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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

#571

Post by ecopoesis »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #348
samatman wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU. People love to say this without linking to a model. That's because the models in this price range are obviously not in the same weight class as a MacBook. Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... lite…

The term you’re looking for is “caliber”, since many will interpret “weight class” to mean the actual weight of the laptop.

> “caliber”

What are you talking about? Laptops aren't even round.

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

#572

Post by pier25 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #97
pier25 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends which chips you're comparing. Eg: The M3 Max is a substantial improvement over the M2 Max in both CPU and GPU. But the M3 Pro is a moderate improvement at best compared to the M2 Pro.

Depends on your use case. Iirc all the m3 are 30% faster than m2 in single core.

GPU maybe but CPU it's more like 15%.

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

#573

Post by samuell »

MBCook wrote: post #420
samuell wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With what RAM? ... and what weight? For $1700 you can get a sub-1kg Asus ExpertBook B9 with 32GB RAM and a 2TB disk and a decent 12th 12 core Gen Intel CPU. https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-ExpertBook-i7-1255U-Military-B94... Not saying it is better in all respects, but definitely in some, meaning there are definitely alternatives.

Well the two reviews give it 1 star as a quality control dumpster fire. And the screen is 1080p from 15 years ago. No thanks.

Each specific configuration gets its own product page, so the distribution of reviews might be a bit random.

Haven't had an issue with mine, except a bit noisy fan that was fixed with a recent firmware update.

Battery life is stellar as well and I can easily go on for the work day and more with it, from what I've seen.

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

#574

Post by thfuran »

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…

>We already live in that world.

Nah, the treadmill stalled out years ago.

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

#575

Post by zarzavat »

jandrese wrote: post #329
deergomoo wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe we are now in the 9th year of 8GB being the baseline Mac laptop RAM config. It’s incredibly stingy. For a while you could make the argument that a lot of Air purchasers wouldn’t need it, but I don’t think that’s the case any more. My wife has an M1 Air with 8GB and between Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack she quite regularly gets beachballs and weird performance hitches.

My wife has been complaining to me about how she regularly gets the "choose which application to terminate" dialog on her Air. I knew in my heart that 8GB wouldn't be future proof, but I underestimated how fast it would be a problem. She pretty much just runs Safari and Libreoffice Calc too, nothing that should really tax the machine.

That sounds like she is running out of disk space, not RAM.

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

#576

Post by CadmiumYellow »

jb1991 wrote: post #467
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…

I'm still using an original M1 Air and the thing is used nearly all day for light casual web usage, and I only plug it in about two times per week -- the energy efficiency is no joke. This kind of battery life really spoils you and when you see other laptops that nearly require the plug charging all the time, tethered, you realize what a big deal these M chips are for true portability.

I've been out of the house all day (6+ hours) with my M1 Pro and it's only just starting to get close to needing to be plugged in. What have I been doing all day? Just running the 23 different docker containers required for my local dev environment. This thing is an absolute beast.

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

#577

Post by edb_123 »

bsder wrote: post #334
ketzo wrote: post #49

The degree to which Apple has kinda just “won” laptops is nuts to me. $999 for an 13-inch M2 Air is just bonkers. You can easily pay $1500, even $2000 for Windows laptops that are hotter, heavier, AND slower.

What's extremely absurd is that most models in the x86 space seem to have gone backwards on screen resolution. My 5 year old Lenovo Carbon X1 14" is 2560x1440 while I can't buy a current X1 with anything above 1920x1200 for any price. WTF?

That sounds very strange. I got my Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen8 (13th gen i7 U-series w/ 32 GB RAM) with a 4K 16:10 OLED display. Best laptop I have ever had, amazingly fast and lasts the whole day. When I did my research before buying, I know the X1 Carbon was available with at least a 2.5K OLED display.

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

#578

Post by vient »

theultdev wrote: post #145
justin66 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives I would pay more for an acceptable alternative - no fan, Windows 11, good battery life, top quality screen, no gimmick features (touchscreen! detachable screen! whatever). No such thing exists, as far as I can tell.

Don't forget the touch pad / gesture recognition. You can tell Windows laptops are general computers, the hardware fires off the gesture recognition and gives the command to the OS, so you swipe, it's recognized, then you get the action. On Mac, the gesture is registered as it's happening, you can pull the screen, cancel, flick it, etc. Not to mention the convenience of taking it to any Apple store and the battery li…

I don't notice anything unusual in that sense on MSI laptop with Linux. I start pinching, browser immediately performs gradual zoom. Swiping with 3 fingers immediately starts a "desktop switch" which is controlled by my movement - so I can pause, revert the gesture, and you will see on the screen exactly what you expect, second desktop partially showing, pausing, and then going back.

Can't test on Windows right now but I would expect it to have even less problems than Linux.

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

#579

Post by acdha »

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.

This is a lazy troll - for example, note how conspicuously people making that claim are unable to identify specific equivalent hardware at significantly lower prices or any discussion of the total cost of ownership over the service life of the device. Simply repeating a cliche forum comment doesn’t contribute anything like those details could.

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

#580

Post by DinaCoder99 »

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.

> you're stuck with MacOS

Interesting way of thinking about probably the biggest draw of the hardware.

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