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

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

#161

Post by skadamat »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #135
retskrad wrote: post #3

I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. Corporations have become pros at exploiting our human psychology. Their ads can make you believe that the smallest bump in improvements will make your older computer appear useless in comparison. That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.

The worst part about M3 is that they now have an 8GB Macbook Pro lineup. These "pro" machines have always been known for work and productivity, and 8GB just sounds like a piss poor product decision

The WORST part is the 8GB Macbook Pro (base M3) doesn't support 2 external displays but this new Macbook Air (base M3) DOES. This is so confusing

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

#162

Post by dataworm »

samatman wrote: post #108
Keyframe wrote: post #63

Outside 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 re…

I think the parent meant the opposite: why buy an Air and not Pro?

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

#163

Post by BeFlatXIII »

input_sh wrote: post #10
zuhsetaqi wrote: post #6

Most interesting change: > Support for up to two external displays: MacBook Air with M3 now supports up to two external displays when the laptop lid is closed …

So it's still limited to two monitors, but now one of them doesn't necessarily need to be the internal one?

So I still need to use Instant View with my docking station, got it. Been using that on my M1 air to drive 2x4K displays (the 30Hz display isn't that useful if I'm mousing around, though)

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

#164

Post by kube-system »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #95
ketzo wrote: post #49

The 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.

It's on par with normal pricing from MS.

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

#165

Post by jjice »

ketzo wrote: post #49

The 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.

You're absolutely right that they make a damn fine laptop (the build quality stands out to me) and they do a great job in that market.

Anecdotally, my Framework 13 AMD ran me 1500 and I ended up with 64 GB of ram, 2 TB of storage, and an AMD 7840U. I bought my RAM and storage separately to get that end cost, to be fair.

I wouldn't be surprised if the M3 actually outperforms my processor by a bit, but having way more RAM matters a lot to me. All that on top of being able to repair my own machine is a no brainer to me.

I know most laptop users wouldn't care about this stuff, but I really hope Framework does well and helps bring repairability back to laptops.

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

#166

Post by lotsofpulp »

sempron64 wrote: post #69
ketzo wrote: post #49

The 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…

> Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution.

Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure this out yet.

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

#167

Post by pmontra »

sempron64 wrote: post #69
ketzo wrote: post #49

The 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…

> The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market

Another way to look at that is "MacOS vs non-MacOS" laptop market.

There is only one manufacturer of MacOS laptops. That helps keeping the number of models down. Same thing for the iOS vs non-iOS phone and tablets market. If you want MacOS or iOS you must buy Apple. Hackintoshes do exist but are a rounding error compared to the number of machines Apple sells. And if you want Apple, you must get MacOS and iOS. You can run something else on that hardware, but again we are writing about rounding errors.

There are non-MacOS laptop manufacturers with even less models than Apple have. Maybe it's very niche but the Framework laptop has been popular on HN lately and it has only two models.

On the other side if you want to buy non-MacOS, then HP, Lenovo or Dell have a zillion of laptops each, ranging from the very low end to the very high end. Some people pick features and look at which models are left with those features (that's me.) Some people pick a price tag instead. Probably the laptop is a commodity to the price tag people, much like gas. Who really cares about the gas company? If you need to fill the tank everything will do.

And about

> the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep

this is something that Microsoft throw at us and we can't dodge it much. My laptop runs Linux and it's from the pre Hybrid Sleep era. I didn't investigate if Linux sleep works well with new laptops.

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

#168

Post by jdashg »

blah-yeah wrote: post #74

I 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'm glad it works for you but I definitely use my windows z13 thinkpad all day on battery.

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

#169

Post by _ph_ »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #100
zer0zzz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting because the whole M# line started with a smart phone and built a pc out of that. As a result it has some unfortunate restrictions that aren’t there when you build a machine out of capable yet pretty clunky intel hardware. I don’t doubt there are similar tradeoffs in the WoS world but I’m not aware of what they are specifically. The restriction I am most annoyed with these days is the lack of external…

> As a result it has some unfortunate restrictions Ah, yes, "poor Apple couldn't find a way". Except it did for the more pricey models.

Well, yes. By using the bigger CPUs, which have more cores, more gpus and more IO hardware on chip.

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

#170

Post by kjkjadksj »

keiferski wrote: post #56

Kind of disappointing that they seem to have discontinued the 11” model. I bought one 5 or 6 years ago and it’s still working fine. Compared to the 13” and 15” models, it feels so much more portable and lightweight.

If you want a really compact device all apple offers today is the ipad, and then you have to deal with ipad os. I feel like as long as the ipad exists they will not make a new 11 inch unfortunately.
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