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MacBook Air with M5

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Re: MacBook Air with M5

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the aluminum body a lot. I'm not particularly clumsy, but each of my macbooks ends up with some fall damage at some point over the 5+ years that I have it. When I used to be assigned a plastic Dell work laptop, I dropped one onto the carpeted floor of my office because I thought it was going into my padded sleeve of backpack and that cracked the case, and broke the screen. I've accidentally yoinked my MBA (las…

Unfortunately dropping your laptop once in 5 years actually does make you too clumsy for a plastic laptop.

Does it? In my case, it was my father who dropped my mac but luckily everything was all safe with tis but a scratch. So perhaps that can be taken into factor as well that its more than one variable.

That being said, I am pretty clumsy but I have never dropped any hardware except a dumb phone which I threw out a lot and it was so small and tiny but it never had any problem.

And then one day I dropped it from top just a little bit and let it drop/slide inside my bag (like a cushion) and that day it died. I recently asked someone about it and turns out that its battery got inflated.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#174

I'm not sure why the negative tone in this thread. The MBA is an amazing value, and appears to have only gotten slightly cheaper . This is a solid product, that continually receives incremental improvements and delivered at a lower price point (when spec'd out).

The MB Air M line is a personal contender for best product of all time: Fantastic performance without fans, amazing battery life, high res display and build quality at that price point. When the M1 came out it was quite frankly unbelievable. And, even after all these years, I still don't see who would beat it across those dimensions.

My M1 Air is going strong as my travel & about-town laptop. It can do everything I do on my vastly more powerful M4 mbp, aside from compile multiple mobile apps simultaneously in less than a minute. Absolutely insane value and anyone who says otherwise has no idea what they are talking about.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#175
I’m still running a 2013 MacBook Air. 4gb of RAM, no CPU to speak of. Still works.

I’ll probably buy this, unless the cheap one they release tomorrow is better. A current MacBook is something like 30x more powerful than my ancient one. It’s going to be insane.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#176
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box. The news here isn't "The M5 Air is a disappointment", it's "Laptops are commoditized and boring".

> Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?

I mean... it really doesn't matter.

There are only a couple of relatively niche spaces where things like cpu performance are really the bottleneck right now.

Hell - RPi 5 is perfectly fine for a huge range of development tasks. The 8gb version is very reasonable $125.

Can you find things that these boxes can't do? Absolutely. Do most developers do those things? ehhhh probably not. Especially not in the webdev space.

Would I still pick a nice machine if given the chance? Sure, I have cash to burn and I like having nice laptops (although not Apple...).

But part of the "AI craze" is that hardware genuinely is commoditized, and manufacturers really, REALLY wanted a new differentiating factor to sell people more laptops. There's not much reason to upgrade, especially if the old machine was a decent machine at time of purchase.

I have 8 year old dell XPS laptops that do just fine for modern dev.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#177
post #14

The one thing that interests me most when it comes to laptops these days is weight. So I jumped right into the tech specs section and looked it up. Since this is the "Air" laptop of the company that is popular for thin and lightweight devices, my hopes were high. But ... The 13 inch version is heavier than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Which has a 14 inch screen and can run Linux.

What I actually like about Apple products is the heft. They feel premium and the heaviness contributes a lot to the premium feel.

I tried a ThinkPad X1 Carbon as well, it felt like a toy.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#178
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like there are a decent number of people finding Asahi stable enough for regular use: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1quko4w/how_via... I imagine there are still some rough edges (and it seems like distro choices are probably a bit lacking at the moment if you prefer something outside of a few specific mainstream options) but given how niche ARM support was before the first M1 machines, the pro…

Asahi is great on earlier models but it will certainly not support the M5 before its already multiple models behind.

Is it? I have my old M1 Air and I am very curious but don't want to go through the trouble of fiddling about with linux for a few days just to leave it rotting after. I would be inclined to maintain a dual boot situation as well and SSD space is at a premium.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#179
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like there are a decent number of people finding Asahi stable enough for regular use: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1quko4w/how_via... I imagine there are still some rough edges (and it seems like distro choices are probably a bit lacking at the moment if you prefer something outside of a few specific mainstream options) but given how niche ARM support was before the first M1 machines, the pro…

Asahi is great on earlier models but it will certainly not support the M5 before its already multiple models behind.

Sure, I don't disagree. I feel like I was pretty explicit about what I was claiming though:

> it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop

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