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MacBook Air M4

apple.com

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Re: MacBook Air M4

#21

Post by ge96 »

trymas wrote: post #5

Anyone can comment on how Apple Silicon (M) MacBook Airs deal with heat? It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips? Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice? UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen…

I have a 2020 Macbook Air M1, use it for xcode, it struggles to build a basic react native based app with watch-widget, but man it is slick, I love thin laptops. I have a carbon X1 too

Struggle as in the build takes 3+ mins

In general though it's cool, maybe when charging it gets warm but I use it on a desk mostly

A general gripe I have switching devices is the keyboard layout ha cmd+c vs. ctrl+c

Stick to an ext keyboard I guess

Edit: 16GB RAM is what I have I sometimes get the "out of application memory" message

Anyway I use my computer for freelancing/working on multiple platforms, it was a good buy (used), alternatively I could have went with a mini but that screen is so good on a mac (although I develop with an ultrawide external monitor).

Re: MacBook Air M4

#22

Post by Velorivox »

trymas wrote: post #5

Anyone can comment on how Apple Silicon (M) MacBook Airs deal with heat? It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips? Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice? UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen…

I have an M2 air. It gets a bit warm when I compile iOS apps, but otherwise I never notice any heat. If I open a few too many tabs or apps, though, I notice a bit of slowdown since I only have 8 GB ram.

However, it is surprisingly functional and I don’t strictly need any additional ram, which was surprising to me.

Re: MacBook Air M4

#23

Post by ezfe »

trymas wrote: post #5

Anyone can comment on how Apple Silicon (M) MacBook Airs deal with heat? It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips? Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice? UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen…

If you’re doing continuous tasks that max out the CPU/GPU it will eventually throttle. That’s when you need a MacBook Pro

Re: MacBook Air M4

#24

Post by Kerrick »

The 13” model is only $300 more than the M4 Mac Mini whether comparing the base models or the 32GB RAM options. That’s a pretty good value for a battery, screen, webcam, trackpad, and keyboard. The main thing you give up is the ability to connect a third large display when at your desktop, a few ports, and support for higher than 60Hz refresh rate on an external display.

Re: MacBook Air M4

#25

Post by ezfe »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #12

If you have an Air and use Intellij IDEA or any other Jetbrains IDE can you let me know how the performance is? This really looks like an amazing computer if it can handle long IDEA hours on medium projects.

It’s totally fine, so long as your build doesn’t take so long (10+ min to throttle)

Re: MacBook Air M4

#26

Post by AdamN »

hwc wrote: post #7

Other than battery mass and screen size, is there a significant difference between the new Macbook Air and the low-end Macbook Pro?

There are quite a few little differences like screen brightness, number of displays in can drive, faster unified memory, etc...

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/macbook-air-vs-macbook-pro/

Re: MacBook Air M4

#27

Post by mettamage »

jghn wrote: post #10
metayrnc wrote: post #6

After getting the initial M1 Air, I am still struggling to find a reason to replace it. Still going strong with no hiccups!

Same. Each year I tell myself I'll get the new one. Each year when the new one comes out I notice that for what I use it for my M1 Air is still completely fine.

The real win for me is that Macbook Pro M1 64 GB are now sold on market places within my price range.

So yea, same.

Re: MacBook Air M4

#28

Post by codesnik »

trymas wrote: post #5

Anyone can comment on how Apple Silicon (M) MacBook Airs deal with heat? It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips? Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice? UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen…

I have M2 Air and using it for rails development, sometimes with multiple docker containers, but the most hungry usually is just chrome with 500+ tabs. It usually does not throttle at all and is barely warm. Unless in direct sunlight (it's black) or unless I put it on top of a blanket without an air gap below for half an hour. I'd say that's coolest macbook I ever owned, no burns or anything near it even on bare skin, unlike some older intel macbooks.

Re: MacBook Air M4

#29

Post by et-al »

Was hoping for the rumored 24 hours of battery life, but it looks like the M4 couldn't squeeze that. Still 18 hours stated, like the M3 Air:

https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-M3,...

Looks like the only arguments for the M4 Air are:

- 32GB RAM option

- 2 more CPU cores

- 100GB/s vs 120GB/s memory bandwidth

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