Live data from Hacker News

New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

apple.com

341–350 of 1001 posts

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#341
post #259
post #49

The degree to which Apple has kinda just “won” laptops is nuts to me. $999 for an 13-inch M2 Air is just bonkers. You can easily pay $1500, even $2000 for Windows laptops that are hotter, heavier, AND slower.

that's also $999 for 8gb of ram (!!!), which will clearly throttle under any actual use.

Newer macOS is actually really good about running with less RAM. The only problem is then your SSD will suddenly fill up. If either was upgradable, this would be no problem.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution. Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure thi…

>Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure this out yet. Follow the money. How much demand is there for it, Who's incentivized to fix it, how much does it cost to R&D, and will that feature increase profit margins? The sad workaround is simply SSD's having faster boot times and setting a computer to hibernate instead of sleep when closed (and not on battery).…

>The sad workaround is simply SSD's having faster boot times and setting a computer to hibernate instead of sleep when closed (and not on battery). It gets "close enough" for many.

That is not a workaround since, as far as I know, only MacBooks have a sufficiently good reputation that when you close the lid, it won’t still be on in your bag.

I assume if this hibernate option was viable, then people would be slamming their Windows laptop shut and stuffing it in their bag at a moment’s notice.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#343
post #309

I'm always a bit irritated when editors still use inch measurements exclusively, when it's only used in 3 countries officially still. Not talking about screen sizes obviously, but I really don't have an intuition for what 'less than half an inch' thickness is and I'm sure there are a _lot_ of people who use English as their interface language outside of the US.

I get it. It'd be nice if all these major companies used both in and cm. Americans have to go back and forth with metric a lot and it would be useful to think of every day items in terms of both inches and cm.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#344
post #49

The degree to which Apple has kinda just “won” laptops is nuts to me. $999 for an 13-inch M2 Air is just bonkers. You can easily pay $1500, even $2000 for Windows laptops that are hotter, heavier, AND slower.

But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU. It is probably the best laptop in the $1K price range for laptops that don't have a GPU, but that's basically it. The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality…

Hybrid sleep being broken is the #1 dealbreaker issue I have with my work-supplied XPS 9570. I know that machine is pretty long in the tooth at this point, but in some ways that actually makes it worse, that it's been all these years and Dell just shrugged and moved on.

It really doesn't make me want to reward them with more money, only to find out what exciting new issues will be present and trivially reproducible for the entire next revision of the hardware.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#346
post #3

I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. Corporations have become pros at exploiting our human psychology. Their ads can make you believe that the smallest bump in improvements will make your older computer appear useless in comparison. That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.

Let's put it this way. M1 Max can build some amount of code in 134 seconds. M3 Max can do it in 70 seconds. Does this sound like a small bump? Source: XcodeBenchmark

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#347

Am I the only one who is bothered by the cut-out for the webcam and the rounded corners of the screen? Fortunately, laptops are just toys for me, and I save a lot of money by not buying one from Apple anymore.

I love the rounded corners honestly. The screen feels more natural with it. The camera notch however bothers me daily. The most annoying bit about it is that the notch is so large that the mouse cursor can get lost in the dead zone behind it.

It's awful design... It would had been forgivable if it was just a small circular camera cutout, but I'm guessing they didn't do that purely because they wanted to be different. Plus to go with a circular camera cutout on their Macbooks would suggest that it's not a great design choice on the iPhone either.

It's the only thing I genuinely hate about my M3 Macbook. Almost everything else is great.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU. It is probably the best laptop in the $1K price range for laptops that don't have a GPU, but that's basically it. The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality…

> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU. People love to say this without linking to a model. That's because the models in this price range are obviously not in the same weight class as a MacBook. Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... lite…

The term you’re looking for is “caliber”, since many will interpret “weight class” to mean the actual weight of the laptop.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#349
post #309

I'm always a bit irritated when editors still use inch measurements exclusively, when it's only used in 3 countries officially still. Not talking about screen sizes obviously, but I really don't have an intuition for what 'less than half an inch' thickness is and I'm sure there are a _lot_ of people who use English as their interface language outside of the US.

To be fair to the editors, the inch measurement is just coming from Apple, that's how they refer to it. If the editors converted the model name into centimeters they'd be using a different name than Apple, and probably losing some search traffic as well. But I feel your pain: it's not even a great description, because the screen isn't 13 inches, it's 13.6 or something like that.

I can deal with the screen sizes, as they are used everywhere ( it's similar to e.g. 3.5mm jack I guess) and you know what's meant by that, but stating the thickness in inches got me.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#350

I'm still very bummed with Apple's strategy in using # of supported external displays as a feature to gate laptops. I had to return a decently spec-ced M3 Macbook PRO 14" because it only supported 1 display (base M3) and pay more for M3 pro even though I don't need the extra horsepower. And now the base M3 Air's support 2 displays? This is wild

Stuff like this is why I can not switch to Apple, I would not expect or even think to look up which Macbooks can support at least 2 displays if they otherwise had decent enough specs for them. Who knows what else I am failing to consider?

I don't want to waste time migrating to a new system, only to find out I need to return/resell it, or later down the road find out another arbitrary/artificial limitation Apple has set that I either have to find a work around for or suck up until I can switch machines again if none exist.

This is unfortunate since there are some features that have made it very tempting to switch.

Post reply on HN