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New MacBook Air

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Re: New MacBook Air

#461

Post by modeless »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #231
Plyphon_ wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> You can actually just tap the volume icon on the Touch Bar and slide your finger back and forth immediately

No you can't! There is a pretty long delay. If you move your finger during the delay, nothing happens. Then when it finally decides to switch modes, you have to move your finger again for it to change the volume. Hope you didn't hit the edge of the touchbar yet. Combined with the phantom button presses when using the top row of the keyboard, especially the Siri button, plus other small issues, the whole thing is bafflingly terrible.

Re: New MacBook Air

#462

Post by PHGamer »

hows the disk on the air? I thought I heard somewhere the disk was was a weaker one, maybe that was the normal macbooks?

Also how bad or good would the performance be on an air to develop ipod/iphone style apps?

Re: New MacBook Air

#463

Post by hijp »

Damn, this leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because I bought a Macbook Air in September for $1,800 and it's performed terribly.

I can barely compile Gatsby sites and it struggles on displaying Apple's own marketing pages (that run fine on my ipad and iphone).

Even more, you can only trade in up to the 2018 Macbook Air, which means I'm stuck with this lemon.

Re: New MacBook Air

#465

Post by saagarjha »

vbezhenar wrote: post #440
Silhouette wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why does it matter when you can afford that RAM? Just buy and forget about it, it's cheap enough. We used to land to the moon with CPU less performant than Apple's HDMI adapter cable, it's fun comparison but not very useful, that's just the way things are and it's not going to change anytime soon.

> Why does it matter when you can afford that RAM?

Why should everyone have to afford that RAM?

Re: New MacBook Air

#466

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.

Speaking of which -- how does one go about buying an QWERTY layout XPS 13 dev edition with ubuntu in Germany? Navigating teh dell website is impossible to find it -- I just find the windows based units.

Re: New MacBook Air

#467

Post by Zarel »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #411
pwinnski wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

They refined the scissor mechanism. It's an improved scissor mechanism with better key stability than previous scissor keyboards on their laptops (so sort of the "best of both worlds" between the butterfly keyboard and their old scissor keyboard). The new mechanism is also used in the Magic Keyboard and 16" MacBook Pro.

Re: New MacBook Air

#469

Post by semi-extrinsic »

VLM wrote: post #452
tommoor wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

programming != running a text editor. A lot of usecases involve running a replication of the server environment locally in resource intensive containers

I'm lucky to have development access to a small slice of a very large vmware cluster. I'm surprised no one else operates this way. The performance gains are immense.

Or how about just having a workstation at work? E.g. the Dell XPS 15 is a very popular laptop, but an equivalent cost workstation is around 8x faster for sustained well-parallelizable loads. Use a KVM switch with your work monitor, or use it as a headless server, do whatever. Want to work on machine learning stuff? Throw in an RTX 2080 Ti, off you go, never worry about cloud costs. Are you I/O bound? RAID0 off a couple NVMe drives.

It's immensely flexible and I'm surprised it's not more common.

Re: New MacBook Air

#470

Post by aledalgrande »

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…

I find it a bit opaque that they do not advertise exactly which series/gen they are putting on the machine. Can't find it even on the Tech Specs page.
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