I wish they will bring back a smaller form factor.
12" MacBook despiste its CPU flaws was the perfect size.
New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
111–120 of 1001 posts
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#112I love my m2 mbp 14" Frankly, Apple is an amazing organization and I am extremely thankful that they've empowered product designers to bring us these amazing creations. Apple is one reason that I love existing in this era. Sure, there are others. But having Apple... enables me to bring a laptop + a backup battery (anker 737) practically anywhere and work all day without needing a direct electricity connection. Laptop…
I agree; actually being able to work outside again was something I lost with my old 16in intel pro, it couldn’t keep itself awake more than 2 hours
My old pro did not have a screen bright enough for sitting on a patio with it either.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#113£1,699 for 13" Air with M3 (8/10/16), 24GB RAM, 512GB vs £2,299 (from Costco) for 14" MBP M3 Pro (11/14/16), 36GB RAM, 512GB I'm unsure if £600 extra is worth it for average dev use? The main points I know are: better screen, speakers, fans, 12GB extra ram. But not sure about valuing those at £600. Hm (I'm making this specific comparison because I've just ordered the MBP, but could return it, and get the MBA :D)
You will never regret more memory but if you want value, put that 600 into nvidia or apple stock.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#114Earlier 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. People love to say this without linking to a model. That's because the models in this price range are obviously not in the same weight class as a MacBook. Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... lite…
Personally, I'm ok with getting 2nd hand business grade models off Ebay. They're generally pretty good (and cheap). But a lot of people (especially the less technically inclined) will only buy brand new, which I think is for safety. Anyway, 2nd hand laptops on Ebay can be both really good and in that price range. :)
I'm not sure it makes sense to compare new laptops with used laptops, especially since the latter generally don't come with any sort of warranty. And when you're buying off ebay (and can't inspect beforehand, like with craigslist/nextdoor), you don't even know for sure if it will work on day 1.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#115The 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.
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…
> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives
I would pay more for an acceptable alternative - no fan, Windows 11, good battery life, top quality screen, no gimmick features (touchscreen! detachable screen! whatever).
No such thing exists, as far as I can tell.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#116For anyone having issues with only one external display at once, DisplayLink adapters work very well, allowing you to connect much more displays if you need them.
It comes with a bunch of downsides though. It is lossy, requires a third-party driver (and you become dependent on them to provide timely updates for new macOS releases), protected content from iTunes and other players is not visible on the laptop display when DisplayLink adapters are connected, a bunch of HiDPI resolutions are missing on Apple Silicon Macs, etc. USB-C Alt-Mode and Thunderbolt always trump DisplayLin…
> It is lossy,
I was cautious about this issue before buying the device, but the fears turned out to be unfounded. Sure it won't be good enough for competitive gaming or something like that, but watching youtube is pretty good, and text rendering is indistinguishable from regular display. The only issue is that refresh rate seems to be about 30fps but for many tasks it is acceptable.
> USB-C Alt-Mode and Thunderbolt always trump DisplayLink.
Yes, but does it allow you to connect 3 displays to your notebook? I actually wanted just 2 external displays, but the DisplayLink device had 2 ports, and I have many HDMI displays laying around, so I connected 3 because I can.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
$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.
I run an offline LLM on my M2 MBA with 16 GB RAM. It's fine (but I will buy more RAM on my next machine, in large part due to LLM developments).
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#118I really wanted to love the 13" Air but two things made me switch to the Pro after trying it for a few weeks. One is that the internal speakers suck in comparison to the Pro. I 'm not looking for audiophile quality from laptop speakers, but the Pro speakers are good enough for casually watching youtube videos, TV shows, podcasts, etc, whereas the Air speakers are harsh and tinny. The second is that the default resolution isn't .5x the native resolution, as it is for most Apple desktop/laptop displays. It's some weird in-between resolution that creates aliasing on text and such. If you bump it down to a true .5x, it's 1280x~800, which is borderline unusable for desktop browsing these days.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#119For anyone having issues with only one external display at once, DisplayLink adapters work very well, allowing you to connect much more displays if you need them.
Maybe things are better in the Apple Silicon days, but I tried using an external "carry it with you" monitor that used DisplayLink on an old Intel MacBook and it was an endless stream of headaches. Frequently the computer just wouldn't see the monitor at all until I restarted both of them, custom settings like color and rotation would often reset, etc. The DisplayLink drivers seemed like total shit.
For me it works like a charm. I had to change the USB hub though, first one was buggy and would randomly stop working. But on a second one everything is fine.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#120The 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.
Depending on your use cases the software environment for the mac has never been worse right as the hardware has gotten so powerful and cool running. Major mac devs have totally abandoned the platform in recent years. Apple needs to rebuild good faith among developers especially game developers, or at the very least get ahead of the software drain and put and end to what factors have been causing it.
> Major mac devs have totally abandoned the platform in recent years.
Abandoning the (clearly lacking) Mac Store is not these same as abandoning the macOS platform.