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The 2020 MacBook Air

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Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#151

Post by snazz »

Scoundreller wrote: post #125
gowld wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Baseline Storage Macs don't have baseline storage! They have soldered-down sealed-in storage. Before that, it was fine to get minimal RAM and disk and upgrade it later, like every other OEM did to soak the whales without driving away cost-conscious consumers. Then the soldering-money-gun came and used artificially constrained RAM and SSD to enforce value-based pricing and profitably planned obsolescence.

And disappointing that they've removed the SD card slot. I have a nice adapter that sits flush on the Macbook air and holds an extra 128gb.

Is that at all comparable in speed to a SATA SSD? I know that Apple uses NVMe SSDs in MacBooks, but if something over the SD card bus were anywhere near the speed of any internal SSD that would be very impressive.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#152

Post by rconti »

sintaxi wrote: post #20
nicoburns wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much did the battery replacement cost? Mine's still ok, but it probably won't be long before I'd consider a replacement. But that does rather depend on the price...

I have replaced the battery in both my rMBP (2015). It costs about $100 and can be done yourself.

I did a DIY on my 2011 Air for $70ish and while it seemed to solve my problems at first, after a short while it seemed like every time i went to use the machine it was dead. (I only use it once every week or three). I'm not sure if it's not sleeping, or waking from sleep, or what. I use it too little to even troubleshoot. But that was enough to get me to pull the trigger on a new i9 Air yesterday.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#153

Post by snazz »

enraged_camel wrote: post #139
JohnTHaller wrote: post #19

Pro Tip: The MacBook Air line of today has taken over for the MacBook line of old. It's not like the original air which was so much thinner and lighter than everything else. Thickness of the 13" MacBook Air is 0.63" vs 0.59" of the 13" MacBook Pro and weight of the Air is 2.8lbs vs 3.0lbs for the Pro. The MacBook Air is the lower-end MacBook now.

>> Pro Tip: The MacBook Air line of today has taken over for the MacBook line of old. If that's the case, I'd like it to become as light as — or even lighter than — the old MacBook, which weighed merely 2.03 pounds. At this point, I'd love to have a Macbook Air with a battery that lasts "only" 6 hours, but weighs around 1.5 pounds. Hell, I'd pay extra for the option.

I think this is a decently unpopular opinion---6 hours of battery life is atrocious for the use case the Air is competing in.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#154

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

raverbashing wrote: post #126
thelittleone wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soldering SSD to MacBook Pro motherboard. Eliminating the ability to remove it when logic board dies and retrieve data with a Simple USB adapter.

Well, even if you could, I think Full Disk Encryption is on the T2 chip now. No way of reading the drive even if you remove it.

That's a different issue than the lack of expandability.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#155

Post by 0xff00ffee »

pjungwir wrote: post #129

I have a late 2013 Macbook Air and I love it. I do most of my work on a Xubuntu desktop, but the Air is great for travel, working outside, or carrying around the house. I use it every day. I bought it to replace a heavy plastic dual-boot Dell laptop that was falling apart. It felt weightless and the battery lasted 10+ hours. Every time I see a new Apple laptop now I dread that I'll have to go back to a non-Apple Linu…

Let's hear it for 2013 Macs!

My 2013 MBP is going strong. I do 100% of my work on this computer, and half of that is through AWS EC2 instances (x86 and ARM linux, and Windows for testing); if I need a local OS I run VMWare images of Ubuntu and Windows. I've had 0 issues with this computer. It really blows my mind how good it is.

By comparison: my first laptop was a Toshiba Portege (sic) in 1992 that was monochrome for about $4000... and then my various jobs usually gave me IBM Thinkpad / Lenovo thinkpads, buit would waterfall them routinely.

But my MBP2013? this is the longest I've owned any computer in my life (work or personal), and I have absolutely no reason to replace it.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#156

Post by snazz »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #146
ebg13 wrote: post #54

The only interesting part of this was the performance comparison chart showing that Apple's ARM chips from 2018 and 2019 are significantly faster than the 2020 Intel chip. MacBook Air 2020 (4-core Core i5) 1,127 2,854 11″ iPad Pro 2018 (8-core A12X) 1,118 4,477 iPhone 11 Pro (6-core A13) 1,321 3,387

Can the iPad and iPhone sustain the performance? I think that’s the kicker. Your regular laptop even an air will have a fan. The A series chips look amazing on paper but iPad and iPhones don’t have the cooling for sustained performance.

The 2016 MBP (the only one I've used) has very poor thermals too. The much lower TDP/benchmark point of the A series means that they're surprisingly competitive with the poorly-cooled MacBooks. If MacBooks of that era had better thermals, the Intel chip would blow it out of the water on sustained use.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#157

Post by andrekandre »

snazz wrote: post #153
enraged_camel wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Pro Tip: The MacBook Air line of today has taken over for the MacBook line of old. If that's the case, I'd like it to become as light as — or even lighter than — the old MacBook, which weighed merely 2.03 pounds. At this point, I'd love to have a Macbook Air with a battery that lasts "only" 6 hours, but weighs around 1.5 pounds. Hell, I'd pay extra for the option.

I think this is a decently unpopular opinion---6 hours of battery life is atrocious for the use case the Air is competing in.

maybe for the market of the air, but would definitely appreciate a lighter design option personally, so maybe there is probably a market for it, but maybe just not big enough for apple i guess

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#158

Post by vulcan01 »

thelittleone wrote: post #111
snazz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the kinds of people who wouldn’t be running Linux on the other laptops, maybe they just like macOS better than Windows? It’s not like Hackintoshing is trivial. It’s not necessarily a developer machine.

This is pretty much it. OSX is what locks me in to Apple. Ironic that it (OSX) is free.

Nitpicking, but I wouldn't necessarily consider it "free". There is a cost to get it, which is the price of your Mac.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#159

Post by kirstenbirgit »

aczerepinski wrote: post #123
scarface74 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $10,000 Gold first generation Apple Watch, the trash can Mac Pro, the 12” MacBook, and the dumpster fire last generation keyboards.

I disagree on the 12" MacBook. My wife has one and I think it's a fantastic product. With only 0.2 lbs separating the Air and Pro right now, I don't think both lines really need to exist. If they had kept iterating on the ultra-light MacBook it would be such a great product to recommend to parents, etc.

I think it's a big shame they're not making the 12" anymore. It's a perfect computer for lounging around on the sofa or on the go. The new Air actually feels a lot more heavy and cumbersome compared to it.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#160

Post by snazz »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #68
insaneirish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple couldn't just go for ARM they'd have to adapt their OS for that and I assume by now there is a lot of code in there making use of x86 quirks not easily adaptable to ARM If you think Apple doesn’t have macOS running on ARM today, then you’re probably missing something.

I guess it could make lots of sense for them to support ARM and build ARM-based devices, that said I'm not an Apple dev in any capacity so I don't know what's going on internally. But right now there is now ARM-based Apple device running MacOS, is there?

Ummm... iPhones? iOS and macOS share almost completely the same kernel (https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu).
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