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MacBook Air with M5

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Re: MacBook Air with M5

#461

Post by ProllyInfamous »

havaloc wrote: post #195
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 don't get it either. I've rolled out well over a hundred of these in a higher education setting and I have never had one have a hardware issue or needed to retire it other than wanton damage. I still have a ton of M1s in circulation and they are great still. I had to just replace a Dell with only 2.5 years of service, they tend to fall apart.

Twenty years ago, I worked at a Dell laptop repair facility, which primarily supported education customers.

>other than wanton damage

Some fairly clever students read their warranties closely and figured out how to get annual upgrades without violating warranty exclusion clauses. Very clever. Very annoying.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#462

Post by TiredOfLife »

lurking_swe wrote: post #315
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 forgot to mention the trackpad. MUCH nicer than the competitor trackpads. especially if you use some of the advanced gestures (some are hidden in accessibility settings).

> you forgot to mention the trackpad.

I have occasionally used MacBooks and the trackpad is the same as windows laptops. Or rather it becomes as good when I enable tap to click

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#463

Post by ProllyInfamous »

jstummbillig wrote: post #170
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).

The MB Air M line is a personal contender for best product of all time: Fantastic performance without fans, amazing battery life, high res display and build quality at that price point. When the M1 came out it was quite frankly unbelievable. And, even after all these years, I still don't see who would beat it across those dimensions.

>fantastic performance without fans

I have an MBA15M3 that is lovely. With 1mm thermal heat pads (internal, CPU|case), I was able to increase the run-time before throttling significantly.

Among my favorite evening companions. Much more durable than initially conceivable.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#464

Post by panny »

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…

-can't boot linux

No thanks.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#465

Post by mft_ »

mixtureoftakes wrote: post #111
mft_ wrote: post #55

Looking at the M5 Max specifically, two thoughts: 1) The price for a 14" model with the most powerful Max processor with 128GB of RAM ($5099 with all else left at the default settings) doesn't seem to have jumped hugely considering what's being going on with RAM prices in the world. 2) Interesting/disappointing that they aren't offering a model with even more RAM, further jumping on the local inference train.

Yeah and also they still want to get at least some sales on the mac studios and mac pros with ultra chips, 256gb m5 max wouldve straight up killed both of those products. We can have nice things but nobody is going to hurt themselves to give out things that are the very best possible, theres probably a lesson in this

> 256gb m5 max would've straight up killed both of those products.

1) Not necessarily, as the thermals would presumably be different, the use-case is different (not everyone wants or needs a laptop; expandability of the Pro, etc.) and Max =/= Ultra, especially if you're crunching local inference.

2) Even if there was some cannibalisation, does that matter? Unless we assume Apple is running a higher profit margin on Studio/Pro machines (unlikely, since laptops are more expensive than the equivalent Mini/Studio) they're still making roughly the same money at the end of the day. And for the higher end (i.e. workloads needing the Ultra and/or >256GB RAM) there's still no competition.

3) I'd not be surprised (RAM shortages aside) to see the RAM options on the Ultra increase before long, maintaining the differentiation, just at a higher level.

Basically, Apple stumbled into relevance as (amazingly) the most cost-effective option for local inference. Having found themselves in this position, it would be a huge fail to not lean further into this. They seem to be doing this to an extent by optimising chips for e.g. prompt processing, but increasing the RAM is needed too.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#466

Post by applfanboysbgon »

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…

I got an excellent Windows gaming laptop for $900 USD. It has a beautiful 17" 144hz glare-resistant display, not an awful glossy screen that might as well be a mirror in lit environment. The workmanship is great and the keyboard has a full numpad and utility keys. It came with a 1TB SSD and 16GB ram, both of which I doubled with additional parts after the fact for about $120. It would cost +$600 to reach 2TB SSD and +$400 per 16GB to extend the Macbook Air. Even at the current bullshit 500% inflated RAM prices, it would only cost $200 for +16GB on a Windows laptop. Given that 16GB is a complete non-starter for a $1.1k laptop in the world of programmers who only know how to use Electron, the Macbook Air is actually just garbage for price.

If money is no object to you, you can pay a >$1k premium for a 13" 60hz display if you care about fan noise under load or battery life. I personally don't mind either of those things, and will gladly enjoy my laptop with vastly superior specs in all other regards for half the price.

Windows has its problems, but they are fixable. You can hack and modify Windows all you want to get rid of the BS. I'll take that over an OS that believes the manufacturer owns the machine rather than the user, any day.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#467

Post by dask »

caymanjim wrote: post #98
mg wrote: post #14

The one thing that interests me most when it comes to laptops these days is weight. So I jumped right into the tech specs section and looked it up. Since this is the "Air" laptop of the company that is popular for thin and lightweight devices, my hopes were high. But ... The 13 inch version is heavier than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Which has a 14 inch screen and can run Linux.

I bought a ThinkPad X1. Had to send it back for repairs three times in the first year, including a complete motherboard replacement, and it died again immediately after the warranty expired. Been a $2800 door stop since then. The case is flimsy plastic that gets beat to crap easily. The trackpad is over-sensitive in all the wrong ways which makes it hard to use as an actual laptop. Plus it's weaker and slower than an…

Very different experience here. I have an X1 Extreme Gen 4 since 2022 (running Linux), and have had zero hardware issues so far. The only thing that's annoying is that it gets quite warm on the hand rest.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#468

Post by oblio »

cromka wrote: post #405
oblio wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be new to the Apple world. Unless Apple starts failing again as a company (bad financials), they won't provide any official support for Windows or Linux.

Use some arguments. Also, 15 years into the ecosystem.

I'm actually not an Apple user but I've seen them do their thing for close to 30 years now.

Apple is notoriously a control freak. They want to control the hardware, they way to control the software, they want to control the services, they want to control the entire experience.

What you're saying goes against everything they stand for.

Every time they open up, they do it because they're forced to.

They moved away from PowerPC (more control) to Intel (less control) because PowerPC couldn't keep up (despite them lying for half a decade about its performance, at some point it became too hard to distort reality).

They provided Windows dual-boot because they had to, their PC market share was too low and they couldn't get many applications so they had to accept it. After the iPhone took off and Mac started having a bigger marketshare and things were ported to it, they didn't need it as much so they stopped trying, they ditched dual boot for ARM. They never provided any real support for Linux, just some random hints and kind words, basically. They have more than enough money to sponsor an official port.

If anything, it's amazing that someone presumably technical can be "15 years into the ecosystem" and not understand these larger patterns so that I have to explain them like this :-)

Every time they open up, it's because they're weak. Once they're in a position of power:

* only XCode as an official IDE

* no JIT on iOS

* no first-class support for Ruby, Python, JS, etc to build iOS applications

* AppStore, no sideloading

* must use Mac to build for iOS

* ...

They're basically PC Nintendo. Always have been. The mega genius Jobs didn't want fans in a PC from the 1980s because they weren't cool, leading to said PC melting.

I find it funny that people keep excusing a multi-trillion dollar company for not finding pocket change to fund official porting efforts (such as Linux on Apple hardware, or Swift on Linux and Android) across decades. They're not doing it because they don't want to. They never will.

The purpose of a system is what it does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#469

Post by jamespo »

PaulHoule wrote: post #396
timothyduong wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait til she jumps on a windows 11 device! But I do agree with you. Thankfully it is minimal relative to windows.

First thing I do with a Win 11 install is ask Copilot how to turn all the crap off. ;-)

2nd thing to do is install and dual boot linux :D
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