Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 1001 posts

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#541

Post by goosedragons »

nacs wrote: post #482
qwertox wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024. I am in the group of people who go for Full HD. It's enough for me, my eyesight is relatively bad. Then again, I use 3 monitors.

You'll like the way Apple does their screens even more then. They're 3-5k screens but they essentially scale up their UI 3X so it still looks like a 1080p except 3x sharper. They are what Apple calls "Retina" displays.

If you can't see the extra sharpness it's not really a pro...

A 13"-15" 1080p screen is pretty similar PPI to a 27" 4K display. This is pretty nice because if you have both at the scaling level elements are the same size on both.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#542

Post by aembleton »

itsoktocry wrote: post #479
exe34 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could…

> nicest keyboard When have MacBooks ever had the nicest keyboard? They have pretty good keyboards, but I have 10 year old ThinkPads with keyboards that I prefer.

Keyboard feel is very subjective. Different people like different things about keyboards.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#543

Post by chimeracoder »

rkangel wrote: post #180
r00fus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it's completely acceptable for hobby usages that don't involve running offline LLMs. If you're doing work, get a Pro.

I have found 8GB RAM to be completely unusable on Windows and Linux these days. Once you've got Chrome open with half a dozen tabs and any even slightly memory hungry program (VS Code or Android Studio etc.) you're out of luck. Actually I had to have my last work laptop replaced because 8GB wasn't enough for Chrome and a Teams video call! If I tried to screen share a browser tab of Jira everything would start paging.…

> I have found 8GB RAM to be completely unusable on Windows and Linux these days. Once you've got Chrome open with half a dozen tabs and any even slightly memory hungry program (VS Code or Android Studio etc.) you're out of luck.

Honestly, even 16GB isn't enough if you keep a modest (say, O(100)) number of tabs open. I regularly find my MBP slowed down due to "memory pressure" (swapping) at that point, with closing/restarting the browser to be an instantaneous fix.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#544

Post by vilunov »

threeseed wrote: post #433
izacus wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, you're overexaggerating a bit. If you follow your pattern with Apple, you'll end up with a measly 8GB/256GB model which will only be useful for basic browsing. (And with more and more Electron apps, might struggle even with that once you hop onto a video call.)

Video transcoding is done on the GPU and has nothing to do with memory/storage. And there isn't a trend towards more Electron apps. Increasingly developers are using Tauri which is Rust based and extremely lightweight.

Tauri is not that much different from Electron honestly.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#545

Post by tasuki »

jcadam wrote: post #450

Finding a laptop that runs Linux natively and acceptably is always a challenge. My Dell XPS 9315 touts linux support, but only with an older version of Ubuntu using custom drivers (as I discovered after purchasing it). So I've got manjaro running that took quite a bit of coaxing - though the built-in webcam has never, and probably will never work with any linux other than Ubuntu 20.04, and the APM has always been ext…

I have a ~2018 Dell XPS that runs Ubuntu and Debian fine.

I still prefer the ~2017 ThinkPad X1 Carbon, despite the much slower CPU, half the memory, worse screen, and the coating peeling off. Not sure why I prefer it, perhaps some combination of it being lighter, quieter, and the screen opening 180°

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#546

Post by Klonoar »

jwells89 wrote: post #268
sempron64 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU. It is probably the best laptop in the $1K price range for laptops that don't have a GPU, but that's basically it. The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality…

As someone who likes to keep at least one machine dedicated to each major OS around at any given time, the thing that’s frustrating about non-Apple laptops is that just about all of them, including machines costing well in excess of base Macbook models, make big tradeoffs somewhere or another. Very few are good all-rounders, even if many are better than Macbooks in one or two aspects. I would kill for a version of Th…

> I would kill for a version of ThinkPad X1 Nano or X1 Carbon for example that had the battery life, silence, and unplugged performance of a Macbook Air

Ditto on the Nano. I wind up looking at it every few months and then begrudgingly walking away because it just doesn't make any sense to buy.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#547

Post by wubrr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #537
itsoktocry wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. They are awesome, but not perfect. Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.

I agree 100% with what you've said, but this sentence: > Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Basically boils down to "Apple is selling a much better product, and they know it." I.e. your first bullets (over priced storage, RAM, charging for multi monitor support) all just boil down to "Apple charges more because they can". The "you'…

[flagged]

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#548

Post by eropple »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #481
exe34 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could…

> The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. It's simple: People without much money have basic needs and want a ~$600 laptop but Apple doesn't sell one. It doesn't matter if the $1000 Macbook has better battery life than a $1000 Dell because they don't have a $1000 budget.

I'm not sure those people are the intended Macbook audience, though. How many of those people wouldn't be roughly as productive using an iPad or something? I've found myself doing almost all my non-development, non-media stuff on an iPad Air as of late and the environmental constraints have been really helpful for focus.

(My iPad Air was $599 new, and I use a shockingly pleasant $30 case-and-keyboard combination for typing--no, it's not a mechanical keyboard, but c'mon.)

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#549

Post by microtonal »

rchaud wrote: post #405
skadamat wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree with the simplicity of purchasing an Apple computer compared to other laptop manufacturers. Headphone brands and monitor makers also suffer from this same fate :/

Not that simple when there are multiple generations of each on sale, with wildly different prices should you change the storage or RAM toggle. The MacBook Air used to have a multiple USB-A ports plus video, now it 2 ports that have to handle everything. So now the dongle/no dongle question has to become considered as well.

Not everything. MacBooks have MagSafe for power, which frees a port for power or having to use an adapter with power passthrough.

Though it’s not a big issue in practice. When at home or the office, I just plug into a display with a USB or Thunderbolt hub. On-the-go, the Apple adapter works great.

Having to plug more than one cable is annoying anyway when you move between desks.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#550

Post by sib »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #481
exe34 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could…

> The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. It's simple: People without much money have basic needs and want a ~$600 laptop but Apple doesn't sell one. It doesn't matter if the $1000 Macbook has better battery life than a $1000 Dell because they don't have a $1000 budget.

That's different from being "overpriced."

Overpriced would be "costs more than it should for what it is," not "costs what it should but is more product than I can afford."

Post reply on HN