Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 593 posts

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

#431

Post by Bud »

fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #38
agloeregrets wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M2 does not hold a candle to the M1 Pro or Max, don't worry. Every improved spec is much better in the M1 Pro/Max.

Yeah but my guess is soon the M2 Max will be revealed. Its probably already developed, they just need to wait six more months to reveal. Clearly apple is able to jump straight to the M2, but they are releasing M1 to maximize profit.

Please either support made-up arguments like this, with sources, or even better, don't post them to begin with. Don't waste our time.

Absolutely nobody wants to hear that you have magical oracular powers that enable you to tell us what the secret evil motives are behind Apple's CPU development iteration schedule and product release schedule.

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

#432

Post by hit8run »

copperx wrote: post #132
hit8run wrote: post #112

I don’t buy 60hz displays in 2022. No way this comes without 120hz „Pro Motion“. Disgusting.

Are 120 Hz 4k or 5k external displays common?

144hz 4K is common yes. 5k upwards there is nothing above 60hz.

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

#433

Post by stouset »

pxmpxm wrote: post #313
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,…

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…

What even is "used memory" anyway?

I'm sitting here on an M1 MacBook Pro with 64GB of memory. I'm running Chrome with a few dozen tabs open, Slack, VS Code, and Terminal. Apparently 32GB of memory is being "used".

Do you believe I would experience noticeable performance loss if I was running 16GB of memory?

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

#434

Post by filoleg »

synaesthesisx wrote: post #270
CoastalCoder wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that link. For my next work laptop, I've been waiting to see if (sometime soon) there would be a MBP that supported external refresh rates > 60 Hz. Given that the M2 MBA still has that limitation, I suspect not.

I can run my Samsung CRG9 (a 49” UW monitor) with one of my M1 machines (an original 13” Pro w/ M1) at 120hz with no issues, FWIW. I suspect it would probably have issues running 4K @120hz however.

Regular 4k@120hz is totally doable on M1 Max MBP, can confirm that myself.

Hard to answer the question regarding 4k+ ultrawides @120hz though, primarily because i dont think there is a display like that in existence yet (googling didn't net much success there for me). The only ultrawide 4k+ display i found that is above 60hz is the LG 5k ultrawide with thunderbolt 4 support, and it maxes out at 70hz (and M1 Max MBP supports it at that refresh rate just fine, that's my current setup).

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

#435

Post by ja27 »

asdff wrote: post #306
exhilaration wrote: post #30

And for the first time, MacBook Air supports fast charge for charging up to 50 percent in just 30 minutes with an optional 67W USB-C power adapter. Anybody know if the 67W USB-C power adapter is finally stock? Edit: Nope, still gotta wait a month: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MKU63AM/A/67w-usb-c-power... Other (bigger) chargers are a 2 month wait. Looks like Apple is still suffering from supply chain issues.

If that means they ship with something like a 45W that's just cruel. I bet the charge merely maintains when the computer is under load.

45W is likely plenty for almost any use.

I have the 16" M1 Pro MacBook Pro and regularly run it from a small 30W USB-C PD charger. That keeps up with the demand even running Photoshop, Minecraft, Xcode, etc.

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

#436

Post by abraxas »

coldtea wrote: post #344
grumpyprole wrote: post #111

Almost 10 years ago we purchased a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for approx 2K UK pounds. It's really surprising and disappointing that a decade later these same specs essentially cost the same!

Yeah, only - the processor has several times more transistors and cores, - plus several special purposes devices for encoding video, AI tasks, and so on - the video performance is several times faster - the battery lasts 4 times as much, - the RAM is several times faster, - the SSD is 4-5x faster, - the display has twice the resolution and extremelly improved brightness and color rendition... and so on So dissapointi…

that's not a lot to show for over a decade when you compare that to the relative progress made over previous decades.

