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New MacBook Air

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Re: New MacBook Air

#231

Post by chipotle_coyote »

Plyphon_ wrote: post #220
mFixman wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly never understood the hate for the touchbar. It allows me to be much more granular with volume and brightness, and I never really used F-keys anyway.

Volume adjustment is actually a great example of why I hate the touchbar. - I can't adjust the volume without looking at it. Because the touchbar is flat with no haptic feedback when I land on a button, it's hard to remember the exact position of the volume 'button' without looking. Sounds trivial - but combined with point 2.... - The way the volume control expands - it actually moves the 'volume down' button AWAY fr…

You can actually just tap the volume icon on the Touch Bar and slide your finger back and forth immediately and it works; you don't have to tap, then move your finger to the volume slider and move back and forth.

(This is clever, but basically undiscoverable unless someone tells you in, for example, a comment on Hacker News, which is how I found out.)

Re: New MacBook Air

#232

Post by altern8tif »

dbbk wrote: post #199
squiggleblaz wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does it say "we stuffed up, and in response to your feedback we've gone back to basics"? Sometimes, people want to hear acknowledgement of error.

Are you seriously expecting them to say "our previous product was bad, this one is good"? When has any tech company ever done that?

That takes courage.

Re: New MacBook Air

#233

Post by thomassharoon »

gigatexal wrote: post #196
parsimo2010 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This announcement should mean that the current 13" Pro will soon be replaced by a 14" Pro with magic keyboard and higher power processor options, otherwise there will be too much overlap between product lines. But Apple has been content in the past to have overlapping product lines, so they might not.

True -- the next few months should be really interesting in this space. I was thinking of ditching OS X entirely for a linux box but I can't get over how great the Mac hardware is -- it just doesn't run Linux all that well and costs an arm-and-a-leg such that buying one to nuke OS X just seems like a waste

Tried ditching OSX and moving to Ubuntu a 2020 Thinkpad X1 carbon G7. Gave up after I had to first update WiFi driver only to have sound break.

loved the hardware, but returned the box.

Re: New MacBook Air

#235

Post by inertiatic »

tomp wrote: post #175
saila wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're joking, but I have a 2018 Mac Mini with just 8GB of RAM, and I often run Eclipse, IntelliJ, and PyCharm at the same time (along with multiple browsers and other stuff), and performance is fine. I was actually surprised by this--when I first started using this computer, I thought for sure I would need to add more RAM, which for the 2018 model is too complicated to do yourself (at least to me it…

Semi-joking, but the problem is real for me. I've a 2013 13' MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM, and my system can't cope with my workflow ... tens of tabs in Safari, webapps in Chrome (YouTube, Google Docs, ...), Eclipse with Scala / Java, ... it's a huge struggle.

I was handed a 2017 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM at my current job while waiting for my actual laptop to be delivered, and it was a nightmare.

I keep a lot of tabs open to look things up, but nothing excessive on that machine. I also run VSCode or Pycharm and would also bring up 5-10 containers at times.

It seriously hurt not only my productivity but also my mood afterwards just by having to put up with it for weeks.

Unless you're a very basic user I don't get why you would settle for 8GB in 2020. 8 gigs of RAM cost basically nothing, it's not worth changing your workflow in the slightest to work around that artificial limitation.

Re: New MacBook Air

#236

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

Silhouette wrote: post #215
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I'm deciding between 32GB or even 64Gb, just to be on the safe side. Because nowadays you're running Slack, Spotify, several messengers, Firefox, Chrome, IntelliJ, Docker and Kubernetes on your local machine.

Which is kind of horrifying, if you stop and think about it. You're wondering whether you need another 32G of RAM to run a basic working environment, a glorified text editor, and some communications software. I used a BBC that could do that in 32K of RAM in the 1980s! Obviously I'm not really suggesting the functionality today is equivalent, but the idea that ultimately you're meeting the same basic needs yet it now…

Its certainly amazing how much memory consumption has grown. I like to think of it in terms of economics, we could never write today's software using 80s methods. Slack in assembler? Impossible. Kubernetes in C++? Maybe, but there will be security holes, and Go is just more productive. Developers are expensive, very expensive.

Re: New MacBook Air

#237

Post by shadytrees »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #212

Anybody know what's the cheapest setup you could get away with for iOS/xcode development? Would it be a (used) Macbook Air, or can you not really run xcode effectively on them?

It would definitely be painful to run XCode and iOS Simulator on a used MacBook Air, but not impossible. Price-wise, however, it's hard to beat a Hackintosh. Here, for example, is a $300 build: https://hackintosher.com/builds/cheap-hackinosh-2020-300-cat...

I remember being broke out of college and setting one up out of necessity. It's still going! I'm typing on it now. It needs a motherboard/processor upgrade, _maybe_, these days. Still one of the best cost-saving decisions I've made in my life. And it just plain feels good to not have to throw out / recycle a laptop every five years. They're terrible for the environment.

There are shops that will build the hardware for you. Setting up the bootloader is still the hardest part, but it gets easier with each iteration of the Hackintosh software ecosystem.

Re: New MacBook Air

#238

Post by jagger27 »

dbbk wrote: post #199
squiggleblaz wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does it say "we stuffed up, and in response to your feedback we've gone back to basics"? Sometimes, people want to hear acknowledgement of error.

Are you seriously expecting them to say "our previous product was bad, this one is good"? When has any tech company ever done that?

A good value trade in program would have been nice. I managed to sell my 2017 15” for a bit under $2000 CAD to upgrade to the current 16”. I would have rather dealt with Apple than deal with hagglers and low ballers.

Re: New MacBook Air

#239

Post by FpUser »

snemvalts wrote: post #37
solat wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this MBA turned out really well, current Windows featuring WSL2 is quite impressive though. Having a full Ubuntu or Debian on your machine is priceless. Or you develop on a remote server, then you just need a good terminal. So currently both macOS and Windows are good for JS dev. It's a matter of taste and price.

i think most people prefer to not sell their souls for advertising when it comes to their desktop environments.

I just looked at mine, no ads. In anyways I do not use start menu to launch apps. I just do Ctrl+Esc or Win key and proceed to type name of the app. 2-3 latters is normally enough to auto-fill result and off you go. I can't remember last time I used mouse to hunt apps in a menu
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