My 4-year old Dell XPS 15 is up for replacement, but somehow no manufacturer aside from Apple is making laptop with decent specs nowadays? I want 2TB storage, a 4k (or close) HiDPI display, good build quality, and not a bulky gaming laptop. The XPS 15 was perfect, it had those specs, except it only had 1TB storage which is now full. I was expecting that to not be an issue 4 years later ... But now Dell discontinued XPS, and their new Pro/Premium models have worse specs in almost all ways. The only non-Apple thing that I can find that even comes close, is a bulky 16" ThinkPad.
And then there is Apple who pack everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device, plus a very fast CPU and battery life that is years ahead of anything else ... Why is there no competition here? I'm willing to compromise on battery life, and I don't need the fastest CPU, just a good quality work laptop where I can run `cargo build` / `docker pull` without worrying about filling up the disk, and mostly just a browser aside from that. Why is the gap so large?
There's nothing close, Apple has better talent and the vertical integration gives them an edge (especially on performance per watt on their chip designs).
Since the M series chips, there's been no other option if you care about quality. There are crappy alternatives with serious tradeoffs if for some reason you are forced to not use Apple or choose for non-quality reasons.
The leap from intel to the M series chips really left everyone else behind. I can't even use my 2019 Macbook anymore it feels so sluggish.
I have an M3 Pro and it blows all my old computers out of the water. Can handle pretty insane dev workflows (massive Docker composed environments) without issue and the battery life feels unfair. I can put in an 8 hour workday without my charging cable, I don't think I have turned it fully off in a few months, it just chugs along. It really embodies the "it just works" mindset.
In my experience the Snapdragon X Elite is about the same as an M2. It's got slightly worse battery life but still a battery that blows the competition out the water.
Plus you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc without paying Apples ridiculous prices
Snapdragon are just getting started. The Snapdragon X2 is coming out later this year with 18 cores
Is the performance gap so huge? Power efficiency yes, absolutely, but for peak performance last I saw the last AMD vs M3 benchmarks were a slightly slower single core, and a little faster in multicore. Doesn't seem as world changing as described.
But it seems the parent's point is there's no reason Dell couldn't have kept making improved XPS models. Maybe they don't compare on a $/watt basis with Apple silicon, but you could presumably have still paid less and gotten something pretty decent.
Maybe check out the Framework laptops? For example the Framework 13's new screen is 2.8k @ 256PPI apparently [1], which has slightly more pixels than the Macbook Air M4[2] (obviously pixels isn't everything), but you can get up to 8TB NVMe storage + an extra storage expansion cards if you're happy to sacrifice ports and up to 96GB RAM. [3]
Personally I've been a huge fan of my Framework 13, and am planning at some point to swap out the mainboard with the new one they released — it's pretty nice that you can do that (and they sell a desktop case to put the old mainboard in, so you end up with a faster laptop and a spare desktop afterwards!).
Battery life is the main downside, although it doesn't bother me too much — running manufacturer-supported Linux is very nice and worth having to charge more frequently. It uses USB-C anyway, so it's just one cable for all my devices — doesn't feel like that big of a deal.
The main problem with the Framework 13 at this point is underwhelming battery life. I have one of the newly announced models reserved in hopes that the new CPU improves that to a reasonable degree, but if reviews come out and that turns out to not be the case there’s a substantial chance I’ll cancel.
I think it appears large for a couple of reasons. First is that Mac screens are much closer to 3K than 4K. You can find tons of really nice 14" 3K laptops so the gap is pretty much negligible there, especially if you consider how cheap you can get 3K OLEDs on Windows PCs nowadays. Second is that many companies try to limit SKUs for their off-the-shelf products and 2TB or 4TB apparently aren't moving units. People who really want that model can just go buy a bigger drive to drop into it.
That said, one last thing to consider is that while 14" Macbooks are very capable for their footprint, they are heavier and thicker than some other options. If weight is the concern there are 16" laptops that are thinner and lighter than the 14" macbook. The LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 weighs 0.5lbs less and is 0.10" thinner than an MBP14 and has two ssd slots.
> First is that Mac screens are much closer to 3K than 4K. You can find tons of really nice 14" 3K laptops so the gap is pretty much negligible there, especially if you consider how cheap you can get 3K OLEDs on Windows PCs nowadays.
You are discounting the quality of a Macbook screen without understanding how it differs from competitors. A Macbook is the only laptop on the market that accurately reproduces colors out of the box to an extent that is sufficient for color grading photographs or video. I'm a hobbyist photographer and primarily do editing on a desktop where I have LG and Ezio displays that are color accurate, but when I'm out and about there is no alternative on the market I can buy other than a Macbook, because while on paper the "resolution" of other laptops may be similar or even superior, in actuality they are somewhat between shit-tier and D tier in actual color reproduction and quality. Macbook displays are MASSIVELY better than anything any other laptop offers at any price point non-Apple.
I previously used a mixture of different laptops and have over the course of time shifted to using Macbooks for everything because the performance, battery life, power efficiency, display quality, software availability, and annoyance minimization advantages are so large for Apple that it makes no sense to use anything else, except perhaps Linux just to use Linux (which I do on a Framework 13 for personal tinkering projects). I don't see how anyone can honestly recommend that anybody purchase a non-Apple laptop in 2025 for any purpose other than tinkering with Linux, in which case the Frameworks are great.
There's obviously a cost to that superiority and not everyone can afford it, but that doesn't mean alternatives are /preferable/. They clearly are not, they are a trade-off in every single aspect. Even in the case of weight that you mentioned, that trade-off is in durability, the Macbook weighs more because it has an entirely metal chassis and most non-Apple laptops are cheap plastic monstrosities.
Seems like you haven't actually looked into it if that's the impression you got, because both Thinkpad (X1) and Framework (13) make a laptop that fit your requirements. The X1 carbon even offers a 4k OLED option if you want it.
Going from an X1 Carbon to a MBP felt like stepping 10 years into the future. The seamless lid close, battery life, operating temp, build quality and performance were all _huge_ upgrades.
I held out on Mac for 20 yrs, no idea what I was thinking.
I have a framework 13” and a few MacBooks. The framework is a really mediocre laptop, even for PC laptops. I don’t even think it really has potential to be honest.
I’ve been browsing the Lenovo (and others’) website for weeks, and the only two laptops it shows with 2TB storage and 4k display are the ThinkPad P1 and P16s.
The ThinkPad X1 and Framework 13 have a much lower resolution display. Also, I appreciate Framework’s mission, but it’s not the build quality that I’m looking for.
Yep, there's no one else. It's a sad state of affairs in the laptop world outside of Apple.
Used to be primarily a Linux on the desktop user, but have been on macOS since the M1 air, and now typing this from a 14" M4 Pro MBP that will probably last me the next 5+ years easily.
I don't love macOS but it's usable, I pretty much live in the terminal anyway, and the ecosystem features are nice - I make heavy use of clipboard sharing between my laptop and phone, iMessage, and universal control with my iPad that's on my desk.
There's just no other laptop on the market that has this combination of aesthetics, performance, thermals (this thing is cool and silent), screen quality, top notch speakers and microphone for a laptop, and unmatched trackpad. Let alone anything that'll run Linux without some headaches.
I had hopes for the Snapdragon X elite laptops, but no Linux still, and they still don't hold a candle to the Macbooks.
I put a LOT of the blame on ARM chipset manufacturers. The reason you can't get a good ARM laptop that isn't a Mac is because the chipset manufacturers treat them like they treat everything else. They want to have a custom patched kernel that's already 2 decades old and they drop support for it next month.
It says a lot that probably the best in the space is the humble Raspberry Pi.
Gaming laptops aren't neccessarily bulky, my Razer Blade 14 is about the same dimensions as my macbook pro 14. They're about the same age and price (2022), the main difference is that the Razer is much faster (plugged in) but the MacBook is vastly more efficient. I do respect how fast MacBooks feel subjectively, but in terms of number crunching and graphics processing the Razer is a lot better. I guess my overall point being youre not going to beat a macbook on efficiency, but there are options out there that aren't bulky or tacky.
I use a razer blade 14 personally... My mileage varies. I love that I can run a lot of stuff on it, but I hate the fact the ram was soldered and the GPU definitely throttles. I recently ran a benchmark for some GPU code I wrote and found that my steamdeck outperforms the Laptop 3060. Its also got terrible battery life and doesnt help that my work laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad P1 beast (FWIW the razer 14 has better battery life with linux than the lenovo) which is great for building code, terrible as a portable. For me the biggest complaint I have about Macs, is well the OS. With the razer at least I can replace windows with ubuntu and most things work. Im really hoping the AMD stuff catches up soon, otherwise I may have to upgrade to a new desktop + macbook air for personal work.
The way I see it is that Apple competitors have given up on premium portable devices. Apple tech is so far ahead that consumers looking for the best non gaming hardware will most likely choose Apple devices.
For competitors, spending a huge amount of money in R&D to try to compete with Apple, will be most likely at a loss. At least until some chip manufacturer (read: Intel) doesn't step up their game.
As a consequence, competition has moved to the middle-low quality segment, one in which they can still compete because of 2 main factors: Apple is not interested in that segment and most companies won't move away from Windows (even if they probably should).
Does it really require that much R&D? Slap one of the excellent AMD mobile processors with built-in GPU in there, standard cooling (they don't use much more power than they did 5 years ago. They surely have the blueprints for the last XPS machines), and a bigger NVME. It's all more or less commodity hardware in a name-your-preference shell.
I've been using LG Gram laptops running linux. They are fantastic. My current daily drive is 3lbs, 17" display, 32GB RAM i7 CPU, and I bumped the SSD to 2TB. It is lighter than my 13" Macbook air and cost $1200 at Costco. Oh, and battery life is 14-16 hours of use.
The Asus ROG Flow Z13 with 128gb unified memory and the AMD Ryzen AI Max amu would be my first non-M4 laptop pick. Surprised how under-reported this device is.
Hope lenovo ships the amd max in a P1 type laptop. I have an almost 5 year old thinkpad P1gen2 with Core i9, 64GB, 2.5Tb disk, T2000 discrete GPU, 4K oled touch display running Linux. Something similar that runs LLMs faster would be nice. The GPU is limited by only 4GB. Also, something that does not run out of battery power in less than 2 hours.
Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition is in fact lighter than the Macbook Air, has Lunar Lake, up to 2 TB storage, great battery life, and a 2880 x 1800 OLED display. It's pricy, though.
An M4 air will run circles around Lunar Lake being over 30% faster at geekbench (both single and multe-core) and over 40% faster at Cinebench 24. The GPU is 25-35% faster too. Air is also 60-80% faster at Geekbench AI.
People spent a decade upgrading laptops for a mere 5-10% increase in performance (sometimes less). I can't see someone giving up that much of a performance jump unless Windows is absolutely the only option.
