Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New MacBook Air

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 587 posts

Re: New MacBook Air

#381

Post by _bxg1 »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #367
_bxg1 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recently upgraded from my 2015 15 inch MBP to the new 16 inch MBP (32 gigs of ram) Hah, that's exactly the upgrade I made except from a 2013 > Having to look at the keyboard to change volume is not an upgrade in user experience Agreed; I wouldn't call the touch bar an upgrade, just a very tiny downgrade that doesn't matter much with the Escape key now separated back out > The touchbar freezes for me once a week or…

nice... thank you for finally help me get rid of those ridiculous application specific buttons.

You can also go even further and do basically whatever you want with the touch bar if you use third-party tools like BetterTouchTool. Making your own buttons with your own icons, mapping them to scripts, whatever. I haven't gone that far myself but it's an option

Re: New MacBook Air

#382

Post by trollied »

zarmin wrote: post #119
geerlingguy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still mis-hit one of the arrow keys about 20% of the time with the annoying 'full size left and right' arrow key arrangement. Going back to inverted-T makes perfect sense. It was an experiment that failed.

It was an awful experiment that should have never left the lab. What could possibly have been the thinking for the entire butterfly/touchbar line, "People should be looking at the keyboard more when they type. Also, there's not nearly enough wrist pain going around. I wonder what important part of the Macbook we can ruin to address both of these problems."

I suspect they're slowly fixing all of the things that Jony Ive wouldn't allow them to change back. No more brutal "form over function".

Re: New MacBook Air

#383

Post by lliamander »

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…

I'm using a 4-year-old Thinkpad with a dual core U-series i7 and 32GB or RAM. The results are...adequate.

A typical compile for me takes about twice as long compared to colleagues with newer H-series processors, but the individual projects are pretty small so that often isn't a huge deal.

However, once you try and run nearly a dozen docker containers for local testing, things slow down quite a bit. Multitasking while those tests are running is very difficult.

Re: New MacBook Air

#384

Post by chrisseaton »

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…

I thought the same thing, but then I got a MacBook Air and couldn't believe how slow it was in practice. I didn't know if it was thermals or memory bandwidth or something, but Java compiles which used to take 5 minutes would suddenly take 30 minutes and it just wasn't even really tractable to use.

Re: New MacBook Air

#386

Post by chrisseaton »

dimitar wrote: post #289
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…

If you are running something computationally intensive isn't a desktop more suitable? 45W will get your laptop pretty warm and noisy and will drain your battery.

> 45W will get your laptop pretty warm and noisy and will drain your battery.

So put it on a stand and plug it in? Problem solved.

Re: New MacBook Air

#387

Post by jyrkesh »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #274
geodel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whole world seems to be celebrating that Javascript desktop turds runs 10 times slower and consumes 10 times more resources than 20 year old native applications. So I guess everything is worth celebrating.

In the olden days, we complained about apps that used all our ram. Nowadays, we complain about Firefox or proprietary web browsers using all our ram, when in reality they're doing the best they can. The task manager can't show users who's actually to blame, so lazy devs get the glory while hardworking browser developers cop the flack.

Except that when I use the old apps that used to use all my RAM, now they don't because I have more RAM.

I don't blame the browser vendors (except maybe that V8 made JS juuuuuust good enough to make something like Node viable). They took a thing that run slow for everyone, and they made it faster.

I do blame application developers for writing everything to the web because it's there. There's instances of folks doing better than most in Electron/JS land, but it's still nothing close to the native or even managed Java/C# apps of yesteryear.

Really I should just link to my last Electron rant, seems like they're getting closer together nowadays... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22598148

Re: New MacBook Air

#388

Post by lliamander »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #370
dimitar wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are running something computationally intensive isn't a desktop more suitable? 45W will get your laptop pretty warm and noisy and will drain your battery.

I'm on a 7200u (i5, 15W) and I could really use the extra oomph (rounding things, it'd be 40% extra performance assuming a cubed increase in power consumption vs performance improvement -- which is pretty close to what I've seen in practice) of it being 45W. Been looking at the newer gaming notebooks, and I'm waiting the "real world confrontation" of 10th generation i7s (specially those that have AVX512) vs Renoir (l…

You might be interested in the ThinkPad P1 (Gen 2). It has the option of not including a dedicated GPU, which will save a considerable amount on battery power, while still packing in a 6-core i7 H-series processor.

But I am also interested in the upcoming processor generations.

Re: New MacBook Air

#389

Post by Fredej »

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…

Yeah, I'm writing C++ on a 2013 Macbook Air. This would be a _huge_ upgrade for me.

Re: New MacBook Air

#390

Post by iamben »

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…

Can someone explain chip speed and relevance in a way I'd understand pretty please? I dialled out of this stuff years ago - at a point when bigger numbers just meant better, but now they just seem the same?

I'm still using a 2013 MBA as my primary machine day to day. It has an i7 and 8gb of RAM. I've been waiting for the keyboard change before I upgraded, but today I see my options are i5 and i7 (as 2013). I'd get 16gb of RAM, but literally have no clue about the chip stuff. I'm assuming we've moved on somewhat from 2013?!

Any help much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Post reply on HN