Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original Air lineup was thinner in the front and seemed a little lighter. The thicker front on newer airs gives more battery life, but I'm not a fan of it.
The thinness at the front was a bit of a hack though wasn’t it? So Steve Jobs could make it look good in photographs. I’d take the extra battery life any day.
MacBook Air with M5
251–260 of 531 posts
Re: MacBook Air with M5
#252This 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…
If this one is anything like the previous ones, ThinkPad is still beating it in the keyboard department. Plus you get x86_64 and vendor support for Linux. X13 is probably the best equivalent in Lenovo's line.
… if it’s not the power layer, it’s the network, video, Bluetooth that won’t power up anymore after a nap
Re: MacBook Air with M5
#253 The difference is in the number of GPU cores. One chip has an 8-core GPU, while the other has a 10-core GPU.
I'm wondering why they would have a 2 GPU core option. Maybe the 6 GPU one is binned since it is only available with 16G RAM? But no, the 10 GPU core is also needed for any storage increase....Re: MacBook Air with M5
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
The MBA is an absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs. I use it (MBA 15" M3) with a large complex TypeScript code base, and it is fast and amazing at 24GB of ram or more. PS. The biggest speedup I got this past year (10x) was switching to native TypeScript (tsgo) and native linting (biome or oxlint).
> 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".
Re: MacBook Air with M5
#255I refuse to buy macbooks/apple products and advise my people to do the same. I make it clear it's not about specs, it's not about UI, its about the fact that apple makes the world actively worse so they can sell you a better alternative. You cant have iMessage anywhere else because they don't want you to, you are locked into apple stores because they refuse competition, you cant repair your own device because they ge…
Re: MacBook Air with M5
#256Re: MacBook Air with M5
#257This 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.
I remember the old keyboard because I got so sick of it I snapped the laptop in half in a rare fit of disgust (I was under a lot of stress at the time).
Overall, Apple blew it out of the park, and I happily forgive the earlier problems. Now I hope that Tahoe is just some kind of planned demolition phase before they introduce a totally new unsurpassable stable OS.
Re: MacBook Air with M5
#258Not exciting at all, but a nice incremental upgrade. I always enjoy incremental upgrades from Apple as they're usually significant, and 4 years worth of increments add up to big leaps, to the point my 8 year upgrade cycle is usually quite exciting. Though a bit disappointing that it came with a $100 (almost 10%, above inflation) price bump. There's not much point to a spec bump when it's paired with a price bump, and…
Re: MacBook Air with M5
#259I refuse to buy macbooks/apple products and advise my people to do the same. I make it clear it's not about specs, it's not about UI, its about the fact that apple makes the world actively worse so they can sell you a better alternative. You cant have iMessage anywhere else because they don't want you to, you are locked into apple stores because they refuse competition, you cant repair your own device because they ge…
However there is no comparable laptop hardware in the non-Apple world. Even if I wanted to pay double, there is no usable fanless high-quality quick laptop. Very sadly. The Air is just too good for the money and the competition too bloody incompetent and bad.
Re: MacBook Air with M5
#260Earlier 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.