It’s a nice looking product and apple silicon is arguably very powerful and light on power consumption.
But the massive anti-repair propaganda put out by this company, abusive business practices that prevent most people from truly accessing their hardware (unless it’s the Apple way); and soft locking devices via disabling features when parts are replaced/repaired by third party shop.
I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds. Trouble is... I don't use it. In fact I just bought a used Thinkpad off ebay to replace it for 99% of my work.
People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac
> I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds.
How have you managed to have so many laptops? Are you a collector? A reviewer who is given a lot of free review units?
Laptops have only been around since about 1980, so even someone who started then and has bought 4 laptops a year on average ever since then would still be a little shy of hundreds, so I'm guessing you must have an interesting story.
Afraid not. I got a job in Uni at a store that refurbished laptops and as a perk we could take a handful to learn about / disassemble every week, on the condition they came back. Later I would provision units for medium sized companies and also developed an expensive habit of buying up every other model on ebay. It's great to have had experience with so many designs but in retrospect I should've just bought one every 3-4 years and stuck with it. I just never could be satisfied with a design but to be fair back then most had serious shortcomings
I guess today I tend to over focus on the laptop as an end where others see it more as a means. Probably won't ever be satisfied until I sit down and design my own. But the MBA 15 is very nice.
Too nice. "manufactured with precision to the micron and delivered to your door straight from the factory in Shenzhen"
I have never gotten this mindset. A macbook is meant to be used, no matter what you paid for it. It's not some piece of jewelry you have to do touch with velvet gloves. At least from my experience with (modern) thinkpads, the mac last way longer anyway.
Maybe Apple oughta try an ad campaign with people's used machines to disabuse that mindset, then. But their whole brand is about creating spotless luxury icons, almost like collectibles that belong in a museum.
Not really? HP, Dell, and Lenovo all offer QHD or even 4K screens on the premium business models I usually buy and have done so for awhile. They’re just less common on the used market since they’re not the default spec, 1080p is practically good enough for Windows/Linux, and QHD incurs a minor battery penalty. but an aftermarket QHD panel can go for as low as a hundred.
You can even find panels on new computers that smoke Apples like the 3k 120hz OLED on the Zephyrus g14. Apple’s screens typically lag behind the competition which is natural given they don’t make their own screens, don’t want to sole source, they are anal about QA, and it’s logistically faster & easier to ship a bleeding edge screen on some premium computer that sees a few hundred thousand in sales than the MacBook that sells millions.
> People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac
you have discovered the reason applecare sells well. and frankly the higher the tier of laptop, the more sense it makes - no sense insuring the base-tier model, it's basically disposable, since a non-covered "any other repair" (other than screen) is $700 on (eg) MBP, or $350 (iirc) on a MBA you're basically over halfway to a new unit with a new battery/faster processor/etc. But on a loaded out 64GB/4TB M1 Max MBP ($3k at b+h for a good long while there) then it's worth having it repaired.
arguably on the high-end apple laptops, if you intend to carry them around and actually use them, it's just part of the lifecycle. like, if you have one screen repair in 3 years you break even, if you have one "any other repair" you come out ahead. this is actually constant across all the model lines (MBA screen repairs are cheaper, applecare is still 1/2 of a screen repair).
having insurance on desktops is certainly dumb, but it makes a lot of sense in movable items. people carry around phones and laptops, and they drop them. it happens to wintel PCs too, believe it or not. for the price of prepaying half a screen upfront you basically don't have to worry about your laptop and you also get a 512b memory bus with best-in-class battery life and performance etc.
and I know applecare triggers a lot of haters, "that's a scam, I'm too smart for that!!!", "I won't buy something that I can't repair myself!!!" but like, that generally just speaks to the degree of hostility with which a lot of people approach the apple lifecycle. It's very much designed as a first-party service model, yes of course, but it actually works, and apple laptops actually do achieve long service life with this model. You're not the first person to realize that dropping a $3-4k laptop is gonna feel pretty bad etc, but people tend to systematically dismiss the solutions that have been provided to fix that, because they're not the solutions that the wintel world provides.
And frankly, not having to worry about dropping my laptop is a benefit above and beyond what x86 would provide with the kinds of solutions that are generally quoted, and paying for a premium on-demand business grade warranty on a wintel laptop would probably be roughly as expensive even if it existed on the hardware I'd want (can't get a dell/lenovo/hp business-tier warranty on a redmibook I bought off amazon, right?).
