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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

#561

Post by internetter »

danpmurray wrote: post #526
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picked up a M3 Macbook Pro and this thing works like an absolute beast. I currently have Photoshop, Illustrator, VSCode, multiple Chrome windows - each with 20-40 tabs - and this thing is not even sweating. I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery. Completely changed the way I work

How much RAM does it have, and have you ever wished you had more?

I can answer this. I have a very similar workload to OP. I've found myself with resolve, affinity photo, chrome, vscode, spotify, ect open simultaneously, and have had absolutely zero struggle on my 8gb air.

If you become "enlightened" you can notice that sometimes when you, say, open your spotify window after a long time elsewhere, the spotify is briefly unresponsive. Not in a way you notice, more in the sense that if you are looking for it, you can see hints it is swapping.

The only time I wish I had more is when I got into iOS development and began running VMs on my mac.

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

#562

Post by johnnyanmac »

carlosjobim wrote: post #443
johnnyanmac wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure this out yet. Follow the money. How much demand is there for it, Who's incentivized to fix it, how much does it cost to R&D, and will that feature increase profit margins? The sad workaround is simply SSD's having faster boot times and setting a computer to hibernate instead of sleep when closed (and not on battery).…

> Follow the money. If you follow the money, you can see it flowing in to Apple's bank account from consumers.

sure, trillion dollar company invested hundreds of billions over a decade to secure their own supply chain from parts to distribution.

But I don't think every other OEM would have the same success even if it ended up being higher quality.

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

#563

Post by chongli »

pquki4 wrote: post #510
chongli wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, and I always upgrade the RAM even though I don’t like paying more. Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control. Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced…

> It puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control If you are talking about "native" apps, maybe. Otherwise, nah. Cross-platform apps based on web like Teams and Spotify won't put too much effort on performance as long as it is not too slow. And if you haven't realized, most of the stuff you interact with is online. People just shove an entire website. As for professional apps -- if you can't run a heav…

I'm talking specifically about native, non-professional apps targeted at regular consumers (such as grandma, aunt Suzie, little Billy working on his science project). These are the kinds of apps that are published on the Mac App Store. Apple specifically includes Performance as a section under its App Store review guidelines. I bet if you submit an app that gobbles up more than 8GB of RAM and starts swapping like crazy on a baseline Mac, you'll get rejected by the review team.

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

#565

Post by piva00 »

danpmurray wrote: post #526
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picked up a M3 Macbook Pro and this thing works like an absolute beast. I currently have Photoshop, Illustrator, VSCode, multiple Chrome windows - each with 20-40 tabs - and this thing is not even sweating. I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery. Completely changed the way I work

How much RAM does it have, and have you ever wished you had more?

My MacBook Pro M3 has 36GiB RAM and does all of the comment above + music producing (dozens of VSTs on some 1-2 dozens tracks) + projection mapping and can run some LLM models locally like the Mistral ones.

I've only managed to hear the fan when chatting with a LLM, for anything else it's been an absolutely silent beast.

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

#566

Post by eropple »

015a wrote: post #488
diffeomorphism wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, without googling tell me: what is an Apple model number Z15T_5108? > All other details can be configured in the buying flow but there's not much to think about if you just want a simple laptop. You would think so, but unfortunately not. Apple is quite good at upselling and their price gating for screens, ram etc. is very opaque. In other words: whether you want the air with non-sabotaged specs or the pro or the…

> the air with non-sabotaged specs Anyone who says this has never used an 8/256 Air post-M1, and is complaining about them hypothetically. They're fine. They're fantastic computers. You can upgrade to 16/512, which puts the machine at $1500. This is $200 cheaper than a Dell XPS 14 16/512. "But the Dell has dedicated graphics" no it doesn't. "But, well, the Dell has a higher resolution display" no, its actually 1080p,…

Just checking: are you saying that the M2 and M3 make 8GB/256GB viable, or that they were for the M1 Air too? Because I had an M1 Air with 8GB of RAM for a while, and that thing was painful. I haven't had to be careful about how many tabs I had open in a browser for a long time--but I also haven't had 8GB of RAM in a long time, either.

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

#567

Post by exe34 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #479
exe34 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could…

> nicest keyboard When have MacBooks ever had the nicest keyboard? They have pretty good keyboards, but I have 10 year old ThinkPads with keyboards that I prefer.

Are thinkpads considered "ultra mobile" (or whatever the buzzword is nowadays)? I thought they were more hefty? The thin/lightweight laptops from back then had crappy clickety keyboards.

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

#568

Post by jsz0 »

dbbk wrote: post #84
snizovtsev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$999 is for soldered 8GB/256GB crap. Add $400 for 16GB/512GB models.

I can guarantee you that most people buying the $999 laptop have 5 Chrome tabs open and don't store files on their computer. 8GB/256GB is fine.

I dunno about Chrome but a single YouTube tab in Safari can use over 1GB of RAM these days. It's absolutely insane to sell a computer in 2024 that's gonna struggle to open 10+ browser tabs.

https://imgur.com/a/VzCQ4zF

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

#569

Post by chongli »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #553
chongli wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, and I always upgrade the RAM even though I don’t like paying more. Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control. Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced…

> I disagree, and I always upgrade the RAM even though I don’t like paying more. Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control. Shouldn't you be doing the opposite then? Keeping the baseline amount so you can know what it's like for people without a large budget and stop patronizing the applications without acceptable footprints in that circumstance? > In that world you’d have all the so…

Shouldn't you be doing the opposite then? Keeping the baseline amount so you can know what it's like for people without a large budget and stop patronizing the applications without acceptable footprints in that circumstance?

I'm not a developer of native Mac apps. If I were, I would definitely have a baseline machine for testing.

The Stable Diffusion XL model is ~13GB

That's not a baseline consumer application. See my other reply (re: grandma and little Billy). If you're developing a native Mac app for grandma and little Billy, Apple probably doesn't want you shipping a 13GB model with it. This is an example of the point I'm trying to make: find a way to compress the model so the end user doesn't have to deal with that kind of bloat (or host it in the cloud).

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

#570

Post by FredPret »

lavela wrote: post #484
FredPret wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funny how you say total spending and then argue with a percentage ... so? Total spending is the key factor; Apple gets exposure to 25% of the total human economy by catering to one polity which is also the easiest one to do business in. That's a no-brainer if I've ever heard one. By contrast, India's economy is only 3% of the world total. [0] It's interesting to note that this understates US dominance in luxury pro…

How is this an either-or situation if you could just provide an additional internationalization for 'preferred language english' + 'IP outside of US'? 'less than an inch (11.5mm)' would still be a better specification if you want to have a version where you rather err towards US customers. I'm not offended by seeing inches, just irritated that you wouldn't cater to the rest of the world.

It's not either-or and they do cater to the rest of the world. But when they release something new, they'll always try to make it work for their US customer base first.

If you check these specs in a month, it'll probably tell you the size in mm. I just checked the iPhone page from here in Canada and it says this: 5.77 inches (146.6 mm)

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