people pay real world money for this, money they worked hard for. It's unfathomable to me.
> Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway.
The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could find in shops at the time cost the same, and felt like cheap rubbish. And this laptop just refuses to die, and handles my workload just fine after all these years. I'm dreading the day I have to replace it.
There's a volume zones of people who want "a laptop and nothing more", will pay for better materials and Apple has perfected that segment with a few caveats [0].
To your point, then comes the lower end ("just give me something cheap"), the corporate middle ("the same laptop as at work"), and the super high end (gaming, CAD, anything needing special software or a discrete GPU), with the outliers (linux etc)
IMHO windows laptop nowadays are for people who either don't really care, or have already a very specific target or limitation.
For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple.
[0] resistance to abuse isn't there. A macbook's screen will be dead pretty quick if not handled with appropriate care. A Lenovo Flex for instance will take it a lot longer.
Similar stories. I usually had a windows laptop and linux and VNC'd into the linux box and with win 10 and 11 I just got tired of fighting all the garbage that microsoft tries to push on you in the OS. I really just want to get to work, so I bought a top of the line M2 macbook air and couldn't be happier with my decision. Apple has their apps on there but I don't get pop ups and ads and have to go through a bazillion privacy settings to turn of MS spying on every little thing.
I’ve been an Apple only user the last 20 years, but they simply lost me with the garbage they sold since 2016. The M series was too little too late. It also didn’t help that macOS didn’t get better anymore and the yearly release cycle only made it more buggier. I’m happy with AMD finally catching up to intel and nvidia with a performance to price ratio Apple will never deliver.
Tastes differ. My work MacBook unlocks with a fingerprint (with random sensitivity, if my hands are too dry, for example, it does not register) even in 2024. My Windows laptops had been unlocking with face recognition for 10 years or so. I find the latter much more convenient, especially when I have the laptop on a stand and use an external monitor and keyboard/mouse. Does not look like Apple is ahead of anything here. Hardware wise Apple is actually okay for the price in the low end, but you can only add memory/SSD/CPU (at ridiculous $/{GB,GHz} ratio) for the higher end, you can't get an OLED display, or a good keyboard, or bigger battery at any price.
>>Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway.
It is not correct, unless you select minimal amount of ram and SSD. Select versions with proper amount of memory and MacBook becomes much more expensive than comparable windows machine.
>Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway.
Until you want more memory or a larger SSD then the Macbook is all of a sudden double the price of the equivalent PC laptop.
>Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.
That's basically true, but with Apple becoming more and more expensive that does leave a very large low-end market for them to play in.
What keeps me from Mac is some people report some weird incompatibility issues with third-party things. Like external mouse, keyboard, monitors. All of my mac user friends complained about this to some extent.
Plus, on my laptop I just simply upgraded the RAM with another 16GB of RAM which will give me some breathing room for at least another year.
For me, a windows computer "just works". Everything I connect I know will work as expected. Not looking forward to learn some new quirks. Even the top left action buttons just irk me to death.
Yeah, whoever managed (or didn't manage) the Surface trackpad project needs fired. Can't count how many times I have belted out obscenities while working on my Surface Pro. Garbage. I forgot it had a touch screen and I never flip the screen. All that caused the trackpad to be ignored, I guess. Again, hot garbage.
I have a MacBook Pro M1, which is pure fluid bliss. It cost less, it's faster, and the battery lasts for days.
>Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops.
I've been positively delighted by my two Intel Alder Lake laptops I use during travel for play (ASUS Vivobook S 14X OLED, 12700H CPU) and work (Lenovo V14 G3, 1255U CPU) respectively. I can get 4 to 8 hours off of them depending on use with the charge limited to 80% for longer overall life, and as I just mentioned the hardware are quite powerful in their own right.
>The trackpads are downright unusable.
Both of my laptops I just mentioned have wonderful touchpads. Frankly though, this absolutely will vary by several country miles depending on manufacturer and even model. I suppose I got lucky here.
>And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.
I'm gonna be honest: I fucking hate screens bigger than 1920x1080 (or x1200 for 16:10 screen ratios). My laptop for play has a 2880x1800 screen, but I've got it rendering at 1920x1200 because so many programs just assume pixel densities around that area and either can't or won't handle scaling.
I also have to still do some scaling up even at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 at laptop screen sizes anyway because everything is so small, but it's still less compatibility headaches compared to physically denser pixels.
In my experience, most people looking for "just a notebook" don't care about any of those things. They want a low maintenance, high performant (for day-to-day tasks, not gaming) portable computer with a great battery that runs Chrome, Office and Spotify, and comes with great customer service - nothing comes close to being able to bring your Mac to the next Apple Store.
You’re going about your decision tree backwards. People don’t say “I don’t want a touchscreen” or “I don’t want to game”. You don’t make decisions based upon what you don’t want to do… you make them based upon what you do want to do.
I was talking with my dad recently, and he wanted a new computer that could handle email, a little Excel, Facebook, and some other light web browsing that didn’t get stuck in an infinite reboot loop for system updates (which somehow his Windows got stuck somehow). There are a bagillion options for Windows laptops that fit those needs. He ended up not being able to make a decision and is still using his same old laptop.
Whereas my son wanted a desktop computer that would support playing Valorant at 60fps at 1440. That narrowed things down substantially and ended up building one to his specs.
If a Mac fits your requirements, then you have far fewer decisions. And that’s part of the point. For the a long time, Apple has stuck to a restricted set of SKUs. This is by design. It’s not that they couldn’t offer a touchscreen, or a convertible, or a xMac. It’s that they’ve been there… had many form factors and SKUs and it almost killed the company.
Even if you say you want a Dell laptop — have you ever tried to browse their site? If you say you want a laptop you’re presented with 68 options (I just did this). 68.
Am I so glad though that Apple didn't buy into the touch for the laptops. Now this comes with a caveat, if you have some like the Yoga that the hinge can go all the way around, touch isn't bad. But god, in the early 2010s when everyone was throwing touch on their laptop screens, I hated that so much. Laptop hinge only goes 120 degrees or something like that, lets throw touch screen on it! horrible idea.
Although I heard many complaints about the Yoga. Never owned one, but if I had a laptop with a touch screen, that seems like the route to go. The Surface too, but I've also heard those stop feeling snappy pretty quick and tons of thermal issues.
>Then sure there's about 10 models. But at that point is it much complicated than say, choose from the DELL XPS line ?
Yes. A thousand times more complicated. I usually get Apple gear for myself, but am always asked to help friends and relatives with PC laptop buying decisions...
Definitely agree with the simplicity of purchasing an Apple computer compared to other laptop manufacturers. Headphone brands and monitor makers also suffer from this same fate :/
Not that simple when there are multiple generations of each on sale, with wildly different prices should you change the storage or RAM toggle.
The MacBook Air used to have
a multiple USB-A ports plus video, now it 2 ports that have to handle everything. So now the dongle/no dongle question has to become considered as well.
There's still some weirdness as you get higher in the lineup. They start to break out into different variations of each chip, with varying degrees of memory for each variation. Like you can get a Macbook Pro with an M3 Pro chip with 11 core CPU/14 core GPU, or an M3 Pro chip 12/14 cores, or an M3 Max chip with 14/30 cores for $400 more or 16/40 for $900 more. And if you do the 14/30 M3 Max, you can choose 36 or 96gb memory, but if you choose the 16/40 Max, you can choose 48 64 or 128gb memory.
> it boggles my mind how most other companies (maybe Framework is an except) still have dozens or even 100s of SKUs for consumer laptops
And the crazy thing is, despite Dell having 170+ laptop SKUs they don't use that fact to actually have a wide range of products.
You'd think with 170 different SKUs they could produce an ultrabook with ports, wouldn't you? A modernised version of the E7270? Apparently not, though.
Having 100s of SKUs is an information denial tactic to ensure that users forfeit all of their consumer surplus[0] and pay exactly what they are willing to pay in the hopes that they get a "good one".
The problem with this tactic is that there's a lot of SKUs that give people a terrible experience and they jump to another brand.
Apple's solution to this is to instead have 50 SKUs, organize them by a few very easily understandable categories, and then price every SKU exactly within $50-$75 of one another so that there's always a meaningful upgrade for slightly more money. This is also why Apple is very stingy with storage and RAM. They use the cost of upgrades to pull you to higher priced SKUs, which then need their own upgrades, and OH LOOK there's an even nicer base model for just a little more!
[0] The amount of money you save when the thing you want to buy turns out to be cheaper than what you were willing to pay.
I think System76 also has a pretty simple evaluation process. You mostly just select the form factor you want and then configure it. Also, unlike Apple, they make it easy to get a machine exactly tailored to your needs. They don't force you to pay $$$ for an expensive processor when you just want a bit larger SSD and some extra memory...
The only non-user friendly defaults in the Mac purchasing flow are the 8G RAM and 256G SSD. I think in 2024, 16G & 512G should be the default, with an option to downgrade.
With such bloated webapps now a days, those 8G of RAM are going to cook too fast...
> I didn't enjoy the process of looking through dozens of various lines that Dell has and then other companies like Lenovo and HP earlier in the process, just to find a "mid-range usable computer with a decent screen".
Newegg's feature selector is pretty good at sorting through this. Just uncheck all the bad screen resolutions and CPU models and see what's left. Bonus: Require at least 32GB of memory in an exact power of two, excluding all the junk that solders 8GB to the system board.
Have you ever tried to trade in an Apple prdoduct? They ask you to enter the serial number and then bizarrely ask you to indentify to device. You basically have to refer to MacRumors to get it right. Apple has the same problem, if not worse.
Dell has XPS 13, XPS 15, and XPS 17 and now the plus designation. It's pretty easy.
Disregarding that there are 10 different laptop product lines to choose from, if I've already somehow decided that what I want is an XPS and I want a 13 inch screen size, my first two search results are
I gather that one of these is a newer revision than the other, but it's a lot more confusing than "M2" and "M3". I need to know whether I want (up to) a Core Ultra 7 155H vs a Core i7-1250U, and whether (up to) Intel Arc Graphics is better than Intel Iris Xe graphics.
Scrolling down further adds the XPS 13 Plus and XPS 13 2-in-1 Laptop. How does XPS 13 Plus compared to XPS 13 Laptop? What about to the other XPS 13 Laptop, is it better than both? Or is this a weird side-grade where you get a different form factor which is in some ways nicer, but then also comes with all the dumb parts of the Apple's "Touch Bar" and none of the good parts? (that's my 10 second interpretation of the product, but more clueless customers will have absolutely no idea)
So, if you have a device made after that transition and Apple doesn't already know the details (e.g. because you didn't buy it direct), they'll also need to know how much RAM and SSD space it has.
They ask for serial which you can copy and paste from the "About this Mac" dialog box that is in MacOS.
From there it asks you the year of your laptop which is also in the same dialog box.
From there it asks you which CPU version and core count you have (for M series laptops with multiple options.) To get this info, you click on "More Info" on the same dialog box(In Sonoma you also click System Report and it is all there).
Afterwards it just asks the condition of the laptop (ie, does it turn on, screen cracked etc.)
I don't see why you would need MacRumors for this.
I’ve done a trade in a few times with Apple and it’s always been simple. There’s a serial number on the device, or you could just select it from devices attached to your account
Actually I just did this the other day with an iPad Pro and it was kinda neat. Instead of asking me to enter the serial number, it said something like “it’s this device” or “use this device”. After I tapped that it just continued on and asked me about the condition of the iPad.
