521–530 of 796 posts
At 500 nits of brightness, it is also
25 percent brighter than before
If the screen has no anti-glare coating, it needs to be crazy bright to be usable outside.
My favorite for a new laptop would be the Thinkpad X1 Carbon. It is lighter, has a matte screen and can run Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wonder how long these M chips were in R&D and meanwhile they were just watching everyone on the internet complain how crappy mac laptops were but they knew this was coming
AMD and Intel chips take ~5 years from starting work to being available to buy The architecture is basically frozen 2 years before tapeout, which itself is a year before they go on sale.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still stuck on a 2019 MBP from work. What garbage hardware. Up for a refresh in December.
Just to put things into perspective, the 2019 MBP might be worse than M1 Macs, but it's still way better than anything I've seen in the PC world (which is why Macs have been able to coast through bad decisions regarding keyboard, ports, and touchbar for so many years). That said, I'm very excited for these new ARM devices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)?
But this is why I noted that, every so often US for geopolitical reason seems willing to except even domestic pain for some period of time if the relative position of US increases due to the rest of world suffering more during strong-dollar periods.
Give that article a read to understand what I'm saying regarding periodic "harvesting" of rest of world economy (for one, via financial flows into $ and assets as safe haven). Arguably Volcker's extreme tightening in 1970's, with his willingness to crush even the domestic economy for a time, was due to geopolitical interests to maintain trust in the $ as reserve currency and to crush USSR economy by destroying commodity prices and bankrupting their economy partially due to their inability to print the currency of which they had some external debts in.
But I think this is a complex topic you can find many arguments both ways. And US policy has gone back at forth at times pursing both strong and weak for their own interest.
Though I didn't mean to imply weak dollar wouldn't also boost US domestic economy. But to the thrust of my post which way US regime wants to go depends on current geopolitical context.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How is that last part prescient? That's a year after Euromaidan. Ever since then, 2014, critics have always lambasted any US/EU in support of the Ukrainian people. Why? Because geopolitically Ukraine was meant to be another Belarus, a patsy state, for Russia and its allies. That statement is the opposite of prescient, in that we now see the mask off and the devil that patsy Ukrainian governments were actually making…
It's prescient because it hints as US long term interest in keeping Europe and Russia apart (in recent times seen most clearly with meddling with Nord Stream 2 pipeline agreement, and encouraging sanctions that are on their way to destroying European industrial power and impoverishing their citizens on account of lack of cheap energy).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Air with 8 GM of ram is perfect for a personal laptop where your primary focus is web browsing, watching media and occasional video/photo editing. I hear people say that today, but how is it going to feel in 2025, when you try loading up MacOS 16 on it? Given the trend of Apple's development, I don't think 8 gigs is going to be sufficient for most people going forward. That's basically iPad-tier memory constraints…
Do people upgrade? I still see a bunch of old safari versions in our web traffic. It’s the biggest thorn in my side supporting them. One thing that is a problem is that web pages get bigger and bigger and more resource intense. I doubt my 2011 air could handle a modern day web page with videos and a bunch of css transforms like on the apple site.
I believe Apple is pretty good about keeping people on the latest versions of their software, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were a few stragglers or people using EOL devices that are stranded on an older build. I can definitely believe that it's a PITA supporting them, though. Working around MacOS shenanigans is the most frustrating part of my job too.
> One thing that is a problem is that web pages get bigger and bigger and more resource intense.
Eh... I'm not sure if I agree with that sentiment. In the early 2000s there were also people saying "desktop apps are going to get bigger and more resource-intensive", but that never really happened. In fact, the Java runtimes people used in that era were usually heavier than modern applications today, or evestn Electron-bundled programs. IMO, the web has been resource-intensive ever since Javascript became the lingua franca. Nowadays, I think we're making progress to reduce the resources used on websites. Things like WASM and lighter JS frameworks are going to make all the difference here. In fact, I can even see ourselves in another Web2 golden age in a few years. I personally don't think the SAAS landscape is long for this earth, and once it fades away, there will be less incentive to make bloated, broken applications and more of a focus on refining user experience and performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wonder how long these M chips were in R&D and meanwhile they were just watching everyone on the internet complain how crappy mac laptops were but they knew this was coming
When Linus Tech tips did a review and tear down of the last Intel MacBook Air the design had no heat pipe and was just passively cooled. The first MacBook Air with the M1 design was equivalent but with an updated motherboard that had an M1. The A12Z in the DTK is derived from the A12 which came out in 2018 so it probably was earlier than that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have pretty good support except for the GPU at this point (admittedly I'm waiting for this until I install it on my machine). They've had to write all the drivers from scratch, so it was bound to take a while. But on the plus side the hardware interfaces seem to be stable across generations. M2 parity with M1 was implemented in 48 hours! So I'm pretty confident it will mostly be case of linux support continuously…
The GPU is important.. afaik the keyboard and trackpad aren't working yet in Asahi Linux. I don't expect Apple to support the Linux community. It feels like this is trending in one direction. It felt like things stopped being "favorable" to us when they stopped supporting OpenGL and made no effort with Vulkan. The touchbar and some wifi chipsets were poorly supported for years before M1 debuted. What has been impleme…
You could triple boot Windows, MacOS and Linux with Intel Macs. A Mac was a great choice because you could develop for and support all 3 of those platforms (plus Android and iOS). Aside from having bad GPUs, expensive storage, and little modularity, they were great machines for development.
Now, with no Linux or Windows support, not so much (unless you don't need to use anything but MacOS.) Unfortunately, if you need to support MacOS or iOS, you don't have much of a choice. Just really unfortunate that what used to be possible with one machine may soon require two. So long as Apple supports any Intel Mac, many Macs will be able to get OS updates thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. I'm not sure when Apple will drop Intel Macs though. The last Mac to use an Intel processor released in 2020, so there will hopefully still be quite a few years left of support for Intel Macs for the time being.
1. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/START.htm...