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

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

#521

Post by [deleted] »

makeset wrote: post #469
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We got a SIKER battery replacement for a 2012 MacBook Pro, but one cell swelled up and the battery wouldn't hold a charge. One Amazon reviewer for one of the replacement MacBook battery packs says that they might be building replacement battery packs out of old worn damaged, or mismatched cells. I don't know if that's the case. In any case I bought a second battery pack from TECHOWL and it seems to be working for a f…

I’ve changed half a dozen MacBook batteries with Anker over the years, and all worked flawlessly. One I thought was swollen and they promptly moved to send a replacement, but turned out it was my case that was warped.

[deleted]

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

#522

Post by mhio »

dayvid wrote: post #472
geerlingguy wrote: post #17

The biggest question I have is whether it has WiFi 6E or just WiFi 6 (2x2 80 MHz like the original M1 MacBook Air). That's the one thing that's kind of gimped it for me—if I could get more WiFi bandwidth, especially with the ProRes decoding built into the M2, I might be able to edit 4K video over my network wirelessly for the first time. Would be amazing. To be clear, I still think the M1 Air was the best portable la…

I have an M1 Pro 14" and ethernet is literally 9-10x faster than Wi-Fi using speed tests.

What do you use for an ethernet adapter? I can hardly tell the difference with a RT8153 adapter, then the increase in CPU usage renders it largely pointless.

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

#523

Post by fomine3 »

philliphaydon wrote: post #518
fomine3 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want laptop manufacturers to copy Apple's "click-everywhere" feature (called Force Touch). Maybe patented?

Isn’t that what dell just made? In the dell XPS 13? https://youtu.be/6fPj6mj-M_k

It's good to know! But with annoying touch bar.. I wish they expand it to other models.

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

#524

Post by shmoogy »

gnicholas wrote: post #514

What upgrades would folks recommend from the base configuration? I've never had an Apple Silicon machine and assume the base processor/RAM would be fine, but I've heard others say not to go with less than 16 GB of RAM. I think I'd go with the 512 option for the SSD. Would love to hear from folks with Apple Silicon experience!

16gb 1tb ssd is the min for me. I've only notified things slowing down twice - I had open: a few instances of Tableau Desktop, some jupyter notebooks, several RDPs, a 500k line xml file in VS code, several excel sheets, slack, Skype, teams, discord, a lot of chrome windows and tabs, outlook, and Spotify.

Wanted to upgrade to 32gb ram but max is 24 on the new airs.

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

#525

Post by biztos »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #473

Oh my god, that midnight colour. I just bought an M1 and knew this would be coming soon. I didn’t expect a new colour that looks so amazing though, haha. I guess I’m selling my brand new M1.

I have a friend who as of 2019 was still running her black plastic MacBook for music production. (Probably still is.)

Every time I saw it I felt a little pain -- why did I buy the white one? (Which turned half yellow with time.) I guess it made it easier to give away when it got too slow for coding.

I have the M1 Air and my two complaints are: no MagSafe, no SD Card. Otherwise, I love it, even though it crashes every time it goes to sleep on an external monitor and Apple's in-house software makes me root for Asahi every day. But it does look a little bland.

This new black one fixes 1/2 of my hardware complaints: it'll be hard not to upgrade out of cycle.

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

#526

Post by [deleted] »

antipaul wrote: post #449
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!

I see your point. Essentially, you get a fast computer for contemporary, real world use, for the same price as 10 years ago. Though if you ignore the specs, the M2 air (for 1500 so you get the same storage space), is probably equivalent – 8GB unified RAM and fast SSD seems equivalent to 16GB ram from decade ago. Together with the improved software capabilities, I think the overall "experience" is "better" and you get…

[deleted]

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

#527

Post by diffeomorphism »

cassianoleal wrote: post #362
postalrat wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disk can have high transfer speeds but access time isn't at all comparable to ram. I was interested until I saw it tops out at 8gb. My environment typically needs just over 16gb.

What tops out at 8gb by the way? The previous gen Air gos up to 16Gb, and this gen's goes up to 24Gb.

Their website presentation tops out at 8.

If I go to their store website it shows me only two options:

- 8 core, 8 core gpu, 8gb, 256

- 8 core, 10 core gpu, 8gb, 512

No indication whatsoever that this 8gb is not fixed. Nor is the storage fixed. But the only way to find out is to try and buy it, at which point I can just turn the first model into the second or something else entirely. Also, none of the presented options is anywhere close in price to the top spec model.

I thought apple was supposed to be good at UX?

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

#528

Post by biztos »

quacker wrote: post #408
gnicholas wrote: post #25

Cannot believe the updated base MBP has the old Touch Bar. Why can’t they give us back our function keys? EDIT: and is now the only laptop without MagSafe? There are more ports on the new MBA!

The 13" MacBook Pro is so strange. It is identical to the M2 MacBook Air, except: - Worse camera: 720p camera where the Air has a 1080p camera - Worse speakers: stereo speakers where the Air has four-speakers (I'm assuming stereo is 2-speakers?) - Bigger battery: 58.2 WHr vs 52.6 WHr (about a 2hr battery life difference) - Slightly heavier: +0.3 lbs over the Air - Slightly smaller screen: 13.3" vs the Air's 13.6", al…

> I'm assuming stereo is 2-speakers

You can't do stereo with fewer than 2 speakers but even if you have 64, you're probably still doing stereo. (Or you are a movie theater.)

Generally speaking, you can probably achieve better stereo sound with the 4 speakers than with the 2, but this is not always the case. Coming from Apple, I would normally expect the Pro to have higher-end speakers and thus probably sound better.

But I could be wrong, since Actual Audio Professionals don't use the onboard speakers for anything serious.

Also: I'm really surprised there are enough TouchBar lovers to justify its continued existence.

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

#529

Post by diffeomorphism »

tablespoon wrote: post #274

> The new MacBook Air features MagSafe for dedicated charging and peace of mind when users are plugged in. MagSafe was one of Apple's best hardware ideas, and I'm really surprised they dropped it for a few generations. I'm glad they realized their mistake and brought it back, though.

Any advantage of this over just a magnetic usb c connector (like $20-30, works with anything)?

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

#530

Post by diffeomorphism »

shmoe wrote: post #494
alexeiz wrote: post #493

Two huge drawbacks: * memory is capped at 8GB * you have to pay ridiculous $300 for a 256GB SSD upgrade

?? I see options for 16gb, 24gb?

Not on apple's website. There you only see two options, both 8gb. Only after trying to buy it, you see that apple lied and there are much more than two models and 16 and 24 are options.
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