I have seen that serial number prompt before though, I don’t know what makes it ask for a serial number versus prompting to use the current device’s serial number. I’m not even sure how it knew what device I was on to be honest.
If a normal person just wants a “simple laptop,” they can go to Best Buy or whatever brick and mortar and pull one off the shelf. They don’t need to dig into hundreds of SKUs unless they want to do so.
BestBuy will still have a ton of different options that look similar but one is inexplicably a lot more expensive than another, even within the same brand.
Really surprised not to see any mention of the 2x2 grid Jobs introduced in 1998: Pro, Consumer, Desktop, and Portable. It was the solution to exactly this problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10cZg8pLmXk about 6 minutes in.
> I was recently buying a Dell laptop for my sister and it boggles my mind how most other companies (maybe Framework is an except) still have dozens or even 100s of SKUs for consumer laptops.
If you remember back in the day, Nokia also had a crazy number of SKUs for their phones. Nokia is no longer the power it used to be. Could it mean many SKUS means a lack of focus ? Thinking you can out market / out segment your competition rather than try to concentrate more on the product ?
I find AMD also has less SKUs than Intel. Here, as a challenger you can't really afford to segment the market as much as the leader. You need to concentrate your offerings in a few potent products.
They do it so that the consumer can't price match nor return swap from one retailer to another. The model number ultimately becomes a type of trace to reveal which retailer sold the device.
If you know what you want then most sites will have filters to narrow down the choices very quickly. If you don't know what you want and nobody told you what you need then any model is probably fine.
I don't get it. What's so great about Apple's lack of choice?
Even at a logistical / production level.. having all theses different units, options, suppliers, information, incompatibilities, tests, after sales.. insane.
This will sound slightly provocative but I genuinely wonder: why would anyone buy anything else than an apple laptop? Gaming? ideology? budget constraints? lack of familiarity with MacOS?
They are marginally more expensive, but they also very easy to sell second-hand. I'm speculating that the monthly cost is on par with a PC.
Lots of people doesn't see Apple laptops like you obviously do. Ask provocative questions and you'll get likewise answers. For my needs and my opinions:
- The software is worse. Linux is better. Windows has much broader options. I run both.
- I game.
- Ideology? Yes, Apple is an awful company.
- Familiarity? I have used it enough to know it cannot do a lot of things I need, want, like, etc.
- Budget? Yes, but not because it is too expensive, but because it cannot do anywhere near what Linux and Windows can do (for me) for way less.
>I'm speculating that the monthly cost is on par with a PC.
What is the monthly cost of a Mac that can run games, run old software I require for work and hobbies and (importantly) isn't locked down in either hardware or software so I can use it for something completely different later in life?
> They are marginally more expensive, but they also very easy to sell second-hand. I'm speculating that the monthly cost is on par with a PC.
They aren't marginally more expensive. I'm writing this on a Chromebook I bought for $300 before the pandemic. Including electricity, cables, etc., I figure it has cost me about $6.50/month.
If you need Windows programs for your work, or need the ports, or want to play games, that kinda answers the question. The Mac laptops are otherwise just better for most people. And the often-repeated "every user is different" is not really true; most people fit the mold.
I don't like MacOS these days, I like the idea of being able to repair my computer if something breaks, and I want the option to at least attempt data recovery if I have a drive failure.
Reasons for buying other laptop (at least for developers):
1. Better choice of desktop environment (KDE/GNOME vs OS X)
2. Wider/better selection of applications
3. Better development environment
4. Ease of deployment of your own apps
5. Better fit for your budget (why spend 3000 Euros on a
limited set of features, when you can spend the same amount and get huge number of features/better features)
6. Capability to connect upto 3 external displays (which Macbook has got only recently)
Gaming is a big one. Apple has now forced gaming companies twice to do work that is not necessary for a percent of their customer base. Thrice if you are picky.
The picky one is the death of Rosetta 1
Then they killed 32 bit binaries. This is the main reason the little Mac icon on steam is useless.
Then Arm processors and yet another recompile that was probably more than a recompile.
If you buy a windows machine, the last 30 or so years of gaming are available to you. And everything older can be emulated.
For me personally, it's a few things I dislike. I do computer graphics for fun. I like using OpenGL and Vulkan because it's the most accessible both in terms of audience and material available. Apple doesn't support either (OpenGL is deprecated, Vulkan only available via translation layer).
Additionally, and this is probably more problematic because I actually like Metal as an API, I don't live in the high income region of the US. I know I won't be happy with the default SSD. I know I want at least 16GB of RAM (can't run integration tests locally at work with 8). For a Windows laptop I go for 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM. But the added premium makes this really difficult. I'm in Germany so it's not like a Mac would eat up a year of my net wage but it's enough that I'd maybe rather go for the thinkpad.
And if I actually tried to get a bit more beef in my GPU and by a larger model because I think the 13 inch are a bit small, I'd probably spend 3k or 3.5k. That's a maxed out gaming laptop. Really hard to justify the price.
Oh come on, you're overexaggerating a bit. If you follow your pattern with Apple, you'll end up with a measly 8GB/256GB model which will only be useful for basic browsing.
(And with more and more Electron apps, might struggle even with that once you hop onto a video call.)
> you'll end up with a measly 8GB/256GB model which will only be useful for basic browsing.
I must be doing something wrong then. I've got one of those measly models and I do quite a bit more than just basic browsing without any problem. Video calls are the least of that, and they work fine.
Anyone who says the 8/256 Airs are throwaway machines has literally never used one. Full stop. You have an opinion about what 8gb of memory is capable of, which is influenced entirely by Intel CPUs and Windows. It hits different on the M1 platform and MacOS.
I have the base level M2 Air and it’s anything but a basic browsing machine.
Runs everything I throw at it development wise, while a good few other things are open and it has never felt slow. Compare that to any Windows laptops with the same spec and it would be chugging along with just Chrome open.
I do all of my development on a measly 8GB/500GB model. The only application that has performance problems for me VCVRack, and that’s only after I surpassed 900 modules
While they do swap more often than one with more RAM (obviously), at least with the M1s, the SSDs are stupidly fast, to the point that you barely notice it for day-to-day work. They nerfed the SSD on M2 base models; not sure about M3.
For the record, on my base M1 Air, I generally have Safari, Spotify, and Alacritty open at any given time. I can also run Docker Desktop if necessary, although I prefer colima since I don’t need any of the bloat.
Ah. Apple fanboys and their partly-usable, overpriced laptops with notches. You have to buy ONCE, it's not like you have to worry about what other laptop you could've bought every single time you use one. Do the research, buy a $600 laptop. It's usually adequate for everything except gaming.
This was Apple’s secret - they punch bigger with large quantities of components.
When the original iMac came out, it was by far the #1 computer SKU. It was way better than competing products at the price range because of those economies of scale.
Okay, without googling tell me: what is an Apple model number Z15T_5108?
> All other details can be configured in the buying flow but there's not much to think about if you just want a simple laptop.
You would think so, but unfortunately not. Apple is quite good at upselling and their price gating for screens, ram etc. is very opaque. In other words: whether you want the air with non-sabotaged specs or the pro or the pro pro or the pro max is not simple.
Anyone who says this has never used an 8/256 Air post-M1, and is complaining about them hypothetically. They're fine. They're fantastic computers.
You can upgrade to 16/512, which puts the machine at $1500. This is $200 cheaper than a Dell XPS 14 16/512. "But the Dell has dedicated graphics" no it doesn't. "But, well, the Dell has a higher resolution display" no, its actually 1080p, the Air is higher resolution. "But, but, the dell, its, uh, no wait never mind don't buy Dell, buy a (insert some other brand)" the thing a lot of people really don't want to accept about Macs, right now, is that they're actually so extremely obviously the best computer money can buy that its irresponsible to buy anything else at $1000 and above (unless you're gaming or doing AI, but get a desktop at that point).
I'm still very bummed with Apple's strategy in using # of supported external displays as a feature to gate laptops.
I had to return a decently spec-ced M3 Macbook PRO 14" because it only supported 1 display (base M3) and pay more for M3 pro even though I don't need the extra horsepower.
And now the base M3 Air's support 2 displays? This is wild
I believe we are now in the 9th year of 8GB being the baseline Mac laptop RAM config.
It’s incredibly stingy. For a while you could make the argument that a lot of Air purchasers wouldn’t need it, but I don’t think that’s the case any more. My wife has an M1 Air with 8GB and between Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack she quite regularly gets beachballs and weird performance hitches.
Obviously a planned obsolescence tactic. If the base models were 16GB there's a fine chance Apple wouldn't see another dollar from those customers for another 10+ years at minimum. The average customer doesn't understand their memory requirements and cannot be expected to predict how they may change in the future. It's the only thing they got left they can use to trick customers into buying a machine that will need to be replaced sooner.
That's so extremely backwards in relation to everything else it's mind boggling. 16 gb being considered and priced at premium, where I had a single chrome tab eating 3gb easily few time's recently.
No, what’s worse is Apple, or is it random self-styled influencers, spreading the false narrative that Apple Silicon magically requires less RAM and people actually believing that.
This comes up often, but it's honestly totally fine for a non-technical user who only occasionally uses anything other than Safari and Photos.
The vast majority of their market would not fit into the developer, content creator, or just plain power-user category. There's people who just log on to do internet banking and email when they're not on Reddit or Facebook.
For some anecdata, 16/512+ would be a waste on my parents, in-laws and my whole extended family for that matter. They would benefit from it, but they're not screaming at spinning wheels, and are probably a bit more patient and accustomed to 'slowness', which is pretty subjective.
This is why for my Mac needs I have a cheaper Mini. If I'm going to have to be stuck with 8GB or pay insane markups for 16gb, I'll get the 8GB Mini, and only do the purely Mac-centric stuff on it to minimize pain.
I disagree, and I always upgrade the RAM even though I don’t like paying more. Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control.
Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced into a treadmill of computer upgrades like we haven’t seen since the 90’s when CPUs were skyrocketing in performance every year.
For anyone who forgets what the 90’s was like, here’s an example with Mac models:
1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020
1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
That’s a 31-fold increase in clock rate (and several times that in overall performance) in the same timespan we’re discussing. Software that was written for the G4 had no chance of running on the LC (ignoring CPU architecture differences).
MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).
Agree it is crazy, I am writing this from my M1 Air with 8GB of RAM and I am yet to ever have a real issue with a RAM limitation... the OS does an amazing job juggling RAM.
The RAM being so low is confusing. Given RAM is one of the cheaper components. I guess they do some smart swap memory using SSD - but my Air laptop struggles to run PowerPoint, few browser tabs and video calling at the same time.
The way Apple has always had e-waste laptops at the bottom of the line is pretty disgusting with their environmental posturing. MacOS barely works on 128GB space and 8GB ram yet for many years that was the baseline, it was particularly bad because the ram gets full just browsing then your baseline OS and a few files is enough that the swap disk would get full soon after.
Have a crate with about 40+ of those machines at work, essentially useless from the era where the person in charge of buying laptops just bought the bottom end for every employee and considered it a job done.
Seems like a borderline conspiracy to fry the internal SSD over time, adding a wear-point to the product family, and making sure consumers keep consuming. I'm talking about system paging: virtual memory on the disk.
Even worse, if one plots the (price, unified memory amount, chip type), and looks at it from right-to-left, then the dollars per system capability is disgusting when you order a lesser system. You get the most value for your money when you buy the maximum unified memory configuration (on those three points).
