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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

#311

Post by nicoburns »

M4v3R wrote: post #281
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you haven’t used an M1 device without telling me. People getting their hands on 8GB M1 MacBook Airs in the early days were saying the memory management and performance were making it snappier than the 16GB Intel MacBooks.

I made a mistake of purchasing a 8GB M1 MacBook Pro. It was painful to work with. For casual stuff it worked just fine, but as soon as I ran a Docker image (with 2GB memory limit), had Slack and few other light apps open, some tabs in Safari it started to become slow. Painfully slow. The spinning beach ball was a very frequent sight to me. My RAM usage was often in the red zone and I had to kill applications constant…

Docker on Mac is a pretty terrible experience in general in my experience. Better to run things natively if you can.

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

#312

Post by dylan604 »

haswell wrote: post #286
dylan604 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to show our commitment to our users, we're only responsible for 25% of future cancer where our competitors are responsible for 29%. I just don't see that line being effective.

What do you propose, then? Should they just not say anything at all? Or is your contention that the product should not even exist?

Chaning one's perspective on PR vomit would be my suggestion. If it comes from a PR team, then of course it is all shiny, smells great, long lasting, making the world a better place. The true information will never come from those PR departments. Maybe, it'll come from an interested 3rd party, but then you have to know if they are just being informative or if they have an agenda and distorting info as well.

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

#313

Post by pxmpxm »

cassianoleal wrote: post #295
grumpyprole wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. > What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly? If the swapping is fast enough not to be noticeable, then speed is all that matters. In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all! The whole reason why we have all these layers of memory (disk, RAM, L3, L2 and L1 cache,…

Apple must've spent a fortune on marketing bamboozlement ("you don't need as much RAM with apple silicone") that even people on HN now seem to parrot it.

NVME is around two orders of magnitude slower than DDR3 RAM, so as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall.

As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.

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

#314

Post by asdff »

trenchgun wrote: post #247
mmmmmbop wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to that, today's 2000 GBP are more comparable to 1600 GBP in 2012 due to inflation.

Also, software bloat means that the old macbook can't do shit with today's software.

Currently using a 2012 macbook pro, with a 512gb ssd, and 16gb sticks. It's more than enough power for I'd say 99% of what people use computers for (ms office, adobe suite, some cad, light dev work, etc.) These days its not hard to call upon compute from the heavens priced by the second should you need more horsepower.

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

#315

Post by nicoburns »

axlee wrote: post #148
BoumTAC wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker

Not Docker, webpack. Your run-of-the-mill webpack dev server will happily gulp gigabytes of RAM, and pray that your frontend dev stack only runs one of them. Your IDE will probably use a few more gigabytes on top of that for static analysis and autocompletion, and that's how you need at least 8-10GB to run develop your average mid-size web app without swapping.

My webpack config for a fairly large app run under a single GB, and performance on my m1 pro machine is so good that I have it permanently running the background. Maybe you need to optimise your config?

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

#316

Post by FireBeyond »

microtonal wrote: post #24
freediver wrote: post #9

Notch is painful to see. Hope they walk back on it like for the mag safe.

I stopped noticing the notch after using it for, what, maybe half an hour on my MacBook Pro? And the screen estate besides the notch is extra and the idea fits well with the macOS menu bar.

Notch is still a huge annoyance to me with a few things in my menubar (and that's while using Bartender).

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

#317

Post by nicoburns »

zekrioca wrote: post #207
criddell wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe multi-monitor is considered a pro feature?

M1 Mac Mini does natively support up to two external monitors – one via the HDMI port and a second via USB-C.

That because it doesn’t have an internal display… this has to displays in total as well.

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

#318

Post by olliej »

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…

I've been looking for replacement home networking gear the last few days - I still don't understand Wifi 6 vs 6E, but mostly what I wanted to say was when the Wifi4,5,.. naming came out a few years back my response was "ugh, stupid marketing" and now that I was actually having to look for hardware the difference in actually comparing functionality with linearly increasing numbers is so wonderful :D

That said, what exactly does E imply? I was really trying to distinguish devices using separate 6ghz backplane, and that was annoyingly opaque to me as a person who writes does code but aggressively avoids anything networking :D

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

#319

Post by pxmpxm »

petercooper wrote: post #308
cassianoleal wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. > What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly? If the swapping is fast enough not to be noticeable, then speed is all that matters. In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all! The whole reason why we have all these layers of memory (disk, RAM, L3, L2 and L1 cache,…

In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all! Just in case anyone was curious, I looked into this recently, assuming 7-8GB/s was pretty darn fast, but dual channel DDR2 RAM was doing such speeds in 2002. So a high end SSD is about as fast as 20 year old memory, if you ignore latency.

Ah beat me to it!

The idea that Mx swapping to NVME is essentially no-op from performance perspective is patently wrong.

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