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

MacBook Air with M5

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 531 posts

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#471

Post by kintamanimatt »

wisplike wrote: post #263
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 wish it was different Amen to that, my keyboard on my m1 air recently failed. I was horrified to find out it is literally riveted to the frame. I got this close to buying a new one. Something annoyed me about this perfectly good laptop being rendered compltely useless and I ended up buying a replacement keyboard, ripping out the old one and shimming this one with paper. Its not perfect but here I am typing from i…

How did it fail?

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#472

Post by cromka »

oblio wrote: post #468
cromka wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 :-)

I don't talk to people this condescending.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#473

Post by wink »

overfeed wrote: post #328
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…

Why the restriction to laptops? I don't get why prosumers would marry themselves 24/7 to a single portable device, when their conflicting requirements vary by task and circumstances: portability, high performance, low energy usage, and low noise aren't permanent requirements. Sure, there's no single device that has Apple's blend of attributes, but who need that in this age of VMs and broadband Internet? My 32-core HE…

> Why the restriction to laptops?

The last company that was willing to give me a non-laptop desktop... I left in 2005. (with one exception where I simply did not ask)

Not even if "1k EUR desktop + 200 EUR netbook" would have cost less than a beefy laptop.

No, I don't know why.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#474

Post by diffeomorphism »

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…

Heavier than competing 14in laptops. Just okay res display. Low refresh rate. No oled or mini led. Basically unrepairable.

There are reasons the MacBook pro exists. The air is a nice machine but there are definitely trade-off.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#475

Post by AndroidKitKat »

Shadowmist wrote: post #446
sitharus wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time my Windows gaming PC updates it nags me about setting up backups to OneDrive. I cannot install Windows without a Microsoft account unless I apply work-arounds. It constantly offers Office 365, even adding dummy icons to the start menu. There are adverts on the login screen. To be fair I installed Bazzite there, but for a laptop I cannot find an equivalent device at the same price point even ignoring the ne…

Even after saying no to OneDrive and doing all I can to remove it, it tends to randomly come back months later and will automatically start uploading my desktop and documents folder to the cloud. Edit: I even specifically bought the Pro version hoping to be able to shut some of this off.

It's not worth the hassle, but for the Windows machines in my house I set up Windows Server and have all the machines provisioned to an Active Directory domain where I turn off all the crap via Group Policy. You can get by with just editing Group Policy for a standalone Windows Pro copy, but for more than one machine I really didn't want to fiddle with having to update each machine's policy whenever Microsoft does something stupid.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#476

Post by jurgenburgen »

vbezhenar wrote: post #443
my123 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LPCAMM2 is more present on business/high end machines unfortunately. It's not an Intel restriction.

There are Intel CPUs which come with bundled RAM. For example Intel Core Ultra 5 238V. It's like SoM: RAM is mounted directly on the CPU package, not even soldered on the motherboard. I'm not sure what particular advantages does that bring over traditional packaging, maybe shorter wires to allow for faster turnarounds between CPU and RAM. But there's zero chance of upgrading or replacing RAM for sure.

> I'm not sure what particular advantages does that bring over traditional packaging

Massive increase in bandwidth, which is useful for e.g. running local LLMs.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#478

Post by drob518 »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #411
drob518 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used local AI models on a 32 GB MBP? I ask because I'm looking to finally upgrade my M1 Air, which I love, but which only has 16 GB RAM. I'm trying to figure out if I just want to bump to 32 GB with the M5 MBAir or make the jump all the way to 64 GB with the low-end M5 MBP. I love my M1 Air and I don't typically tax the CPU much, but I'm starting to look at running local models and for that I'd like faster a…

For local models are you wanting to do: A) Embeddings. B) Things like classification, structured outputs, image labelling etc. C) Image generation. D) LLM chatbot for answering questions, improving email drafts etc. E) Agentic coding. ? I have a MBP with M1 Max and 32GB RAM. I can run a 20GB mlx_vlm model like mlx-community/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-4bit. But: - it's not very fast - the context window is small - it's not usefu…

Thanks for the info.

I’d like to do agentic coding first, but then chatbot and classification as lower priorities. I don’t really care about image gen.

Also, if you’re only able to run 35B models in 32GB, seems like I’d definitely want at least 64GB for the newer, larger models (qwen has a 122B model, right). My theory there is that models are only getting larger, though perhaps also more efficient.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#479

Post by snowwrestler »

gizajob wrote: post #89
geerlingguy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Air lineup was thinner in the front and seemed a little lighter. The thicker front on newer airs gives more battery life, but I'm not a fan of it.

The thinness at the front was a bit of a hack though wasn’t it? So Steve Jobs could make it look good in photographs. I’d take the extra battery life any day.

The final version of the “wedge” Air case was an amazing piece of physical design. The lid had a large-radius complex curve that perfectly controlled reflections. The bottom case had a curve that made it look like the machine was hovering above the desktop from almost any angle. Calling that a “hack” is sort of like calling it a “hack” that a Ferrari looks fast even when it’s parked.

The new designs are overtly boringly utilitarian. I would say they intentionally look ugly. I guess this must have been intended as a marketing signal.

And it seems like it’s working since you think the new design delivers better battery life. It doesn’t! The 13-inch M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5 MacBook Airs are all specced for 18 hours of battery life.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#480

Post by IshKebab »

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.

Honestly for the price you'd have to pay to get an equivalent Windows laptop you can buy two Macbook Airs. I think Apple's higher end machines are overpriced but their entry level laptops are a bargain, for what you get. Unless you need Linux (and the resulting bugginess/short battery life), it's really a no-brainer.

(Don't tell my Linux isn't buggy. I use it, but I regularly run into nonsense like this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512297 that doesn't happen on Windows or Mac. I still haven't figured out why VSCode freezes for half a second every few minutes on Linux.)

Post reply on HN