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MacBook Air with M5

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Re: MacBook Air with M5

#231

Post by netsec_burn »

std_move wrote: post #216

This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k. - it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent - a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use - best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU - no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff a…

I prefer the Dell Rugged line or Thinkpads, since a single water droplet on the keyboard is enough to kill this laptop.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#232

Post by dijit »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #224
dijit wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets be real, the fact that the Air is good for developers is.. honestly, great. But these devices are meant for home users. Not a tremendous amount of home users having huge gradle/go/cargo/node packages in my experience. The backup problem is real, I'm surprised Apple doesn't come out with a new time capsule (edit: for phones/tablets)- but I guess they want that sweet iCloud services dollar.

maybe I’m forgetting all the benefits of time capsule but you can plug any old storage device into a Mac now and turn it into a “Time Machine.“ It’s pretty turnkey at this point. What would a modern time capsule offer besides maybe remote back ups?

oh no, absolutely- apologies for the confusion.

Time "Machine" on MacOS continues to work (though it's clearly not as important to Apple as it once was).

The issue is: if you want to back up a phone: it will take space from your laptop and it must be tethered to do the backup. This means that if you have a 1TiB phone, like I do, you need at least 1TiB of local disk on your laptop to be able to do a single backup if the phone is anywhere near full.

This is in contrast to how Time Capsule works right now for MacOS, whereby you have an SMB share (like, a 100+TiB NAS) and your laptop will just back itself up when it can.

Such a feature would be pretty killer on iPhones/iPads, or having a "photo server" to offload your photos... idk, but Apple won't do it.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#233

Post by dgxyz »

netsec_burn wrote: post #231
std_move wrote: post #216

This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k. - it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent - a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use - best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU - no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff a…

I prefer the Dell Rugged line or Thinkpads, since a single water droplet on the keyboard is enough to kill this laptop.

The last 3 dells at work, all high end precision/pro max machines, have lasted 9 months before failing completely. No thanks.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#234

Post by criemen »

giwook wrote: post #186
cj wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm excited about this. The previous generation base model 15" Air was good enough for our company to make it the default computer for everyone. Previously we were giving out base model MBP's. And they're $1000 cheaper. Today, the MBP is just way too powerful for anything other than specific use cases that need it.

Out of curiosity, what are some good use cases for a MBP now with the MBAs being so powerful? I can think of things like 4K video editing or 3D rendering but as a software engineer is there anything we really need to spend the extra money on an MBP for? I'm currently on a M1 Max but am seriously considering switching to an MBA in the next year or two.

> Out of curiosity, what are some good use cases for a MBP now with the MBAs being so powerful?

Local software development (node/TS). When opus-4.6-fast launched, it felt like some of the limiting factor in turnaround time moved from inference to the validation steps, i.e. execute tests, run linter, etc. Granted, that's with endpoint management slowing down I/O, and hopefully tsgo and some eslint replacement will speed things up significantly over there.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#235

Post by dgxyz »

PaulHoule wrote: post #229
std_move wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I am not a huge fan either. I would much prefer Linux or a very customized Windows. For instance, the inability to write to NTFS filesystems without addons is annoying. But I believe that for most users, the default MacOS experience is now much better than what Windows is with default settings.

On my Mac is is beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… beachball.. you’d have thought somebody gets paid to make me watch the beachball for how much it happens. And this is a top of the line M4 mini with maxed out RAM and everything.

WTF are you doing with it? Mine doesn't do that (M4 Pro MBP / 24Gb)

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#236

Post by apparent »

netsec_burn wrote: post #231
std_move wrote: post #216

This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k. - it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent - a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use - best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU - no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff a…

I prefer the Dell Rugged line or Thinkpads, since a single water droplet on the keyboard is enough to kill this laptop.

Did this happen to you? I was under the impression that a tiny spill was no longer fatal for Mac laptop keyboards. I've seen it happen a few times and be fine, but maybe the people I knew were just lucky?

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#237

Post by PaulHoule »

dgxyz wrote: post #235
PaulHoule wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my Mac is is beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… beachball.. you’d have thought somebody gets paid to make me watch the beachball for how much it happens. And this is a top of the line M4 mini with maxed out RAM and everything.

WTF are you doing with it? Mine doesn't do that (M4 Pro MBP / 24Gb)

Try to browse the web. Try to listen to music with Plexamp. Ordinary boring stuff but I think it is looking all over Slovakia for my AirPods or something so it can take them away from whatever machine I really want to use them on.

The feeling is exactly like the way it was with Windows circa 2005 when you expected your machine to go bad like cheese in a few months.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#238

Post by mdasen »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #157
jermaustin1 wrote: post #38

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.

As someone clumsy, I'm so grateful that my MacBook Air can take a beating. It has one slight dent of about 1mm in the 4 years I've had it and I definitely drop it or knock it off a desk or something a few times a year.

I'll take the extra weight of aluminum (0.3lb, 130g). Yes, someone might say the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is 14", but the 13" MacBook Air actually has a 13.6" screen.

If I were in the market for a PC laptop, I'd definitely take a look at the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but I'm also not worried about the weight of my MacBook Air. The X1 Carbon Intel ones are on sale right now since Panther Lake will be a huge upgrade coming soon, but even on clearance they aren't cheap. An X1 Carbon with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage (Ultra 7 268V, the cheapest one due to the sale) will cost $1,679 while a similar MacBook Air will cost $1,699 - and the M5 has 48% better single-core performance and 56% better multi-core performance (Geekbench). A 16GB/512GB (Ultra 5 225U) X1 Carbon is $1,538 compared to $1,099 for a MacBook Air - and the M5 has a 74% single and multi core advantage there.

Panther Lake might narrow the performance gap, but early indicators don't seem like that's the case. Even the top of the line Ultra X9 388H sees the M5 with a 36% single-core advantage while the Ultra X9 388H gets 3% faster multi-core. And I'm not sure the higher wattage "H" processors work for something like an X1 Carbon.

The highest non-H Panther Lake processor (Ultra 7 365) sees the M5 get 51% better single-core and 58% better multi-core. Maybe we'll see better, but it looks like Intel isn't closing the gap in 2026.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#239

Post by [deleted] »

mg wrote: 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.

[deleted]

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#240

Post by Buttons840 »

std_move wrote: post #216

This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k. - it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent - a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use - best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU - no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff a…

Plus a touch pad that uses all available space and allows clicks on any part of the touchpad surface.
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