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The 2020 MacBook Air

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Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#131

Post by ghshephard »

pivo wrote: post #89
dean177 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8GB is absolutely fine for most people, but it is an expensive upgrade.

In my experience with family members who have 8G laptops, they are not fine. Even my mother who just uses a web browser, mail.app and occasinally Photos is not fine with 8G. Her MacBook Pro regularly ground to a halt. I replaced it with a used model that was almost exactly the same except that it has 16G and now she is fine.

Beg to differ - I slam my MacBook Air (2015 i5 w/8GB ram) pretty hard, and I don't run into a lot of problems. I usually have a nice mix of office, iphoto, itunes, acorn, chrome with a dozen or so tabs, jupyter + pandas running doing some data -engineering. It's a pretty good workhorse - I don't run into many issues with the exception that occasionally I'll hit a web page that spins up the CPU hard enough that the fans start making noise (at which point I just close the offending web page) - but that's a CPU (or maybe web page) problem, not Memory issue.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#132

Post by mbreese »

frandroid wrote: post #110
thelittleone wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soldering SSD to MacBook Pro motherboard. Eliminating the ability to remove it when logic board dies and retrieve data with a Simple USB adapter.

Is that Ive or Cook though

Probably was due to their obsession with making things as thin as possible (Ive). Internal connectors take up more space than direct soldering. But, it’s also probably easier to manufacture (Cook), because you don’t have to have a person manually plug in a cable/ribbon. But on the balance, I’d guess that the decision to remove internal ports was all about thinness.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#133

Post by marcinzm »

Niccizero wrote: post #27

I don't see the reason to buy a such a compromised machine over a X1 Carbon or a XPS 13. No ports, crappy soldered everything, worst company for consumer rights, etc. They have nice screens I guess? And you can't deny the brand appeal of the Apple logo.

For me OSX works better than Windows or desktop Linux.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#135

Post by rconti »

pivo wrote: post #89
dean177 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8GB is absolutely fine for most people, but it is an expensive upgrade.

In my experience with family members who have 8G laptops, they are not fine. Even my mother who just uses a web browser, mail.app and occasinally Photos is not fine with 8G. Her MacBook Pro regularly ground to a halt. I replaced it with a used model that was almost exactly the same except that it has 16G and now she is fine.

My 2011 Air has 4gb and it's too little. 8 would be fine in it. But I wouldn't buy an 8gb machine today.

Swapping's also not as big a deal on SSD machines, as it used to be.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#136

Post by rconti »

Niccizero wrote: post #27

I don't see the reason to buy a such a compromised machine over a X1 Carbon or a XPS 13. No ports, crappy soldered everything, worst company for consumer rights, etc. They have nice screens I guess? And you can't deny the brand appeal of the Apple logo.

It's hard to take seriously the opinion of anyone who reduces the appeal of a computing environment to the logo on the lid.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#137

Post by prewett »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #44
JohnTHaller wrote: post #19

Pro Tip: The MacBook Air line of today has taken over for the MacBook line of old. It's not like the original air which was so much thinner and lighter than everything else. Thickness of the 13" MacBook Air is 0.63" vs 0.59" of the 13" MacBook Pro and weight of the Air is 2.8lbs vs 3.0lbs for the Pro. The MacBook Air is the lower-end MacBook now.

Hopefully they will make the MBP “pro” again and focus on features and power instead of thinness.

I have a 2018 MBP, 2.9 GHz i9, 32 GB ram, Radeon Vega 20. The thing is like a portable server, I'm not sure what more features and power a laptop user would realistically neeed. (Obviously real servers are more powerful, but I worked at a company that ran MMO game servers written in Python [i.e. not that fastest] off of similarly spec'ed hardware a few years ago, it's certainly sufficiently for all of my development needs)

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#138

Post by hoorayimhelping »

thelittleone wrote: post #81
yoz-y wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are three: the golden watch, the coffee table book and the Apple Park. Although the park seems to have worked out really well in the end.

Soldering SSD to MacBook Pro motherboard. Eliminating the ability to remove it when logic board dies and retrieve data with a Simple USB adapter.

I don't think that's vanity, I think they made a conscious tradeoff in service of thinner computers. It's a good tradeoff in my opinion: the thinness of the computer has more of an impact on my average day to day usage than being able to remove a faulty logic board.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#139

Post by enraged_camel »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #19

Pro Tip: The MacBook Air line of today has taken over for the MacBook line of old. It's not like the original air which was so much thinner and lighter than everything else. Thickness of the 13" MacBook Air is 0.63" vs 0.59" of the 13" MacBook Pro and weight of the Air is 2.8lbs vs 3.0lbs for the Pro. The MacBook Air is the lower-end MacBook now.

>> Pro Tip: The MacBook Air line of today has taken over for the MacBook line of old.

If that's the case, I'd like it to become as light as — or even lighter than — the old MacBook, which weighed merely 2.03 pounds.

At this point, I'd love to have a Macbook Air with a battery that lasts "only" 6 hours, but weighs around 1.5 pounds. Hell, I'd pay extra for the option.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#140

Post by extragood »

bluedino wrote: post #92
CapriciousCptl wrote: post #26

Absolutely glowing review. Personally, I'm not as enthusiastic about its design. My 2016 Dell XPS 13 (Ubuntu) with a 4k screen is lighter at 2.6lbs and smaller without a bezel around the screen.

And how much thicker is that thing? The edge around that machine is the worst as well.

The Dell is 37% thinner than the Mac at the tallest point:

* Macbook Air 2020: 0.16–0.63 inch (0.41–1.61 cm) [1]

* Dell XPS 13 2019: 0.3"- 0.46" (7.8mm – 11.6mm) [2]

[1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/

[2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...

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