I also have a 4-year old XPS15. The SSDs and RAM are super easy to upgrade. There are two internal SSD slots (one shipped empty). Dell charges not-quite Apple-scale arms and a legs for RAM/SSD upgrades, so I bought mine Dell-minimal and immediately upgraded them both and have bumped them up as prices come down for new parts. The upgradability was a major reason I went for the XPS15 instead of the XPS13 (my previous machine)
I always feel that the kind of laptop I want is a unicorn if I exclude Apple M-series laptops. Is there a laptop out there which is fanless (passively cooled), supports Linux reliably, has great performance per watt, has decent raw performance (anything better than a recent lower end AMD/Intel laptop processor), and has great build quality?
I don’t think there are any fanless x86 but I had a system76 pangolin for work. It was quite well built (I bought the next gen one for myself). They OEM the notebooks though, so the quality is decent (I’m coming from a 2015 Mac book, pretty much the gold standard of Macs)
I wanted an XPS15 for a while, but they kept getting relatively worse than my 2017 one. I ended up just replacing the battery on it and kept the 1080p screen that wasn't great anymore, but I was not going to buy a laptop with a worse battery for a higher price than what I got the old laptop for.
Later I bought a new Malibal laptop, but mostly for the screen, usb-c ports and lower weight,but had to compromise on getting an unnecessary nVidia GPU that I just blacklist right away because the right laptop just didn't exist. I like the laptop, but I can't recommend Malibal laptops though, they are a weird company and getting things to work alright took way more effort than on my old XPS.
Good question and probably worth an article or two. My thinking is that Apple is designing silicon that makes for great laptops (M4 in this case) and then building around that. You will be hard pressed to find an x86-64 chipset that does what the Apple chipset does, and without that no matter what laptop you build around it is not going to be competitive. Nimbler companies like Framework are working with more speculative silicon (like the AMD Ryzen AI Max) which people like Dell and Lenovo won't do (yet?) But even there you get closer but not really close to something like the compute complex in the Macbook Air.
Mobile. A lot of games I played as a kid have mobile apps, and in some cases, I don't know if its the case for all of them, the userbase is mostly on their phones. I can only imagine this is the case for a lot of things.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the thinkpad x1 extreme laptop. It was basically the lenovo/thinkpad response to the xps 15. It's way thinner than the ThinkPad T16/P15 lines.
they claim it's a 16" laptop but only because they made the bezel smaller enough to fit a larger display in the same space.
it's usually mostly on par with the dell xps but i'm not sure about the specs though... my personal laptop is a rusty thinkpad x270 (i'm torn between the newly announced m4 macbook air or the upcoming framework 12) and i've been issued a m3 macbook pro for work.
I have an X1 extreme gen 2 - great expandability (two SSD slots), good port selection, not too heavy but runs hot, the GPU is crap and the battery life isn't great. Running pop os with KDE on it; normal usage.
And just checking the XPS 14 it has both 2tb and 4tb storage options, and the 3.2k OLED screen is higher resolution than what Apple's 14" offering contains and it's 120hz.
Surface Laptop 7? While they don't technically sell a 2TB config, they do use a 2230 M.2 SSD and there are 2TB versions of those. As a bonus it's WAY cheaper to do it that way than from the factory. The Surface Pro tablets are another option if you can live with the form factor. Even easier to swap the SSD in those too.
I'm very disappointed with my Surface Pro tablet ... battery life sucks, resuming from sleep is really slow and the keycover needs to be disconnected and reconnected for it to 'remember' it is there. I've owned 4 Surfaces over the years and won't buy again.
I'm not a fan of OS X but seriously considering one of these just for the battery life and it-just-works portable computing.
Well, my ThinkPad P14 Gen5 is pretty much this. Small, lightweight, 64gig RAM, 2TB SSD, and a pretty darn good screen. But yeah it's black and has a coating and you won't feel like a genius machinist when you touch it, plus no apple logo, so I guess Apple wins again. How do they keep doing it?
I am quite happy with Asus and Thinkpad pro graphics laptops, wihout being bulky gaming laptops, and I get more tech per buck with the nice Win32/DirectX and CUDA ecosystems that everyone is "emulating" nowadays.
Why get the lesser copy, when I can get the original at better price?
The thing that irks me, is the premium price for storage. Everyone has a cloud storage package to sell, so the air model that has amazing features but small storage will cost you in the long run. Storage should be easy to replace and plentiful!
My laptop before getting my M2 MPB was a top of line ThinkPad P series with all the best on paper specs. As long as I was running benchmarks on it while it was plugged in and I didn't care about fan noise, performance was fine. Once you tried to use it like an actual laptop it was terrible in just about every way. Performance when on battery was either so throttled as to be barely usable, or would kill the battery in 45 minutes. The noise and heat it spit out when doing anything even moderately taxing was extreme. Despite having the most expensive graphics card they offered at the time, interactive 3D and games was still always stuttering and rarely ran smooth. Sleep was hit and miss, so if I just closed the lid and chucked in my bag, there was good chance it would be both hot and dead when I pulled it out an hour later.
There is a lot more to a good laptop than specs, and so far only Apple seems to really get that.
Especially for the command line and a browser which are primarily rendering text, pixel density matters so much! Why look at pixelated text when you can have print-quality crisp text? I never want to go back to low pixel density displays!
I had an XPS 15 with 4k display in 2016, yet in 2025 it’s somehow difficult to find a laptop with that pixel density?
I wonder the same with phones actually, my Nexus 6P from 2015 (10 years ago!) had an amazing 518 ppi display. When the modem died I got a Pixel 2 which had only 441 ppi, and the display was a really noticeable downgrade, text looked significantly uglier, I could see the pixels and hinting artifacts again. I expected high pixel densities to become mainstream to the point where every screen has a density at the limit of what the human eye can perceive, yet here we are 10 years later, and Google’s flagship phones have only 495/486 ppi, worse than the Nexus 6P!
Pixel density is important for crisp small text, so cli on a 14 inch screen and maybe web browsing would be good reasons for a 4k display - it would be the only reasons for me at least.
> I'm willing to compromise on battery life, and I don't need the fastest CPU, just a good quality work laptop where I can run `cargo build` / `docker pull` without worrying about filling up the disk, and mostly just a browser aside from that.
I know this isn't your point but this is exactly why I don't use docker--but I'm a bit surprised to hear you mention `cargo build` as something that might fill up the disk. I've been a vocal critic of Rust on Hacker News in the past, but the one thing I always thought they did very, very well, was Cargo and the tight executables it produced for me.
The optimised release binary isn't the issue - it's the many GB of build artifacts produced along the way if you have a lot of dependencies. You can accumulate hundreds of GB in target/ over time working on large projects.
If you don't travel from your house with it I understand your confusion, the weight is a factor when traveling. I never have back pain, but when I do, its because I'm carrying a heavy laptop around on my back.
Because they are laptops. I can't even use my 16" MacBook Pro on the couch. It's portable sure, but it's not a laptop. You can't take it anyway, only move it from desk to desk. It's the single heaviest thing in my bag when I travel.
I can do the same work on a MacBook Air when I'm away, and it's basically just a desktop when I'm home. To me it would make way more sense to have a desktop at home and a 12 - 14" laptop, if it wasn't for the cost of having both.
It's really nice to be able to take a laptop out and start working on an idea wherever you are. Macbook Air makes me more productive and home or anywhere because it's less of a hassle to boot up the laptop.
I have a gaming laptop, even 14", and I can't stand the boot up time and needing a thick power brick cable to get things going. I barely use it as a result and use my Steam Deck more.
When I'm walking around S.E. Asia and it's 90 degrees and humid I care about every extra gram.
Even an Air is too heavy IMO compared to say an LG Gram. But, I need the specs and the screen so I lug around a MacBook Pro 16" at 4.6lbs - often I have to lug around 2, my corp one and my personal one.
Given an iPad Pro 13" is 1.3lbs they "could" (for some definition of "could") make a 16" device with keyboard closer to 2 lbs.
I have (at least) 2 laptops at any given time. They fit into 2 categories:
1) Is 99% of the time actually on my lap when I'm using it. It's (usually) the one I take with me when I leave the house. I care very, very much about its size and weight. It's an M1 Air and I wouldn't mind if it was a bit smaller/lighter.
2) Is 99% of the time sitting on my desk, plugged into my KVM. It almost never leaves my house. I don't care how bulky it is. However, I prefer medium-ish form factors in case I do need to travel with it.
Any laptops I have over 2 will usually be in the 2nd bin, but sometimes the 1st.
Only answering for myself here, but when I already have 10+ lbs of camera gear in my backpack, a huge gaming laptop makes a big difference compared to an ultrabook. And I'm not talking about an excessive amount of gear either. One body plus one lens plus a couple extra batteries, etc, easily gets me to 10 lbs. And then I still have to get on a plane with it.
Other than my work laptop (a horrible, horrible Dell Precision), my laptops hardly ever leave the house: MacBook Air M2, Lenonov X220 (Linux) and HP 17 (Windows). I still prefer the sleek and light one over the others.
I bought an XPS 16 recently. 4K screen, 64 GB RAM (+8 GB VRAM), 2 TB storage (4 TB was an option). It cost about 3/4 as much as a similarly specced MBP.
I know many people still love MacOS, but it lost me a few years ago. I've also, frankly, had much better milage out of Dell machines than Apple ones over the last ten years.
Dell XPS 13 isn't discontinued, its rebranding will be fully rolled out later this year
In the meantime Dell XPS 13s are currently available with 2TB and 64GB RAM (with a better screen than this Air I might add) and with a Snapdragon X Elite chip (which there are very few compatibility issues with in March 2025 even with gaming)
If its a 14 inch laptop you want XPS 14s are currently available with upto 4TB. They will also be rebranded later this year. They're on Intel chips and I'm hoping they will switch to Snapdragon on the rebrand to get the Apple like battery life
I don't think the SL7 is a like-for-like comparison even if it seems like it on paper. The SL7 is great if you want/need to run Windows - I convinced my sister to get one and she loves the battery life and low heat (less fain noise) compared to her previous devices.
If you want a nix experience, Linux support is still a WIP and progress is quite slow because of a lack of help from Snapdragon and OEMs. I expect that it might take a generation or two to get it to the point where it was with the x86 SLs.
However, at this stage, I'm tired of the quirks of Windows so the lack of
nix support pushed me to get the Macbook Air for myself.
I really wish Apple would make a MacBook Air variant with display quality on par with the iPad Pro or MacBook Pro (ProMotion/120hz and XDR/HDR, at least). The screen quality is the only reason I currently use the Pro despite its chunkier weight, since the local compute/memory of the Air is already plenty for me (and most users).
The iPad Pro proves that weight and battery life is no excuse here for the lack of state-of-the-art display tech in the MacBook Air. And as for cost — the base 14” MacBook Pro M4 (at $1600) isn’t significantly more expensive than the 15” MacBook Air M4 configured with same CPU/RAM/SSD (at $1400).
It’s really quite a shame that the iPad Pro hardware is in many way a better MacBook Air than the MacBook Air, crippled primarily by iOS rather than hardware.
