What’s missing from Apple’s lineup now is an a lightweight option. This is almost a pound heavier than the discontinued 12” MacBook.
Is almost a pound noticeable?
New MacBook Air
561–570 of 587 posts
Re: New MacBook Air
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha-ha, reading this from the 2015 MPRO 13", exact same experience. I've tried to move to DELL XPS 13 2 years ago on Linux, did not work for me, however with a new line of Dell's I am starting to thinking about repeating this experiment. Apple's 2016-2019 laptops were pretty unusable, hope they revert the touchbar too.. A question, has anybody tried System76 comparing to Dell/Apple?
Wow, this is a common theme. I have a 2015 13" macbook which wasn't max specced out and I feel like I'm hurting these days RAM wise and HardDrive wise. I bought a super specced out 2020 XPS 13 2 in 1 because of reservations about the latest macbook pro 13 and I kind of hate it. I think this is personal taste, but I just don't love the build as much, the trackpad, and ubuntu is acting pretty flaky. The camera and wire…
I felt the same way as you about my 2015 13” so I reformatted the drive with apfs and did a fresh install of Mojave. Got a ton of storage back and it runs like a new machine. One of the best things I’ve ever done.
Re: New MacBook Air
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm lucky to have development access to a small slice of a very large vmware cluster. I'm surprised no one else operates this way. The performance gains are immense.
Or how about just having a workstation at work? E.g. the Dell XPS 15 is a very popular laptop, but an equivalent cost workstation is around 8x faster for sustained well-parallelizable loads. Use a KVM switch with your work monitor, or use it as a headless server, do whatever. Want to work on machine learning stuff? Throw in an RTX 2080 Ti, off you go, never worry about cloud costs. Are you I/O bound? RAID0 off a coup…
It's more cost upfront, which is often a show-stopper. "Why can't you spin a beefy instance on EC2 when you need it for these 2-3 hours of intense work? It's so much cheaper!"
Also, a cloud VM, if it breaks, is replaced "for free" and "instantly"; fixing a physical machine has a cost and is a delay. Unless you're big enough to keep a spare (probably makes sense for many dozens of machines), it also looks a bit uneconomical from the business's POV.
Never mind that your cloud costs in a year end up being comparable to said workstation.
Re: New MacBook Air
#564So I guess that ARM processor theory is pushed out for another year or two...
Re: New MacBook Air
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if that changed recently. I gave up on it a year ago. I went through all this (though with Ubuntu not Fedora), switched modes, disabled secure boot, read every web page I could find. Nothing worked. I'm kinda tempted to see if I can get it working now, but honestly, also kinda traumatised by the whole experience and never want to touch it again.
I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu's installer capabilities, but Fedora's has made huge advances in the past 5 years. I went in to the setup fearing the worst (that is, the struggle that was doing a secure boot, UEFI Windows 8 + Fedora 20 setup in 2014), but was shocked at how good Fedora 31's install routine was. I shrank the 1TB SSD partition in Windows, disabled the proprietary fake-RAID, then booted Fedora's XFC…
dammit, now I'm tempted to try again. Thanks, I think ;)
Re: New MacBook Air
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is still a 1.2 GHz base clock.
Because wasting energy on a 4 GHz base clock is completely pointless (and so is your criticism) if you can adjust frequency as needed. 99% of the time 1GHz is sufficient. It’s only when you launch the browser that a faster CPU is useful, not when you’re reading through a website
Don't you know? Higher is always better! 5 Ghz in my laptop, plz!
Re: New MacBook Air
#567Keep in mind that probably the most important spec when considering a new laptop is one that is often not directly stated: the processor series. I'm not talking about i3/i5/i7, but rather U/Y/H. This letter determines the TDP (thermal design power/point) them machine is designed to run at. The TDP will govern the setting for the base clock speed, and, just as importantly, the throttling behabior under load. Processor…
MacbookAir always seemed like a tablet with keyboard to me. I have seen ordinary people complaining that they can't multitask apps there, that they have to run one app at the time. I think Air is not supposed and never was to be used as a development or video processing machine.
Re: New MacBook Air
#568- Quad core processor - Scissor keys - No touch bar MacBook Air, the new MacBook for Pros.
I honestly never understood the hate for the touchbar. It allows me to be much more granular with volume and brightness, and I never really used F-keys anyway.
You can be just as granular by using shift + alt + volume/brightness. That way your changes will be in 0.25 step increments rather than the default full steps.
Re: New MacBook Air
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I'm on a 2016 macbook air, 8gb RAM and doing web programming everyday. 3 phpstorm windows, sometimes Photoshop open, more than 20 tabs in Chrome, iterm, figma, paw... Honestly it runs pretty well and I was waiting for this update.
I think you’ll be happy with the update, especially if you were happy with the previous machine. Remember you can try it out for 14 days risk free, so if you have any doubts you have time to test it thoroughly before committing. https://www.apple.com/shop/help/returns_refund
How are you going to return it if all Apple stores are closed due to COVID-19 ?
Re: New MacBook Air
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer, how would I step into, step over, step out in Xcode without function keys?? (Continue being ctrl-cmd-Y is the worst shortcut ever). It truly hampers my development because I have to look at the touchbar to see where on earth those keys are (F6, F7) or step in/continue in Chrome (F10, F11). Also, where on earth is the escape key??
The escape key is back on the new 16 inch, but even on older Touch Bar Macs you can tap anywhere on the left side of the Touch Bar (doesn't have to just be the escape button area) and it will still work. Different strokes for different folks, but I've never liked using the function keys for debugging. I just click the buttons on the screen. I'm a little surprised they don't have a way to set the Touch Bar buttons up…
I will try the "left of the escape key" trick - thanks!
Moving the mouse cursor up to the toolbar always seems a lot of travel and swishing around if you're hovering over variables to see their contents in the source code.
I have found the auto/local/all view in Xcode to be a bit dumb and unable to properly expand some template objects in C++ so it's all just an exercise in frustration anyway!