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

#437

Post by stouset »

pxmpxm wrote: post #358
alsetmusic wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re describing your results on an Intel Mac. They aren’t relevant to this particular bit of the discussion. And, owning two different M1 laptops, I concur that the relationship between the RAM and SSD and M1 SoC yields fundamentally different results from prior hardware. The result is stunning.

What relationship would that be? The DDR4x ram in the M1 can hit 70gb/sec, compared to 7gb/sec and ~3.5gb/sec average for the NVME. There's no amount of magic to get around those facts.

I'm a professional systems programmer. I agree with everything you're saying, in principle.

Except I have two M1 MacBook Pros (one 16GB, one 64GB). I frankly don't notice the difference between the two on any workload. This involves compiling multiple projects, running multiple docker containers locally in virtual machines, running VS Code, Slack, Chrome, and other productivity tools.

These machines frankly feel like alien fucking technology and I don't say that lightly. I'm used to year-over-year improvements being almost unnoticeable. These machines feel like I've jumped ten or more years forward in performance and responsiveness. And they do so while barely generating heat. My previous Intel MBP would make my home office hot just by being in a Zoom call. When I first got my M1 MBP, I left it running all night performing a SIMD-heavy pure math workload pegging every core at 100%. Not only was it faster, but the room wasn't even perceptibly warmer than ambient.

I have a gaming PC next to my work area. Zen 9 3950X, GeForce 3080, 64GB of DDR-4000 RAM, and Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. The fans go blazing and I start sweating just booting Windows. And unless I'm doing something in VR, it performs comparably to the MacBook Pro. I barely turn the damn thing on these days.

Alien technology.

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

#438

Post by ja27 »

copperx wrote: post #80
exhilaration wrote: post #30

And for the first time, MacBook Air supports fast charge for charging up to 50 percent in just 30 minutes with an optional 67W USB-C power adapter. Anybody know if the 67W USB-C power adapter is finally stock? Edit: Nope, still gotta wait a month: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MKU63AM/A/67w-usb-c-power... Other (bigger) chargers are a 2 month wait. Looks like Apple is still suffering from supply chain issues.

Is there a third-party charger that can deliver that wattage?

Anker Nano II is tiny and does 65 watts.

RavPower sells some dual-port models that will do 90W PD if you use one port or 45/45W or 60/30W using both ports. I ran my i9 MBP on the single port and it regularly drew 90W.

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

#439

Post by stouset »

pxmpxm wrote: post #397
troupe wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While your second statement is probably true, do you actually disagree that 16 gigs of RAM on an M1 gets you much better performance than 16 gigs on an Intel Mac?

Isn't it the same DDR4x in either?

Computers are not just the sum of their hardware specs.

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

#440

Post by seabriez »

onphonenow wrote: post #427
seabriez wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you just said it, your wife. X1 maybe went with this screen for whatever reason but there are other laptop options (XPS 13, Surface Laptop). XPS is even better than Air 3.5K 3456x2160. I think for newer consumers, they can more "easily" navigate through all these options to decide, well, I'm not a Pro (or not using it for Pro) and I will get Air. But in the end it's not a PRO level device and it's really sad…

My sibling uses an air - built and sold one company, doing the same again with 8 digit funding. He could buy any computer he wants. He chose an air. This is unique a bit to tech world, my piece of this in IT side is not the SAAS tech directly and old IT they don't work so well so I don't buy them. The upside, he handed off his huge tricked out machine to me. I think especially for folks who are not in one spot (ie, s…

Yeah, that's the issue here, Apple positions itself as a luxury device. Personally, I think there's a halo effect from iPhone being good, but it doesn't mean that other Apple products are. It's just hype and undeserved hype at that. Also, I just don't like Apple as an industry player, they rewrite and replace into CLOSED software (Embrace, extend, and extinguish), to use most of it, you need to be 100% Apple devices. This is terrible. As consumers, we've benefited GREATLY from vendors competing, and that's what has driven a lot of innovations on our table top. Apple goes against all of that, and this is why I don't/won't spend more money there. If you see WWDC at least 40% was about replacing already existing functionality of Google Docs.
Post reply on HN