I know Apple wants to differentiate ProMotion as a Pro feature, but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Stuff that would be completely unheard of purely because of how noticeable 60hz vs 120hz is.
Actual reputational damage is going on because of these poor decisions, I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share. They just look like old and slow phones to most normal people now, “look how nice and smooth it looks” is such an easy selling point compared to trying to pretend people care about whatever Apple Intelligence is.
> but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Stuff that would be completely unheard of purely because of how noticeable 60hz vs 120hz is.
Are they? I'm a tech person and I can barely notice it at all. And I don't think I have a single non-tech friend who is even aware of the concept of video refresh rate.
Whenever there's something that doesn't feel smooth about an interface, it's because the app/CPU isn't keeping up.
I've honestly never understood why anyone cares about more than 60hZ for screens, for general interfaces/scrolling.
(Unless it's about video game response time, but that's not about "running smoother".)
Have never heard anyone in my life that isn’t an engineer comment on Pro Motion. Not even in an accidental sort of “hmmm why does my phone just feel faster” kind of way.
This is a feature that really only matters to the Hacker News crowd, and Apple is very aware of that. They invest their BOM into things the majority of people care about. And they do have the Pro Motion screens for the few that do.
Even I — an engineer - regularly move between my Pro Motion enabled iPhone and my regular 60Hz iPad and while I notice it a little, I really just don’t see why this is the one hill people choose to die on.
>I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share
Apple has >80% of the total operating profit in the smartphone market. The new entry level phone went up in price $200. Why do you think they do/should care about market share?
I’ve considered trying an ultralight PC laptop with a superior screen. But the sad state of reality is that:
(1) Windows these days feels like a constant battle against forcibly installed adware / malware.
(2) Linux would be great, but getting basic laptop essentials like reliable sleep/wake and power management to work even remotely well in Linux continues to be a painful losing battle.
(3) Apple’s M series chips’ performance and efficiency is still generations ahead of anyone else in the context of portable battery-powered fanless work; nobody else has yet come close to matching apple here, though there is hope Qualcomm will deliver more competition soon (if the silicon’s raw potential is not squandered by Microsoft).
Just because Apple’s competition has been complacent and lagging for many years, doesn’t render irrelevant any feedback to Apple regarding what professional laptop users would like.
Because some people would pay the same price (or even more) as a MacBook Pro to have a great screen in a thinner, lighter laptop that shouldn't cost Apple that much more to make.
Like how the MacBook Air was originally a premium-priced product instead of an entry-level product in Apple's lineup.
how about because it's ridiculous that a $2200 laptop cannot correctly show photos taken by the company's own $600 phone? People mentioned being stuck at 60hz, but it's also one of the few remaining non-xdr displays that Apple offers.
I wish for that machine too; and the price delta between the Macs is why I expect this will never happen. And unfortunately, I'd rather spend the extra bucks than go back to 60hz.
Apple seems quite content with making 120hz a feature of "Pro" models across the line (iPads, iPhones, Macs).
As others have said, they do this on purpose. It's the same with memory. I'd probably switch from a Pro to an Air if I could get 64gig ram (for LLM work) but they'd rather charge me $4800 instead of ~$3200 (guessing the price given the top end 32gig Air is $2800)
It's frustrating because I'd prefer a lighter device. In fact, even the Air isn't that light compared to its competition.
I'd happily pay +$500 ($5300) for Macbook Air PRO if it was effectively the same specs as Macbook Pro but 1.5lbs lighter.
I have absolutely no problem paying a premium for an upgraded display. The problem is that Apple does not offer that option for the MacBook Air.
The MacBook Pro has an amazing screen, which is why I bought the MBP. But the MBP compromises increased weight (which I don’t want) in exchange for more performance (that I simply don’t need). And we know this compromise is not needed to host a better display, as evidenced by the existence of the iPad Pro.
Don’t get me wrong, the MacBook Pro is a fantastic product and I don’t regret buying it. It just feels like a huge missed opportunity on Apple’s part that their only ultra-lightweight laptop is so far behind in display tech vs their other non-laptop products (like the iPad Pro which is lighter still, just crippled due to iOS limitations).
I would gladly pay even more than the price of my MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air with a screen on par with the iPad Pro or MacBook Pro. Or even for an iPad Pro that runs OSX!
A pro will still be a good 2.5x the speed compared to the Air due to memory bandwidth. It would be rather silly to spring for that amount of memory for that purpose, anything more than say a 14B param model will be painful.
It's actually quite crazy that we need to get those bulky pro models just to get the basics like better screens and more memory. The performance between the Air and Pro is anyways pretty much the same, except for long running tasks where pro benefits from active cooling.
Wonder if we are going to see some changes here with the upcoming M5 models.
Hell, I would be happy if Apple at least enabled the virtualization instructions that are already available in the Mx chips inside the iPads, and allowed e.g.: something like UTM in Apple Store with Hypervisor support. It would be a good differentiator between the cheaper iPads running Ax chips vs the more expensive iPads running Mx.
Considering the powerful hardware, the form factor and the good keyboard (I have a used Apple Magic Keyboard paired with our iPad Air M2), if I could virtualize an actual Linux distro to get some job done in the iPad it would be great. But no, you are restricted to a cripped version of UTM that can't even run JIT and because of that is really slow because of that.
I have considered going back to Mac after about 5-7 years on Windows/WSL, but the storage premium is just too much to swallow. If the $999 was a base 16GB RAM and 512GB storage, I'd consider it. I just added another 32GB of RAM to my 2020 built desktop for $50. You can get a 1TB crucial M.2 drive for $70. I know I'm comparing apples and oranges, but the storage cost is too much, and 256GB is much too little.
Edit: to go to 32GB RAM is $400. To go to 1TB SSD is another $400. That is essentially doubling the $999 cost. $400 buys me between 4 and 6 1TB M.2 drives or 2-3 2TB M.2 drives.
Side Note: I recently bought a 11T HDD for $120...
You can AT WORST buy the storage OUTRIGHT for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE. But in most cases you can buy more than double what Apple is offering for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE.
I boycotted Apple for years because of these issues, but unfortunately I think this battle is lost. I gave up. I have a macbook Air. It is nice, but it is a glorified SSH machine. They must know this, because I'd prefer to get an iPad pro with a keyboard but run an actual fucking desktop OS. But then again, the fucking iPad isn't even good at the one thing it is supposed to be good at: writing... The 3rd party apps are leagues ahead of Apple Notes.
What I can't figure out is:
- Why are there no good competitors?
- Why are there no good linux laptops with good battery life?
The whole point of Apple's pricing strategy over the past few years is that since they have a monopoly on storage/RAM upgrades, they can price base model computers at margins below what they'd normally be comfortable with, and then gouge users on the upgrade costs to claw back some of those margins. That's how they're able to charge $400 for an extra 16GB of RAM.
I doubt it. In corporate environments I see so many base models being used. Most office workers do everything on SaaS web apps anyway; they only need sufficient RAM to run a browser and browser-based apps. Having small amount of storage is a feature not a bug, because it prevents employees from downloading too much company proprietary information onto their laptops.
I'm in another, bizarre camp. I'd pay double whatever they're charging for if I could run linux on it utilizing all of the hardware. Also, if notch went away, but that's another story. Unless someone knows of laptop hardware that comes close to both performance, comfort, and battery which can run linux.
Oddly enough I'd probably accept a much cheaper, shittier laptop if it ran OS X, but, I've been all-in on Apple hardware since 2006, so maybe I don't understand how bad the non-Apple laptops really are. Conceptually I'd be fine with Linux on the desktop -- hell I used to use OpenBSD as a daily driver -- but OS X is in my veins now.
You can make the notch go away with third-party apps. On the Pro laptops the screen has miniLED backlighting, so the dark area stays purely black. Removing the notch this way leaves you with a 16:10 screen, so you still have more screen real state than in most other laptops.
The notch has gone away, at least as of Sonoma on a 15" M3 Air, but at the cost of some real estate at the top of the screen. Basically they just don't draw anything at or above the lower edge of the notch, so it looks like the screen ends there even when it doesn't.
I actually wanted to get the notch back so I could have as much vertical screen real estate as possible and was disappointed to find that there doesn't appear to be any reliable way of doing this.
It's true that seeing that number next to $400 next to 16GB is agony, but a 32GB 1TB 15" M4 Air for $2k is a hell of a deal. I have the upgraded M1 Air and after using it for a few years, (1) I still have no reason to upgrade and (2) it's worth more to me than whatever paid.
I’d love to buy that config as my personal laptop, but the problem is that my 512/16 M1 Air still works so well for my use case that I can’t find enough reasons to justify the expense. M6 Air maybe!
I think you are crazy. The performance difference between MacOS and WSL is like night and day. I was just shopping for a Linux laptop and I have found that the top end models from Microsoft, Lenovo and Dell to be as or more expensive than Apple (with the exception of having user replaceable SSDs). There is nothing in the PC world that compares to Apple Silicon. If the price is too much, look at the refurb or used market where you can get really significant discounts.
100%! I find that folks like this are comparing specs on paper but have no clue what the real life differences are like in practice, hence missing out. Or maybe they are trying to justify not spending the money but still life is short, go for the best
Apple doesn’t have a lightweight laptop with a matte screen. Their MacBook Air is light but has a reflective screen. The Pro has a matte screen (upgrade option) but is pretty heavy.
A true portable laptop, one that can be used not just at home where lighting could perhaps be controlled, needs to by lightweight and have a non-reflective screen.
True, I guess they do want to push iCloud. I just can't justify the pricing. Comparing the 15" to System 76, I get a bigger screen, TWO 2TB M.2 drives, and 64 GB RAM for $150 cheaper than a 15" with one 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. And the System 76 comes with a bunch of ports, too.
There are kits to upgrade the mini and studio to max out storage for reasonable prices. I've watched YT videos on the process and it doesn't look too hard.
As for the laptops, probably not feasible.
I will say that unlike laptops/desktops I used to buy before I went Apple, I use them for a really long time. When I ran Windows, I'd upgrade every few years. I had my Mac Pro 2012 for 9 years before upgrading to a Studio. Yes, I maxed out the storage, and it was annoying how expensive, but amortized over 9 years? Not as bad.
EDIT: if I was purchasing a Studio now, I'd likely do the 3rd party upgrade to 8TB (what I saw in a YT video). That's double what my M1 Studio maxed out at.
Not sure about your use-case, but nowadays i don't do anything fancy with my laptop.
So far I've decided that going forward I'll likely be getting a cheap baseline laptop (curretly eyeing a 16gb/512gb macbook air m4 or the upcoming framework 12) and then get some beefier desktop to remote into. i don't even need a gpu, the heavy stuff i do largely revolves around running virtual machines.
I did most of my work in a screen session running emacs on a 48cpu/192gb ram machine in a previous job, and I did some tests and remote desktop nowadays is pretty good (way above the "usable" threshold).
