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New MacBook Air

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Re: New MacBook Air

#261
post #81

- Quad core processor - Scissor keys - No touch bar MacBook Air, the new MacBook for Pros.

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.

It's a mandatory and expensive feature.

Re: New MacBook Air

#262
post #19

The refined scissor mechanism with 1 mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience. The inverted-T arrow keys help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets, or game environments. This isn't progress. This is the baseline. Apple have gone from bad to OK, and they're celebrating as though they've achieved something amazing.

It's amazing how well received the "I'm cynical and world-weary" angle plays on Hacker News.

"This is the baseline. Apple have gone from bad to OK"

Apple's scissor keyboard is pretty broadly considered the best in the industry by a country mile. Their butterfly mechanism was a bad misstep (I mean...almost indistinguishable from my Yoga 720, but compared to prior Apple keyboards), but saying that they went from "bad" to "OK" is just nonsense.

"and they're celebrating"

Advertising doing what advertising does. So brave on HN to point out that marketing is marketing-ee. Are you also telling me that the new car isn't going to make me an adventure seeking extrovert?

Re: New MacBook Air

#263

After using the latest Macbook Pro 13" for over a year I have recently had my 2015 Macbook Pro 13" repaired. Both are max specs. It was a $600 bill, but it has been so worth it. The keyboard just works, it doesn't run hot and the fan doesn't blast under the slightest load, the performance is much better, the battery lasts longer and the external screen + keyboard and mouse are detected every single time without havin…

Ha-ha, reading this from the 2015 MPRO 13", exact same experience. I've tried to move to DELL XPS 13 2 years ago on Linux, did not work for me, however with a new line of Dell's I am starting to thinking about repeating this experiment. Apple's 2016-2019 laptops were pretty unusable, hope they revert the touchbar too.. A question, has anybody tried System76 comparing to Dell/Apple?

I'm actually thinking of doing the same thing. Why didn't it work for you the first time around?

Re: New MacBook Air

#264
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all (most of us anyway) wanted them to go back to the scissor design. Are we going to now complain that they did what the community has been begging them to do? Was butterfly a mistake? Yes. Were they slow to correct the issue? Yes. Now that they fixed it we should be happy about it. As far as talking about it being amazing, its called marketing spin. This is how it works. However, those two sentences do not say a…

They deserve flak and they are getting it. It doesn’t have to be logical. It is emotional. They also created an emotional brand. Somehow I think Apple can handle it. Anyone wasting energy complaining is only doing so because they are waiting to buy again. It makes as much sense defending them as it does yelling at them about a keyboard.

I held off buying a new MBP replacement for two years now thanks to the massive criticism over the butterfly fiasco. I'd say the complaining was useful and had an impact. Not wasteful at all.

Re: New MacBook Air

#265
post #19

The refined scissor mechanism with 1 mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience. The inverted-T arrow keys help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets, or game environments. This isn't progress. This is the baseline. Apple have gone from bad to OK, and they're celebrating as though they've achieved something amazing.

They've turned around. That is amazing for any company, especially apple.

Re: New MacBook Air

#266
Keep in mind that probably the most important spec when considering a new laptop is one that is often not directly stated: the processor series.

I'm not talking about i3/i5/i7, but rather U/Y/H. This letter determines the TDP (thermal design power/point) them machine is designed to run at. The TDP will govern the setting for the base clock speed, and, just as importantly, the throttling behabior under load.

Processor series TDPs are Y: 4.5W, U: 15W, H: 45W.

The new MacBook Air appears to have a Y series processor, like the MacBook, which means it will be aggressively throttled to keep power consumption and heat generation low.

Practically, that means that the new Air will not be capable of running sustained workloads much above its base clock speed, which makes it unsuitable for many programming-related tasks.

The Pro is still a much better choice for programmers. The 13 is suitable for many things, but the 16, with the H series processor, is really preferred for computationally intensive work.

You can get away with this machine if your workflow primary involves a text editor and remote servers, but otherwise I would still opt for the pro.

Re: New MacBook Air

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not well-versed at all in Go and Kubernetes? Isn’t the large RAM usage from the usage of containers? Is Go a memory-hog?

Its a GC language, so yes it needs more than C++, but less than Java. I believe that is because often structs can live on the stack.

Re: New MacBook Air

#268

After using the latest Macbook Pro 13" for over a year I have recently had my 2015 Macbook Pro 13" repaired. Both are max specs. It was a $600 bill, but it has been so worth it. The keyboard just works, it doesn't run hot and the fan doesn't blast under the slightest load, the performance is much better, the battery lasts longer and the external screen + keyboard and mouse are detected every single time without havin…

Ha-ha, reading this from the 2015 MPRO 13", exact same experience. I've tried to move to DELL XPS 13 2 years ago on Linux, did not work for me, however with a new line of Dell's I am starting to thinking about repeating this experiment. Apple's 2016-2019 laptops were pretty unusable, hope they revert the touchbar too.. A question, has anybody tried System76 comparing to Dell/Apple?

I am thinking of going to Dell from an 2014 MBP, what did not work with Dell on your last experiment?

The latest XPSs look very nice.

Re: New MacBook Air

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha-ha, reading this from the 2015 MPRO 13", exact same experience. I've tried to move to DELL XPS 13 2 years ago on Linux, did not work for me, however with a new line of Dell's I am starting to thinking about repeating this experiment. Apple's 2016-2019 laptops were pretty unusable, hope they revert the touchbar too.. A question, has anybody tried System76 comparing to Dell/Apple?

I'm actually thinking of doing the same thing. Why didn't it work for you the first time around?

Meh, the camera was on the left bottom side of the screen. On every online meeting, I was looking like a parent talking to kids from the corner :D

Also, I had a windows edition which works pretty bad with linux. A friend of mine got a new Linux edition with fixed camera and I think perfect XPS is 15" 32Gb for linux. That's my alternative #1

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