791–800 of 1001 posts
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The 14" M2 Pro is 30% heavier than the M2 Air and 20% thicker. I don't really classify that as "not much". I have a 14" M1 Pro from work and a personal M2 Air and it's always surprising how much heavier the M1 Pro feels from my Air.
$1.30 is not much more than $1.00
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I was about to say the same thing but I've just had a look at Dell for a product comparison. It seems crazy to me that in 2023 Apple offer a £2,699.00 laptop with just 512Gb of non-upgradable storage. Looking at Dell's Precision line bundled with Ubuntu, they might be user upgradable but they're still roughly a similar ball park to Apple price wise. Personally I'm going to need to see some full package benchmarks bef…
>they're still roughly a similar ball park The PC industry uses wildly inflated prices, especially MSRP. A more realistic price for laptops can be found on various deal sites. A comparable Dell, Lenovo, or HP laptop will cost about .5-.6 of the equivalent macbook pro price. The vast majority of laptops, even after accounting for 1-2 TB of storage and 32 GB RAM cost less than $1.5k. MBPs start around $2k.
I’ve actually been considering an M1 MBP from a deal site in the UK. They seem to be about £300 off MSRP at the moment.
I bought a MBP 14 (max 32, 32GB, 2TB) Dec 2021 and I mostly don't regret it (probably should've only gotten 24 GPU cores and gone silver). Here are some pros and cons I don't think get enough play: - Turning on "Low Power Mode" when on Battery gives me roughly 10h of battery life. Functionally this is more than good enough for me. - Backlight leakage around the keys feels janky - It's pretty hard to pick it up unless…
Another reason the Air is a good choice for most people is that it doesn't have a fan. I've cleaned quite a bit of dust/lint/etc. out of various laptops. Without a fan, that's much less likely to be an issue. In one recent case, a family member was about to buy an entire new laptop because their old one was feeling very sluggish. I checked it out and realized that the fan had completely died and the system was consta…
Having no fan is an absolute game changer not just because of dust, but this way I can have the machine running near its thermal ceiling for extended amounts of time without going crazy from the fan noise, very handy when gaming, which I wouldn't want to do on the other Macbooks for that reason. I had to put a CPU indicator into the menubar because there's no way to hear high load anymore, so it's very easy to miss that Steam has crashed again and is now keeping all cores maxed etc. The silence really nice when using it in a quiet space, e.g. for tethered shooting without disturbing people, or in the quiet coach of a train, absolutely love it. I'd recommend the one with fewer GPU cores since that might give you slightly worse graphics, but it'll thermal throttle later and less overall when gaming or rendering.
Other differences that aren't as drastic as the specs suggest include the display, which other than the difference in real estate, I can't say I've ever really noticed to be worse, it looks gorgeous despite its significantly lower specs. The 16" has very nice sound for a laptop, but the Air sounds way better than anything that thin should, it's better than the stereo speakers in my Dell monitor, fine for a quick round of casual gaming and the like. Connectivity might be a dealbreaker (esp. the single external display), but it fits what I need well (except for the SD card reader, would love to have that). And it's pretty lightweight, very sturdy, thin, compact, which is what ultimately made me pick it, much more suitable for travelling and having it in a backpack when cycling and the like. It'll even run off a tiny 30W power bricklet!
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The M2 MBA is probably closest to my perfect laptop. Thin, no moving parts (no fan), very fast, 24GB RAM, super long battery life. I love it.
Agreed on form factor, but screen is quite a bit worse quality wise than the Pro. Lower refresh rate, lower density backlighting etc. Would like the Air form factor with the premium screen
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Yes, the year over year improvements were 90% just the tsmc node changes. But the ridiculous (and IMO amazing) performance per watt is a mix of iOS/macOS and their chip design. Those efficiency cores are unmatched, paired with the right scheduling from the OS. The M2 is underwhelming as its the same 5nm as the M1 was. But rumors say the M2 pro and max are on the 3nm node. And it took so long for the release, as 3nm w…
In the beginning I thought the “performance per watt” thing was just folks who want Apple to be better clinging to a stat that made it look like that was the case. But in late 2021 I was long overdue for an upgrade, so I got an M1 Max MacBook Pro and holy hell, now I get it. The battery lasts stupid long. Like, the fact that I can bring this thing on a plane or train without worrying if they’ll have working electric…
My new setup as of November is an M2 Air (16GB /1 TB) and an base model M1 Studio. I really couldn't be happier. I run a small WFH / Music Production / Photography studio in my basement and I really wanted an always-on always connected computer, for which the Studio has been perfect. The M2 Air is pretty close to a perfect laptop. My complaints (low audio volume, slighty cramped screen) are absolutely dwarfed by the…
I am as happy with my 13” M1 mbp 2020 as you with your. My only gripe is that the screen is too small and more importantly after two years I went from a stellar 21h battery life to 13h for lightweight work and it now also seems to drain on sleep. And it seems to lose charge quicker under load. The battery capacity is still reported as 91%of spec which does not explain this behaviour. I hope yours holds up better.
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I used FCP on an M1 Air with _8gb_ to edit 4K videos for over a year. Assuming you have enough fast storage (or are happy to use a proxy workflow), it certainly can be done, although everyone’s workflow is different. Assuming no storage speed bottleneck, timeline scrubbing was smooth up to about 2x forward or backward, from memory - after that you hit decoder limits. Proxy workflow gets around that too, though. Rende…
What’s a proxy workflow in this context?
> With up to 96GB of unified memory in the M2 Max model, creators can work on scenes so large that PC laptops can’t even run them.4 ... > 4. Testing was conducted by Apple in November and December 2022 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M2 Max, 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, 96GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 graphics with 24G…
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MST wouldn't be supported even if it had a DisplayPort output. Apple explicitly did not support MST pre-M1 as well.
But it worked if you installed Windows instead. So the hardware supports MST
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> Intel hasn’t exactly been innovating in the last 2 years. What on earth are you talking about?! Alder Lake was a huge step up for Intel, and Raptor Lake has improved things more than I would have expected as well. Before Alder Lake, Intel's CPUs honestly sucked. AMD still seems to have a modest competitive advantage in terms of efficiency and battery life (making AMD not that far off from where Apple is in hours of…
> For a lot of legitimate use cases, there are at least half a dozen Windows laptops coming out right now that I would instantly pick over a MacBook, and the same would not have been said 2 years ago. Would you mind listing a couple? I'd prefer to buy a Windows machine for my next laptop, but I've been SO burned by hibernation bugs, CPU throttling, battery issues, etc. And I've had an OG 13" M1 MBP from work for the…
Those have a huge tie in with the software, so I wouldn't expect hardware innovation to help.