Yeah, but I don't want my hard drive in an external enclosure for my laptop. I'm writing this comment from a macbook air, which is comfortably in my lap, thankfully only plugged into power.
Fair. A better comparison would be System 76. Comparing the 15" to System 76, I get a bigger screen (16"), TWO 2TB M.2 drives, and 64 GB RAM for $150 cheaper than a 15" with one 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. And the System 76 comes with a bunch of ports, too. For the same specs, it is $550 cheaper.
most non-Mac laptops have a spare slot for an SSD (and the original one is likely replaceable), with RAM being replaceable too. Why wouldn't the desktop prices apply here too?
The purpose of a professional machine is that it pays for itself when you make money using it. If that's not your case, then why do you need professional equipment?
I don't think 1TB of storage makes something professional equipment. I have well over 500 GB of photos. I want each of those stored locally where I control the data. Nor do I think 32 GB of RAM makes something professional. I'd prefer to future proof such a large purchase, and because I can't even go back to Apple in 3 years and purchase more RAM I have to decide right now what might be useful in 5-7 years.
You’re making it seem like they’re hiding that information under a footnote. The real text on the page, which is quite visible, is:
> Up to 23x faster than fastest Intel‑based MacBook Air
And right next to it:
> Up to 2x faster than MacBook Air (M1)
The footnotes are there to expand on the conditions of the measurements.
So not exactly misleading. On the contrary, it seems to me they’re quite clearly saying “if you have an Intel or M1 MacBook Air you have reason to upgrade. Otherwise, don’t”.
"Up to" is still doing a lot of work there. What kinds of workloads are we talking that get the big numbers, and what can we realistically expect on real workloads?
I'm reminded of 90s advertisements in which the new G3 processor was supposed to be so many times faster than the Pentium or even Pentium II. Their chosen benchmark: how long it takes to run a Photoshop plugin. On Mac OS pre-X, a Photoshop plugin got 100% of the CPU because there was no preemptive multitasking. Windows 9x versions of Photoshop had to share the CPU with whatever else was running.
As someone that migrated to the M1 Macbook Air from a Mid-2014 Macbook Pro... the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target, amusingly.
If they'd just give me onboard mobile connectivity, I'd upgrade to the next Air sooner, otherwise this thing will run until it dies... and maybe some day they'll start comparing performance against their original M1.
> the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target
Definitely. I have ZERO rational reasons to upgrade from my lowest-spec first-gen Air M1. I use it everyday and speed and battery life are still way more than I need.
I see a lot of people requesting cellular modems in MacBooks, but the integration with iPhone hotspot connectivity is so good that I don’t really see the point of it for most people.
The page up to 2x faster than M1, but it's not worth upgrading from for the average person, your laptop should last longer than 4 years hence why they market to Intel Mac users.
I think that was around the time when macbooks were "fast enough", especially since that was when SSDs became the default. I remember I got my first macbook around 2011/12 and at the time doing your own upgrade of memory and replacing the hard drive with an SSD was a pretty popular DIY upgrade (N=1).
> the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target, amusingly
yeah i just checked mine, it says MacBook Pro 16" 2019 and the cpu is an intel i7. i don't know what to say, it still meets all my requirements, i don't feel any need to upgrade.
> the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target, amusingly.
Yeah, particularly for the Air that makes complete sense, though. Consumer laptops tend to get replaced pretty slowly. I'll be upgrading from a _2016_ MBP (though not to the Air, given the lack of the 120hz screen; going to go for the Pro).
Why would you need onboard mobile? It’s 2 clicks to trigger a mobile hotspot from your iPhone and there are very cheap LTE dongles on eBay. Not sure how much service would cost, most of us have reasonable download caps on our mobile plans. The dongles have better data plans than phones.
1) Apple releases incremental upgrades! Why won't they make huge strides every year so I can upgrade!
2) People who upgrade every year are sheeps!
3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice! (yes, not Windows though).
4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!
Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.
"Hey, you noticed things are slow? Well, this thing is a lot faster" is pretty good marketing if it's true, nobody except the very wealthy are dropping thousands of euros/dollars on a new device for 10% performance gains, however if it's twenty-three times the performance of the Mac I currently own? Maybe it's enough to convince me or someone like my Mum to splurge on a new device.
Maybe my current Mac is not "good enough" anymore when 23x is the number on the box if I buy new.
It's fair to compare with devices that you expect actual people to actually upgrade from, there's a lot of Intel macbook airs in the field.
> Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.
It still makes claims like that arbitrary and meaningless. What does "23x faster" even mean, it's not like there are that many people who are upgrading from an Intel MBA yet are also fulltime Cinebench/etc. testers.
> It's fair to compare
Well yes. It's reasonably fair (realistically its not like any of those people this is targeted at would feel a difference between 10x, 15x or 30x) and obviously smart.
Depends what you mean by 'faster' ... I wouldn't be surprised if the AGC was more responsive (faster response on the screen to user input) than a modern computer. Early computers were often quite snappy.
Considering that a modern Ryzen is 1375 times faster than a VAXstation 4000/60, and a VAXstation 4000/60 is around 1280 times faster, at least in clock, than an AGC, that would mean the M4 would need to be about 5.6 times faster than that modern Ryzen.
Hmmm... The M4 might be ten million times faster than the AGC, depending on the instructions per clock of the AGC and the VAXstation 4000/60 with which we're comparing it.
I've got an M1 Air and there's still no really compelling reason to upgrade. MagSafe and a nicer camera don't really justify it, especially when Continuity Camera is better than on the M1 or M4.
As I said in another comment, probably the benchmark is done just using some hardware instruction that didn't exist on those models and gets compiled to several instructions (possibly by a very very old compiler, while we're at it) vs something handwritten in assembly for the purpose of one specific benchmark.
Does this mean it's 23x faster for normal workloads? Nah.
Apple when they were pumping clang were also claiming that binaries produced with clang were much faster than those made with gcc. This was because they used a 15 years old version of gcc that didn't have any vector instructions (because they didn't exist at the time) and benchmarking using some code that was solely doing vector stuff.
Haha. Well, I guess it kind of makes sense in some way, Apple doesn’t want to say anything negative about any generation of “M” processor, maybe?
Up to 23x faster. Of course, the fastest Intel MacBook Air is pretty old. But 23X is pretty crazy, right? I wonder what they are comparing against. Int-8 matrix multiplications or something else that’s gotten acceleration lately, maybe?
That’s roughly the Air I have still. I hate using it (prior to recently adding the cooler shim mod, it would thermal throttle constantly) but between a Hackintosh and my work Mac I haven’t felt the need to upgrade. I think sometime in this M4/M5 gen is when I’ll pull the trigger and retire the Hackintosh to gaming rig only status.
I don't think it's silly to state. That message is probably for intel macbook air users who may be considering an upgrade.
(Anyway, I just ordered one for my wife, a soon-to-be-ex-intel-mac user. She'll probably be pretty happy about this, especially since she doesn't have an intel air as powerful as that one.)
People don't upgrade every year. I still have an Intel MacBook Pro (2020 I think?) that I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon because it still works great.
And the benchmark is probably jut using one hw instruction that didn't exist on that model and now exists, and is not representative of anything at all.
I love how even fair and justifiable critique of Apple needs to be hedged with the "Apple is great" prefix, such is the terror of the Apple downvote mafia on HN.
/typed from my Macbook Pro M4 — Love Apple — This is great!
The first thing I noticed in all of these announcements is that every main comparison is against M1. Why are they comparing with hardware 2-3 generations ago? I don't care whether my Intel i9 has 50x the performance of a Pentium processor from the 90s, it seems like a disingenuous attempt to make the numbers as high as possible.
With M1 Air, Apple had to blow us away. People, including me, had hard time believing Apple's claims and many people were coping by looking at the Keynote charts and assuming that Apple must have tricked everyone by not giving proper scale metrics etc.
When people put their hands on the real device, it was slaying almost everything on the market and soon it was clear that this thing is a revolution.
You don't one up this easily. Apple claims 2X performance improvement over M1 Air and I am sure its mostly true but that M1 Air was so ahead that for a lot of people workloads didn't catch up yet.
At this very moment I have 3 Xcode projects open, Safari has 147 tabs open and its consuming 11GB of my 16GB Ram and my SSD lifetime dropped to 98% due to frequent swap hits and yet I'm perfectly fine with the performance at this very moment and I'm not looking for immediate replacement.
I can't imagine 147 tabs. I have 9 pinned tabs and maybe ... 6 other tabs open if I'm particularly busy. I also turn off my work laptop at the end of the day, because all of my state is restored when this handful of tabs comes back.
Maybe this is just me managing my ADHD, but when I see people with hundreds of tabs open I just can't imagine how they work. Every tab has been mashed down to its favicon and I watch them struggle to find the right one. It seems insane to me.
Same. Each year I tell myself I'll get the new one. Each year when the new one comes out I notice that for what I use it for my M1 Air is still completely fine.
This is where I am, too. I have an M1 Pro and I have never loved a computer more. This thing is a beast and just about anything I throw at it is fine. I can't imagine how much better the M4 is. Unless this computer gets stolen or doused with water, I'll probably have it for at least another 3-4 years. Absolutely amazing value for my money.
Nor should you have a reason to replace it. The device is barely 4 years old. There was a time until very recently when laptops would be expected to last 10+ years minimum with minor RAM and SSD updates.
I don’t know when that time was. Hardware and software requirements have been moving fast for just about forever, until actually maybe the past 5 years.
There was never a time when laptops were expected to last 10+ years.
I'm still happily using an 8GB M1 running Firefox in OSX + Firefox/VSCode/NodeJS in a Debian VM. Lots of tabs open. Both OSX and Debian can use compressed RAM.
agreed, which is awesome, the only thing that worries me is that they will drop support for it earlier than they have to when they want to force people to upgrade eventually. I hope to get 10 years out of my M1
Everyone I know that got an M1 cheaped out on the 8gb model and are now struggling to use a browser with heavy sites and multitasking(zoom) at the same time.
But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.
Totally an anecdote, but my 8gb M1 runs fine with multiple browsers/tabs, VS Code, and Spotify all open. Usually performance is only an issue for me when working with larger ML models. I wonder why others are getting worse performance? Maybe it's the specific sites they're using?
Do you use it as a laptop, or is it hooked up as a desktop for the most part? If the former, I'd try one of the M series in the same role and see if you notice a difference in ergonomics.
The last time they "innovated" on macbooks we got a touch bar (ignoring M chips). I'm good with incremental improvements if we can avoid those gigantic blunders.
Don't forget this also came with the awful butterfly keyboard, allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness. It had terrible reliability, Apple was forced to do replacements and IIRC required a motherboard replacement to actually replace.
And why did Apple do all this? To increase the Average Selling Price ("ASP") of Macs. That's literally it.
the new M4 Macbook Air for $999 is incredible value and that's what I want the Air to be: a good compromise of power and price. For example, the 12" Macbook made too compromises to be just a little bit thinner.
