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The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

bou.ke

61–70 of 348 posts

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#61

Yeah, right - if you choose to ignore the following: You can't upgrade the RAM, you can't upgrade the SSD, it doesn't have replaceable battery and you are forced to run a crippled OS on it (macOS Big Sur deliberately cripples VPN and firewall on it so that select Apple softwares can bypass them, allowing Apple better access and control over your data and softwares). (And if you don't care about any of the above, then…

OP: "In-N-Out is my favorite fast food restaurant." You: "No, you're wrong."

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#62

Not to invalidate the author's enjoyment of his own purchase, but it would be nice if he clarified which computers he had owned in the past

> The performance feels a lot better than my MacBook Pro 16”, which is only a year old and about 3x the price. Last sentence of the first paragraph

I was issued the 16" last gen Intel MacBook pro at last job (new job I'm back on whatever I want) and it was a seriously underwhelming experience for 3K's worth of hardware, screen was good, touchpad was sublime -everything else was crap.

Battery life was mediocre (worse still if you actually use it), it got ridiculously hot under load, the fans where really loud and pitched at a frequency it was hard to ignore - I'd have put it down to a bad unit but everyone else with the same model had the same issues.

It was fine but for double good thinkpad money it wasn't fine enough.

I was glad to hand it back, new place doesn't care what I run so I'm back on Fedora on a fast desktop and I'm happy again, I still have a work issued macbook pro but it sits on a shelf behind me until I need to test something.

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#63

Except the interface which has been designed for touch interfaces without having any touch capability on the Mac, for the sake of "design unity" bullshit. You can't have M1 without macOS Big Sur. Not only on macOS, but generally the entire web is mobile-first and desktop-last philosophy.

Blatantly false assertion. No touch design changes in Big Sur, confirmed by Hair Force One.

The following explains and illustrates the problems with macOS and how they've shoehorned design changes that do not belong to Desktop environments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXG5REBi2fo

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#66

In my experience, the latest computer I buy is always "the best computer I've ever owned". They get better every year, why is this still surprising?

Uh the dell xps 13 I bought in 2016 definitely refutes this experience. That machines touchpad singularly ruined the experience. It’d ghost swipe in strange ways. It was very user hostile. Also there’s the long stagnation of performance during the previous decade.

But generally I agree with you. I just think it’s important to remember it’s not all been a monotonic function of good.

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#67
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, why not an external monitor? I have the M1 13 for on the go. An external monitor for day to day.

The 16" MBP is terrible with an external monitor (or at least mine is with my external monitor). Fans spin up like crazy and the case gets hot enough to fry an egg on. It's the one terrible weakness of an otherwise great machine.

Had the same issue. I sold my 16" MBP and moved to the 13" M1 MBP. Performance is comparable (if not slightly better) and the fans almost never go on unless I'm compiling code and maxing out all cores.

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#69

Yeah, right - if you choose to ignore the following: You can't upgrade the RAM, you can't upgrade the SSD, it doesn't have replaceable battery and you are forced to run a crippled OS on it (macOS Big Sur deliberately cripples VPN and firewall on it so that select Apple softwares can bypass them, allowing Apple better access and control over your data and softwares). (And if you don't care about any of the above, then…

It seems weird to me that someone on HN would declare a computer that doesn't run Linux the best computer

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#70

In my experience, the latest computer I buy is always "the best computer I've ever owned". They get better every year, why is this still surprising?

> They get better every year, why is this still surprising?

If my pre-butterfly keys MacBook stopped working some time between 2015 and 2019, and I had to get a replacement, I wouldn't consider the MacBooks produced during that era to be "better".

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