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Apple unveils all-new MacBook Air, supercharged by the new M2 chip

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Re: Apple unveils all-new MacBook Air, supercharged by the new M2 chip

#271

Post by maigret »

bayindirh wrote: post #94
agloeregrets wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are thinking of the 14 inch. The M1 Air and M1 Pro have only a different cooling solution and it does not really make a difference.

That small cooling difference affects how these CPUs are clocked and how they behave under sustained workloads. A long video render is easily 2-3h at 100% CPU load. A scientific simulation is >24h at 100% load, with instruction trains optimized to get every ooze of performance, hence hitting the TDP almost instantly. A MacBook Air M1's body is not an unlimited heatsink attached to M1 SoC. I've succeeded to heat my M1…

Indeed they shortly hinted at this in the keynote.

Re: Apple unveils all-new MacBook Air, supercharged by the new M2 chip

#272

Post by KVFinn »

agloeregrets wrote: post #75
jmyeet wrote: post #31

The 24GB unified memory is a really nice upgrade (the M1 MBA has 8GB upgradeable to 16GB). The CPU/GPU upgrades are predictable and wlecome but the memory is huge. A lot of development isn't CPU bound but is memory bound or at least can really benefit from more memory. This upgrade makes the MBA an entirely viable dev machine for many workloads. I have a MBP (Intel) but it's expensive. Getting a viable machine for $1…

> makes the MBA an entirely viable dev machine for many workloads. So this, like the M1 supports only ONE external display.. so as long as you live the lopsided big-small life, sure.

>So this, like the M1 supports only ONE external display.. so as long as you live the lopsided big-small life, sure.

Oh no, you're breaking my heart. Is there no adapter you can buy that splits that 6k thunderbolt bandwidth into two smaller external displays? Okay I just googled, and it looks like there are third party DisplayLink which sort of maybe work, but are not officially supported? But people SEEM to have dual 4k monitors working?

Re: Apple unveils all-new MacBook Air, supercharged by the new M2 chip

#273

Post by needcleartype64 »

nickpp wrote: post #181
needcleartype64 wrote: post #63

It's still only 224 pixels per inch (ppi), not the 254 ppi of the MBP 16". Back when Apple had subpixel RGB font antialiasing like Cleartype the 224ppi was fine but 224ppi text doesn't look sharp with grayscale antialiasing. It's not without good reason that an iPad Retina display is 264ppi. I switched from Mac after Apple removed Cleartype-like font rendering because my external 4K display no longer had as sharp of…

Excellent observation. But I will add that it seems to me that Microsoft also removed ClearType in Windows 11 as well… at least partially.

It's not enabled by default, but can be enabled in 30 seconds by (1.) pressing the Win key, (2.) starting to type "adjust cleartype...", (3.) clicking "Adjust Cleartype Text", (4.) clicking "Turn on Cleartype". One can then fine tune it but the defaults work great.

Re: Apple unveils all-new MacBook Air, supercharged by the new M2 chip

#274

Post by tablespoon »

> The new MacBook Air features MagSafe for dedicated charging and peace of mind when users are plugged in.

MagSafe was one of Apple's best hardware ideas, and I'm really surprised they dropped it for a few generations. I'm glad they realized their mistake and brought it back, though.

Re: Apple unveils all-new MacBook Air, supercharged by the new M2 chip

#275

Post by znpy »

notatoad wrote: post #237
jmyeet wrote: post #31

The 24GB unified memory is a really nice upgrade (the M1 MBA has 8GB upgradeable to 16GB). The CPU/GPU upgrades are predictable and wlecome but the memory is huge. A lot of development isn't CPU bound but is memory bound or at least can really benefit from more memory. This upgrade makes the MBA an entirely viable dev machine for many workloads. I have a MBP (Intel) but it's expensive. Getting a viable machine for $1…

for the person who's looking for a machine to handle emails, facebook, netflix, and maybe a bit of document editing, 8GB is totally fine. and even if that extra ram was free, it still has a cost in battery life. 8GB of ram is the right choice for a lot of people buying a macbook air.

> a machine to handle emails, facebook, netflix, and maybe a bit of document editing, 8GB is totally fine

for that kind of usage a $750 acer/asus laptop would probably be good too, however.

Re: Apple unveils all-new MacBook Air, supercharged by the new M2 chip

#276

Post by ghaff »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #135
geerlingguy wrote: post #17

The biggest question I have is whether it has WiFi 6E or just WiFi 6 (2x2 80 MHz like the original M1 MacBook Air). That's the one thing that's kind of gimped it for me—if I could get more WiFi bandwidth, especially with the ProRes decoding built into the M2, I might be able to edit 4K video over my network wirelessly for the first time. Would be amazing. To be clear, I still think the M1 Air was the best portable la…

> the best portable laptop Apple made since the 11" Air before it was discontinued I used to have an 11" Air as a daily driver. The portability was nice but I'd never go back to a computer that small. Too cramped, too little screen real estate, too small a battery. It doesn't surprise me that 11" laptops are rare these days.

I've gone back and forth over the years. Part of me would like a smaller system for travel but 1.) I always end up wondering if the tradeoff is worth it given how relatively small and light 13" laptops can be and 2.) I probably will never again travel to the degree I was doing it at peak. So I probably wouldn't actually buy an 11" MacBook Air even if I could.

Re: Apple unveils all-new MacBook Air, supercharged by the new M2 chip

#277

Post by KVFinn »

gnicholas wrote: post #25

Cannot believe the updated base MBP has the old Touch Bar. Why can’t they give us back our function keys? EDIT: and is now the only laptop without MagSafe? There are more ports on the new MBA!

>Cannot believe the updated base MBP has the old Touch Bar. Why can’t they give us back our function keys?

It's truly bizarre. They must have 10 million of the old laptop bodies in a warehouse or something?

Re: Apple unveils all-new MacBook Air, supercharged by the new M2 chip

#279

Post by grumpyprole »

apozem wrote: post #238
grumpyprole wrote: post #111

Almost 10 years ago we purchased a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for approx 2K UK pounds. It's really surprising and disappointing that a decade later these same specs essentially cost the same!

Not to be rude but this is an inaccurate and poor understanding of computers. The entire chip architecture of the Mac changed since 2010. 16 gigs of RAM on an M1-based chip gets you much, much better performance than 16 gigs on an Intel chip from 10 years ago. Even the RAM and SSD stats you cite are apples and oranges - both have gotten dramatically faster in the last decade.

> Not to be rude but this is an inaccurate and poor understanding of computers

Not to be rude, but a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. Software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years. What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?

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