Right and I'm not sure consumers are willing to tolerate innovation.
I recall the amount of hate touch bar got on HN and everyone asking Apple to revert back to building normal machines (which they did with Macbook Pro).
They should do their "touch bar, delete ports, flat keyboard" innovations on a new Macbook Max or Ultra product line and see how it goes. The Air and Pro can stay traditional and keep the HDMI and headphone jacks etc.
I actually enjoy the Touch Bar on my 2018 MacBook Pro. The screen brightness slider offers more granular control. On my M1 air there is often a brightness gap where the screen is either too bright or too dark when using the keyboard to adjust brightness. Then I have to go to the menu bar to get the brightness level I actually want.
It's even better on the 2019+ models when they brought back the escape key.
I would agree that the added expense of that oled touchscreen isn't worth it tho. The M series Macs often go on sale at pretty large discounts (seemingly even more than the Intel Macs), and removing the oled touchscreen and the T2 chip that controlled it probably contributes to that.
I think the M1 was a pretty huge innovation. It's the first time a laptop felt portable and without compromise. I can get a full day of work out of my laptop without plugging it in. It's pretty wild.
Before this laptops were simply things that were small enough that you could carry one from point A to point B, but they were still effectively tethered to a wall and desk for any non-trivial usecases.
Apple’s innovation strategy is not to take risky moves. They are more of a fast, competent follower company. Even iPods were a slightly conservative implementation of MP3 players, which were already becoming a thing at the time (you could even get mp3 players with solid state, albeit flash, drives while Apple’s iPods were still spinning rust).
Of course iPods became very popular because they put it all in a package that gave it a UX that non-nerds wanted to use. The flash drive style MP3 players… had tiny capacities, they had to be “managed” by the users. iPods, just dump your whole hard drive on the thing. That solid state memory is much better in a mobile device… I mean, my Sandisk player, I’ll give it an A+ on reliability. C- on capacity. Apple always gets a B in every field.
Their next thing was supposed to be VR. But nobody could find an application for VR, so Apple’s gimmick of taking something with a perfect idea and making a copy that is almost as good at the thing it does right, but which doesn’t have any massive downsides, didn’t work.
They are in a tough spot now, the tech sector seems to have lost its dreamers and so nobody is making these A+/C- devices for them to level out.
An odd take. How can you downplay the iPod and then jump over the iPhone? They also got the iPad, Air Pods, Apple Watch, and Face ID just right. Not always as era-defining as the phone, but certainly pushing their own category.
Of course, the VR thing is a remarkably well engineered thing nobody needs.
What innovation is there from a laptop these days? Apple Silicon chips were the innovation we needed (better performance for better battery).
Last time people cried for Apple to innovate they added the touch bar to laptops. Computers (and phones) are a mature product category where I don't want innovation, I just want them to be functional.
And butterfly keyboards. Don’t forget their innovative trash can MacPro. Hockey puck mouse anyone? Apple has an impressive history of missing the mark.
It's been a while since they made a bold choice. When I bought an iPhone a couple years ago, even the apple store employee kinda shrugged his shoulders when I asked if the new 14 phone was better, besides the camera, than the cheaper 13.
I bought a 13 Pro Max on launch day and I am still using it today. I have never kept a phone this long in my life. The cameras and performance are still fantastic. The only thing that would be nice is USB-C and USB 3.0 transfer speeds. But that is not enough for me to upgrade.
For me as a professional, that's just fine; I never used the touch bar, but the fingerprint sensor was a great addition. Not worth upgrading for on its own, but a neat upgrade.
I think a macbook with a much better front facing camera would be good, teleconferencing is a multiple times a day use case for us. They did an in-between with the system that allows you to use your iphone camera(s) which do support more wide angles, but that doesn't work on my current work laptop as it's locked down and I'd have to lock down my personal iphone as well if I want the two to connect.
The touchbar was a downgrade for me. Turns out my fingers go slightly above the key when typing certain symbols that are [shift]+[number key]. It took me a while to figure out why my laptop kept opening a music player seemingly at random a couple times per day, but it was because the touchbar was so sensitive that slightly brushing it was triggering the "play" button.
I ended up having to disable almost the whole bar to keep it from happening, just fill it with "blank" zones.
I also can't reliably drag-n-drop with force-sensitivity turned on for the touchpad, so there's another "innovation" I have to turn off. I don't even have, like, dexterity issues or a disability or something, but it makes it so damn fiddly that my drag-n-drops drop too early about half the time.
what do you mean? they cut prices, improved battery life and improved performance, like they do almost every year. every few years they do something big like a new form factor or a new CPU architecture!
Anyone can comment on how Apple Silicon (M) MacBook Airs deal with heat?
It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips?
Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice?
UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.
> - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.
If you are doing normal developer things, the MacBook Air is 100% fine. I use mine daily (M3 Air 13in, 24GB RAM), it handles Rails + Postgres, it handles JS (Next.js + React), it handles Flutter (for desktop and mobile), it handles IntelliJ and RubyMine and DataGrip, it handles Android Studio and Xcode for iOS apps -- including Android/iPhone software emulators. I can load up large Docker projects with 12+ containers, totally fine. I occasionally play with LM Studio, no issues.
Under all of the above, no throttling, no heat issues, works fine on laps, etc. Half the time, it's barely warm to the touch.
---
The only time it gets hot for me, is running the CPU + GPU max'd out hard, for long periods of time. If I try to run FF14 or Warframe via Crossover/Codeweavers for an hour or two, for example, it gets warm and throttles a bit. (Still works, no crashes, no issues, but it does get warm and throttle).
I have M2 Air and using it for rails development, sometimes with multiple docker containers, but the most hungry usually is just chrome with 500+ tabs. It usually does not throttle at all and is barely warm. Unless in direct sunlight (it's black) or unless I put it on top of a blanket without an air gap below for half an hour. I'd say that's coolest macbook I ever owned, no burns or anything near it even on bare skin, unlike some older intel macbooks.
The 2011 Intel macbook air I used when visiting home throughout college was downright _dangerous_ on a lap, but performed so much better than my Atom-based Aspire One that I felt compelled to learn to tolerate OSX, as a longtime Linux nerd.
I eventually got the M1 Air for serious ocaml and rust development and found it would get quite toasty (tho never concerning) during big compile/test cycles, but generally only over several dozen seconds of full load.
I upgraded to a 14” pro with an M2 Max and am reasonably happy with it and think it was an important upgrade for my productivity. In daily use, fans kick in rarely but when needed for a speciality job like TLA model checking, they can reject a lot of heat (= performance margin). Of course it would be nice if it weighed less (mine is 1.8kg after including a case), but as a side benefit the machine can play games (even emulated x86 ones inside Parallels!) so it’s hard to say I’m worse off than my previous status quo of VSCode remoting into my big Linux desktop :)
Ran the Mac native copy of No Man’s Sky on a 16GB m3 Air last year. 1080p and on default visual settings
The laptop never got hot, game never stuttered (beyond NMS glitching engine which exists on windows too). Slight bit of increased warmth, but my phones gotten hotter browsing bloated websites.
I don’t blame Microsoft for looking at bailing on consoles. iPhones will be more powerful in a couple more cycles.
When I tested a 15” MBP with an i7 and touch bar vs my M1 Air the Intel Mac throttled down 30% immediately and the M1 barely throttled towards the end. The test was a 4K transcode in handbrake and the M1 air was only 10-15 minutes behind.
I’ll try to replicate the test with an M3 13” vs the 15” touchbar intel. Don’t have my MBPs at work.
> UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.
Depends on how much you care about the last bit of performance and how often you expect running into throttling. In my experience, it takes the M2 Pro multiple minutes of full load before the fan starts. I do a lot of Rust programming on smaller projects and I think the air would have been fine for me. Compilation takes at most a few minutes on the first run. For doing larger projects like LLVM, the pro is a better option. MLIR took 10 minutes to compile each time I pulled in new commits on main. Then throttling becomes an issue.
I have a 2020 Macbook Air M1, use it for xcode, it struggles to build a basic react native based app with watch-widget, but man it is slick, I love thin laptops. I have a carbon X1 too
Struggle as in the build takes 3+ mins
In general though it's cool, maybe when charging it gets warm but I use it on a desk mostly
A general gripe I have switching devices is the keyboard layout ha cmd+c vs. ctrl+c
Stick to an ext keyboard I guess
Edit: 16GB RAM is what I have I sometimes get the "out of application memory" message
Anyway I use my computer for freelancing/working on multiple platforms, it was a good buy (used), alternatively I could have went with a mini but that screen is so good on a mac (although I develop with an ultrawide external monitor).
you can remap modifier keys if you so inclined in keyboard settings, without additional software, and have separate settings per internal and external keyboard.
I have an M3 Air which I occasionally use for AI (image gen & LLMs), gaming, and light dev work, and it never heated up enough to become uncomfortable, exactly as described in reviews. In fact, this was the main reason why I got Air over Pro - the latter apparently can get uncomfortably hot in some cases (although still far less often than your typical Intel laptop), and I wanted something that would truly be a laptop.
I have an M2 air. It gets a bit warm when I compile iOS apps, but otherwise I never notice any heat. If I open a few too many tabs or apps, though, I notice a bit of slowdown since I only have 8 GB ram.
However, it is surprisingly functional and I don’t strictly need any additional ram, which was surprising to me.
I can't speak to the Airs, but I went from an Intel Pro to a M3 Pro in a previous job and the battery life improved massively. I used to be able to heat my study by running a linter, but after the switch I remained chilly. I'm now on a M2 and have broadly observed the same.
I play Football Manager on my M1 Air and I've never felt heat. This is a game that used to turn my Intel MacBook Pro into a testicle roaster with 2 hour battery life.
Also have an M2. I don't have any issues running multiple web servers, running vite builds etc. Usually 20 tabs open and Affinity Photo or something as well.
I'm a web dev with both a M2 Max (in a Pro) and a M3 (Air).
Never heard the fan come on a single time with either machine while developing. Heat has never been an issue. Battery life is superb on both. Pro has better screen but is way heavier. Air is much nicer to bring to a cafe.
The only time I've ever heard the fan come on is when playing 3d games, especially non-native Apple Silicon games.
If I were getting one only for development, I'd get an Air. If it were meant to be a desktop replacement workstation for work and gaming and movies and such, then the Pro.
Both are easily more than fast enough for web dev. Not sure about other stacks (especially with heavy compiles or virtualization). I have a few services in Docker and that's fine (on both machines).
It's just so so much better than the shitty old Wintel days that I don't even worry about it anymore. Lightyears ahead of any ThinkPad or Latitude, etc.
it throttles when not limited to bursty tasks; some people mod theirs by simply placing a thermal pad between the bottom of the laptop and the heatspreader to get performance identical to the MBP - but then you can not have it comfortably on your lap
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And then there is Apple who pack everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device, plus a very fast CPU and battery life that is years ahead of anything else ... Why is there no competition here? I'm willing to compromise on battery life, and I don't need the fastest CPU, just a good quality work laptop where I can run `cargo build` / `docker pull` without worrying about filling up the disk, and mostly just a browser aside from that. Why is the gap so large?