Better yet, with a maxed out unified memory configuration, one can further save on SSD writes by using (and loading/storing) RAM disks for their projects!
Most people buying a MacBook for work are likely getting a higher unified memory, so their workstations live longer. Meanwhile consumers will have to keep consuming as they fry their internal SSD's on their airs...
I was also wondering if a 1TB apple fabric device is simply an 8TB fabric device with 8x the write life...
It sucks since the M series laptops have been amazing, with this one glaring problem.
I have a great M2 pro machine, but officially it can only support 2 external monitors. I should be able to close my screen and power 3. I can do this with a dock so it's not a resources problem.
I am curious what is different between the Air and the Pro that the Air can power 2 external monitors (it does say when the lid is closed) and the Pro can only power 1 regardless. Or is this a software update and the Pro page just has not been updated.
I keep hoping that this is a problem that is only temporary and eventually it will be removed or as time goes on each series can run 1 more monitor or something.
Really? I just recently tried out (and took a photo of) an m2 macbook pro with 2k displays attached, lid open and screen mirroring on. 4 screens with 60“ tv in the distance. Would that really not work on an m3 mac?
I can do 4 monitors with my lid closed with my Dell XPS 13. It is crazy to see an Apple Laptop that costs $2000+ cannot do a laptop that costs $1000. People with money really don't know how to shop.
Keep in mind 2 displays are only supported with the lid closed. So the only change is that now you can use an external monitor in lieu of the internal display.
Lid closed? Depends on the exact Macbook version ... The lid of my MacBook Pro (M1 pro, 16-inch, 2021) is open and actively displays stuff and additionally two external LG 4K monitors are directly connected to it via USB-C. The third USB-C port is in use for external disks, but maybe I should try sometime to connect a third monitor ...?
But nevertheless, Apple's hardware strategy sucks ...
I feel like I accidentally discovered a huge hack for this by upgrading to a 49" DQHD monitor. It's the exact same resolution as two 27" 1440p monitors so it's like any Apple silicon chip has always supported dual external displays. And it was a much better overall value compared to buying 2 displays + over-specced macbook.
Do you mind sharing the monitor model? Found the Samsung LC49G97TSSNXDC for $999[1], but also a reddit thread about some issues with it and a 2019 MacBook Pro[2] (which is admittedly Intel rather than Apple silicon-based).
I am hoping the limit is just a MacOS thing, like how MST1.2(?) was supported on my old MBA(2015) hardware but not available on MacOS. I could Daisy chain DisplayLink monitors on Linux, but MacOS wouldn’t let me, and I was limited to a single monitor.
I use Asahi Linux on M2 now, and the USBC display support isn’t done yet, but I am hoping it would be better than MacOS.
Unfortunately it isn't. There are only two display controllers in the M1/2/3 and that can't be worked around in software. MST won't work in Asahi Linux because it's not present in the hardware. It worked on x86 Macs because the GPU supported it.
You can use more external displays using a dock and DisplayLink Manager though. I got three extra monitors to run on my M1 Air with no problems that way.
If it can identify something people will pay more for, while not quite putting off most people, it'll do it, no matter how mad.
So if most people think 8GB is fine for a laptop, they'll buy it, and everyone else pays through the nose for more.
Most people only want one extra screen? That's what you get on the base machine and you must pay (alot) for more. If one day most people need two, then you'll get two.
Apple seem to spend a lot of design time on how to extract the most money out of those willing to pay, no matter how annoying it is.
Stuff like this is why I can not switch to Apple, I would not expect or even think to look up which Macbooks can support at least 2 displays if they otherwise had decent enough specs for them. Who knows what else I am failing to consider?
I don't want to waste time migrating to a new system, only to find out I need to return/resell it, or later down the road find out another arbitrary/artificial limitation Apple has set that I either have to find a work around for or suck up until I can switch machines again if none exist.
This is unfortunate since there are some features that have made it very tempting to switch.
It's on-chip silicon, not a marketing feature. This kind of product design is just really hard. Mask sets get well into the billions of dollars, you can't just assemble a list of features as if they're all free. You need to decide upfront, often years in advance, what feature you think people will want to buy for the market you think you'll find yourself in. There are no easy answers.
But just in general, Intel has always prioritized lots of I/O flexibility on its chips. If you look at the datasheets there have always been dozens and dozens of units on every SKU that are never plumbed out to ports on the device. Three or four display outputs, six or eight USB controllers, stuff like that. Apple is the opposite: they won't include something if they aren't absolutely sure they need it. So after the shift from x86 to Apple silicon, laptop users are feeling a squeeze on I/O that used to seem "free".
Even if there are technical limitations that prevent Apple from adding more I/O easily, as a consumer it feels like artificial segmentation/limitation.
Apart from the initial M1 MacBook Pro release, it feels like most products Apple has released in the last few years has always been missing one or two features, and the next release happens to have that feature. E.g. the first M1 Air did not have MagSafe even though the Pros did, and then Apple included MagSafe in M2 Air, but it didn't support multiple displays; now Apple is including multiple displays in M3 Air.
It feels awfully convenient that each generation conveniently has a nontrivial feature upgrade.... Apple has less incentive to make each generation "complete" -- by delaying features (more) consumers will feel obligated to upgrade per generation.
It does seem odd, though, to brand a laptop as "PRO" and limit it to 2 displays, then release a non-PRO device that can handle more.
Edit: Better wording, I suppose, that the non-PRO supports two external monitors with the lid closed, the PRO supports 1. Still an odd overall offering/branding.
In principle I agree. But the M3 chips are similar for the M3 Macbook Pro and M3 Macbook Air. The PRO laptop is the one that only supports 1 display while the AIR supports 2 with the lid closed.
I had a 2019 cheesegrater Mac Pro. With Catalina, I was able to drive two 4K screens at 144Hz in HDR10, because Catalina apparently supported DSC 1.4.
Then they introduced the ProDisplay XDR with Big Sur which had people agog at "how were they able to drive this 6K display given the bandwidth limitations?"
Well, the answer is because they absolutely nerfed/bastardized DSC 1.4 from Big Sur (and it's maybe only been updated in Monterey? Unsure, I no longer have the screens - ironically I bought an XDR) to make it happen with some proprietary magic: those same screens could now only be driven at 60Hz in HDR10 or 95Hz in SDR.
Proof in the pudding was that my monitors (LG27GN950-B) actually allowed you to change the advertised/supported DSC version, and when I "downgraded" the monitors to DSC 1.2, performance actually improved, and allowed 120Hz SDR and 95Hz HDR.
This happened with many many users, across many screen types.
Apple studiously ignored it, and may still be. They simply don't care if you're not using an Apple display.
But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU. It is probably the best laptop in the $1K price range for laptops that don't have a GPU, but that's basically it.
The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality control that confuse consumers and leave them unhappy. This is the flip side of choice in prioritizing, say, gaming performance over battery life while optimizing price or vice-versa.
Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution.
> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU.
People love to say this without linking to a model. That's because the models in this price range are obviously not in the same weight class as a MacBook.
Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... literal-minded Hacker News commenters will understand what I mean, but let's start there.
Please link to a model, just one in the 500-600 range that is comparable to a 1K Apple model.
I have owned half a dozen Windows laptops in the past, in all kinds of price ranges, cheaper and far more expensive than a Macbook Air.
None were even remotely comparable to the build quality and practicality of a Macbook Air. This was true even in the Intel CPU era. In the M processor era, the gap only increased.
You cannot even do research on a good Windows laptop because the makers constantly change the model numbers to confuse the customer and hide the flaws of these systems.
You buy a Windows laptop then either the screen, the battery life, the touchpad or the keyboard will suck ... maybe all four.
The sole reason to buy a Windows laptop and put up with all these flaws is playing games. If you need that you will put up with all that crap.
As someone who likes to keep at least one machine dedicated to each major OS around at any given time, the thing that’s frustrating about non-Apple laptops is that just about all of them, including machines costing well in excess of base Macbook models, make big tradeoffs somewhere or another. Very few are good all-rounders, even if many are better than Macbooks in one or two aspects.
I would kill for a version of ThinkPad X1 Nano or X1 Carbon for example that had the battery life, silence, and unplugged performance of a Macbook Air for example, but no such machine exists even if I were to spend twice as much as the cost of a MacBook Air.
> The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality control that confuse consumers and leave them unhappy. This is the flip side of choice in prioritizing, say, gaming performance over battery life while optimizing price or vice-versa.
This is 100% it, Lenovo has been killing it lately with their Yoga/Slim series, but for every laptop they have that competes with a MacBook, they also have a myriad of other options that are just e-waste. At the end of the day, the average consumer is not going to do the same kind of research that a tech enthusiast might do, and Apple has a somewhat simple catalog (although incredibly overpriced once you step out of the entry configs).
I bought a laptop for about $600 with a GPU (RTX 3050).
The display... is not comparable. Sure, it's 144hz compared to the Mac's 60hz... but it's only 74% NTSC at 250 nits with 1080p, so the color accuracy and dim picture is distractingly bad.
And as for sleep, it's just useless. You close it with 70% at night and it's dead by morning. Supposedly the battery is the same size, but even when it's awake, the battery never makes it last more than ~2 hours. Also, that's two hours... when I'm not gaming, as I painfully learned when trying to download a Windows ISO. When I'm gaming, well, then it's shorter.
I might as well mention the thick, heavy, completely plastic construction. Feels like it will shatter from one drop. On the upside I managed to upgrade it from 8GB to 16GB... but then I'm wondering why this laptop even shipped with 8GB in the first place.
Ultimately though, it runs Windows with a basic GPU. Desktop Parametric CAD isn't coming to Mac anytime soon.
Things that matter to me and that all Windows laptops in the same price range or lower as the MBA have shittier speakers, camera, monitor (both brightness and color accuracy). The trackpad feels entirely wrong on those plastic devices and often you have loud fans turning on at random times. Furthermore they're usually heavier despite being made out of plastic rather than metal.
> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives
I would pay more for an acceptable alternative - no fan, Windows 11, good battery life, top quality screen, no gimmick features (touchscreen! detachable screen! whatever).
> The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market
Another way to look at that is "MacOS vs non-MacOS" laptop market.
There is only one manufacturer of MacOS laptops. That helps keeping the number of models down. Same thing for the iOS vs non-iOS phone and tablets market. If you want MacOS or iOS you must buy Apple. Hackintoshes do exist but are a rounding error compared to the number of machines Apple sells. And if you want Apple, you must get MacOS and iOS. You can run something else on that hardware, but again we are writing about rounding errors.
There are non-MacOS laptop manufacturers with even less models than Apple have. Maybe it's very niche but the Framework laptop has been popular on HN lately and it has only two models.
On the other side if you want to buy non-MacOS, then HP, Lenovo or Dell have a zillion of laptops each, ranging from the very low end to the very high end. Some people pick features and look at which models are left with those features (that's me.) Some people pick a price tag instead. Probably the laptop is a commodity to the price tag people, much like gas. Who really cares about the gas company? If you need to fill the tank everything will do.
And about
> the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep
this is something that Microsoft throw at us and we can't dodge it much. My laptop runs Linux and it's from the pre Hybrid Sleep era. I didn't investigate if Linux sleep works well with new laptops.
Hybrid sleep being broken is the #1 dealbreaker issue I have with my work-supplied XPS 9570. I know that machine is pretty long in the tooth at this point, but in some ways that actually makes it worse, that it's been all these years and Dell just shrugged and moved on.
