It's fascinating they used Excel in the product photos instead of Numbers. I wonder who actually uses Numbers these days? Or any of the Apple "productivity" apps for that matter.
New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
101–110 of 1001 posts
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#102I am most interested to see if the M4 chip will dramatically improve performance of local LLMs. I like M1 Pro so far with models up to 30-70b parameters, but the memory bandwidth is my current limit. With a large jump in unified memory and bandwidth we could see 120b parameter models running on a laptop. As a side note, why does Apple continue to reference the Intel MacBook Air... It's over 6 years old now, no shit t…
I'm a senior software dev that is still using the last of the intel macs (granted a maxed out 16" not an air). These kind of comparisons are still valid for me. There are plenty of others less technical than me that want these too. The youngest intel Airs only just aged out of applecare coverage last year, and for most casual users getting 4 years out of an Apple computer is totally expected.
My personal laptop is 7 years old so these comparisons are relevant to me, too. I’ve operated on my Air a bit to reduce thermal throttling and I don’t use it for anything crazy so it’s still useful, but one of these days I’ll upgrade. I’m sure there are plenty of people like us with these old beasts.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#103The degree to which Apple has kinda just “won” laptops is nuts to me. $999 for an 13-inch M2 Air is just bonkers. You can easily pay $1500, even $2000 for Windows laptops that are hotter, heavier, AND slower.
And they have Linux integrated into the system. I'm amazed how many developers get a Macbook just to install Docker Desktop right after.
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Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#104Outside of pricing, why would one buy Air vs Pro these days? I've had OG Air back in the day and tapered form factor was great. I recently was in an Apple store and looked at pro and airs.. they felt same, and also air seemed heavy (compared to ye olde tapered one). Now with Pro at 14" and Air pushing to 15".. why?
Air has no fan which means no moving parts and no noise.
The only time I have heard the fans on my pro was when running games on ultra. If you hear the fans chances are if you had the air instead it would be throttling. Up to you if that is tolerable. I can’t stand throttling so I got the macbook pro with two fans.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple Cynic/Windows user here with a genuine question - why is this interesting? I'm currently looking at my wife's old corporate-issued windows laptop, which is running 2 external monitors as well as it's own display - am I missing something here, or is this just a case of Apple being held to different standards to other manufacturers in terms of feature parity?
Well, it's definitely "interesting" because it was a weird and user-unfriendly restriction on previous M1/M2 Airs and now it's gone. So that is interesting for sure. Perhaps more to the point, you're right -- Apple doesn't deserve to be lauded for removing something that was a dumb restriction in the first place. But it is interesting considering this is the most popular laptop in the world.
I don't think there is anything interesting. Someone on the hardware side thought it would be great to hardwire one of two the display controllers to the internal display. That would explain why M1 and M2 can't be fixed in a software update and why the Mac Mini supports two external displays.
Restriction implies they made the deliberate decision to withhold or break functionally. Limitation is probably more accurate, because they didn't put the extra work to make it work properly.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#106The degree to which Apple has kinda just “won” laptops is nuts to me. $999 for an 13-inch M2 Air is just bonkers. You can easily pay $1500, even $2000 for Windows laptops that are hotter, heavier, AND slower.
999 for a laptop with 8 gbs of ram in 2024 That's pathetic.
In 2018 that would have cost 799. Considering inflation, Apple is doing pretty great right now with keeping their prices from going insane.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
An interesting difference with the new pro models, if you want to pay around $5k, is that you can have 128Gb unified Ram in them and run inference locally with exciting LLMs.
5k for a computer with 128gb doesn’t seem like a great deal. You can get that much ddr5 today for like $400 sometimes less than that on sale.
yeah but you can't get an nvidia gpu with at least 128gb (H200) for less than $40k
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#108Outside of pricing, why would one buy Air vs Pro these days? I've had OG Air back in the day and tapered form factor was great. I recently was in an Apple store and looked at pro and airs.. they felt same, and also air seemed heavy (compared to ye olde tapered one). Now with Pro at 14" and Air pushing to 15".. why?
Better monitor, better speakers (much better in both cases), HDMI, SD. Fan, meaning less throttling on heavy workloads. Support for high-resolution and multimonitor setups. If any of these are attractive, you get the Pro.
Apple's "Pro" branding has become increasingly meaningless but in the MacBook category, which I believe is where it originated, it's meant to suggest "media professional", a demographic which has reason to care about all of these things.
There are even shades of this in the iPhone and iPads Pro, which have a few features which are mainly of interest to professional media types. For AirPods it just means "the expensive ones", and for Vision Pro it means "this is expensive". That's the main signal for phones and tablets as well, realistically.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#109The degree to which Apple has kinda just “won” laptops is nuts to me. $999 for an 13-inch M2 Air is just bonkers. You can easily pay $1500, even $2000 for Windows laptops that are hotter, heavier, AND slower.
$999 is for soldered 8GB/256GB crap. Add $400 for 16GB/512GB models.
I found it's completely acceptable for hobby usages that don't involve running offline LLMs. If you're doing work, get a Pro.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
$999 is for soldered 8GB/256GB crap. Add $400 for 16GB/512GB models.
I can guarantee you that most people buying the $999 laptop have 5 Chrome tabs open and don't store files on their computer. 8GB/256GB is fine.
That's a bold statement.
Videos, music, photos, all of these add up fast. I have encountered plenty of family and friends needing help when their storage is exhausted.
Then there is the ever increasong bloat of software, web apps, etc. that chew through RAM.
If this isn't a daily driver, sure. It is fine. But for those where this is their only computer, this is a lot of money for an 'entry level' model that can't do as much.