I'm out here carrying my laptop around on a stone patio every evening as I watch the puppy play outside. I'm using it on the toilet above a tile floor. I'm picking it up and moving it every day, and using it on a blanket on the couch. Yesterday I downloaded dolphin-llama3:70b and ran it locally at interactive speeds, I've been doing dolphin-mixtral:8x7b for months now (not full offload so it's not quite as fast). It's a nice laptop and I bought it to use it, $350 up front to simply never worry about it is more than worth it. The same wintel people who told me to get a framework 16 (with no speedstep) are now telling me to wait for strix halo, and I'm out here living the future for almost a full year now, and strix is probably at least a full year from actual real availability (strix halo is coming later than strix point, and AMD paper-launches all their laptop products badly). The $500 I save (maybe) by waiting 2+ years for a comparable x86 solution in 2025 isn't worth it, and I'd still have an expensive laptop with no warranty even if I went PC.
(and that's assuming strix halo is a drop-in replacement - I think people are going to be more disappointed by cost+ battery life than they realize, socketed quad-channel memory with a big stacked cache to improve performance is not cheap in either dollars or watts, those are going to be $3k+ laptops too.)
similarly to how people whine about drop risk and then just ignore the mechanism provided to solve that problem... people do the same thing with turning the parts program into a negative too. Literally apple will sell you the part and the first-party tooling to fix your screen, or even just rent you the tooling... and that's bad because "it comes in three pelican cases!!!" or something. Like people literally insist it's "all for show" or something and it's actually just part of the secret plan to undermine right-to-repair, because Apple will sell you the tools if you want. there is nothing that people can't spin into a negative somehow. There are very few companies with a more real "hater" phenomenon than Apple, and it just colors every discussion on the topic. People forget that there's two sides to every transaction, there is no forced anything, I am making my choices about my own risks and benefits, just not the ones they make. There are scenarios where it makes sense - and probably not as few as the haters want there to be. They just get shouted down by a fairly dedicated/active hater crowd.
> Apple lets customers configure the 15-inch MacBook Air with 8, 16, or 24 GB of integrated RAM
I wish Apple wasn’t as stingy with RAM upgrade options considering this can’t be upgraded later. For all the talk on the part of Apple of being more sustainable and green, allowing more competitive memory options would help extend the useful life of these products.
Ah give up the hysterics. Sure they care about the environment. They do a lot based on the materials they use, packaging, power for their factories and campuses etc. but they also care about their bottom line like a successful company does. This sort of hyperbolic comment falls flat because it’s reactionary and lazy.
The MacBook Air 15 and XPS 15 both start at $1,299. But the base model MacBook Air only has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage vs the XPS 15's 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Apple has been stingy with RAM for years now.
Whilst I can't speak for the storage part, Mac's have often always had lower RAM than their PC counterparts due to the fact that they had often needed less.
That doesn't mean they can't give more, but it's not an 'apples' to apples comparison.
They won’t really be going with on-device AI, the models require way too much RAM, but maybe they claim on-device AI “pre-processes” and removes personal information before requests are sent to Apple. Apple has a marketing team to spin this better than my description.
24gb is as big as the M3 can be built given the available LPDDR stacks.
The bigger crime is that the 15" can't be configured with the M3 Pro... particularly given the less-ambitious spec compared to M1/M2 Pro. Things like not supporting a second external display make the 15" MBA a non-starter as an 'ultrabook' even with 24GB configurations.
With the M3 Pro, since you get a 192b memory bus, you'd have options up to 36GB as well as dual external display, which is at least adequate for the class of product.
There are priorities apple has when it offers products. The green sustainability initiative is the last of the priorities. The first priority is ensuring good experience. Then comes good options. Then comes green sustainability.
> The MacBook Air is made with over 50 percent recycled content overall, a first for the company. This includes 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100% recycled tin in the solder and gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards, 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets (which is 99% of the rare earth elements in the device), 100% recycled cobalt in the MagSafe connector’s battery and magnets, 100% recycled copper in the main logic board (also a first), 90% recycled steel in the battery tray, keyboard feature plate, and trackpad beam plate, and 35% or more recycled plastic in other components.
> Additionally, over 25 percent of the electricity used to manufacture the device was sourced from supplier clean energy projects. And 100 percent of the wood fiber used in the packaging is recycled, as is 99 percent of the fiber-based plastic.
what a grievously incompetent take on a company that publishes clearly for decades the removal of toxic materials long before others, which runs its engineering campus off solar, and so on, long before others did the same, as just two examples.
Apple’s silicon is really, really, really powerful. Enough to run Death Stranding on a laptop without a fan. Sucks it runs macOS though. There is an experimental distro of Linux for Apple silicon, but it’s still in development and doesn’t run very much software.