It really doesn't make me want to reward them with more money, only to find out what exciting new issues will be present and trivially reproducible for the entire next revision of the hardware.
I buy myself supposedly overpriced Macs and never have hardware issues, but buy family, that prefer Windows, more affordable $400-800 HP/Toshiba laptops. Over the last decade and a half, the HPs/Toshibas invariably have keyboard failures within a year or two, with ignored keypresses and key labels rubbing off, and internal fans seized, overheating problems. And those cheap plastic cases are never the same once opened. I hate them so much. Although, I suspect if I spent as much on a PC that I do on a Mac, we wouldn't have those issues, but I can't bring myself to spend that much on a Windows laptop.
> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives,
I don't think this true, unless you have extremely low standards for "acceptable". I've tried a number of $400 laptops and in every single case got fed up with the shittiness within minutes.
> Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution.
Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure this out yet.
My Asus zenbook 14 is around that price, has a 1TB disk, and 16GB of ram. I'm sure the processor on the M3 is faster, and probably a fair amount more battery out of it, but now I'm comparing a $1000 zenbook to a $1700 13' macbook once I add disk and memory, without the upgraded cpu.
About a year and a half ago, I was looking to get a new MBPro to replace my existing one. I loved the hardware, but having used Linux since the alphabet floppies, the software was always meh. So I was in Costco one day and they had cheap Lenovo ideapads (Ideapad 5 Pro 14") on sale for something like $700US. I bought one, put Pop_OS! on it and it's been running great since. Has and AMD processor, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. It's really snappy and best of all it's pretty solid with no deck flex.
You're absolutely right that they make a damn fine laptop (the build quality stands out to me) and they do a great job in that market.
Anecdotally, my Framework 13 AMD ran me 1500 and I ended up with 64 GB of ram, 2 TB of storage, and an AMD 7840U. I bought my RAM and storage separately to get that end cost, to be fair.
I wouldn't be surprised if the M3 actually outperforms my processor by a bit, but having way more RAM matters a lot to me. All that on top of being able to repair my own machine is a no brainer to me.
I know most laptop users wouldn't care about this stuff, but I really hope Framework does well and helps bring repairability back to laptops.
> Anecdotally, my Framework 13 AMD ran me 1500 and I ended up with 64 GB of ram, 2 TB of storage, and an AMD 7840U. I bought my RAM and storage separately to get that end cost, to be fair.
HN used to say that System76 were the best laptops ever, so I bought two of them. They’re an incredible pile of shit, in addition to the battery life or the clunky build, the fans turn on and off like my gamer boyfriend’s PC back in 2001.
System76 said they won’t take them back, after I tried to give it to every intern.
I’m absolutely flaggerblasted at what Linux or Windows users tolerate, it seems fine for them, since all of their laptops is like this! The problem is having low standards, and compared to this, they think their laptop is great.
I've oscillated a lot on "my next" laptop over the years. For a while (at the height of the butterfly-keyboard/touchbar-madness) I thought about going to Linux for my personal machine. I haven't gotten there, but the Framework gives me hope that a really really excellent, serviceable, and understandable laptop can and does exist.
Just out of curiosity, why? I have ~200 tabs open in chrome, and have ~10 different apps open. Mac could handle it perfectly well due to reliance on swap and compressed memory. My swap used is 20 gb but really can't say that even when switching apps fast.
It's not crap, though. I am using the exact config with an M1 and it's really quite usable, even for development. Also I have hundreds of tabs open. You can even watch movies because the speakers are so good - opposed to any PC laptop I ever owned.
Hotter, heavier, and worse battery life, for sure. Slower is up for debate --- having more ram, more cores, and possibly discrete GPU is great for all sorts of things. The Ryzen 7840HS is not any worse than the M3 in multithreaded things.
Just recently there was a Thinkpad P14S on sale for $999 that blows the Macbooks out of the water in terms of ram and storage, while having a high quality OLED display and a Ryzen CPU that can easily trade blows with Apple silicon. It is hotter and heavier and has very bad battery life, though.
I just find it fascinating that people think Macbooks are faster without even bothering to at least look at some benchmarks as context. Sure, M processors are good, but Intel and AMD aren't really sleeping the past few years, but rather made some significant improvements that are worth acknowledging.
In $999 13" M2 Air you get 8GB Unified RAM and 256GB memory. Intel ARC seems to be better than M2 graphics. Weight is exactly the same. Usual downsides remain - fan and smaller battery life, although still pretty good.
My opinion is you can pick two: low cost, high build quality, good specs.
No one matches Apple's build and screen quality. But their base models are pretty underpowered, and it's not until you're spending closer to $2k that you get specs that feel appropriate for 2024. On the Windows side, there are lots of cheaper options, many of which have beefier specs, but the build quality pales in comparison.
The right tradeoff depends on your budget and what you really need out of a device.
Please post links to benchmarks of a windows laptop that costs the same as a base model Apple laptop but is faster, while being similar in weight, battery life and heat.
I think it's good to correct some exaggeration, but personally I would still prefer an 8gb M2 with small storage on a laptop that easily gets all day battery life. If it were going to sit on my desk 24/7 connected to a monitor, then I'd take the Asus ExpertBook. But as someone who travels and works from home but works all over the house or out of coffee shops, I would easily prefer the Mac.
You can, but you're getting a glorified iPad with a keyboard. Bottom-spec systems have 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage. What is this, 2012? As usual, making it a machine that's useful for light development or other more demanding tasks rapidly run you into Apple's usurious expansion pricing; what should (IMNSHO) be their bottom-end device with 16GB memory and 1TB of storage is $1,699.
That will be a great little machine to use until it starts throttling. You'll need an MBP to keep consistent peformance.
But add the mandatory upsells to a sensible amount of RAM and storage, and the 'bargain' Mac will be rather more expensive.
But yeah, there's still a real lack of Windows laptop competition these days, especially if you want a GPU. 'Gaming laptops' tend to come with severe heat/noise/weight/battery problems.
(And why are competitors touchpads still shit-tier compared to Apple? Even on those bulkier gaming laptops where space isn't at a premium and the price is on the premium side)
Depending on your use cases the software environment for the mac has never been worse right as the hardware has gotten so powerful and cool running. Major mac devs have totally abandoned the platform in recent years. Apple needs to rebuild good faith among developers especially game developers, or at the very least get ahead of the software drain and put and end to what factors have been causing it.
Newer macOS is actually really good about running with less RAM. The only problem is then your SSD will suddenly fill up. If either was upgradable, this would be no problem.
> The degree to which Apple has kinda just “won” laptops is nuts to me.
It's nuts that the entire rest of the industry basically has own-goaled Apple into a dominant position. Apple's playbook:
1. Model-year build stability over faster go-to-market on new components.
2. Better build quality.
3. Better battery life.
4. Better display, especially in value models.
That sounds very strange. I got my Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen8 (13th gen i7 U-series w/ 32 GB RAM) with a 4K 16:10 OLED display. Best laptop I have ever had, amazingly fast and lasts the whole day. When I did my research before buying, I know the X1 Carbon was available with at least a 2.5K OLED display.
What I will never understand is that the screen options differ depending on which market you're in.
When I was looking at Thinkpads there was never any better options than 1920x1200 but if I switched to the US site I could order with the HiDPI OLED screen.
I mean, it makes sense now that they essentially merged their mobile and desktop architecture to be one for all. That plus full vertical integration means they can do a lot of things that'd end up costing double in a windows laptop to have a pale imitation of.
With that said, the specs on a Mac air are extremely modest when you really look at them. Apple is simply optimizing to do more with less.
Fun fact, the M3 Air is exactly the weight of one m3 air at room temperature; at 15C, one m3 of air at 1ATM is 1.23kg, which is the exact same weight as the M3 Air.
And for contrast, the M2 Air (1.24kg) was a tiny fraction of the weight of air on one m2 (10332kg) at 1atm. In other words, the relative weight of the latest MacBook Air has increased by a factor of ten thousand! I know Jony Ive was keeping the products lightweight, but I didn’t realize it would get this bad without him…
I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. Corporations have become pros at exploiting our human psychology. Their ads can make you believe that the smallest bump in improvements will make your older computer appear useless in comparison. That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.
> I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro
I don't know why you bought a new one. You can have two ways to look at this, one way is your ultra pessimistic view, my view is I don't need to upgrade my laptop ever 2 years anymore.
Before the M1 Max I was upgrading so often because intel macbooks sucked so much. Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a decade.
As for being "exploited" by ads, just don't be, stop mindless consumption...
I max spec a laptop and ride it as long as I can. Replaced a 2012 MacBook Pro just last year, and will likely be doing the same around 2032 ;)
I’m doing most of my daily driving on whatever computer work gives me anyway, this is just the personal dev/audio machine. I do the same with a gaming computer too though, my gaming laptop from like 7 years ago is still going strong. I turn down shiny graphics settings to get good FPS anyway, I care way more about gameplay than visuals.
> Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a decade.
That's a nice thought but the computer will probably lose security updates in the next 10 years.
And that really annoys me. The press release says that the new computer is "built to last" and I'm sure that's true, physically. I have a 2015 Macbook Pro which works fine (obv. slower than a modern computer but fine for everything I need to do), it does still get security updates (it's two OSs behind the current macOS at the moment), but I think the time until it doesn't is probably measured in months.
As I say, it works perfectly, was indeed "built to last", but I guess I'm going to have to throw it away (bad for the environment) and buy a new one soon?
That also makes me less enthusiastic about dropping huge amounts of money when I do finally buy a new laptop.
An interesting difference with the new pro models, if you want to pay around $5k,
is that you can have 128Gb unified Ram in them and run inference locally with exciting LLMs.
It seems like a pretty speculative use. That much money would go a long way on a $20/month subscription, and the field is changing rapidly. Unless you’re an AI researcher, might as well wait a year or two and see what changes?
I suspect LLM performance will be a differentiator for Pro and newer Apple laptops in coming years.
If Apple releases on-device AI, this will be an effective way of getting people to upgrade like they used to, but haven't had to recently. For example, I bought Pro-level computers in my younger years, but now would only consider an MBA, mini, or iMac. But they could get me to go for a Pro if it were the only way to get more RAM for better AI performance. It will also likely shorten upgrade cycles since newer computers would have the latest and greatest performance. When I bought my M2 MBA years ago I suspected it would last me a long time. Now I'm not so sure since I don't have a ton of RAM.
What a waste. Build a 4090 desktop for that price, sheesh. Or spend the money renting spot 4090 instances whenever you need to via a MB air or whatever other laptop. And you'd probably still not end up spending the full amount.
The "pro" isn't for work or productivity, its for the appearance of work and productivity. Most people who buy Macs don't really understand what they are getting, developers included.
Speaking only of the Air here: The newer laptop feels thicker, since it doesn't have the nice tapered front. In general use, outside of only one external display in clamshell mode, the M1 feels similar. If you push things, like for video editing or rendering, the M2 or M3 are markedly better.
However, you quickly hit throttling if you push for more than a couple minutes at a time (like when you export in Handbrake, it will slow down and only run marginally faster than the M1, in my experience).
The M2 and M3 are more evolutions of the M series. If you already have an M1 machine, there's no real need to upgrade. But if you don't, the M3 seems like a great device to get.
Eg: The M3 Max is a substantial improvement over the M2 Max in both CPU and GPU. But the M3 Pro is a moderate improvement at best compared to the M2 Pro.
