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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

#361

Post by elxr »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #14

This looks like what the Macbook (2015) wanted to be. Keyboard and single port aside, it was a fantastic form factor, albeit crushingly slow. Mine no longer holds a charge, and am eagerly awaiting replacing it with one of these. Over time I've also noticed I no longer care about having the fastest possible laptop, since my job provides me with an MBP and that's where serious work gets done. I have a feeling this is g…

I'd rather buy a similarly light laptop, that has a touchscreen.

You can already get AMD Zen 3+ machines in this size class, that isn't too far behind in perf & efficiency. Doing so gives you much better Linux compatibility, a touchscreen, and (sometimes) better feeling keyboards. Battery life will always come up short though, x86 laptops just can't match these new macbooks.

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

#362

Post by cassianoleal »

postalrat wrote: post #345
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,…

Disk can have high transfer speeds but access time isn't at all comparable to ram. I was interested until I saw it tops out at 8gb. My environment typically needs just over 16gb.

What tops out at 8gb by the way? The previous gen Air gos up to 16Gb, and this gen's goes up to 24Gb.

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

#363

Post by vetinari »

olliej wrote: post #318
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 ex…

E implies the ability to use additional channels at the 6 GHz frequencies. With 5 GHz there are some problems, almost everyone uses the lower ones, leading to congestion and ignoring the upper ones due to DFS (radar detection; people are not fond of their wifi randomly not working).

And contrary to yours opinion, I consider that both 4 (-n) and 5 (-ac) brought very nice things (like support for new frequencies, wider channels or multiple streams). I happened to own 3x3 MIMO ac router at the time and together with 2015 MBP, I saw what it was not necessary to provide ethernet port anymore.

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

#364

Post by seunosewa »

elxr wrote: post #361
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #14

This looks like what the Macbook (2015) wanted to be. Keyboard and single port aside, it was a fantastic form factor, albeit crushingly slow. Mine no longer holds a charge, and am eagerly awaiting replacing it with one of these. Over time I've also noticed I no longer care about having the fastest possible laptop, since my job provides me with an MBP and that's where serious work gets done. I have a feeling this is g…

I'd rather buy a similarly light laptop, that has a touchscreen. You can already get AMD Zen 3+ machines in this size class, that isn't too far behind in perf & efficiency. Doing so gives you much better Linux compatibility, a touchscreen, and (sometimes) better feeling keyboards. Battery life will always come up short though, x86 laptops just can't match these new macbooks.

Why do you need a touchscreen? What are some of the applications? I feel like the screen would get dirty.

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

#365

Post by vetinari »

nicoburns wrote: post #311
M4v3R wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Docker on Mac (and Windows) is a full-blown VM. The containers assume Linux, so they are getting it -- inside that VM.

That also brings issue with networking. Sure, if you are using the bridged (in Docker's parlance) networks, you won't notice. If you need to use host/ipvlan/macvlan, you will.

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

#366

Post by icemelt8 »

seunosewa wrote: post #364
elxr wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather buy a similarly light laptop, that has a touchscreen. You can already get AMD Zen 3+ machines in this size class, that isn't too far behind in perf & efficiency. Doing so gives you much better Linux compatibility, a touchscreen, and (sometimes) better feeling keyboards. Battery life will always come up short though, x86 laptops just can't match these new macbooks.

Why do you need a touchscreen? What are some of the applications? I feel like the screen would get dirty.

No post body was provided.

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

#367

Post by somethoughts »

I wish there was a MacBook variant that had a 15" screen but cost under $1500. I feel like this is probably the only missing gap in the laptop line up. Its hard for me to understand the limitation considering the iMac is at 24".

As a parent with 2 kids - giving each a Mac laptop that won't cause eyestrain/reduced productivity is a non starter at $1999 each.

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

#368

Post by vetinari »

criddell wrote: post #292
zekrioca wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, they seem to treat their desktop machine differently.

Nope, just as the sibling wrote: with that chip, they have two outputs total to play with, and on laptops one of them is wired to the internal display.

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

#369

Post by dschuessler »

duxup wrote: post #331

Anyone do full time web dev work on an Air? I’m thinking of switching from PC land but not sure.

Until February I used a 2013 Air with 8 GB. It was perfectly fine for web dev, even with Docker.

The current model will probably not even notice what you throw at it.

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

#370

Post by pxmpxm »

coldtea wrote: post #360
pxmpxm wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sessio…

> Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb. Well, I use my M1 (16 GB) for heavy video editing and music sessions, plus professional programming, with IDEA, VMs, and so on. And I don't seem to ever need even close to 16GB, much less "way north", or even saw it be slow. > 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 Ci…

> Maybe it's time to come over to M1 and 12.4?

This is the very type of bamboozlement I was alluding to - instruction set and/or silicon architecture doesn't actually change the amount of data you use.

Citrix will still need to buffer the same (compressed?) 4K worth of pixels and Edge will still to load up the full DOM, cache all the sources, stand up a sandbox with javascript virtual machine etc.

There's nothing magical there... a single frame of 16 bit 8K RAW will allocate the exactly same amount of heap on M1, M2, Intel or anything else for that matter.

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