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MacBook Air with M5

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Re: MacBook Air with M5

#281

Post by matthewkayin »

prmph wrote: post #221
Xeoncross wrote: post #74

I'm glad the air now comes standard with 16GB of RAM and 512GB disk space. It's not that the M1 with 8/256GB was slow at all, but even browsing the web gets into 12GB of usage and exhausting the 256GB is fairly easy if you backup your 256GB phone, try to edit a few videos, download enough Gradle/Go/Cargo/Node packages, or install enough 20GB office apps. Any apple silicon with 16GB / 512GB of stage (even the M1 serie…

Where does it stop? Of course having a bit more room does not hurt, but my view is that if 256GB was not enough for you, 512GB wouldn't be either. To me it's mostly about learning to mange RAM and storage space on your machine. A lot of stuff does not need to be hoarded on the machine. Move infrequently accessed data to an external drive. Be ruthless about purging stuff you no longer really need. Refuse to run apps t…

I think 512GB is a fair minimum for a computer these days, but I agree with your "Where does it stop?" sentiment when it comes to RAM.

If browsing the web takes 12GB of RAM, at what point do we stop chasing after more RAM and instead start demanding better performance and resource usage out of the web?

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#283

Post by bryanlarsen »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #278
bryanlarsen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The X1 Carbon is getting updated to Panther Lake, and Panther Lake is getting competitive with the M5. > in literally every benchmark you can come up Nope, Panther Lake will win most gaming benchmarks. The M5 will win most others but not by "running laps around" levels.

At what power envelope? Intel chips can compete with M series chips, but usually at way higher power, which means fans running like a jet engine.

Similar power envelope. It depends on the laptop of course, but many Panther Lake laptops score comparably on battery life tests in reviews.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#284

Post by mholm »

hnra wrote: post #271
mholm wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thermal throttling under sustained heavy load This gets mentioned a lot, but I do quite a bit of dev work on my M4 MBA and have never even felt it get warm. Sustained heavy loads are extremely rare with how quick this thing is.

How long are your compile times?

Fairly short, I'm a Go developer generally working with terraform and microservices. I'd expect some throttling if you're doing 3+ minute compiles, I think. But I think the problem is overblown by the tech video reviewer population that regularly does extremely intensive workloads.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#285

Post by ProfessorLayton »

prmph wrote: post #221
Xeoncross wrote: post #74

I'm glad the air now comes standard with 16GB of RAM and 512GB disk space. It's not that the M1 with 8/256GB was slow at all, but even browsing the web gets into 12GB of usage and exhausting the 256GB is fairly easy if you backup your 256GB phone, try to edit a few videos, download enough Gradle/Go/Cargo/Node packages, or install enough 20GB office apps. Any apple silicon with 16GB / 512GB of stage (even the M1 serie…

Where does it stop? Of course having a bit more room does not hurt, but my view is that if 256GB was not enough for you, 512GB wouldn't be either. To me it's mostly about learning to mange RAM and storage space on your machine. A lot of stuff does not need to be hoarded on the machine. Move infrequently accessed data to an external drive. Be ruthless about purging stuff you no longer really need. Refuse to run apps t…

>Where does it stop?

I don't know but macOS is making it ever more difficult to manage storage, with lots of random things under "macOS" pushing ~40GB or "System Data" that gets a crapload of unrelated things like podcast [1] downloads, with no easy way to purge.

[1] I spent too much time hunting down ~250GB of missing disk space, and it turns out it was the Podcasts app's cache, while the app itself reported no downloads. I fully expected this to be managed automatically, but was getting out of disk space warnings. It's a mess.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#286

Post by skullone »

kristjansson wrote: post #241
netsec_burn wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

??? I do dishes with an MBP next to the sink. I wouldn't put it under the faucet, but it's ~fine so far.

I wouldn't if I were you. Indeed there's a membrane that can keep drops away from electronics, but one big drop will find a way eventually. Doesn't even have to be a spill. Macs are infinitely fragile actually, there is zero effort spent on moisture or even dust intrusion.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#287

Post by myHNAccount123 »

MantisShrimp90 wrote: post #249

I 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…

> 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.

I like the UI. What do you think they making worse?

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#288

Post by PaulHoule »

madeofpalk wrote: post #265
PaulHoule wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What am I supposed to do, drive 300 miles to the nearest Genius Bar?

What would you do if your non-Apple computer was having performance issues?

I'd say this. I haven't had a Windows desktop computer with serious problems since 2007.

I had a long string of Windows laptops that were basically OK from maybe 2013 to 2023 except for problems with USB that got progressively worse over time (for each machine.) I think some of them were were real hardware problems but I think also the USB 3 spec doesn't guarantee that you can plug in very many devices and have it work, it depends on the PCIe architecture inside the machine. That "ding" sound when a USB device disconnects from windows has traumatized me and I've turned it off anywhere where I can because it is like a gunshot to a Vietnam vet.

I found very little literature about other Windows laptops users facing these problems but endless posts by AppleCare frequent fliers who seem to spend their lives at the Genius Bar and getting their old defective laptops replaced with new defective laptops, I think Windows users just expect it to be all screwed up.

For a long time Windows has struggled with processes that suck down a lot of resources at boot time. At home it is things that do software updates and saturate my 2x20Mbps internet connection. At work it is the backup program that saturates my Ethernet.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#289

Post by beacon294 »

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.

My problem was simply chrome so I switched to brave.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#290

Post by normie3000 »

haunter wrote: post #282

The new cheap Macbooks have also been more or less confirmed. Macbook Neo, probably coming with the iPhone A-series chips https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/03/apple-accidentally-leak...

iPhone processor? Should be interesting to see how performance is.
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