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

apple.com

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

#361

Post by porphyra »

ketzo wrote: 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.

Hotter, heavier, and worse battery life, for sure. Slower is up for debate --- having more ram, more cores, and possibly discrete GPU is great for all sorts of things. The Ryzen 7840HS is not any worse than the M3 in multithreaded things.

Just recently there was a Thinkpad P14S on sale for $999 that blows the Macbooks out of the water in terms of ram and storage, while having a high quality OLED display and a Ryzen CPU that can easily trade blows with Apple silicon. It is hotter and heavier and has very bad battery life, though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/s/7CgJwku18K

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

#362

Post by [deleted] »

tnmom wrote: post #325
Solvency wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain technically the hardware difference here? Or is there none and Apple's track firmware/software is just better.

Probably some vendor provides the trackpad, and provides a driver for that trackpad, and it recognizes the gesture and then sends Windows a `GestureHappened()` event. Versus macOS being fully integrated and effectively generating `GestureProgress(0.31)` events.

[deleted]

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

#363

Post by turtlebits »

samuell wrote: post #156
ketzo wrote: 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.

With what RAM? ... and what weight? For $1700 you can get a sub-1kg Asus ExpertBook B9 with 32GB RAM and a 2TB disk and a decent 12th 12 core Gen Intel CPU. https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-ExpertBook-i7-1255U-Military-B94... Not saying it is better in all respects, but definitely in some, meaning there are definitely alternatives.

1080p - that's a non starter for me.

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

#364

Post by burnte »

jm4 wrote: post #301
skadamat wrote: post #160

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

I think even worse than that is that they still only put 8 GB RAM in the base and middle options.

This is why for my Mac needs I have a cheaper Mini. If I'm going to have to be stuck with 8GB or pay insane markups for 16gb, I'll get the 8GB Mini, and only do the purely Mac-centric stuff on it to minimize pain.

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

#365

Post by lavela »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #313
lavela wrote: 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.

It's the US Apple website, what do you expect? Of course the measurements will be in football fields and eagles/freedom units. Go to other local websites and the specs will be in the local units (most likely metric), but even in Europe, display sizes or car wheels are almost always denominated in inches.

If it is the US website I'm just asking where the international english website is I guess. Choosing UK or South Africa doesn't make the inch go away.

This is totally fine for companies targeting US domestic markets I guess but I suspect Apple sees itself as an international company and they should have the budget for proper internationalization.

Maybe they just don't care for people to know how thin the Air is, but the number of search results for 'thin' on the page let's me think otherwise.

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

#366

Post by FredPret »

lavela wrote: 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.

Why is # of countries or # of people important?

It's the total spending dollars that's important. By using US customary units, you get 25% of the world GDP in one easy-to-do-business-with entity.

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

#367

Post by dataworm »

seam_carver wrote: post #345

M3 MBP will also get 2 display support when the lid is closed in a macOS update. https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/04/14-inch-m3-macbook-pro-multi-...

The M2 MacBooks should also get that because the hardware supports it. The M2 Mac mini allows to connect 2 displays over USB-C if you don't use the HDMI port.

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

#368

Post by dataworm »

zuhsetaqi wrote: post #356
seam_carver wrote: post #345

M3 MBP will also get 2 display support when the lid is closed in a macOS update. https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/04/14-inch-m3-macbook-pro-multi-...

Source?

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/04/m3-macbook-pro-multi-di...

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

#369

Post by sircastor »

jjice wrote: post #165
ketzo wrote: 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.

You're absolutely right that they make a damn fine laptop (the build quality stands out to me) and they do a great job in that market. Anecdotally, my Framework 13 AMD ran me 1500 and I ended up with 64 GB of ram, 2 TB of storage, and an AMD 7840U. I bought my RAM and storage separately to get that end cost, to be fair. I wouldn't be surprised if the M3 actually outperforms my processor by a bit, but having way more…

I've oscillated a lot on "my next" laptop over the years. For a while (at the height of the butterfly-keyboard/touchbar-madness) I thought about going to Linux for my personal machine. I haven't gotten there, but the Framework gives me hope that a really really excellent, serviceable, and understandable laptop can and does exist.

I would love if I could run macOS on a Framework.

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