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MacBook Air with M5

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Re: MacBook Air with M5

#381

Post by gigatexal »

std_move wrote: post #216

This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k. - it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent - a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use - best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU - no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff a…

Yup. This a 1TB disk (how I’d configure it) and max out the ram is what I’d get.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#382

Post by benbayard »

mikae1 wrote: post #320
std_move wrote: post #216

This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k. - it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent - a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use - best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU - no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff a…

> You can maybe get a cheaper Windows laptop but it will be terrible in almost everything It will be worse at almost everything, except running my preferred OS (Linux). Being able to upgrade/repair RAM, storage and battery at home is quite a perk too.

Many newer Windows laptops are now having their ability to update ram and storage removed as well. I believe the newest intel architecture introduced this, but my information might be out of date.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#383

Post by SXX »

jruz wrote: post #341
mikae1 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can maybe get a cheaper Windows laptop but it will be terrible in almost everything It will be worse at almost everything, except running my preferred OS (Linux). Being able to upgrade/repair RAM, storage and battery at home is quite a perk too.

Not on the latest but I’m happily running Asahi NixOS

On M1 there are still issues with wifi not recovering after sleep and for me its just disappear sometimes.

Something like Framework is more expensive thanks to RAM abd SSD shortage, but Linux support is so much better.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#384

Post by storus »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #363
PaulHoule wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think user switching is part of the problem in my case.

one other thing to check is if you installed any kernel extensions...inside Apple engineering, folks with kernel extensions could get bizarre errors since the quality of them could screw up stability with all sorts of symptoms. kextstat | grep -v com.apple would show anything _maybe_ troublesome, but not guaranteed related.

In my case no kernel extensions. Every few days the computer freezes with a beachball and/or screen starts falling apart in large blocks randomly shuffling around the screen and I need to power it off. The first logicboard also added a bunch of pink noise in a few clusters all over the screen. Whenever I got close to freeze my power charging beeps were getting more and more frequent up to around 1 beep per 3 seconds with USB charger in (the beep when you insert power adapter into USB port).

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#385

Post by dijit »

throwaway290 wrote: post #377
dijit wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh no, absolutely- apologies for the confusion. Time "Machine" on MacOS continues to work (though it's clearly not as important to Apple as it once was). The issue is: if you want to back up a phone: it will take space from your laptop and it must be tethered to do the backup. This means that if you have a 1TiB phone, like I do, you need at least 1TiB of local disk on your laptop to be able to do a single backup if t…

Can you symlink iphone backup location to an external drive?

might be smarter to try mounting the drive on the path that backups use, instead of hoping that the software follows symlinks.

That said, we're very much in "power user" territory now, and it does nothing to support the untethered use-case that Time Machine allows.

In fact, the real punch of my comment before was that this would be a way of selling additional hardware (the old time-capsules) to consumers.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#386

Post by zem »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #371
zem wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting, I had to stop using my trackpoint because it was giving me rsi in my index finger. the track pad hasn't given me any issues.

It's all about not doing the same thing, whatever that same thing may be. I switch between trackball and mouse as each one gets a bit uncomfortable.

I'm also convinced that trackpoints themselves are stiffer and less comfortable to use than they used to be in the older thinkpads

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#387

Post by Robdel12 »

tiffanyh wrote: post #59

I'm not sure why the negative tone in this thread. The MBA is an amazing value, and appears to have only gotten slightly cheaper . This is a solid product, that continually receives incremental improvements and delivered at a lower price point (when spec'd out).

I retired my M1 MacBook Air last year, really out of power greed. I wanted to play with local LLMs (lol).

I seriously never had issues with my m1 in my workloads. Dev stuff, docker, etc. editing 30min 4k GoPro videos. I probably would these days with rust dev stacked in there but yeah. Can’t agree more, they’re an amazing value.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#388

Post by jibe »

twodave wrote: post #369
zonkerdonker wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its absolutley mind boggling. My work machine (lenovo) regualry roasts itself to 0% battery in my backpack during my commute

This is likely some monitoring/attendant software your employer is running remotely, not the fault of the hardware directly.

Happens on my ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14, personal laptop frequently enough i do a full power down when not using it. Definitely a hardware/Windows problem.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#389

Post by dangus »

MoonWalk wrote: post #379
dangus wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you are comparing against an M1 or M2 you can find numerous PC laptops that will beat that out in performance and still have a quiet/cool/long battery life operation. Yes, the MacBook Air is unique-ish for having no fan at all, but a slow running fan that you can barely hear is going to get you more performance with basically zero added cost or compromise. And for those users who don’t need top performance and…

Not true. Mac OS does not nag you about subscription services. What are you talking about? Windows is offensive, insufferable trash. From its CONTINUAL hounding about "your Microsoft account" to its bug-riddled, regressive, and shambolic UI. Things Windows users took for granted 40 years ago are simply gone. Example: Select three PNGs in Explorer and right-click on them, and look for "Open with..."

Literally the moment you buy a Mac. Apple hardware comes with 3 month trials of various subscriptions, and you get a notification about it. They try to get you to sign up in hopes you’ll forget to cancel.

When I bought my iPhone 17 the sales associate even tried to pitch signing up for the trial in person as he guided me through the purchase process.

When you cancel the trial it ends it immediately instead of ending it at the end of your trial period, a dark pattern designed to encourage you to forget to end your trial.

Apple devices also nag you about buying AppleCare in the system preferences.

I’ve never been hounded about my Microsoft account. Be specific. When does this happen? Yes, you need one to set up Windows 11 (just like a Mac and especially iOS are basically useless without an Apple account anyway), but after that I’ve never been hounded around anything related to it.

Never had problems figuring out how to open stuff in Windows. No idea what you’re saying.

Most of these extreme claims about Windows seem to come from people who don’t even use the OS regularly and have forgotten about the ways in which macOS does many of the same commercial OS practices.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#390

Post by drob518 »

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 agree with the sentiment, but in general it's not worth my time to try to purge. I used to do that back in 2005. Heck, in the 1990s, I'd buy a new hard drive every year. But these days, I find that a hard drive lasts me for 5 years if I plan well.
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