Since the M series chips, there's been no other option if you care about quality. There are crappy alternatives with serious tradeoffs if for some reason you are forced to not use Apple or choose for non-quality reasons.
I have an M3 Pro and it blows all my old computers out of the water. Can handle pretty insane dev workflows (massive Docker composed environments) without issue and the battery life feels unfair. I can put in an 8 hour workday without my charging cable, I don't think I have turned it fully off in a few months, it just chugs along. It really embodies the "it just works" mindset.
How on earth are there literally ZERO non Apple laptops with a trackpad as smooth as Apple’s?
This is an old technology. Surely someone must have reverse engineered this by now?
Plus you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc without paying Apples ridiculous prices
Snapdragon are just getting started. The Snapdragon X2 is coming out later this year with 18 cores
Apple does have some serious competition now
But if you don’t want Apple, or you want to be able to upgrade, check out Frameworks. [1]
Really satisfying combination of quality and value for high performance laptops.
[1] https://frame.work/
Apple is better because of actual superior technology. The chips are custom made and no one can match the technology yet.
Maybe check out the Framework laptops? For example the Framework 13's new screen is 2.8k @ 256PPI apparently [1], which has slightly more pixels than the Macbook Air M4[2] (obviously pixels isn't everything), but you can get up to 8TB NVMe storage + an extra storage expansion cards if you're happy to sacrifice ports and up to 96GB RAM. [3]
[1] https://community.frame.work/t/framework-laptop-13-deep-dive...
[2] https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/
[3] https://frame.work/gb/en/products/laptop-diy-13-gen-amd/conf...
EDIT: typo + formatting
Battery life is the main downside, although it doesn't bother me too much — running manufacturer-supported Linux is very nice and worth having to charge more frequently. It uses USB-C anyway, so it's just one cable for all my devices — doesn't feel like that big of a deal.
I think it appears large for a couple of reasons. First is that Mac screens are much closer to 3K than 4K. You can find tons of really nice 14" 3K laptops so the gap is pretty much negligible there, especially if you consider how cheap you can get 3K OLEDs on Windows PCs nowadays. Second is that many companies try to limit SKUs for their off-the-shelf products and 2TB or 4TB apparently aren't moving units. People who really want that model can just go buy a bigger drive to drop into it.
That said, one last thing to consider is that while 14" Macbooks are very capable for their footprint, they are heavier and thicker than some other options. If weight is the concern there are 16" laptops that are thinner and lighter than the 14" macbook. The LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 weighs 0.5lbs less and is 0.10" thinner than an MBP14 and has two ssd slots.
You are discounting the quality of a Macbook screen without understanding how it differs from competitors. A Macbook is the only laptop on the market that accurately reproduces colors out of the box to an extent that is sufficient for color grading photographs or video. I'm a hobbyist photographer and primarily do editing on a desktop where I have LG and Ezio displays that are color accurate, but when I'm out and about there is no alternative on the market I can buy other than a Macbook, because while on paper the "resolution" of other laptops may be similar or even superior, in actuality they are somewhat between shit-tier and D tier in actual color reproduction and quality. Macbook displays are MASSIVELY better than anything any other laptop offers at any price point non-Apple.
I previously used a mixture of different laptops and have over the course of time shifted to using Macbooks for everything because the performance, battery life, power efficiency, display quality, software availability, and annoyance minimization advantages are so large for Apple that it makes no sense to use anything else, except perhaps Linux just to use Linux (which I do on a Framework 13 for personal tinkering projects). I don't see how anyone can honestly recommend that anybody purchase a non-Apple laptop in 2025 for any purpose other than tinkering with Linux, in which case the Frameworks are great.
There's obviously a cost to that superiority and not everyone can afford it, but that doesn't mean alternatives are /preferable/. They clearly are not, they are a trade-off in every single aspect. Even in the case of weight that you mentioned, that trade-off is in durability, the Macbook weighs more because it has an entirely metal chassis and most non-Apple laptops are cheap plastic monstrosities.
I held out on Mac for 20 yrs, no idea what I was thinking.
> everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device
The X1 carbon we have in our house has a 13” 16:9 screen, which I hate.
OTOH Macbook Air not only runs cool even when you build stuff on it, but somehow manages to do so without any fans.
The ThinkPad X1 and Framework 13 have a much lower resolution display. Also, I appreciate Framework’s mission, but it’s not the build quality that I’m looking for.
Used to be primarily a Linux on the desktop user, but have been on macOS since the M1 air, and now typing this from a 14" M4 Pro MBP that will probably last me the next 5+ years easily.
I don't love macOS but it's usable, I pretty much live in the terminal anyway, and the ecosystem features are nice - I make heavy use of clipboard sharing between my laptop and phone, iMessage, and universal control with my iPad that's on my desk.
There's just no other laptop on the market that has this combination of aesthetics, performance, thermals (this thing is cool and silent), screen quality, top notch speakers and microphone for a laptop, and unmatched trackpad. Let alone anything that'll run Linux without some headaches.
I had hopes for the Snapdragon X elite laptops, but no Linux still, and they still don't hold a candle to the Macbooks.
It says a lot that probably the best in the space is the humble Raspberry Pi.
Sacrificing some of the Blade aesthetics for better thermals with Asus laptops was a game changer for me.
For competitors, spending a huge amount of money in R&D to try to compete with Apple, will be most likely at a loss. At least until some chip manufacturer (read: Intel) doesn't step up their game.
As a consequence, competition has moved to the middle-low quality segment, one in which they can still compete because of 2 main factors: Apple is not interested in that segment and most companies won't move away from Windows (even if they probably should).
You've got my curiosity..
> Oh, and battery life is 14-16 hours of use.
Oh. Now you've got my attention!
My coworker has one. It will probably be my next portable workstation.
Or the Intel Lunar Lake processor.
Both have extremely good laptop options - the Lenovo Yoga Aura edition is pretty much macbook quality.
And runs LLMs (https://github.com/intel/ipex-llm/blob/main/docs/mddocs/Over...)
People spent a decade upgrading laptops for a mere 5-10% increase in performance (sometimes less). I can't see someone giving up that much of a performance jump unless Windows is absolutely the only option.
- Time your purchase
- get coupons
- get a corporate discount if you can
to get them at a sane price
The 14.5 inch version is 1.6kg, 2TB, 2.9k resolution, also great design and build quality. $1700
https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/zenbook/zenbook-pr...
https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/zenbook/zenbook-pr...
Give it a read and do a simulation of how much it would cost you to replace the part that forced you to buy a new laptop.
https://system76.com/laptops
all these are likely cheaper per GB RAM and per TB SSD
Later I bought a new Malibal laptop, but mostly for the screen, usb-c ports and lower weight,but had to compromise on getting an unnecessary nVidia GPU that I just blacklist right away because the right laptop just didn't exist. I like the laptop, but I can't recommend Malibal laptops though, they are a weird company and getting things to work alright took way more effort than on my old XPS.
Apple Retina screens are all 1000cd/m2.
Good question and probably worth an article or two. My thinking is that Apple is designing silicon that makes for great laptops (M4 in this case) and then building around that. You will be hard pressed to find an x86-64 chipset that does what the Apple chipset does, and without that no matter what laptop you build around it is not going to be competitive. Nimbler companies like Framework are working with more speculative silicon (like the AMD Ryzen AI Max) which people like Dell and Lenovo won't do (yet?) But even there you get closer but not really close to something like the compute complex in the Macbook Air.
Mobile. A lot of games I played as a kid have mobile apps, and in some cases, I don't know if its the case for all of them, the userbase is mostly on their phones. I can only imagine this is the case for a lot of things.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the thinkpad x1 extreme laptop. It was basically the lenovo/thinkpad response to the xps 15. It's way thinner than the ThinkPad T16/P15 lines.
they claim it's a 16" laptop but only because they made the bezel smaller enough to fit a larger display in the same space.
it's usually mostly on par with the dell xps but i'm not sure about the specs though... my personal laptop is a rusty thinkpad x270 (i'm torn between the newly announced m4 macbook air or the upcoming framework 12) and i've been issued a m3 macbook pro for work.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/scc/scr/laptops/appref=xps-p... ?
Sure doesn't seem to be discontinued at all?
And just checking the XPS 14 it has both 2tb and 4tb storage options, and the 3.2k OLED screen is higher resolution than what Apple's 14" offering contains and it's 120hz.
Current models at the time of the announcement may still be produced and then inventories depleted, but those will be the last of them.
Here is what I am using right now from my fastfetch:
Display (SDC4193): 2880x1800 @ 90Hz [Built-in]
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics (16) @ 5.13 GHz'
GPU: AMD Device 15BF (VGA compatible) @ 0.80 GHz [Integrated]
Memory: ---- GiB / 58.51 GiB
Disk (/): ---- TiB / 1.82 TiB
You can even go cheaper and get a slower CPU as far as I know. And for that price apple doesn't give out that much RAM.
What requirement you have is not meet here?
I'm not a fan of OS X but seriously considering one of these just for the battery life and it-just-works portable computing.
Why get the lesser copy, when I can get the original at better price?
I believe all brands offer some laptops with hidpi screens.
The only part where Apple is unmatched is in battery life but you mention it is not a strong requirement.
Panasonic Let's Note. Your welcome.
It's repairable, upgradable, and has a *removable battery* (unheard of in 2025).
P1, P16s, T16, P14s
Most of which support:
- Up to 96 GB RAM
- 8 TB SSD (Dual slots)
- Upgradable memory and storage
- 4K OLED displays
- Excellent build quality
What more is needed?
There is a lot more to a good laptop than specs, and so far only Apple seems to really get that.
Makes zero sense to get a P series when you could get a Macbook
My hunch is that relaxing this seemingly arbitrary requirement will result in many suitable notebooks
I had an XPS 15 with 4k display in 2016, yet in 2025 it’s somehow difficult to find a laptop with that pixel density?
I wonder the same with phones actually, my Nexus 6P from 2015 (10 years ago!) had an amazing 518 ppi display. When the modem died I got a Pixel 2 which had only 441 ppi, and the display was a really noticeable downgrade, text looked significantly uglier, I could see the pixels and hinting artifacts again. I expected high pixel densities to become mainstream to the point where every screen has a density at the limit of what the human eye can perceive, yet here we are 10 years later, and Google’s flagship phones have only 495/486 ppi, worse than the Nexus 6P!
You do realize we had 1440p phones in 2015-2016 right?
HiDPI is not new, and it's clarity amazing. Stop buying huge low res screens for ripoff prices in 2025
I know this isn't your point but this is exactly why I don't use docker--but I'm a bit surprised to hear you mention `cargo build` as something that might fill up the disk. I've been a vocal critic of Rust on Hacker News in the past, but the one thing I always thought they did very, very well, was Cargo and the tight executables it produced for me.