> I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. Corporations have become pros at exploiting our human psychology. Their ads can make you believe that the smallest bump in improvements will make your older computer appear useless in comparison. That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.
It's also why you should understand your personal use case and do research. I think this is on you, not Apple. Corpos gonna corpo -- you have to do the research to figure out whether the gains from new chips will actually impact your workflow.
> I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro
If you bought a M3 Max just to fuck around on Facebook and Hacker News then of course you won't notice a difference. If you are running workloads that actually require that level of performance then you will notice a significant difference. M3 Max is twice as fast at rendering 3D scenes in Cinebench.
Let's put it this way. M1 Max can build some amount of code in 134 seconds. M3 Max can do it in 70 seconds. Does this sound like a small bump? Source: XcodeBenchmark
For sure, capitalism requires a certain level of consumer savvy to remain sane.
For most real-world users, the M3 really is about 30% faster in single-core and 100% faster in multicore. That is really significant for a lot of us, especially software engineers. But the really big speedups mentioned in Apple's marketing are more niche and it takes some savvy to recognize that.
(I'm plenty content with my M1 Max for now and I expect I'll continue to happily use it for a few more years)
> That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.
I wouldn't exactly just avoid them, though most are useless, so it's not a bad idea. You just want to understand what they are... even honest ones will only present information that is a reason to buy.
E.g., when I saw the iPhone 15 ads and the best thing they could say about was that it had some titanium, I knew it was a product I could ignore. (Not that I have an iPhone 14 either, but I already knew that one wasn't worth an upgrade to me).
I really wanted to love the 13" Air but two things made me switch to the Pro after trying it for a few weeks. One is that the internal speakers suck in comparison to the Pro. I 'm not looking for audiophile quality from laptop speakers, but the Pro speakers are good enough for casually watching youtube videos, TV shows, podcasts, etc, whereas the Air speakers are harsh and tinny. The second is that the default resolution isn't .5x the native resolution, as it is for most Apple desktop/laptop displays. It's some weird in-between resolution that creates aliasing on text and such. If you bump it down to a true .5x, it's 1280x~800, which is borderline unusable for desktop browsing these days.
I'm curious what your comparison point was for the audio quality of the MacBook Air.
In the Windows world, I rarely if ever come across a laptop where the speakers weren't clearly last in precedence for engineering and BOM consideration. Just astoundingly bad sound quality accepted as normal in the Windows laptop world, even in supposedly premium machines.
In comparison, even the least impressive MacBook Air speakers are good.
But if you were coming from another MacBook Pro when evaluating the Air I can see why you would have come away wanting better. The Pro machines are indeed a clear step up, and the larger 16" models are even better given the extra space they have to work with.
Yep I was coming from an older Intel MBP, so the downgrade to the Air was dramatic enough to be irritating. But I agree, the sound engineering in the Air isn't bad in absolute terms, probably even pretty good... just not close to the Pros.
I have an Air and I felt like its speakers were pretty decent, but my wife bought a Pro and they're just incredible.
Sometimes I hear her watching some movie or show a few rooms away, and I can never know if she's watching it on the TV or on the Pro just by the audio alone. Those speakers do fill the room, and them some.
Do a lot of folks actively watch media content on laptops these days?
I have never really watched more than short content on that form factor. I like a bigger screen and a remote, watching anything like a movie on a laptop feels klunky.
You’d think it feels small but go ahead and sit in front of your tv and pull out your laptop. In terms of effective size from where I have the tv and the laptop, the laptop screen is bigger in my field of view. 40 inch tv too, no slouch.
This is also the case with Pro M1 Max. Font is very blurry. It's funny how they turn off "scaling/sharpening filter" when video is watched. I've tried a bunch of things to fix it and none of them worked.
A 4K monitor I use works perfectly fine on Linux, but with Macbook Pro, even though resolution perfectly matches, it still has blurred font (the filter they apply completely changes the look of the font, even though I use the same one), everything just remains blurry and again, watching video disables it.
What are you comparing the font rendering to? Linux/Windows?
That's one of the things that pushed me to Mac from Linux: fonts finally looked nice. (This was around 2010.) I tried everything I could to get Linux to render decently but eventually gave up. I recognize that this is so much down to personal taste. If you prefer Windows-style ClearType to Mac's rendering, Mac (especially on a non-Retina screen) will look awful. If you like Mac's rendering, Windows tends to look awful at any resolution.
So you can get the 0.5 resolution without text aliasing (which I agree is annoying) you just get a smaller viewing area. I keep hearing complaints about aliasing on the Air, and I can respect that since the default resolution causes it, but it is fixable at the expense of reduced viewing area.
Lets not gulp down the koolaid. The speakers on the pro are nice for a laptop but thats it, they are nice for a laptop. A basic bluetooth speaker laps it. Honestly they are balanced poorly and very “boomy” where I feel like I need to turn the volume up more than I have to just to start to discern spoken words from a sort of mumbly bassy sound.
As an Air user who pretty passionately hates hearing a laptop fan, my wonderment at the quality of the Pro's audio would end the moment I heard that fan whine.
I've had a similar train of thought, based on my experience with earlier Macbooks -- that I would pick the Air over the Pro specifically because it does _not_ have a fan and therefore could never make fan noise. But like spinningarrow, I don't think I've ever heard the fan on my work-issued M1 Pro MBP.
Going on a tangent here but it's interesting seeing the love for Apple in this thread right vs the (well deserved) hate in the thread about Apple being fined for 1B in EU [0]
Apple has a serious anti consumer practices and we should not be supporting this company. The EU fine is just a start and hopefully there is a serious crack down to force them to open their hardware and software. Cheers to EU and its wonderful policies, let's hope the rest of the world follows through!
In any case, encouraging their behavior by constantly purchasing their services and computers should be discouraged.
Their hardware maybe good but we should cease to support this company until their attitude changes.
Apple Cynic/Windows user here with a genuine question - why is this interesting? I'm currently looking at my wife's old corporate-issued windows laptop, which is running 2 external monitors as well as it's own display - am I missing something here, or is this just a case of Apple being held to different standards to other manufacturers in terms of feature parity?
Well, it's definitely "interesting" because it was a weird and user-unfriendly restriction on previous M1/M2 Airs and now it's gone. So that is interesting for sure.
Perhaps more to the point, you're right -- Apple doesn't deserve to be lauded for removing something that was a dumb restriction in the first place. But it is interesting considering this is the most popular laptop in the world.
It's not interesting in a "wow, Macbooks can finally support two external displays" as much as "this does make this intentionally-small form factor slightly more tolerable."
Comparing the port count/capabilities of the two isn't a fully fair comparison though. The Apple Silicon Macbook Air models are likely 1) much faster than that corporate-issued laptop (even if it's workstation class), and 2) much smaller and quieter (no fan noise even under load).
Though I'm not sure why all the griping about how many monitors an Air can support; users can buy a Macbook Pro if they want more monitors? I don't understand the logic behind buying a tiny, thin laptop only to dock it as a workstation.
It’s interesting because the whole M# line started with a smart phone and built a pc out of that. As a result it has some unfortunate restrictions that aren’t there when you build a machine out of capable yet pretty clunky intel hardware. I don’t doubt there are similar tradeoffs in the WoS world but I’m not aware of what they are specifically.
The restriction I am most annoyed with these days is the lack of external GPU passthrough. I’m not even sure the asahi Linux folks have gotten that working yet.
So folks are probably just happy they’re not having to deal with as many compromises and tradeoffs (they get to have their PC that works almost just like a smartphone but does more things their intel machine could now). That’s totally understandable.
It's easy to deduce that it's a big deal for macbook air users because it wasn't possible before.
It's easy to deduce both from the article and from other comments here, which presumably you read if you're going through the trouble of responding to someone else's comment.
I typically despise this type of question, where you're obviously trying to make a point but playing dumb and playing it off as if you have no clue what you're talking about.
This type of question is used all over the place and super obnoxious.
I'm not American, genuine question, why is it a big deal that you're getting free healthcare? I've had free healthcare my whole life, shrug.
As a European, genuine question. Why is it a big deal that Biden wants to forgive student loan? I've gotten free education my whole life, shrug.
As an apple user, why is it a big deal that Dell is extending it's warranty to 2 years? My apple device gets updates 4 years later, shrug.
The limitation started because the M chip combined the CPU and GPU and combined the RAM with the VRAM. That's why its battery life and power efficiency blows Windows laptops out of the water. So they didn't just limit it for no reason.
So I still need to use Instant View with my docking station, got it. Been using that on my M1 air to drive 2x4K displays (the 30Hz display isn't that useful if I'm mousing around, though)
Readit News
If you didn't know anything about laptops and wanted to buy your first one, it would be a nightmare to figure out what all those seemingly random numbers mean on most non-Apple laptops.
Apple continues to simplify the laptop naming scheme, we're at a point where it's simply:
Air OR Pro
Small screen OR big screen
All other details can be configured in the buying flow but there's not much to think about if you just want a simple laptop.
It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them.
Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.
Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway.
Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.
I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery life, a screen that didn't upset my eyes, and importantly the OS just got out of the way during general usage.
I wound up buying myself an m1 air about 6 months later.
My only gripe is that I wish it had more RAM, but even then the unified memory approach has made my expected ram usage vs actual ram usage a bit of an odd thing. It consistently uses less ram than I'd normally anticipate. That said, more ram by default would help fill in those times when I do load it up.
It also has imo better ports and a track point.
The problem is that Windows sucks more and more with every iteration and there is nothing Lenovo or other manufacturers can do about it. Lenovo also keeps shipping hot and loud Intel CPUs which hurt reputation of the ThinkPad line and may confuse new buyers. Still if you know what to choose you will get more for your money with P14 than Macbook air imo.
They are awesome, but not perfect.
Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.
The plateau of 6 hours is less Microsoft's fault here and more a combination of stinginess by OEMs and their willingness to reduce cost by taking money to have extra installed software out of the gate.
> The trackpads are downright unusable.
This varies wildly by OEM and price point. Below some weird gulf, this is the truth. Above some arbitrary shore, there is a plateau of goodness, of which some rival the historic best from macs.
> The keyboards are a hit or a miss.
Again this comes down to the choices made by the OEM during their costing. I recently picked up a Chromebook from Acer just to have something that was not "very Computer" when I found myself needing An Computer to look something up with. It had surprisingly little flex to the chassis, and I found myself quite enjoying the deck, minus...
well
> And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.
Or 1366x768, the Devil's Resolution. The reasons for this are weird and varied but the short form is that economies of scale have yet to make it more profitable for companies to standardize on higher density panels. It actually makes me insanely mad that the laptop I started college with (a dell c600 hand-me-down I'd been tinkering with since high school) had a better resolution at 1400x1050 and that the 2560x1600 beast that I carried after that... that in 2012 would define the lower side of "retina".
It is disturbing it didn't sink the Macbooks. It speaks volumes of how little people care about their own data. About their own privacy. There should've been zero sold. It truly is dismal and a very large systemic problem a laptop like this is sold.
Because when it breaks, are you going to wipe it and restore from backup? No. You will just hand it over to a repair person and even an ethical shop much less Apple doesn't even have a chance to hand the disk back before handling it. An unknown amount of complete strangers will access your everything. Your medical records, your banking, your private photos, everything.
And people pay real world money for this, money they worked hard for. It's unfathomable to me.
