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New MacBook Air

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Re: New MacBook Air

#411

Post by LeifCarrotson »

pwinnski wrote: post #122
GordonS wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the marketing copy most people are taking issue with with. They tried a new design, which was horrible to use and had a high failure rate. They continued to claim the new keyboard was amazing, and stubbornly continued to use this crappy keyboard long after the problems were apparent. And now they are touting a "normal" keyboard mechanism as if they've invented something new and wonderful... only Apple co…

"The refined scissor mechanism with 1 mm of travel delivers a responsive, comfortable, and quiet typing experience." What in that says "invented" "new" or even "wonderful?" It seems like you're reading into the text what isn't even there.

The previous sentence: "Now features the new Magic Keyboard."

"Refined" is also an adjective that has a definition close to "new and wonderful". It's not just a word to bring out an emotional response to make people feel like buying the thing.

Re: New MacBook Air

#412

Post by WillPostForFood »

Engineering-MD wrote: post #189
WillPostForFood wrote: post #181

What’s missing from Apple’s lineup now is an a lightweight option. This is almost a pound heavier than the discontinued 12” MacBook.

I think the new iPad Pro with trackpad is filling this gap.

I travel a lot and use a MacBook 12 for development. I like to keep it light, so the Air and MacBook Pro are too heavy, and the iPad pro doesn't work yet as a development platform.

Re: New MacBook Air

#413

Post by closetohome »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #280
endorphone wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

> 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? Why is that acceptable? If you lie or misrepresent the truth in almost any other field, you get criticised. But when marketers do it, they're immune. That's just weird.

False advertising is, in fact, illegal. If in your opinion they've crossed the line into actual factual inaccuracy, it's your right to take legal action against them, or request that your state's attorney general do so on your behalf.

Re: New MacBook Air

#414

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jbeales wrote: post #301
Kamshak wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming PHP you just described "a text editor and remote servers"

PhpStorm = Big, Java-based IDE. It's not some simple text editor. PHP Dev often means some sort of local server running too.

big complex IDEs are almost never compute bound.

compilers are often compute bound (certainly on SSDs).

web servers are almost never compute bound.

Re: New MacBook Air

#415

Post by vladgur »

just got a 2019 16in Macbook Pro with i7 & 16GB Ram at work and this thing flies. It is definitely faster than my personal 2013 i5 macbook pro with 8gb of ram, but im going to make it last through this recession for as long as i can. I am salivating over forthcoming 14in macbook pro though

Re: New MacBook Air

#416

Post by emerongi »

baddox wrote: post #408
geerlingguy wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't been forced to deploy something that builds a local K8s cluster and builds and runs 10+ containers just to get a microservices app up and ready for development, I see... (only partially /s).

It doesn't even take that much. Docker Desktop on MacOS is widely known to be terrible and have extremely poor performance. Running webpack-dev-server with filewatching through Docker nearly grinds my 2017 Macbook Pro to a halt. Obviously most node/webpack/JS stuff can run natively on Mac but it's not uncommon to see dev stacks that dockerize everything because that's how the production stack works.

I often have up to 10 VSCode editors, an IntelliJ window and two browser instances open.

Add some server processes, UI watchers/builders, and my Thinkpad starts to freeze up. In an ideal world, I would have a low-latency remote desktop going, but even in 2020 it seems like a pipe dream.

Re: New MacBook Air

#417

Post by closetohome »

chapium wrote: post #15
userbinator wrote: post #13

The inverted-T arrow keys help you fly through lines of code, spreadsheets, or game environments. That sentence made me check again... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macbook_white_redjar_2006... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacBook_Air_1b.jpg ...and yes, it's the same layout of the arrow keys that was there 14 years ago. If they were advertising new full size arrow keys that would definitely be worth mentio…

Anyone have experience with A) their keyboard holding back their performance, and B) their keyboard was also not a mac?

My new Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard comes with an "emoji" key in place of the right-hand Windows key that I can't remap.

Re: New MacBook Air

#418

Post by mm89 »

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 agree with you :) but let's not tell the employers who gladly buy the top-of-the-line models for their programmers ;) I am quite happy with my new 2020 MBP.

Re: New MacBook Air

#420

Post by vetinari »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #336
duiker101 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tried dual-booting an XPS15, which did not go well [0]. I understand the 13's are more Linux-compatible, but I got so badly annoyed by Dell Support I'm never buying Dell again. [0] the drive management software didn't like GRUB, and would complain that there was no drive if GRUB was installed. Repeated reboots later, it would suddenly say "oh look, a hard drive!" and boot into Windows, removing GRUB in the process.…

I suspect this would be due to mixing legacy and UEFI booting, where grub-legacy would interfere with whatever the disk management was doing and fixing it would involve removing grub.

For grub-uefi, it is just another file on a EFI system partition.

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