MacOS makes it easy to remap modifier keys. Command can be mapped to Control, with Control put elsewhere. I mention this because this review (and many like it) mention the mental disconnect when frequently switching between Macs and Windows or Linux.
I'm one of those people. Putting Command on Control means that's one less thing I have to think about. Keyboard shortcuts become mostly the same between the different systems.
There's still a disconnect between Windows's ALT and mac's CMD, which impacts what CTRL does. For instance on mac CTRL+A is the emacs binding while windows maps Select All.
I don't think there is any magic bullet, short of remapping all shortcuts on either of the system, it's just tricky.
Keyboard under System Settings should give you options for changing all the modifier keys. I've got Caps Lock modified to be Escape on mine. Though the jokes on me as I just hit ESC all the time and forget about my remapped Caps.
There's similar options on iOS if you use an external keyboard there.
No because Backspace is not considered a modifier key. The available options for Caps Lock are Control, Option, Command, fn, Escape or just disabling the key entirely.
If you have a workflow that involves RDP to Windows, you also basically have to use Karabiner to swap command and control for RDP only in order to maintain sanity of shortcuts between macOS/Windows.
The price is insane, but I needed a solid dev machine, so that I could run multiple IDEs (GoLand, IntelliJ) + Figma. Additionally, I wanted to dive deeper into AI/ML. Apple's MLX easily competes with Nvidia RTX 4090 [1]. Everything is just instant, and I'm extremely happy with the purchase.
It makes more sense when you think of it "the monitor's top bezel was shrunk to about an inch wide, which allows for the menubar to be pushed up to where the bezel would be, creating more usable vertical screen space."
On my old MBP, the menubar starts below where the camera module is.
That area rarely gets used, so why not put the camera there? It is weird how large the area is, however. The camera is a fraction of the tab's size and there aren't any sensors on either side, I don't think.
You pretty much forget about it after a week or so. The only people who make a giant fuss about it are people who haven't used a system with it for very long, if at all.
No, it's not needed. My theory is that they picked that shape intentionally to match the notch on the iPhones. They could have gone with a much tinier notch, since that notch is only hiding a single web-cam lens. The notch on the iPhones also holds the FaceID cameras and tech, but for some reason Apple refuses to put FaceID on their laptops where it would be much more useful. I suspect they'll make it much smaller in the future or change it to a "dynamic island" notch instead.
I don't think FaceID is a good idea on the computer. On the phone it unlocks when the device is quite close to you, but I suspect someone could sit down at your computer and watch it unlock if you are behind them. Touching the keyboard or just using your watch is more secure.
Of course if you were in the kind of environment where it might be a problem if your computer unlocked as you walked by, you probably wouldn't enable the feature anyway. As it is I am annoyed by iphone and ipad apps that require faceid or other login each time as I'm the only one who uses those devices anyway.
Nevertheless I think faceid on the laptop or imac is an insecure idea.
BetterDisplay[0] can even change the display mode to just use the display area below the notch (which is the same 16:10 that older MacBooks had). Probably noticeable on a MacBook Air, but on a MacBook Pro, the local dimming makes the unused area look exactly like the bezel.
Not really ugly. It is a clever design solution to allow the screen space to be larger without making the case larger. Pushing the display up into the bezel space. the only limitation is leaving space for the camera and two different sensors plus mounting hardware in an area of the screen that is not often used.
Once you’ve used it for a few days, it tends to fade out of awareness. If you really don’t want to see it, there are utilities that make the menubar black so it blends in.
> on Windows, I can type Alt + F
> But on the Mac, I have to type Cmd + Option + Shift + S, which is … yikes. I feel like a Cirque du Soleil performer every time I try it.
Indeed, keyboard shortcut design as well as physical keyboard design is such a forgotten moulded corner of personal computing (especially bad with Apple given they own both the OS and the device)...
But there are apps for that! (at least the former) You can have Alt-F open your File menu on your Mac as well, the press E with Karabiner+KeyboardMaestro combination
> But I found it problematic to go back and forth between the MacBook Air and my PCs, as I would constantly reach for the wrong keyboard shortcuts. The biggest issue is the Ctrl + C (Windows)/Cmd + C (Mac) divide: Those modifier keys are in very different places.
Well, put then in the same place! (and Mac's place is better since it's a more ergonomic thumb key) This is one of the few benefits of different designs - they might force you to reevaluate your common routines
KE+KM combo is close to the best, KE allows you working around yet another dumb limitation of the OS of treating left and right the same (otherwise Ukelele is nice), KM gives you a more friendly GUI and integration with other apps (like Alt+F)
(the only missing low-level part in KE is stuff like home row mods where you'll need another utility like kanata/kmonad, but not sure how well they integrate with KE)
Readit News
But the massive anti-repair propaganda put out by this company, abusive business practices that prevent most people from truly accessing their hardware (unless it’s the Apple way); and soft locking devices via disabling features when parts are replaced/repaired by third party shop.
