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New MacBook Air with M2

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Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#381

Post by bdhess »

jmyeet wrote: post #355
marricks wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram, the college student with 50 tabs open and Spotify in the background? People complaining about low ram sound like the bros asking how many cylinders a car has. Doesn't matter for most people. Just complain about price, yeah, it is expensive! --- This is coming from someone who does light gaming on an 8gb m1 MacBook Air and has plenty of tabs open. I don't see lag. Then again, I…

Remember it's not 8gb of dedicated RAM. It's 8gb shared with the video subsystem. Let's see how far that goes when you plug it into a 4K monitor and/or do anything that requires GPU acceleration (which can include simply decoding video). I think 8gb is borderline criminally low in the circumstances. At least this thing has the option for 24gb though. I just wish that was a stocked model so you could just walk into a…

I use my 8 GB M1 Air with a 5K display regularly and the only situation where it struggles is gaming. Browsing with zillions of tabs, video, etc is beautiful and lag free.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#382

Post by adwww »

dewey wrote: post #328
Nursie wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram The developer for whom a macbook air brings a huge amount of power? I mean, they aren't low-end when compared to the general laptop market, they're awesome!

You responded to a comment about the "typical Air buyer". A developer is really not the typical Air buyer and more the target audience for a Pro line product even if that specific model is plenty fast.

I think the high price actually means that is a typical user. The original casual user type this has been designed for likely use iPads or Chromebooks at this point.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#383

Post by 1123581321 »

jmyeet wrote: post #355
marricks wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram, the college student with 50 tabs open and Spotify in the background? People complaining about low ram sound like the bros asking how many cylinders a car has. Doesn't matter for most people. Just complain about price, yeah, it is expensive! --- This is coming from someone who does light gaming on an 8gb m1 MacBook Air and has plenty of tabs open. I don't see lag. Then again, I…

Remember it's not 8gb of dedicated RAM. It's 8gb shared with the video subsystem. Let's see how far that goes when you plug it into a 4K monitor and/or do anything that requires GPU acceleration (which can include simply decoding video). I think 8gb is borderline criminally low in the circumstances. At least this thing has the option for 24gb though. I just wish that was a stocked model so you could just walk into a…

The SoC contains hardware decoders and external monitors don't require a lot of video memory per se.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#384

Post by Aperocky »

eropple wrote: post #354
marricks wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram, the college student with 50 tabs open and Spotify in the background? People complaining about low ram sound like the bros asking how many cylinders a car has. Doesn't matter for most people. Just complain about price, yeah, it is expensive! --- This is coming from someone who does light gaming on an 8gb m1 MacBook Air and has plenty of tabs open. I don't see lag. Then again, I…

Having had an M1 Air with 8GB of RAM--under very light use it was great, but under anything a little more taxing (a good number of tabs, having Discord open, a relatively "light" creative app like Logic or Fusion 360) it would very rapidly not just get bad, but get stop-the-world awful. (edit: and as a sibling poster notes, plugging it into an external monitor made things a lot worse!) I don't know if MacOS's low-RAM…

I have a M1 with 16G ram. I don't think 8GB ram is even feasible - and that's coming from a user whose primary interface is terminal.

16GB is great though, never had a problem with RAM issue.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#385

Post by [deleted] »

xbar wrote: post #257
DoughnutHole wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might be being hyperbolic, but the euro is definitely not doing too hot right now - it's gone from $1.18 to the euro a year ago to $1.02. The Air in the UK is £1,249, up from £999 - a 25% increase. The EU price is €1,500, up from €1,050 - a 43% increase. At least some of that has to be explained by the euro dropping ~14% against the dollar. Take away 14% from the EU price and you get €1,290 - pretty close to the U…

Here is an example of data abuse. You are comparing 2 different products' prices. The M2 Air is up £49 compared to its US counterpart. A ~5% increase. And its up €200 compared to its US counterpart. An ~18% increase. Exchange rates explain this easily.

[deleted]

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#386

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

whynaut wrote: post #375
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it as a “pronoun.” It makes it into a “person,” or some kind of major deal, like we call localities (usually) by their single pronouns. Sometimes, “The” becomes part of the pronoun, like “ The Netherlands,” or “ The Bronx.” Usually, though, we assign pronouns (I’m not an English major, though, so the proper term may be different). Like, you can’t have “a brooklyn,” or “an amsterdam.” They want to make it s…

The term you want is Proper Noun.

That makes sense.

Thanks!

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#387

Post by pen2l »

marricks wrote: post #312
Thaxll wrote: post #280

The pricing outside the US is outrageous though. Those are very expensive laptops. €1520 for the base version with only 8GB lol

Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram, the college student with 50 tabs open and Spotify in the background? People complaining about low ram sound like the bros asking how many cylinders a car has. Doesn't matter for most people. Just complain about price, yeah, it is expensive! --- This is coming from someone who does light gaming on an 8gb m1 MacBook Air and has plenty of tabs open. I don't see lag. Then again, I…

My super light and thin [1] Carbon X1 Thinkpad from about 5 years ago has 16gb ram, half TB SSD and still runs like a champ with 200 tabs open.

It's just strange to see a premium brand product not being able to compete with same-category class products from a half-decade ago.

[1]: Lighter, in fact, than this MB Air M2

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#388

Post by CharlesW »

staticfloat wrote: post #366
CharlesW wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MY only gripe with the M1 and M2 Air the lack of support for more than a single external screen. Officially Apple specs out a single external screen, but using DisplayPort you can do more. The video below shows how to connect an unreasonable number of external monitors to an Apple Silicon laptop, but a two-external-monitor configuration doesn't seem too crazy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jLAwSvs7vE

Small correction; it’s DisplayLink, not DisplayPort. You have to use DisplayLink because they do some part in software as a part of their driver (which you must download and install) whereas the native Apple stuff has some internal hardware limitation. I run three 1080p monitors off of my M1Pro, and I don’t notice any heavy CPU load from whatever software load the driver may be adding.

> Small correction; it’s DisplayLink, not DisplayPort.

Thanks, staticfloat and ksala_!

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#389

Post by Tagbert »

thathndude wrote: post #211
senttoschool wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For M1 owners, just wait for M3. It should be on TSMC 3nm which will be the next true node shrinkage.

Please post more of this. I need an angel on my shoulder whispering. I have a 16" with the Max chip, and yet . . .

Don’t worry there will be daily rumor stories posted here about the subject along with daily stories about how great recently announced X is. Your challenge is to sail between Scylla and Charybdis.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#390

Post by pletnes »

marricks wrote: post #312
Thaxll wrote: post #280

The pricing outside the US is outrageous though. Those are very expensive laptops. €1520 for the base version with only 8GB lol

Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram, the college student with 50 tabs open and Spotify in the background? People complaining about low ram sound like the bros asking how many cylinders a car has. Doesn't matter for most people. Just complain about price, yeah, it is expensive! --- This is coming from someone who does light gaming on an 8gb m1 MacBook Air and has plenty of tabs open. I don't see lag. Then again, I…

I disagree, RAM is super important. But I went from win10 with 32 GB + dedicated nvidia with 4 GB to M1 on a mbp with just 16 GB. The M1 is still so much faster it’s like swapping a forklift with a fighter jet. I don’t think the numbers are comparable without more analysis of the workload and OS. FWIW I’m doing coding and data analysis with python and 99 tabs in 3 different browsers on both machines.
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