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New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
611–620 of 1001 posts
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#612Finding a laptop that runs Linux natively and acceptably is always a challenge. My Dell XPS 9315 touts linux support, but only with an older version of Ubuntu using custom drivers (as I discovered after purchasing it). So I've got manjaro running that took quite a bit of coaxing - though the built-in webcam has never, and probably will never work with any linux other than Ubuntu 20.04, and the APM has always been ext…
>Finding a laptop that runs Linux natively and acceptably is always a challenge.
Its pretty easy to do a compatibility check on forums before purchasing. My IdeaPad Gaming works flawlessly with Manjaro, even supports the charging settings and performance modes.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who likes to keep at least one machine dedicated to each major OS around at any given time, the thing that’s frustrating about non-Apple laptops is that just about all of them, including machines costing well in excess of base Macbook models, make big tradeoffs somewhere or another. Very few are good all-rounders, even if many are better than Macbooks in one or two aspects. I would kill for a version of Th…
> I would kill for a version of ThinkPad X1 Nano or X1 Carbon for example that had the battery life, silence, and unplugged performance of a Macbook Air Ditto on the Nano. I wind up looking at it every few months and then begrudgingly walking away because it just doesn't make any sense to buy.
I have the first gen and it’s about the perfect size for an ultraportable in my opinion, and its screen, build, and general feel are great but its battery and CPU are underwhelming at best.
The newer gens are even more confusing because they don’t offer the cooler, more efficient U CPU variants, only the hotter more power hungry P variants, which exacerbates heat and battery life issues.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 is interesting, I run Firefox, VSCode, containers and whatever code I'm working on. I never even need to look at RAM usage. It would be interesting to know what triggers the RAM limit in your case. The only application I ever need to terminate is Notes, which for some reason is extremely crash prone on the mac.
I find that spouses never close apps, only close windows, or worse hide them and forget. If one of them is Photoshop...
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 leg…
Only the M2 & M3 Max chips support more than two external monitors[1]. Those start at $3200, and are overkill for the vast majority of use-cases. There's no excuse for a $2000+ machine to not support more than two external monitors. DisplayLink on MacOS is far from ideal, either: it works alright, but it has to use the screen recording functionality in the OS, which causes anything with protected content to freak out…
The excuse is that this is Apple, and the solution to problems with them is to buy more things. In this case, get a $1,500 ultra wide curved monitor which is better than dual head.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#616[deleted]
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 leg…
Only the M2 & M3 Max chips support more than two external monitors[1]. Those start at $3200, and are overkill for the vast majority of use-cases. There's no excuse for a $2000+ machine to not support more than two external monitors. DisplayLink on MacOS is far from ideal, either: it works alright, but it has to use the screen recording functionality in the OS, which causes anything with protected content to freak out…
Also note that 'support multiple external monitors' here actually means 'kinda support some monitors sometimes'. Just google and read the hundreds of threads about external monitor issues on M2 pros.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#618Fun fact, the M3 Air is exactly the weight of one m3 air at room temperature; at 15C, one m3 of air at 1ATM is 1.23kg, which is the exact same weight as the M3 Air.
And for contrast, the M2 Air (1.24kg) was a tiny fraction of the weight of air on one m2 (10332kg) at 1atm. In other words, the relative weight of the latest MacBook Air has increased by a factor of ten thousand! I know Jony Ive was keeping the products lightweight, but I didn’t realize it would get this bad without him…
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#619I've been streaming and recording locally with OBS in 2K (1440p) with an M3 Max MacBook Pro and it works like a charm—with a Sony ZV-E10 being capture by Elgato HD60X.
I can even develop and run Apple MLX code while I'm streaming. (I lose a few frames when generating images with Stable Diffusion or load big LLMs like Gemma 7B.)
My MacBook Pro M1 wasn't there for streaming and recording at the same time. But even an M1 Max could do the job as well.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#620Outside of pricing, why would one buy Air vs Pro these days? I've had OG Air back in the day and tapered form factor was great. I recently was in an Apple store and looked at pro and airs.. they felt same, and also air seemed heavy (compared to ye olde tapered one). Now with Pro at 14" and Air pushing to 15".. why?
Better monitor, better speakers (much better in both cases), HDMI, SD. Fan, meaning less throttling on heavy workloads. Support for high-resolution and multimonitor setups. If any of these are attractive, you get the Pro. Apple's "Pro" branding has become increasingly meaningless but in the MacBook category, which I believe is where it originated, it's meant to suggest "media professional", a demographic which has re…
> Fan, meaning less throttling on heavy workloads.
Surely you mean “more noise”.