People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac
How have you managed to have so many laptops? Are you a collector? A reviewer who is given a lot of free review units?
Laptops have only been around since about 1980, so even someone who started then and has bought 4 laptops a year on average ever since then would still be a little shy of hundreds, so I'm guessing you must have an interesting story.
I guess today I tend to over focus on the laptop as an end where others see it more as a means. Probably won't ever be satisfied until I sit down and design my own. But the MBA 15 is very nice. Too nice. "manufactured with precision to the micron and delivered to your door straight from the factory in Shenzhen"
You can even find panels on new computers that smoke Apples like the 3k 120hz OLED on the Zephyrus g14. Apple’s screens typically lag behind the competition which is natural given they don’t make their own screens, don’t want to sole source, they are anal about QA, and it’s logistically faster & easier to ship a bleeding edge screen on some premium computer that sees a few hundred thousand in sales than the MacBook that sells millions.
Deleted Comment
you have discovered the reason applecare sells well. and frankly the higher the tier of laptop, the more sense it makes - no sense insuring the base-tier model, it's basically disposable, since a non-covered "any other repair" (other than screen) is $700 on (eg) MBP, or $350 (iirc) on a MBA you're basically over halfway to a new unit with a new battery/faster processor/etc. But on a loaded out 64GB/4TB M1 Max MBP ($3k at b+h for a good long while there) then it's worth having it repaired.
arguably on the high-end apple laptops, if you intend to carry them around and actually use them, it's just part of the lifecycle. like, if you have one screen repair in 3 years you break even, if you have one "any other repair" you come out ahead. this is actually constant across all the model lines (MBA screen repairs are cheaper, applecare is still 1/2 of a screen repair).
having insurance on desktops is certainly dumb, but it makes a lot of sense in movable items. people carry around phones and laptops, and they drop them. it happens to wintel PCs too, believe it or not. for the price of prepaying half a screen upfront you basically don't have to worry about your laptop and you also get a 512b memory bus with best-in-class battery life and performance etc.
and I know applecare triggers a lot of haters, "that's a scam, I'm too smart for that!!!", "I won't buy something that I can't repair myself!!!" but like, that generally just speaks to the degree of hostility with which a lot of people approach the apple lifecycle. It's very much designed as a first-party service model, yes of course, but it actually works, and apple laptops actually do achieve long service life with this model. You're not the first person to realize that dropping a $3-4k laptop is gonna feel pretty bad etc, but people tend to systematically dismiss the solutions that have been provided to fix that, because they're not the solutions that the wintel world provides.
And frankly, not having to worry about dropping my laptop is a benefit above and beyond what x86 would provide with the kinds of solutions that are generally quoted, and paying for a premium on-demand business grade warranty on a wintel laptop would probably be roughly as expensive even if it existed on the hardware I'd want (can't get a dell/lenovo/hp business-tier warranty on a redmibook I bought off amazon, right?).
I'm out here carrying my laptop around on a stone patio every evening as I watch the puppy play outside. I'm using it on the toilet above a tile floor. I'm picking it up and moving it every day, and using it on a blanket on the couch. Yesterday I downloaded dolphin-llama3:70b and ran it locally at interactive speeds, I've been doing dolphin-mixtral:8x7b for months now (not full offload so it's not quite as fast). It's a nice laptop and I bought it to use it, $350 up front to simply never worry about it is more than worth it. The same wintel people who told me to get a framework 16 (with no speedstep) are now telling me to wait for strix halo, and I'm out here living the future for almost a full year now, and strix is probably at least a full year from actual real availability (strix halo is coming later than strix point, and AMD paper-launches all their laptop products badly). The $500 I save (maybe) by waiting 2+ years for a comparable x86 solution in 2025 isn't worth it, and I'd still have an expensive laptop with no warranty even if I went PC.