Deleted Comment
I buy gaming laptops because they're the only powerful laptops and their size has never bothered me when traveling
I can do the same work on a MacBook Air when I'm away, and it's basically just a desktop when I'm home. To me it would make way more sense to have a desktop at home and a 12 - 14" laptop, if it wasn't for the cost of having both.
I have a gaming laptop, even 14", and I can't stand the boot up time and needing a thick power brick cable to get things going. I barely use it as a result and use my Steam Deck more.
Even an Air is too heavy IMO compared to say an LG Gram. But, I need the specs and the screen so I lug around a MacBook Pro 16" at 4.6lbs - often I have to lug around 2, my corp one and my personal one.
Given an iPad Pro 13" is 1.3lbs they "could" (for some definition of "could") make a 16" device with keyboard closer to 2 lbs.
1) Is 99% of the time actually on my lap when I'm using it. It's (usually) the one I take with me when I leave the house. I care very, very much about its size and weight. It's an M1 Air and I wouldn't mind if it was a bit smaller/lighter.
2) Is 99% of the time sitting on my desk, plugged into my KVM. It almost never leaves my house. I don't care how bulky it is. However, I prefer medium-ish form factors in case I do need to travel with it.
Any laptops I have over 2 will usually be in the 2nd bin, but sometimes the 1st.
Still MacBook is a better product for most use cases.
Happy with the build quality.
I know many people still love MacOS, but it lost me a few years ago. I've also, frankly, had much better milage out of Dell machines than Apple ones over the last ten years.
Dell XPS 13 isn't discontinued, its rebranding will be fully rolled out later this year
In the meantime Dell XPS 13s are currently available with 2TB and 64GB RAM (with a better screen than this Air I might add) and with a Snapdragon X Elite chip (which there are very few compatibility issues with in March 2025 even with gaming)
If its a 14 inch laptop you want XPS 14s are currently available with upto 4TB. They will also be rebranded later this year. They're on Intel chips and I'm hoping they will switch to Snapdragon on the rebrand to get the Apple like battery life
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/microsoft-surfac...
Wtf is with the downvotes? It literally hits every requirement he had, and the surface laptops are some of the best windows/nix laptops on the market.
If you want a nix experience, Linux support is still a WIP and progress is quite slow because of a lack of help from Snapdragon and OEMs. I expect that it might take a generation or two to get it to the point where it was with the x86 SLs.
However, at this stage, I'm tired of the quirks of Windows so the lack of
nix support pushed me to get the Macbook Air for myself.The iPad Pro proves that weight and battery life is no excuse here for the lack of state-of-the-art display tech in the MacBook Air. And as for cost — the base 14” MacBook Pro M4 (at $1600) isn’t significantly more expensive than the 15” MacBook Air M4 configured with same CPU/RAM/SSD (at $1400).
It’s really quite a shame that the iPad Pro hardware is in many way a better MacBook Air than the MacBook Air, crippled primarily by iOS rather than hardware.
Actual reputational damage is going on because of these poor decisions, I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share. They just look like old and slow phones to most normal people now, “look how nice and smooth it looks” is such an easy selling point compared to trying to pretend people care about whatever Apple Intelligence is.
Are they? I'm a tech person and I can barely notice it at all. And I don't think I have a single non-tech friend who is even aware of the concept of video refresh rate.
Whenever there's something that doesn't feel smooth about an interface, it's because the app/CPU isn't keeping up.
I've honestly never understood why anyone cares about more than 60hZ for screens, for general interfaces/scrolling.
(Unless it's about video game response time, but that's not about "running smoother".)
This is a feature that really only matters to the Hacker News crowd, and Apple is very aware of that. They invest their BOM into things the majority of people care about. And they do have the Pro Motion screens for the few that do.
Even I — an engineer - regularly move between my Pro Motion enabled iPhone and my regular 60Hz iPad and while I notice it a little, I really just don’t see why this is the one hill people choose to die on.
I only ever used Pixels as android phones, so my experience is limited to that.
Apple has >80% of the total operating profit in the smartphone market. The new entry level phone went up in price $200. Why do you think they do/should care about market share?
Things that never happened.
Lot of reasons to dislike. iPhone but this story isn’t true in the least.
https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-17-just-tipp...
Would be nice if the laptops followed suit
Literally the only people I know with non-iPhones are:
* People who can't afford one
* People who want a folding screen
* People who are conceptually anti-Apple
Apple have over 50% market share in the US, talking about "struggling to obtain new market share" seems bizarre.
>The screen quality is the only reason I currently use the Pro
Well why should they, you already bought the more expensive one.
(1) Windows these days feels like a constant battle against forcibly installed adware / malware.
(2) Linux would be great, but getting basic laptop essentials like reliable sleep/wake and power management to work even remotely well in Linux continues to be a painful losing battle.
(3) Apple’s M series chips’ performance and efficiency is still generations ahead of anyone else in the context of portable battery-powered fanless work; nobody else has yet come close to matching apple here, though there is hope Qualcomm will deliver more competition soon (if the silicon’s raw potential is not squandered by Microsoft).
Just because Apple’s competition has been complacent and lagging for many years, doesn’t render irrelevant any feedback to Apple regarding what professional laptop users would like.
Like how the MacBook Air was originally a premium-priced product instead of an entry-level product in Apple's lineup.
Apple seems quite content with making 120hz a feature of "Pro" models across the line (iPads, iPhones, Macs).
The truth of the matter is that Apple does not currently sell a single premium device. Every single one requires serious compromises.
It's frustrating because I'd prefer a lighter device. In fact, even the Air isn't that light compared to its competition.
I'd happily pay +$500 ($5300) for Macbook Air PRO if it was effectively the same specs as Macbook Pro but 1.5lbs lighter.
The MacBook Pro has an amazing screen, which is why I bought the MBP. But the MBP compromises increased weight (which I don’t want) in exchange for more performance (that I simply don’t need). And we know this compromise is not needed to host a better display, as evidenced by the existence of the iPad Pro.
Don’t get me wrong, the MacBook Pro is a fantastic product and I don’t regret buying it. It just feels like a huge missed opportunity on Apple’s part that their only ultra-lightweight laptop is so far behind in display tech vs their other non-laptop products (like the iPad Pro which is lighter still, just crippled due to iOS limitations).
I would gladly pay even more than the price of my MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air with a screen on par with the iPad Pro or MacBook Pro. Or even for an iPad Pro that runs OSX!
> I'd happily pay +$500 ($5300) for Macbook Air PRO if it was effectively the same specs as Macbook Pro but 1.5lbs lighter.
You basically want a macbook pro. I don't think it could be that thin with active cooling that such a configuration would require.
Wonder if we are going to see some changes here with the upcoming M5 models.
Considering the powerful hardware, the form factor and the good keyboard (I have a used Apple Magic Keyboard paired with our iPad Air M2), if I could virtualize an actual Linux distro to get some job done in the iPad it would be great. But no, you are restricted to a cripped version of UTM that can't even run JIT and because of that is really slow because of that.
Double the ram
And yet a complaining comment makes its way to the top. This blows my mind! People will literally complain no matter what
The current Air is great as an entry level device, but there is an underserved segment here.
Edit: to go to 32GB RAM is $400. To go to 1TB SSD is another $400. That is essentially doubling the $999 cost. $400 buys me between 4 and 6 1TB M.2 drives or 2-3 2TB M.2 drives.
You can AT WORST buy the storage OUTRIGHT for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE. But in most cases you can buy more than double what Apple is offering for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE.
I boycotted Apple for years because of these issues, but unfortunately I think this battle is lost. I gave up. I have a macbook Air. It is nice, but it is a glorified SSH machine. They must know this, because I'd prefer to get an iPad pro with a keyboard but run an actual fucking desktop OS. But then again, the fucking iPad isn't even good at the one thing it is supposed to be good at: writing... The 3rd party apps are leagues ahead of Apple Notes.
What I can't figure out is:
I actually wanted to get the notch back so I could have as much vertical screen real estate as possible and was disappointed to find that there doesn't appear to be any reliable way of doing this.
This review says it beats M3 by 2 hours: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/dell-xps-13-9350-review
A true portable laptop, one that can be used not just at home where lighting could perhaps be controlled, needs to by lightweight and have a non-reflective screen.
I just buy lots of storage on my desktop and access it remotely. Tailscale makes it easy to do so.
As for the laptops, probably not feasible.
I will say that unlike laptops/desktops I used to buy before I went Apple, I use them for a really long time. When I ran Windows, I'd upgrade every few years. I had my Mac Pro 2012 for 9 years before upgrading to a Studio. Yes, I maxed out the storage, and it was annoying how expensive, but amortized over 9 years? Not as bad.
EDIT: if I was purchasing a Studio now, I'd likely do the 3rd party upgrade to 8TB (what I saw in a YT video). That's double what my M1 Studio maxed out at.
So far I've decided that going forward I'll likely be getting a cheap baseline laptop (curretly eyeing a 16gb/512gb macbook air m4 or the upcoming framework 12) and then get some beefier desktop to remote into. i don't even need a gpu, the heavy stuff i do largely revolves around running virtual machines.
I did most of my work in a screen session running emacs on a 48cpu/192gb ram machine in a previous job, and I did some tests and remote desktop nowadays is pretty good (way above the "usable" threshold).
> That is essentially doubling the $999 cost.
yeah, it sucks.
[4] against, 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air
> Up to 23x faster than fastest Intel‑based MacBook Air
And right next to it:
> Up to 2x faster than MacBook Air (M1)
The footnotes are there to expand on the conditions of the measurements.
So not exactly misleading. On the contrary, it seems to me they’re quite clearly saying “if you have an Intel or M1 MacBook Air you have reason to upgrade. Otherwise, don’t”.
https://i.imgur.com/pEWPXzK.png
I'm reminded of 90s advertisements in which the new G3 processor was supposed to be so many times faster than the Pentium or even Pentium II. Their chosen benchmark: how long it takes to run a Photoshop plugin. On Mac OS pre-X, a Photoshop plugin got 100% of the CPU because there was no preemptive multitasking. Windows 9x versions of Photoshop had to share the CPU with whatever else was running.
If they'd just give me onboard mobile connectivity, I'd upgrade to the next Air sooner, otherwise this thing will run until it dies... and maybe some day they'll start comparing performance against their original M1.
Definitely. I have ZERO rational reasons to upgrade from my lowest-spec first-gen Air M1. I use it everyday and speed and battery life are still way more than I need.
yeah i just checked mine, it says MacBook Pro 16" 2019 and the cpu is an intel i7. i don't know what to say, it still meets all my requirements, i don't feel any need to upgrade.
Yeah, particularly for the Air that makes complete sense, though. Consumer laptops tend to get replaced pretty slowly. I'll be upgrading from a _2016_ MBP (though not to the Air, given the lack of the 120hz screen; going to go for the Pro).
But I am glad that they continue to refine the technology.