The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could find in shops at the time cost the same, and felt like cheap rubbish. And this laptop just refuses to die, and handles my workload just fine after all these years. I'm dreading the day I have to replace it.
To your point, then comes the lower end ("just give me something cheap"), the corporate middle ("the same laptop as at work"), and the super high end (gaming, CAD, anything needing special software or a discrete GPU), with the outliers (linux etc)
IMHO windows laptop nowadays are for people who either don't really care, or have already a very specific target or limitation.
For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple.
[0] resistance to abuse isn't there. A macbook's screen will be dead pretty quick if not handled with appropriate care. A Lenovo Flex for instance will take it a lot longer.
It is not correct, unless you select minimal amount of ram and SSD. Select versions with proper amount of memory and MacBook becomes much more expensive than comparable windows machine.
I am in the group of people who go for Full HD. It's enough for me, my eyesight is relatively bad. Then again, I use 3 monitors.
Until you want more memory or a larger SSD then the Macbook is all of a sudden double the price of the equivalent PC laptop.
>Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.
That's basically true, but with Apple becoming more and more expensive that does leave a very large low-end market for them to play in.
Plus, on my laptop I just simply upgraded the RAM with another 16GB of RAM which will give me some breathing room for at least another year.
For me, a windows computer "just works". Everything I connect I know will work as expected. Not looking forward to learn some new quirks. Even the top left action buttons just irk me to death.
I have a MacBook Pro M1, which is pure fluid bliss. It cost less, it's faster, and the battery lasts for days.
I've been positively delighted by my two Intel Alder Lake laptops I use during travel for play (ASUS Vivobook S 14X OLED, 12700H CPU) and work (Lenovo V14 G3, 1255U CPU) respectively. I can get 4 to 8 hours off of them depending on use with the charge limited to 80% for longer overall life, and as I just mentioned the hardware are quite powerful in their own right.
>The trackpads are downright unusable.
Both of my laptops I just mentioned have wonderful touchpads. Frankly though, this absolutely will vary by several country miles depending on manufacturer and even model. I suppose I got lucky here.
>And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.
I'm gonna be honest: I fucking hate screens bigger than 1920x1080 (or x1200 for 16:10 screen ratios). My laptop for play has a 2880x1800 screen, but I've got it rendering at 1920x1200 because so many programs just assume pixel densities around that area and either can't or won't handle scaling.
I also have to still do some scaling up even at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 at laptop screen sizes anyway because everything is so small, but it's still less compatibility headaches compared to physically denser pixels.
Dead Comment
The weird part of that argument to me: to arrive to that point you've already made a ton of choices that need to be educated.
You decided on the form factor: you don't want a convertible (neither a Surface like tablet + keyboard, nor something like a Yoga).
You decided to forgo touch.
You decided you don't really want to game. You also evaluated you don't need anything Windows or x86 only.
Then sure there's about 10 models. But at that point is it much complicated than say, choose from the DELL XPS line ?
I was talking with my dad recently, and he wanted a new computer that could handle email, a little Excel, Facebook, and some other light web browsing that didn’t get stuck in an infinite reboot loop for system updates (which somehow his Windows got stuck somehow). There are a bagillion options for Windows laptops that fit those needs. He ended up not being able to make a decision and is still using his same old laptop.
Whereas my son wanted a desktop computer that would support playing Valorant at 60fps at 1440. That narrowed things down substantially and ended up building one to his specs.
If a Mac fits your requirements, then you have far fewer decisions. And that’s part of the point. For the a long time, Apple has stuck to a restricted set of SKUs. This is by design. It’s not that they couldn’t offer a touchscreen, or a convertible, or a xMac. It’s that they’ve been there… had many form factors and SKUs and it almost killed the company.
Even if you say you want a Dell laptop — have you ever tried to browse their site? If you say you want a laptop you’re presented with 68 options (I just did this). 68.
Although I heard many complaints about the Yoga. Never owned one, but if I had a laptop with a touch screen, that seems like the route to go. The Surface too, but I've also heard those stop feeling snappy pretty quick and tons of thermal issues.
Yes. A thousand times more complicated. I usually get Apple gear for myself, but am always asked to help friends and relatives with PC laptop buying decisions...
The average punter buys whatever crap they have on sale at Target or Best Buy.
The MacBook Air used to have a multiple USB-A ports plus video, now it 2 ports that have to handle everything. So now the dongle/no dongle question has to become considered as well.
And the crazy thing is, despite Dell having 170+ laptop SKUs they don't use that fact to actually have a wide range of products.
You'd think with 170 different SKUs they could produce an ultrabook with ports, wouldn't you? A modernised version of the E7270? Apparently not, though.
The problem with this tactic is that there's a lot of SKUs that give people a terrible experience and they jump to another brand.
Apple's solution to this is to instead have 50 SKUs, organize them by a few very easily understandable categories, and then price every SKU exactly within $50-$75 of one another so that there's always a meaningful upgrade for slightly more money. This is also why Apple is very stingy with storage and RAM. They use the cost of upgrades to pull you to higher priced SKUs, which then need their own upgrades, and OH LOOK there's an even nicer base model for just a little more!
[0] The amount of money you save when the thing you want to buy turns out to be cheaper than what you were willing to pay.
With such bloated webapps now a days, those 8G of RAM are going to cook too fast...
Newegg's feature selector is pretty good at sorting through this. Just uncheck all the bad screen resolutions and CPU models and see what's left. Bonus: Require at least 32GB of memory in an exact power of two, excluding all the junk that solders 8GB to the system board.
Dell has XPS 13, XPS 15, and XPS 17 and now the plus designation. It's pretty easy.
- XPS 13 Laptop
or
- XPS 13 Laptop
https://i.imgur.com/2SHL91Y.png
I gather that one of these is a newer revision than the other, but it's a lot more confusing than "M2" and "M3". I need to know whether I want (up to) a Core Ultra 7 155H vs a Core i7-1250U, and whether (up to) Intel Arc Graphics is better than Intel Iris Xe graphics.
Scrolling down further adds the XPS 13 Plus and XPS 13 2-in-1 Laptop. How does XPS 13 Plus compared to XPS 13 Laptop? What about to the other XPS 13 Laptop, is it better than both? Or is this a weird side-grade where you get a different form factor which is in some ways nicer, but then also comes with all the dumb parts of the Apple's "Touch Bar" and none of the good parts? (that's my 10 second interpretation of the product, but more clueless customers will have absolutely no idea)
Yes, Apple changed to a randomized serial number format in 2021. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/14/apple-preapres-for-rand...
So, if you have a device made after that transition and Apple doesn't already know the details (e.g. because you didn't buy it direct), they'll also need to know how much RAM and SSD space it has.
They ask for serial which you can copy and paste from the "About this Mac" dialog box that is in MacOS.
From there it asks you the year of your laptop which is also in the same dialog box.
From there it asks you which CPU version and core count you have (for M series laptops with multiple options.) To get this info, you click on "More Info" on the same dialog box(In Sonoma you also click System Report and it is all there).
Afterwards it just asks the condition of the laptop (ie, does it turn on, screen cracked etc.)
I don't see why you would need MacRumors for this.
I have seen that serial number prompt before though, I don’t know what makes it ask for a serial number versus prompting to use the current device’s serial number. I’m not even sure how it knew what device I was on to be honest.
It's also available inside of the about this mac screen.
Multiple orders of magnitude easier than the PC laptop space.
Deleted Comment
If you remember back in the day, Nokia also had a crazy number of SKUs for their phones. Nokia is no longer the power it used to be. Could it mean many SKUS means a lack of focus ? Thinking you can out market / out segment your competition rather than try to concentrate more on the product ?
I find AMD also has less SKUs than Intel. Here, as a challenger you can't really afford to segment the market as much as the leader. You need to concentrate your offerings in a few potent products.
Having suffered through many Dell laptops (flagships) I'd rather flush the money down the pan than buy one machine from them.
What Dell is selling in comparison to Apple is legacy technology with shoddy workmanship.
Deleted Comment
I don't get it. What's so great about Apple's lack of choice?
Er, no. You still need something. You just don't know what.
All those numbers try to hide that they basically sell all the same.
They are marginally more expensive, but they also very easy to sell second-hand. I'm speculating that the monthly cost is on par with a PC.
- The software is worse. Linux is better. Windows has much broader options. I run both.
- I game.
- Ideology? Yes, Apple is an awful company.
- Familiarity? I have used it enough to know it cannot do a lot of things I need, want, like, etc.
- Budget? Yes, but not because it is too expensive, but because it cannot do anywhere near what Linux and Windows can do (for me) for way less.
>I'm speculating that the monthly cost is on par with a PC.
What is the monthly cost of a Mac that can run games, run old software I require for work and hobbies and (importantly) isn't locked down in either hardware or software so I can use it for something completely different later in life?
They aren't marginally more expensive. I'm writing this on a Chromebook I bought for $300 before the pandemic. Including electricity, cables, etc., I figure it has cost me about $6.50/month.
Just to point out one fact -- people buy $289 Gateway laptops from Walmart and use it as their daily driver.
1. Better choice of desktop environment (KDE/GNOME vs OS X)
2. Wider/better selection of applications
3. Better development environment
4. Ease of deployment of your own apps
5. Better fit for your budget (why spend 3000 Euros on a limited set of features, when you can spend the same amount and get huge number of features/better features)
6. Capability to connect upto 3 external displays (which Macbook has got only recently)
The picky one is the death of Rosetta 1
Then they killed 32 bit binaries. This is the main reason the little Mac icon on steam is useless.
Then Arm processors and yet another recompile that was probably more than a recompile.
If you buy a windows machine, the last 30 or so years of gaming are available to you. And everything older can be emulated.
For me personally, it's a few things I dislike. I do computer graphics for fun. I like using OpenGL and Vulkan because it's the most accessible both in terms of audience and material available. Apple doesn't support either (OpenGL is deprecated, Vulkan only available via translation layer).
Additionally, and this is probably more problematic because I actually like Metal as an API, I don't live in the high income region of the US. I know I won't be happy with the default SSD. I know I want at least 16GB of RAM (can't run integration tests locally at work with 8). For a Windows laptop I go for 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM. But the added premium makes this really difficult. I'm in Germany so it's not like a Mac would eat up a year of my net wage but it's enough that I'd maybe rather go for the thinkpad.
And if I actually tried to get a bit more beef in my GPU and by a larger model because I think the 13 inch are a bit small, I'd probably spend 3k or 3.5k. That's a maxed out gaming laptop. Really hard to justify the price.
For my wife though? Base MBA all the way.
(And with more and more Electron apps, might struggle even with that once you hop onto a video call.)
I must be doing something wrong then. I've got one of those measly models and I do quite a bit more than just basic browsing without any problem. Video calls are the least of that, and they work fine.
Runs everything I throw at it development wise, while a good few other things are open and it has never felt slow. Compare that to any Windows laptops with the same spec and it would be chugging along with just Chrome open.
For the record, on my base M1 Air, I generally have Safari, Spotify, and Alacritty open at any given time. I can also run Docker Desktop if necessary, although I prefer colima since I don’t need any of the bloat.
And there isn't a trend towards more Electron apps. Increasingly developers are using Tauri which is Rust based and extremely lightweight.
When the original iMac came out, it was by far the #1 computer SKU. It was way better than competing products at the price range because of those economies of scale.
> All other details can be configured in the buying flow but there's not much to think about if you just want a simple laptop.
