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New MacBook Air

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Re: New MacBook Air

#341

Post by dimitar »

dijit wrote: post #333
dimitar wrote: post #281

So I got a 2019 Air just before the COVID-19 emergency in my area. I was looking for a small and light machine to carry around, with a little bit of coding and browsing mostly. I would have probably picked the most basic retina model with the dual-core processor (not like my 15m load average is ever bigger than 2.5) - I don't know about the keyboard and the graphics though, they seem ok so far. Did I screw up? I don'…

if you contact them, they will likely upgrade it, Apple tends to let you bring a machine back if one has been released 3 months after you bought yours.

Does it work with resellers as well?

Re: New MacBook Air

#342

Post by marcus_holmes »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #27
cytzol wrote: 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.

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…

To be honest, yes, I'd like them to say "we messed up, and we finally recognised that, so we're fixing it".

I think it would be amazing if the most valuable, most design-focused company in the world admitted to everyone that they made a mistake. It would do a lot towards allowing everyone else to make mistakes without beating themselves up over it. After all, if the thousands of specialist engineers, paid billions in salaries, given the best equipment in the world, in a company that really (and I mean really) values design, can make a mistake, then it's kinda OK that your home page looks a little crappy on mobile.

Re: New MacBook Air

#343

Post by read_if_gay_ »

enraged_camel wrote: post #190
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because wasting energy on a 4 GHz base clock is completely pointless (and so is your criticism) if you can adjust frequency as needed. 99% of the time 1GHz is sufficient. It’s only when you launch the browser that a faster CPU is useful, not when you’re reading through a website

The problem is that it ramps up by 250 Mhz increments, over a period of several seconds, and that can be extremely noticeable in some workflows. I went from an 6700HQ (2.6 Ghz base) to a 10710U (1.1 Ghz base) and the difference is definitely there, and it's jarring enough to the point where I kind of regret it. It feels like a huge step backwards, despite the latter CPU being four generations ahead.

Surprising. What device are you using?

This does not seem to be the case for my i7-8565U nor my older m3-something. The 8565U for example feels just as snappy as my desktop i7-6700, except it’ll throttle after about 30s.

Re: New MacBook Air

#344

Post by gigatexal »

thomassharoon wrote: post #233
gigatexal wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sucks to hear. I was eyeing the T480s

Re: New MacBook Air

#345

Post by Scarbutt »

rpdillon wrote: post #338
Scarbutt wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Does that still holds when using the power adapter?

OP's comment was about thermal dissipation, which, if anything, would be a more difficult problem with the power adapter (since the processor doesn't need to be throttled to conserve battery, for example). So, yes.

Thanks, I guess the question then is, for how long can the mid and max clock rates be sustained.

Re: New MacBook Air

#346

Post by antirez »

I've a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) with an i7 at 3.3 Ghz. Is the new Air with a quadcore i7 going to be a decent CPU upgrade compared to what I got in practical terms, or should I wait for the next Macbook Pro? Consider that I don't want to go > 13" screen size. Thanks.

Relayed story: when I run the Redis test in my Macbook, it is able to stop everything, like if the kernel scheduler was not able to balance between the test and the other tasks, even if I've the Chorome window open and using it. If I open Virtual Box and run the test into a virtualized Linux system, the test runs in a similar time without any usability problem for the other Mac apps. This is how bad scheduling can go, but also how much more efficient the Linux implementation of certain system related stuff can be.

Re: New MacBook Air

#347

Post by gerardnll »

xenonite wrote: post #314
gerardnll wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm on a 2016 macbook air, 8gb RAM and doing web programming everyday. 3 phpstorm windows, sometimes Photoshop open, more than 20 tabs in Chrome, iterm, figma, paw... Honestly it runs pretty well and I was waiting for this update.

Lucky you, because yours still has a U processor, not a Y one.

I'll wait for some benchmarks then. Maybe there's not much improvement. I see Apple is comparing last model that had 2 cores with this new 4 cores and saying there's a 2x improvement.

Re: New MacBook Air

#348

Post by thedance »

ctvo wrote: post #322
pyrophane wrote: post #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…

This is underestimating modern processors and overestimating programming compute resource usage. Your post may apply if we're working with 4K+ resolution video files, rendering and other activities, but the modern programmer, even compiling binaries, will be fine on a MacBook Air. How do I know? I use a 2 generation old Macbook as my primary personal development machine. I write Go, Rust, Java and TypeScript using th…

Well my "programming laptop" spends all of its CPU these days on corporate garbage such as splunkd, which regularly melts down, some kind of corporate managed software updater which is terrible, Zoom, and trying to render dashboards from Grafana which is among the most flagrantly wasteful javascript hacks ever devised. It doesn't help me much that vim and screen are efficient.

Re: New MacBook Air

#349

Post by dijit »

dimitar wrote: post #341
dijit wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you contact them, they will likely upgrade it, Apple tends to let you bring a machine back if one has been released 3 months after you bought yours.

Does it work with resellers as well?

I genuinely don't know, I tend to avoid resellers. :\

Re: New MacBook Air

#350

Post by IggleSniggle »

johnchristopher wrote: post #210
dev_tty01 wrote: post #27

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…

> Did you really expect a bunch of public self-flaggelation? They are telling us clearly that they did what we asked for. Perfect. What ? No. They are telling us they refined it, not that they fixed their mistake. It's not perfect, it's lame and cheesy.

Does refined not mean that they took out some of the bad parts? That's about as close as you can get to admission of a fuckup as you can get in sales copy
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