I don't even want that on my iPad Pro. I would rather tether it with my phone, mobile hotspot, or some other wifi connection.
1) Apple releases incremental upgrades! Why won't they make huge strides every year so I can upgrade!
2) People who upgrade every year are sheeps!
3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice! (yes, not Windows though).
4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!
Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.
"Hey, you noticed things are slow? Well, this thing is a lot faster" is pretty good marketing if it's true, nobody except the very wealthy are dropping thousands of euros/dollars on a new device for 10% performance gains, however if it's twenty-three times the performance of the Mac I currently own? Maybe it's enough to convince me or someone like my Mum to splurge on a new device.
Maybe my current Mac is not "good enough" anymore when 23x is the number on the box if I buy new.
It's fair to compare with devices that you expect actual people to actually upgrade from, there's a lot of Intel macbook airs in the field.
Heck, even some professionals are still on Intel macs: https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/25-of-...
> 3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice!
> 4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!
2 and 4 kind of contradict each other.
I wouldn't be surprised that the average upgrade cycle for a lot of folks is in that 3-5 year range, for both personal and corporate buyers.
It still makes claims like that arbitrary and meaningless. What does "23x faster" even mean, it's not like there are that many people who are upgrading from an Intel MBA yet are also fulltime Cinebench/etc. testers.
> It's fair to compare
Well yes. It's reasonably fair (realistically its not like any of those people this is targeted at would feel a difference between 10x, 15x or 30x) and obviously smart.
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
Hmmm... The M4 might be ten million times faster than the AGC, depending on the instructions per clock of the AGC and the VAXstation 4000/60 with which we're comparing it.
https://zia.io/notice/ApcPNCgTyrYXpUQU2S
I've got an M1 Air and there's still no really compelling reason to upgrade. MagSafe and a nicer camera don't really justify it, especially when Continuity Camera is better than on the M1 or M4.
These days, it's an anti-feature. I have USB-C for everything, why would I give that up?
Does this mean it's 23x faster for normal workloads? Nah.
Apple when they were pumping clang were also claiming that binaries produced with clang were much faster than those made with gcc. This was because they used a 15 years old version of gcc that didn't have any vector instructions (because they didn't exist at the time) and benchmarking using some code that was solely doing vector stuff.
In short, they don't lie, but it's a lie :D
Up to 23x faster. Of course, the fastest Intel MacBook Air is pretty old. But 23X is pretty crazy, right? I wonder what they are comparing against. Int-8 matrix multiplications or something else that’s gotten acceleration lately, maybe?
(Anyway, I just ordered one for my wife, a soon-to-be-ex-intel-mac user. She'll probably be pretty happy about this, especially since she doesn't have an intel air as powerful as that one.)
M3 1.6x faster than M1 (1 year ago).
= M4 1.2x faster than M3.
not bad, but Moore's law is dead for CPUs.
/typed from my Macbook Pro M4 — Love Apple — This is great!
When people put their hands on the real device, it was slaying almost everything on the market and soon it was clear that this thing is a revolution.
You don't one up this easily. Apple claims 2X performance improvement over M1 Air and I am sure its mostly true but that M1 Air was so ahead that for a lot of people workloads didn't catch up yet.
At this very moment I have 3 Xcode projects open, Safari has 147 tabs open and its consuming 11GB of my 16GB Ram and my SSD lifetime dropped to 98% due to frequent swap hits and yet I'm perfectly fine with the performance at this very moment and I'm not looking for immediate replacement.
Maybe this is just me managing my ADHD, but when I see people with hundreds of tabs open I just can't imagine how they work. Every tab has been mashed down to its favicon and I watch them struggle to find the right one. It seems insane to me.
So yea, same.
There was never a time when laptops were expected to last 10+ years.
But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.
I am fine(ish) with the above setup, I don't know what you are talking about. 8Gb is plenty for website browsing.
Apple Intelligence isn't it - it's just playing catch-up with a market that tries to slap AI onto everything it can think of.
The hardware upgrades are always nice but there's nothing 'out there' like a touch bar or even a 'dynamic island'. Just more safe iterations.
And why did Apple do all this? To increase the Average Selling Price ("ASP") of Macs. That's literally it.
the new M4 Macbook Air for $999 is incredible value and that's what I want the Air to be: a good compromise of power and price. For example, the 12" Macbook made too compromises to be just a little bit thinner.
I recall the amount of hate touch bar got on HN and everyone asking Apple to revert back to building normal machines (which they did with Macbook Pro).
Hence, innovation. Now you just get risk-averse updates that offer little reason to upgrade from previous models.
It's even better on the 2019+ models when they brought back the escape key.
I would agree that the added expense of that oled touchscreen isn't worth it tho. The M series Macs often go on sale at pretty large discounts (seemingly even more than the Intel Macs), and removing the oled touchscreen and the T2 chip that controlled it probably contributes to that.
Before this laptops were simply things that were small enough that you could carry one from point A to point B, but they were still effectively tethered to a wall and desk for any non-trivial usecases.
The only thing I'd want is something that'd make it last even longer like waterproofing the top keyboard layer.
Of course iPods became very popular because they put it all in a package that gave it a UX that non-nerds wanted to use. The flash drive style MP3 players… had tiny capacities, they had to be “managed” by the users. iPods, just dump your whole hard drive on the thing. That solid state memory is much better in a mobile device… I mean, my Sandisk player, I’ll give it an A+ on reliability. C- on capacity. Apple always gets a B in every field.
Their next thing was supposed to be VR. But nobody could find an application for VR, so Apple’s gimmick of taking something with a perfect idea and making a copy that is almost as good at the thing it does right, but which doesn’t have any massive downsides, didn’t work.
They are in a tough spot now, the tech sector seems to have lost its dreamers and so nobody is making these A+/C- devices for them to level out.
Of course, the VR thing is a remarkably well engineered thing nobody needs.
Last time people cried for Apple to innovate they added the touch bar to laptops. Computers (and phones) are a mature product category where I don't want innovation, I just want them to be functional.
That seems like a pretty big deal to me?
I think a macbook with a much better front facing camera would be good, teleconferencing is a multiple times a day use case for us. They did an in-between with the system that allows you to use your iphone camera(s) which do support more wide angles, but that doesn't work on my current work laptop as it's locked down and I'd have to lock down my personal iphone as well if I want the two to connect.
I ended up having to disable almost the whole bar to keep it from happening, just fill it with "blank" zones.
I also can't reliably drag-n-drop with force-sensitivity turned on for the touchpad, so there's another "innovation" I have to turn off. I don't even have, like, dexterity issues or a disability or something, but it makes it so damn fiddly that my drag-n-drops drop too early about half the time.
Ah maybe RISC-V! Wouldn't that be fun
It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips?
Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice?
UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.
If you are doing normal developer things, the MacBook Air is 100% fine. I use mine daily (M3 Air 13in, 24GB RAM), it handles Rails + Postgres, it handles JS (Next.js + React), it handles Flutter (for desktop and mobile), it handles IntelliJ and RubyMine and DataGrip, it handles Android Studio and Xcode for iOS apps -- including Android/iPhone software emulators. I can load up large Docker projects with 12+ containers, totally fine. I occasionally play with LM Studio, no issues.
Under all of the above, no throttling, no heat issues, works fine on laps, etc. Half the time, it's barely warm to the touch.
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The only time it gets hot for me, is running the CPU + GPU max'd out hard, for long periods of time. If I try to run FF14 or Warframe via Crossover/Codeweavers for an hour or two, for example, it gets warm and throttles a bit. (Still works, no crashes, no issues, but it does get warm and throttle).
99%+ of developers are fine with a MacBook Air.
I eventually got the M1 Air for serious ocaml and rust development and found it would get quite toasty (tho never concerning) during big compile/test cycles, but generally only over several dozen seconds of full load.
I upgraded to a 14” pro with an M2 Max and am reasonably happy with it and think it was an important upgrade for my productivity. In daily use, fans kick in rarely but when needed for a speciality job like TLA model checking, they can reject a lot of heat (= performance margin). Of course it would be nice if it weighed less (mine is 1.8kg after including a case), but as a side benefit the machine can play games (even emulated x86 ones inside Parallels!) so it’s hard to say I’m worse off than my previous status quo of VSCode remoting into my big Linux desktop :)
Nothing else seems to make it sweat. Just games and presumably mining Bitcoin or other very intensive tasks.
Devs/Gamers should always go for a Pro machine.
The laptop never got hot, game never stuttered (beyond NMS glitching engine which exists on windows too). Slight bit of increased warmth, but my phones gotten hotter browsing bloated websites.
I don’t blame Microsoft for looking at bailing on consoles. iPhones will be more powerful in a couple more cycles.
I’ll try to replicate the test with an M3 13” vs the 15” touchbar intel. Don’t have my MBPs at work.
Depends on how much you care about the last bit of performance and how often you expect running into throttling. In my experience, it takes the M2 Pro multiple minutes of full load before the fan starts. I do a lot of Rust programming on smaller projects and I think the air would have been fine for me. Compilation takes at most a few minutes on the first run. For doing larger projects like LLVM, the pro is a better option. MLIR took 10 minutes to compile each time I pulled in new commits on main. Then throttling becomes an issue.
Struggle as in the build takes 3+ mins
In general though it's cool, maybe when charging it gets warm but I use it on a desk mostly
A general gripe I have switching devices is the keyboard layout ha cmd+c vs. ctrl+c
Stick to an ext keyboard I guess
Edit: 16GB RAM is what I have I sometimes get the "out of application memory" message
Anyway I use my computer for freelancing/working on multiple platforms, it was a good buy (used), alternatively I could have went with a mini but that screen is so good on a mac (although I develop with an ultrawide external monitor).
It's basically the same without the fan noise, it's a lot cooler, and it seems to handle whatever tasks I throw at it just fine.
I would probably go with the Air if I was a project manager, development manager, or someone that did not have to do much work with code.
However, it is surprisingly functional and I don’t strictly need any additional ram, which was surprising to me.
Never noticed any thermal issues at all. It barely gets warm for me.
Make sure to get at least 16GB RAM.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/30/24270669/apple-macbook-p...
So if you’re not gaming nor have tons of UI windows open (since macOS UI is rendered with GPU) - you’ll never experience your M-series getting hot.
No complaints whatsoever.
Never heard the fan come on a single time with either machine while developing. Heat has never been an issue. Battery life is superb on both. Pro has better screen but is way heavier. Air is much nicer to bring to a cafe.
The only time I've ever heard the fan come on is when playing 3d games, especially non-native Apple Silicon games.
If I were getting one only for development, I'd get an Air. If it were meant to be a desktop replacement workstation for work and gaming and movies and such, then the Pro.
Both are easily more than fast enough for web dev. Not sure about other stacks (especially with heavy compiles or virtualization). I have a few services in Docker and that's fine (on both machines).
It's just so so much better than the shitty old Wintel days that I don't even worry about it anymore. Lightyears ahead of any ThinkPad or Latitude, etc.