(and that's assuming strix halo is a drop-in replacement - I think people are going to be more disappointed by cost+ battery life than they realize, socketed quad-channel memory with a big stacked cache to improve performance is not cheap in either dollars or watts, those are going to be $3k+ laptops too.)
similarly to how people whine about drop risk and then just ignore the mechanism provided to solve that problem... people do the same thing with turning the parts program into a negative too. Literally apple will sell you the part and the first-party tooling to fix your screen, or even just rent you the tooling... and that's bad because "it comes in three pelican cases!!!" or something. Like people literally insist it's "all for show" or something and it's actually just part of the secret plan to undermine right-to-repair, because Apple will sell you the tools if you want. there is nothing that people can't spin into a negative somehow. There are very few companies with a more real "hater" phenomenon than Apple, and it just colors every discussion on the topic. People forget that there's two sides to every transaction, there is no forced anything, I am making my choices about my own risks and benefits, just not the ones they make. There are scenarios where it makes sense - and probably not as few as the haters want there to be. They just get shouted down by a fairly dedicated/active hater crowd.
https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
I wish Apple wasn’t as stingy with RAM upgrade options considering this can’t be upgraded later. For all the talk on the part of Apple of being more sustainable and green, allowing more competitive memory options would help extend the useful life of these products.
All is about the bottom line, and that's why they're stingy with the ram as well.
That doesn't mean they can't give more, but it's not an 'apples' to apples comparison.
And the idea seems for it to be more of an LAM with fallback to OpenAI for the LLM.
The bigger crime is that the 15" can't be configured with the M3 Pro... particularly given the less-ambitious spec compared to M1/M2 Pro. Things like not supporting a second external display make the 15" MBA a non-starter as an 'ultrabook' even with 24GB configurations.
With the M3 Pro, since you get a 192b memory bus, you'd have options up to 36GB as well as dual external display, which is at least adequate for the class of product.
But you wouldn't have the same performance with discrete memory, so shrug.
what ?!!!!??????!!! there is absolutely nothing sustainable or green about apple, it's products, or its business practices.
> The MacBook Air is made with over 50 percent recycled content overall, a first for the company. This includes 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100% recycled tin in the solder and gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards, 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets (which is 99% of the rare earth elements in the device), 100% recycled cobalt in the MagSafe connector’s battery and magnets, 100% recycled copper in the main logic board (also a first), 90% recycled steel in the battery tray, keyboard feature plate, and trackpad beam plate, and 35% or more recycled plastic in other components.
> Additionally, over 25 percent of the electricity used to manufacture the device was sourced from supplier clean energy projects. And 100 percent of the wood fiber used in the packaging is recycled, as is 99 percent of the fiber-based plastic.
I'm one of those people. Putting Command on Control means that's one less thing I have to think about. Keyboard shortcuts become mostly the same between the different systems.
I don't think there is any magic bullet, short of remapping all shortcuts on either of the system, it's just tricky.
There's similar options on iOS if you use an external keyboard there.
hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":[{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000039,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x70000002A}]}'
The price is insane, but I needed a solid dev machine, so that I could run multiple IDEs (GoLand, IntelliJ) + Figma. Additionally, I wanted to dive deeper into AI/ML. Apple's MLX easily competes with Nvidia RTX 4090 [1]. Everything is just instant, and I'm extremely happy with the purchase.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/12/13/apple-silicon-m3-...
On my old MBP, the menubar starts below where the camera module is.
That area rarely gets used, so why not put the camera there? It is weird how large the area is, however. The camera is a fraction of the tab's size and there aren't any sensors on either side, I don't think.
You pretty much forget about it after a week or so. The only people who make a giant fuss about it are people who haven't used a system with it for very long, if at all.
Of course if you were in the kind of environment where it might be a problem if your computer unlocked as you walked by, you probably wouldn't enable the feature anyway. As it is I am annoyed by iphone and ipad apps that require faceid or other login each time as I'm the only one who uses those devices anyway.
Nevertheless I think faceid on the laptop or imac is an insecure idea.
… especially when your mouse hides behind it and it takes a few milliseconds to remember the notch
[0]: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay
Once you’ve used it for a few days, it tends to fade out of awareness. If you really don’t want to see it, there are utilities that make the menubar black so it blends in.
Indeed, keyboard shortcut design as well as physical keyboard design is such a forgotten moulded corner of personal computing (especially bad with Apple given they own both the OS and the device)...
But there are apps for that! (at least the former) You can have Alt-F open your File menu on your Mac as well, the press E with Karabiner+KeyboardMaestro combination
> But I found it problematic to go back and forth between the MacBook Air and my PCs, as I would constantly reach for the wrong keyboard shortcuts. The biggest issue is the Ctrl + C (Windows)/Cmd + C (Mac) divide: Those modifier keys are in very different places.
Well, put then in the same place! (and Mac's place is better since it's a more ergonomic thumb key) This is one of the few benefits of different designs - they might force you to reevaluate your common routines
I'm currently using Ukelele, but it's not ideal. And I would really really like to remap Right Alt different to Left Alt, to get a proper ISO layout!
(the only missing low-level part in KE is stuff like home row mods where you'll need another utility like kanata/kmonad, but not sure how well they integrate with KE)