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New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

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Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#531

Post by dangus »

bloopernova wrote: post #502
itsoktocry wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. They are awesome, but not perfect. Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.

Lordy does that multiple monitor thing grind my gears. I just want to display on 3 screens. But the base model is the only one that corporate IT will buy. So I have to buy a DisplayLink adapter to do what the Intel macbooks did with zero problem.

It’s not on Apple to make sure their cheapest consumer-targeted computer is good enough for enterprise use.

To me it’s not really relevant what the old computer models used to do. You have to evaluate what is available today and choose accordingly. Like it or not Intel chips had different strengths and weaknesses. It’s a different design entirely.

I’m split on whether this is a dirty price segmentation trick or a legitimate design limitation where adding more display support is expensive in terms of die size.

Doesn’t matter though, because companies doing serious work are supposed to know to buy the business versions of laptops. They don’t buy Dell Vostro consumer grade PCs, they buy Dell Precision/Latitude/XPS business systems. Apple tells you right in the name of their system: Pro. If you’re a professional you buy the Pro model. If it’s too expensive then buy something else.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#532

Post by HumblyTossed »

miggol wrote: post #505
HumblyTossed wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenovo Ideapad 5 Pro 14" 14ACN6. Got one at Costco over a year ago for around $700US. Runs Pop_OS! really well. Weight is very much light enough for me. Edit: There is one downside I found. I replaced the 512GB SSD with 1TB and nearly needed stitches because the bottom plate was so sharp. Oh and I just looked it up, it's listed at 3.04lbs

Hello, laptop buddy!! Paid more than $700 in euros for it two years ago though. Can totally relate to the sharpness, but otherwise still very happy with it. Had to patch my ACPI to nuke S0 and get decent S3 suspend though. Did they ever patch that with firmware?

I recall doing this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Lenovo/comments/zq3tc5/how_to_disab...

And it worked for me.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#533

Post by mrcwinn »

A great laptop but also a bit of a heartbreaker for me.

The quality of the 16" MacBook Pro (Liquid Retina XDR?) is way ahead of the MacBook Air... which is a shame, because my dream form factor is the 15" MacBook Air. The 16" is so bulky and heavy.

(On the other hand, most of the time I hook my 16 up to Apple's Studio Display, which is definitely not ProMotion or anything exceptional!)

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#534

Post by Klonoar »

makeitdouble wrote: post #462
Longhanks wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, most people looking for "just a notebook" don't care about any of those things. They want a low maintenance, high performant (for day-to-day tasks, not gaming) portable computer with a great battery that runs Chrome, Office and Spotify, and comes with great customer service - nothing comes close to being able to bring your Mac to the next Apple Store.

If I gave these requirements to my parents they'd go to a random computer shop and come back with probably a random 13 or 15 inch DELL. And that's what millions of people get at work as a standard supplied computer. I am not saying the mac isn't good at filling that niche, just that people who really don't care about computers also don't care if it's a mac, and will probably be fine with any recent default configurat…

> If I gave these requirements to my parents they'd go to a random computer shop and come back with probably a random 13 or 15 inch DELL.

And if I did that, they'd also come back with that DELL - and then I'd be stuck doing tech support for them for however long the thing lasts. I cannot begin to count the number of times they've gone and bought some junk computer that they got upsold on.

This is not an experience unique to me, either. The non-Apple laptop segment is (mostly) a broken experience in comparison.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#535

Post by int_19h »

vundercind wrote: post #134
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a laptop for about $600 with a GPU (RTX 3050). The display... is not comparable. Sure, it's 144hz compared to the Mac's 60hz... but it's only 74% NTSC at 250 nits with 1080p, so the color accuracy and dim picture is distractingly bad. And as for sleep, it's just useless. You close it with 70% at night and it's dead by morning. Supposedly the battery is the same size, but even when it's awake, the battery nev…

I was initially issued a Lenovo Thinkpad running Windows at my new job last year. I really liked my bottom-tier IBM Thinkpad back in the mid '00s (running a heavily-tuned Gentoo) and WSL exists so it's possible to do real work on a Windows machine without just using it to run a fullscreen Linux VM (... though WSL2 kinda is that) so I decided to give it a real chance. I was working on getting issued a MacBook within a…

Which ThinkPad model was it?