You would think so, but unfortunately not. Apple is quite good at upselling and their price gating for screens, ram etc. is very opaque. In other words: whether you want the air with non-sabotaged specs or the pro or the pro pro or the pro max is not simple.
Anyone who says this has never used an 8/256 Air post-M1, and is complaining about them hypothetically. They're fine. They're fantastic computers.
You can upgrade to 16/512, which puts the machine at $1500. This is $200 cheaper than a Dell XPS 14 16/512. "But the Dell has dedicated graphics" no it doesn't. "But, well, the Dell has a higher resolution display" no, its actually 1080p, the Air is higher resolution. "But, but, the dell, its, uh, no wait never mind don't buy Dell, buy a (insert some other brand)" the thing a lot of people really don't want to accept about Macs, right now, is that they're actually so extremely obviously the best computer money can buy that its irresponsible to buy anything else at $1000 and above (unless you're gaming or doing AI, but get a desktop at that point).
I had to return a decently spec-ced M3 Macbook PRO 14" because it only supported 1 display (base M3) and pay more for M3 pro even though I don't need the extra horsepower.
And now the base M3 Air's support 2 displays? This is wild
It’s incredibly stingy. For a while you could make the argument that a lot of Air purchasers wouldn’t need it, but I don’t think that’s the case any more. My wife has an M1 Air with 8GB and between Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack she quite regularly gets beachballs and weird performance hitches.
The vast majority of their market would not fit into the developer, content creator, or just plain power-user category. There's people who just log on to do internet banking and email when they're not on Reddit or Facebook.
For some anecdata, 16/512+ would be a waste on my parents, in-laws and my whole extended family for that matter. They would benefit from it, but they're not screaming at spinning wheels, and are probably a bit more patient and accustomed to 'slowness', which is pretty subjective.
Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced into a treadmill of computer upgrades like we haven’t seen since the 90’s when CPUs were skyrocketing in performance every year.
For anyone who forgets what the 90’s was like, here’s an example with Mac models:
1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020
1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
That’s a 31-fold increase in clock rate (and several times that in overall performance) in the same timespan we’re discussing. Software that was written for the G4 had no chance of running on the LC (ignoring CPU architecture differences).
MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).
I looked at the price for m3 and if it would have 16gig it would literally be perfect for just 1k but nope 8 more gigs cost you an arm and a leg
Have a crate with about 40+ of those machines at work, essentially useless from the era where the person in charge of buying laptops just bought the bottom end for every employee and considered it a job done.
Even worse, if one plots the (price, unified memory amount, chip type), and looks at it from right-to-left, then the dollars per system capability is disgusting when you order a lesser system. You get the most value for your money when you buy the maximum unified memory configuration (on those three points).
Better yet, with a maxed out unified memory configuration, one can further save on SSD writes by using (and loading/storing) RAM disks for their projects!
Most people buying a MacBook for work are likely getting a higher unified memory, so their workstations live longer. Meanwhile consumers will have to keep consuming as they fry their internal SSD's on their airs...
I was also wondering if a 1TB apple fabric device is simply an 8TB fabric device with 8x the write life...
I have a great M2 pro machine, but officially it can only support 2 external monitors. I should be able to close my screen and power 3. I can do this with a dock so it's not a resources problem.
I am curious what is different between the Air and the Pro that the Air can power 2 external monitors (it does say when the lid is closed) and the Pro can only power 1 regardless. Or is this a software update and the Pro page just has not been updated.
I keep hoping that this is a problem that is only temporary and eventually it will be removed or as time goes on each series can run 1 more monitor or something.
I've been running three for a while. 2 Thunderbolt 3 + 1 Thunderbolt 2 daisy chained. They work. There are a couple glitches, but they work.
I'm on my work machine now but I believe it also works with the laptop open.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/04/14-inch-m3-macbook-pro-multi-...
But nevertheless, Apple's hardware strategy sucks ...
[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-odyssey-49-1000r-curved...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace/comments/mb9vnv...
I use Asahi Linux on M2 now, and the USBC display support isn’t done yet, but I am hoping it would be better than MacOS.
More-than-one-display is pretty much the standard on regular (non-apple) computers: you can drive as much as your system can sustain.
If it can identify something people will pay more for, while not quite putting off most people, it'll do it, no matter how mad.
So if most people think 8GB is fine for a laptop, they'll buy it, and everyone else pays through the nose for more.
Most people only want one extra screen? That's what you get on the base machine and you must pay (alot) for more. If one day most people need two, then you'll get two.
Apple seem to spend a lot of design time on how to extract the most money out of those willing to pay, no matter how annoying it is.
I don't want to waste time migrating to a new system, only to find out I need to return/resell it, or later down the road find out another arbitrary/artificial limitation Apple has set that I either have to find a work around for or suck up until I can switch machines again if none exist.
This is unfortunate since there are some features that have made it very tempting to switch.
But just in general, Intel has always prioritized lots of I/O flexibility on its chips. If you look at the datasheets there have always been dozens and dozens of units on every SKU that are never plumbed out to ports on the device. Three or four display outputs, six or eight USB controllers, stuff like that. Apple is the opposite: they won't include something if they aren't absolutely sure they need it. So after the shift from x86 to Apple silicon, laptop users are feeling a squeeze on I/O that used to seem "free".
Apart from the initial M1 MacBook Pro release, it feels like most products Apple has released in the last few years has always been missing one or two features, and the next release happens to have that feature. E.g. the first M1 Air did not have MagSafe even though the Pros did, and then Apple included MagSafe in M2 Air, but it didn't support multiple displays; now Apple is including multiple displays in M3 Air.
It feels awfully convenient that each generation conveniently has a nontrivial feature upgrade.... Apple has less incentive to make each generation "complete" -- by delaying features (more) consumers will feel obligated to upgrade per generation.
Edit: Better wording, I suppose, that the non-PRO supports two external monitors with the lid closed, the PRO supports 1. Still an odd overall offering/branding.
The M3 Pro has more space and is more ... pro?
I had a 2019 cheesegrater Mac Pro. With Catalina, I was able to drive two 4K screens at 144Hz in HDR10, because Catalina apparently supported DSC 1.4.
Then they introduced the ProDisplay XDR with Big Sur which had people agog at "how were they able to drive this 6K display given the bandwidth limitations?"
Well, the answer is because they absolutely nerfed/bastardized DSC 1.4 from Big Sur (and it's maybe only been updated in Monterey? Unsure, I no longer have the screens - ironically I bought an XDR) to make it happen with some proprietary magic: those same screens could now only be driven at 60Hz in HDR10 or 95Hz in SDR.
Proof in the pudding was that my monitors (LG27GN950-B) actually allowed you to change the advertised/supported DSC version, and when I "downgraded" the monitors to DSC 1.2, performance actually improved, and allowed 120Hz SDR and 95Hz HDR.
This happened with many many users, across many screen types.
Apple studiously ignored it, and may still be. They simply don't care if you're not using an Apple display.
$999 for an 13-inch M2 Air is just bonkers. You can easily pay $1500, even $2000 for Windows laptops that are hotter, heavier, AND slower.
The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality control that confuse consumers and leave them unhappy. This is the flip side of choice in prioritizing, say, gaming performance over battery life while optimizing price or vice-versa.
Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution.
People love to say this without linking to a model. That's because the models in this price range are obviously not in the same weight class as a MacBook.
Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... literal-minded Hacker News commenters will understand what I mean, but let's start there.
Please link to a model, just one in the 500-600 range that is comparable to a 1K Apple model.
I have owned half a dozen Windows laptops in the past, in all kinds of price ranges, cheaper and far more expensive than a Macbook Air.
None were even remotely comparable to the build quality and practicality of a Macbook Air. This was true even in the Intel CPU era. In the M processor era, the gap only increased.
You cannot even do research on a good Windows laptop because the makers constantly change the model numbers to confuse the customer and hide the flaws of these systems.
You buy a Windows laptop then either the screen, the battery life, the touchpad or the keyboard will suck ... maybe all four.
The sole reason to buy a Windows laptop and put up with all these flaws is playing games. If you need that you will put up with all that crap.
I would kill for a version of ThinkPad X1 Nano or X1 Carbon for example that had the battery life, silence, and unplugged performance of a Macbook Air for example, but no such machine exists even if I were to spend twice as much as the cost of a MacBook Air.
This is 100% it, Lenovo has been killing it lately with their Yoga/Slim series, but for every laptop they have that competes with a MacBook, they also have a myriad of other options that are just e-waste. At the end of the day, the average consumer is not going to do the same kind of research that a tech enthusiast might do, and Apple has a somewhat simple catalog (although incredibly overpriced once you step out of the entry configs).
The display... is not comparable. Sure, it's 144hz compared to the Mac's 60hz... but it's only 74% NTSC at 250 nits with 1080p, so the color accuracy and dim picture is distractingly bad.
And as for sleep, it's just useless. You close it with 70% at night and it's dead by morning. Supposedly the battery is the same size, but even when it's awake, the battery never makes it last more than ~2 hours. Also, that's two hours... when I'm not gaming, as I painfully learned when trying to download a Windows ISO. When I'm gaming, well, then it's shorter.
I might as well mention the thick, heavy, completely plastic construction. Feels like it will shatter from one drop. On the upside I managed to upgrade it from 8GB to 16GB... but then I'm wondering why this laptop even shipped with 8GB in the first place.
Ultimately though, it runs Windows with a basic GPU. Desktop Parametric CAD isn't coming to Mac anytime soon.
Things that matter to me and that all Windows laptops in the same price range or lower as the MBA have shittier speakers, camera, monitor (both brightness and color accuracy). The trackpad feels entirely wrong on those plastic devices and often you have loud fans turning on at random times. Furthermore they're usually heavier despite being made out of plastic rather than metal.
I would pay more for an acceptable alternative - no fan, Windows 11, good battery life, top quality screen, no gimmick features (touchscreen! detachable screen! whatever).
No such thing exists, as far as I can tell.
Another way to look at that is "MacOS vs non-MacOS" laptop market.
There is only one manufacturer of MacOS laptops. That helps keeping the number of models down. Same thing for the iOS vs non-iOS phone and tablets market. If you want MacOS or iOS you must buy Apple. Hackintoshes do exist but are a rounding error compared to the number of machines Apple sells. And if you want Apple, you must get MacOS and iOS. You can run something else on that hardware, but again we are writing about rounding errors.
There are non-MacOS laptop manufacturers with even less models than Apple have. Maybe it's very niche but the Framework laptop has been popular on HN lately and it has only two models.
On the other side if you want to buy non-MacOS, then HP, Lenovo or Dell have a zillion of laptops each, ranging from the very low end to the very high end. Some people pick features and look at which models are left with those features (that's me.) Some people pick a price tag instead. Probably the laptop is a commodity to the price tag people, much like gas. Who really cares about the gas company? If you need to fill the tank everything will do.
And about
> the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep
this is something that Microsoft throw at us and we can't dodge it much. My laptop runs Linux and it's from the pre Hybrid Sleep era. I didn't investigate if Linux sleep works well with new laptops.
It really doesn't make me want to reward them with more money, only to find out what exciting new issues will be present and trivially reproducible for the entire next revision of the hardware.
I don't think this true, unless you have extremely low standards for "acceptable". I've tried a number of $400 laptops and in every single case got fed up with the shittiness within minutes.
Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure this out yet.
Can you show me just one of those, please?
I would buy it today.
