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New MacBook Air with M2

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Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#501

Post by z9znz »

wtallis wrote: post #398
z9znz wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not ram sticks, these are difference in the M2 chip itself. I'm not a chip designer, but I imagine there are more manufacturing quality challenges with the ones that have more RAM.

> These are not ram sticks, these are difference in the M2 chip itself. TSMC fabs don't make DRAM. Apple buys DRAM chips from the same handful of manufacturers that everyone else sources DRAM from.

I don't know much about this topic, but I have read that the RAM in M1/M2 machines is part of the Mx chip itself. Unless I misunderstand, I don't believe it's any kind of separate component - stick or otherwise.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#502

Post by pc86 »

michaelchisari wrote: post #493
pc86 wrote: post #401

I spent an embarrassing amount on a lackluster early 2019 MBP. It's fine as a general purpose laptop but is just a little too slow for serious dev work, a little too heavy as the main travel laptop, battery life a little too short for my liking. I got an M1 for my work laptop maybe 4 months ago and it might honestly be the best laptop I've ever used.

I got the M1 iMac with only 16gb RAM when it came out and it's incredible how fast it is. My previous machines were top-of-the-line intel Macs and the M1 blows them out of the water, performance-wise. I can buy the lowest-end M-series models from now on and feel confident I'll have more than enough power. Gonna save a lot of money going forward.

Yeah, basically same here. My work M1 is 16GB and the '19 Intel is basically maxed out, and I'd take the M1 any day.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#503

Post by rowanajmarshall »

PKop wrote: post #441
girishso wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that going to change anytime soon? Genuinely interested because all currencies, other than USD are depreciating.

Unless Western leaders or US particularly, want a severe global recession to persist, I think they will eventually pursue whatever means necessary to weaken $ and help Europe, rest of world, perhaps with a new "Plaza Accord" type arrangement[0]. This is if one believes they actually care about stabilizing European industry and economy and not rather that they are keen on seeing global chaos for a period of time and a…

> whatever means necessary to weaken $ and help Europe, rest of world

I might be misunderstanding something here, but wouldn't a weak dollar strengthen the US economy (in terms of exports) relative to other peer economies (e.g. Euro area, the UK, Japan)?

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#504

Post by alxlu »

Joeri wrote: post #472
MilaM wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the shared GPU memory, 8 GB is going to be very limiting going forward. Also, this Mac is very likely going to have the same slower SSD like the recently released 13 inch M2 MBP. This means you have to upgrade the SSD as well, if you care about performance. I would not recommend buying an MBA with base specs.

And once you spec it up to the 16 / 512 that it minimally needs to be for any serious work, you are close to the (now discounted) price for the base 14 inch macbook pro at third party resellers. This air is currently way overpriced. At the price it was released it should have had 512 gb storage, which also would have avoided the performance issues. It is still going to sell really well though, so maybe the previous m…

the air is thinner and lighter though. i think a lot of people (including myself) would consider that tradeoff worth it.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#505

Post by KennyBlanken »

ratww wrote: post #324
commandersaki wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What annoys me about MKBHD's video is that he complains about an ageing design like it's a bad thing for the general case. I laud any manufacturer that's come up with a time tested design that doesn't change, which is why the IBM Thinkpads of the day were so popular. But in this specific case, MKBHD is right, this is an Apple being lazy about design and probably reusing their existing parts and tooling just to slap o…

> What annoys me about MKBHD's video is that he complains about an ageing design like it's a bad thing for the general case. That's unfair. He does "complain" but praises Apple for sticking with it immediately afterwards, saying "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It is obvious he's playing two characters presenting different arguments.

The term is "brand safe" and it's how major influencers pander to corporations.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#506

Post by theriddlr »

pcarolan wrote: post #285
adrianN wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back twenty more years are computers were even more expensive. I don't think it makes sense to compare to prices that long ago.

The base model Macbook Air in 2010 was $1299 which means that you get compute and product improvements following Moore's law at deflationary prices. Humans have a hard time understanding the value of power laws. What Apple has done has given us something nothing short of superpowers and we've gotten complacent and feeling entitled to these continuous improvements despite the unbelievable amount of human ingenuity req…

The base MacBook Air had its price dropped to $999 in 2013 and battery life improved to 12 hours. That's what got me onto the Apple bandwagon.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#507

Post by skyyler »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #183
Adraghast wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean common noun instead of pronoun?

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…

>Like, you can't have "a brooklyn"

Every Brooklyn outside of the one in NYC is just "a Brooklyn" and not "THE Brookyln"

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#508

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

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…

Fusion is anything but light, and still not optimized for M1 (still a Rosetta app). Even on a beefy Workstation, it’s no fun. Logic is better but not exactly light if you have multiple track, AU plug-in…

So that’s not surprising - heck, with 16gb or ram it’s not a walk in the park. I’ve discussed with owner a Mac studio, and they were not happy for Fusion either, that’s with 64gb of ram so…

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#509

Post by [deleted] »

thrill wrote: post #412
nightski wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Apple. For a premium price they give you only bare minimum and if you want anything more you can pay thousands of dollars in pure premium and profit for Apple. Of course sheep will keep buying these things.

There's no reason to insult people.

[deleted]

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#510

Post by ohgodplsno »

jmull wrote: post #494
jmyeet wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For a frame of reference, one full frame buffer for a 4K monitor is around 32MB. Put another way, you can have about 32 of them per GB of RAM. Not that you can’t use plenty of GPU RAM, but 8GB gives you a lot of room to work with. (Video decoding need all that much — probably three buffers worth per stream, and at the size of the video, not the screen.)

If you think a compositor only holds a single frame buffer (or even up to three), boy do I have some news for you about the last 30 years.
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