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#536

Post by pquki4 »

gxs wrote: post #39
elthran wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Cynic/Windows user here with a genuine question - why is this interesting? I'm currently looking at my wife's old corporate-issued windows laptop, which is running 2 external monitors as well as it's own display - am I missing something here, or is this just a case of Apple being held to different standards to other manufacturers in terms of feature parity?

This is far from a "genuine" question. It's easy to deduce that it's a big deal for macbook air users because it wasn't possible before. It's easy to deduce both from the article and from other comments here, which presumably you read if you're going through the trouble of responding to someone else's comment. I typically despise this type of question, where you're obviously trying to make a point but playing dumb an…

How is Dell warranty comparable to iOS/MacOS updates? Maybe at least compare that to something related to operating system, like Windows 10/Ubuntu LTS support lifecycle, or Android major version updates, which are usually much longer than the 1 or 2 year warranty that comes with the device? That's too much a rant that is completely meaningless and way too cynical.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#537

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #474
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I finally made the switch to Apple after being thoroughly frustrated with Windows laptops. It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies…

> Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. They are awesome, but not perfect. Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.

I agree 100% with what you've said, but this sentence:

> Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS.

Basically boils down to "Apple is selling a much better product, and they know it." I.e. your first bullets (over priced storage, RAM, charging for multi monitor support) all just boil down to "Apple charges more because they can". The "you're stuck with MacOS" is obviously true but just highlights that Apple has always been about optimizing hardware and software together.

If anything, I think the "dark times" for Apple laptops was the late teens during the era of stuff like the butterfly keyboard, the touchbar, and too few ports. I think Apple consumers have consigned themselves to paying more for a much better product. What they're not willing to do (as much anyway) is to pay a premium for a crappier product. The butterfly keyboard especially was such a disaster ("We shaved .2 mm off the width, all at the minor expense of any key randomly stopping to work at any time!") Admitting mistakes in big corporations is hard so I'm glad they just jettisoned all that stuff.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#538

Post by wubrr »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #457
numbers wrote: post #355

I was recently buying a Dell laptop for my sister and it boggles my mind how most other companies (maybe Framework is an except) still have dozens or even 100s of SKUs for consumer laptops. I didn't enjoy the process of looking through dozens of various lines that Dell has and then other companies like Lenovo and HP earlier in the process, just to find a "mid-range usable computer with a decent screen". If you didn't…

I finally made the switch to Apple after being thoroughly frustrated with Windows laptops. It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies…

[flagged]

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#539

Post by int_19h »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #383
opan wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a M2 Max MBP I'm not using yet because there's no way to get sshfs/fuse working with free as in freedom software on macOS, and Asahi doesn't support external displays yet, so it can't take over for my ThinkPad T440p with either OS. Package management and package availability is much worse in the macOS world. Nix is weirdly broken, at least the ARM macOS packages. Homebrew is okay but not very good, similar t…

> It's like a community of everyone scamming and mistreating each other instead of working together to improve things. I was saying this exact thing to a friend of mine who is big into apple products and suggested that you could technically do the things I wanted to do on apple devices. The general ecosystem between windows/linux/mac is very different. Windows freeware is all packaged and provided on sites last updat…

With Windows these days you can have a much better experience with freeware if you install it via WinGet.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#540

Post by CharlesW »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #499
CharlesW wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever tried to trade in an Apple product? They ask you to enter the serial number and then bizarrely ask you to indentify to device. Yes, Apple changed to a randomized serial number format in 2021. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/14/apple-preapres-for-rand... So, if you have a device made after that transition and Apple doesn't already know the details (e.g. because you didn't buy it direct), they'll also…

But they manufactured it. They couldn't keep a database mapping serial numbers to specs?

That's a great point. My guess is that Apple doesn't share that data with their trade-in partners, which would include the web-based trade-in estimator. I don't recall having to share this when I brought stuff into an Apple Store for an in-person trade-in.
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