Anecdotally, my Framework 13 AMD ran me 1500 and I ended up with 64 GB of ram, 2 TB of storage, and an AMD 7840U. I bought my RAM and storage separately to get that end cost, to be fair.
I wouldn't be surprised if the M3 actually outperforms my processor by a bit, but having way more RAM matters a lot to me. All that on top of being able to repair my own machine is a no brainer to me.
I know most laptop users wouldn't care about this stuff, but I really hope Framework does well and helps bring repairability back to laptops.
HN used to say that System76 were the best laptops ever, so I bought two of them. They’re an incredible pile of shit, in addition to the battery life or the clunky build, the fans turn on and off like my gamer boyfriend’s PC back in 2001.
System76 said they won’t take them back, after I tried to give it to every intern.
I’m absolutely flaggerblasted at what Linux or Windows users tolerate, it seems fine for them, since all of their laptops is like this! The problem is having low standards, and compared to this, they think their laptop is great.
* Framework is philosophically best, and they make solid machiness. * Macbook Air has just insane battery life and is so small.
I would love if I could run macOS on a Framework.
Just out of curiosity, why? I have ~200 tabs open in chrome, and have ~10 different apps open. Mac could handle it perfectly well due to reliance on swap and compressed memory. My swap used is 20 gb but really can't say that even when switching apps fast.
Just recently there was a Thinkpad P14S on sale for $999 that blows the Macbooks out of the water in terms of ram and storage, while having a high quality OLED display and a Ryzen CPU that can easily trade blows with Apple silicon. It is hotter and heavier and has very bad battery life, though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/s/7CgJwku18K
In $999 13" M2 Air you get 8GB Unified RAM and 256GB memory. Intel ARC seems to be better than M2 graphics. Weight is exactly the same. Usual downsides remain - fan and smaller battery life, although still pretty good.
No one matches Apple's build and screen quality. But their base models are pretty underpowered, and it's not until you're spending closer to $2k that you get specs that feel appropriate for 2024. On the Windows side, there are lots of cheaper options, many of which have beefier specs, but the build quality pales in comparison.
The right tradeoff depends on your budget and what you really need out of a device.
Please post links to benchmarks of a windows laptop that costs the same as a base model Apple laptop but is faster, while being similar in weight, battery life and heat.
For $1700 you can get a sub-1kg Asus ExpertBook B9 with 32GB RAM and a 2TB disk and a decent 12th 12 core Gen Intel CPU.
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-ExpertBook-i7-1255U-Military-B94...
Not saying it is better in all respects, but definitely in some, meaning there are definitely alternatives.
And the screen is 1080p from 15 years ago.
No thanks.
That will be a great little machine to use until it starts throttling. You'll need an MBP to keep consistent peformance.
But yeah, there's still a real lack of Windows laptop competition these days, especially if you want a GPU. 'Gaming laptops' tend to come with severe heat/noise/weight/battery problems.
(And why are competitors touchpads still shit-tier compared to Apple? Even on those bulkier gaming laptops where space isn't at a premium and the price is on the premium side)
It boggles my mind people still buy 1080p laptops.
Abandoning the (clearly lacking) Mac Store is not these same as abandoning the macOS platform.
Deleted Comment
Its Unix-like under the hood, with mostly same syntax for the terminal, but linux and MacOS are very fundamentally different.
Deleted Comment
With the size difference between the MBA and MBP almost eliminated, the M2 MBA was a superfluous SKU at launch, much less now.
It's nuts that the entire rest of the industry basically has own-goaled Apple into a dominant position. Apple's playbook:
1. Model-year build stability over faster go-to-market on new components. 2. Better build quality. 3. Better battery life. 4. Better display, especially in value models.
I'm leaving OS and UI out of the discussion.
e.g. $1,899.00 for 15'' 16GB ram + 1TB SSD
i just bot a similar aluminum HP with Oled , Ryzen 7, 16GB , 1TB SSD for $700
the build quality is good, just a tick below apple. the fan is mild, not as good as apple.
but $1200 premium for apple ? I had to say no
My 5 year old Lenovo Carbon X1 14" is 2560x1440 while I can't buy a current X1 with anything above 1920x1200 for any price. WTF?
When I was looking at Thinkpads there was never any better options than 1920x1200 but if I switched to the US site I could order with the HiDPI OLED screen.
Deleted Comment
With that said, the specs on a Mac air are extremely modest when you really look at them. Apple is simply optimizing to do more with less.
If it wasn't intentional they should incorporate it into their marketing -- "exactly the same weight as air!"
I don't know why you bought a new one. You can have two ways to look at this, one way is your ultra pessimistic view, my view is I don't need to upgrade my laptop ever 2 years anymore.
Before the M1 Max I was upgrading so often because intel macbooks sucked so much. Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a decade.
As for being "exploited" by ads, just don't be, stop mindless consumption...
I’m doing most of my daily driving on whatever computer work gives me anyway, this is just the personal dev/audio machine. I do the same with a gaming computer too though, my gaming laptop from like 7 years ago is still going strong. I turn down shiny graphics settings to get good FPS anyway, I care way more about gameplay than visuals.
That's a nice thought but the computer will probably lose security updates in the next 10 years.
And that really annoys me. The press release says that the new computer is "built to last" and I'm sure that's true, physically. I have a 2015 Macbook Pro which works fine (obv. slower than a modern computer but fine for everything I need to do), it does still get security updates (it's two OSs behind the current macOS at the moment), but I think the time until it doesn't is probably measured in months.
As I say, it works perfectly, was indeed "built to last", but I guess I'm going to have to throw it away (bad for the environment) and buy a new one soon?
That also makes me less enthusiastic about dropping huge amounts of money when I do finally buy a new laptop.
If Apple releases on-device AI, this will be an effective way of getting people to upgrade like they used to, but haven't had to recently. For example, I bought Pro-level computers in my younger years, but now would only consider an MBA, mini, or iMac. But they could get me to go for a Pro if it were the only way to get more RAM for better AI performance. It will also likely shorten upgrade cycles since newer computers would have the latest and greatest performance. When I bought my M2 MBA years ago I suspected it would last me a long time. Now I'm not so sure since I don't have a ton of RAM.
These "pro" machines have always been known for work and productivity, and 8GB just sounds like a piss poor product decision
However, you quickly hit throttling if you push for more than a couple minutes at a time (like when you export in Handbrake, it will slow down and only run marginally faster than the M1, in my experience).
I suspect mine would be green almost all the time, even on this almost three year old M1 Max.
Eg: The M3 Max is a substantial improvement over the M2 Max in both CPU and GPU. But the M3 Pro is a moderate improvement at best compared to the M2 Pro.
It's also why you should understand your personal use case and do research. I think this is on you, not Apple. Corpos gonna corpo -- you have to do the research to figure out whether the gains from new chips will actually impact your workflow.
If you bought a M3 Max just to fuck around on Facebook and Hacker News then of course you won't notice a difference. If you are running workloads that actually require that level of performance then you will notice a significant difference. M3 Max is twice as fast at rendering 3D scenes in Cinebench.
For most real-world users, the M3 really is about 30% faster in single-core and 100% faster in multicore. That is really significant for a lot of us, especially software engineers. But the really big speedups mentioned in Apple's marketing are more niche and it takes some savvy to recognize that.
(I'm plenty content with my M1 Max for now and I expect I'll continue to happily use it for a few more years)
Dead Comment
I wouldn't exactly just avoid them, though most are useless, so it's not a bad idea. You just want to understand what they are... even honest ones will only present information that is a reason to buy.
E.g., when I saw the iPhone 15 ads and the best thing they could say about was that it had some titanium, I knew it was a product I could ignore. (Not that I have an iPhone 14 either, but I already knew that one wasn't worth an upgrade to me).
In the Windows world, I rarely if ever come across a laptop where the speakers weren't clearly last in precedence for engineering and BOM consideration. Just astoundingly bad sound quality accepted as normal in the Windows laptop world, even in supposedly premium machines.
In comparison, even the least impressive MacBook Air speakers are good.
But if you were coming from another MacBook Pro when evaluating the Air I can see why you would have come away wanting better. The Pro machines are indeed a clear step up, and the larger 16" models are even better given the extra space they have to work with.
Sometimes I hear her watching some movie or show a few rooms away, and I can never know if she's watching it on the TV or on the Pro just by the audio alone. Those speakers do fill the room, and them some.
I have never really watched more than short content on that form factor. I like a bigger screen and a remote, watching anything like a movie on a laptop feels klunky.
A 4K monitor I use works perfectly fine on Linux, but with Macbook Pro, even though resolution perfectly matches, it still has blurred font (the filter they apply completely changes the look of the font, even though I use the same one), everything just remains blurry and again, watching video disables it.
That's one of the things that pushed me to Mac from Linux: fonts finally looked nice. (This was around 2010.) I tried everything I could to get Linux to render decently but eventually gave up. I recognize that this is so much down to personal taste. If you prefer Windows-style ClearType to Mac's rendering, Mac (especially on a non-Retina screen) will look awful. If you like Mac's rendering, Windows tends to look awful at any resolution.
Edit: nvm, looks like the Air supports two external displays but the Pro only supports one.
yeah, the fact that such basics are still broken is the biggest scandal to me in these premium machines with so much tech progress otherwise
Deleted Comment
Apple has a serious anti consumer practices and we should not be supporting this company. The EU fine is just a start and hopefully there is a serious crack down to force them to open their hardware and software. Cheers to EU and its wonderful policies, let's hope the rest of the world follows through!
In any case, encouraging their behavior by constantly purchasing their services and computers should be discouraged.
Their hardware maybe good but we should cease to support this company until their attitude changes.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39589483
> Support for up to two external displays: MacBook Air with M3 now supports up to two external displays when the laptop lid is closed …
Perhaps more to the point, you're right -- Apple doesn't deserve to be lauded for removing something that was a dumb restriction in the first place. But it is interesting considering this is the most popular laptop in the world.
Comparing the port count/capabilities of the two isn't a fully fair comparison though. The Apple Silicon Macbook Air models are likely 1) much faster than that corporate-issued laptop (even if it's workstation class), and 2) much smaller and quieter (no fan noise even under load).
Though I'm not sure why all the griping about how many monitors an Air can support; users can buy a Macbook Pro if they want more monitors? I don't understand the logic behind buying a tiny, thin laptop only to dock it as a workstation.
The restriction I am most annoyed with these days is the lack of external GPU passthrough. I’m not even sure the asahi Linux folks have gotten that working yet.
So folks are probably just happy they’re not having to deal with as many compromises and tradeoffs (they get to have their PC that works almost just like a smartphone but does more things their intel machine could now). That’s totally understandable.
The M3 MacBook Air relaxes this restriction by allowing two external displays.
It's easy to deduce that it's a big deal for macbook air users because it wasn't possible before.
It's easy to deduce both from the article and from other comments here, which presumably you read if you're going through the trouble of responding to someone else's comment.
I typically despise this type of question, where you're obviously trying to make a point but playing dumb and playing it off as if you have no clue what you're talking about.
This type of question is used all over the place and super obnoxious.
I'm not American, genuine question, why is it a big deal that you're getting free healthcare? I've had free healthcare my whole life, shrug.
As a European, genuine question. Why is it a big deal that Biden wants to forgive student loan? I've gotten free education my whole life, shrug.
As an apple user, why is it a big deal that Dell is extending it's warranty to 2 years? My apple device gets updates 4 years later, shrug.
Deleted Comment