Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 1001 posts

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

#691

Post by grecy »

dividefuel wrote: post #664
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.

My opinion is you can pick two: low cost, high build quality, good specs. No one matches Apple's build and screen quality. But their base models are pretty underpowered, and it's not until you're spending closer to $2k that you get specs that feel appropriate for 2024. On the Windows side, there are lots of cheaper options, many of which have beefier specs, but the build quality pales in comparison. The right tradeof…

Are you suggesting the M2/M3 are "underpowered"?

Please post links to benchmarks of a windows laptop that costs the same as a base model Apple laptop but is faster, while being similar in weight, battery life and heat.

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

#692

Post by olyjohn »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #582
jsz0 wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously a planned obsolescence tactic. If the base models were 16GB there's a fine chance Apple wouldn't see another dollar from those customers for another 10+ years at minimum. The average customer doesn't understand their memory requirements and cannot be expected to predict how they may change in the future. It's the only thing they got left they can use to trick customers into buying a machine that will need t…

Look, I'm not happy about the base ram situation either, I really do think they should put in 12/16GB at minimum. But at the same time, I've never seen non-techies complain that they can't open a few tabs, reply to a few emails, watch youtube, listen to music, and study on their base laptops. They're amazing for that. If we need more memory to accomplish the above tasks any time soon, we're in a sad state of software…

God forbid a novice user learns things and becomes a power user. Memory is so cheap, there's literally no reason these machines should not have 16gb.

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

#693

Post by thomaslord »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #582
jsz0 wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously a planned obsolescence tactic. If the base models were 16GB there's a fine chance Apple wouldn't see another dollar from those customers for another 10+ years at minimum. The average customer doesn't understand their memory requirements and cannot be expected to predict how they may change in the future. It's the only thing they got left they can use to trick customers into buying a machine that will need t…

Look, I'm not happy about the base ram situation either, I really do think they should put in 12/16GB at minimum. But at the same time, I've never seen non-techies complain that they can't open a few tabs, reply to a few emails, watch youtube, listen to music, and study on their base laptops. They're amazing for that. If we need more memory to accomplish the above tasks any time soon, we're in a sad state of software…

We are in a sad state of bloat. 99% of what people do on their computers now goes through a web browser, and opening lots of tabs chews through RAM like nothing else.

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

#694

Post by dividefuel »

grecy wrote: post #691
dividefuel wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is you can pick two: low cost, high build quality, good specs. No one matches Apple's build and screen quality. But their base models are pretty underpowered, and it's not until you're spending closer to $2k that you get specs that feel appropriate for 2024. On the Windows side, there are lots of cheaper options, many of which have beefier specs, but the build quality pales in comparison. The right tradeof…

Are you suggesting the M2/M3 are "underpowered"? Please post links to benchmarks of a windows laptop that costs the same as a base model Apple laptop but is faster, while being similar in weight, battery life and heat.

Underpowered in terms of RAMs, storage, and possibly GPU. Agree that M2/M3 are faster and have better battery life. Weight/heat to me fall under build quality, not specs.

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

#695

Post by kstrauser »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #425
blehn wrote: post #118

I really wanted to love the 13" Air but two things made me switch to the Pro after trying it for a few weeks. One is that the internal speakers suck in comparison to the Pro. I 'm not looking for audiophile quality from laptop speakers, but the Pro speakers are good enough for casually watching youtube videos, TV shows, podcasts, etc, whereas the Air speakers are harsh and tinny. The second is that the default resolu…

This is also the case with Pro M1 Max. Font is very blurry. It's funny how they turn off "scaling/sharpening filter" when video is watched. I've tried a bunch of things to fix it and none of them worked. A 4K monitor I use works perfectly fine on Linux, but with Macbook Pro, even though resolution perfectly matches, it still has blurred font (the filter they apply completely changes the look of the font, even though…

What are you comparing the font rendering to? Linux/Windows?

That's one of the things that pushed me to Mac from Linux: fonts finally looked nice. (This was around 2010.) I tried everything I could to get Linux to render decently but eventually gave up. I recognize that this is so much down to personal taste. If you prefer Windows-style ClearType to Mac's rendering, Mac (especially on a non-Retina screen) will look awful. If you like Mac's rendering, Windows tends to look awful at any resolution.

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

#696

Post by simonh »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #662
bombcar wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does partially cover that market, but only via refurbished. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FGN63LL/A/refurbished-133... The thing that's really sad is that the build quality on sub $1k laptops is just such shite

> Apple does partially cover that market, but only via refurbished. That's not the same thing. If you're budget conscious then you presumably need to keep it for a long time, but now you've got a used battery and a machine that will fall out of support sooner. > The thing that's really sad is that the build quality on sub $1k laptops is just such shite The secret to this one might be refurbished Framework laptops. Su…

Refurbished devices from Apple generally come with new batteries, and sometimes other parts will be replaced as well if needed. I’ve bought several devices refurbished and they’ve been excellent. With iOS devices they even replace the outer shell as standard.

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

#697

Post by eurekin »

superb_dev wrote: post #437
eurekin wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so extremely backwards in relation to everything else it's mind boggling. 16 gb being considered and priced at premium, where I had a single chrome tab eating 3gb easily few time's recently.

What website were you on? 3gb for a Chrome tab is just plain unacceptable in most cases

https://belladoreai.github.io/llama-tokenizer-js/example-dem...

where I measured tokens in my requests before sending things to openai API to ballpark the cost

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

#698

Post by harywilke »

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…

Really surprised not to see any mention of the 2x2 grid Jobs introduced in 1998: Pro, Consumer, Desktop, and Portable. It was the solution to exactly this problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10cZg8pLmXk about 6 minutes in.

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

#699

Post by mort96 »

r00fus wrote: post #109
snizovtsev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I found it's completely acceptable for hobby usages that don't involve running offline LLMs. If you're doing work, get a Pro.

256GB is completely acceptable? Really? That's less than phones these days!

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

#700

Post by kstrauser »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #221
gnicholas wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBAs are much smaller/lighter. The MBA with its lid closed is just a little bit taller than the MBP with the lid open. I love my 13" MBA!

Its a 0.75lb and 0.17”difference though, you’d have to be a calibrated scale to notice that outside of side by side testing.

I just lugged my work-issued MBP through a couple of airports today, and wow, I wish I had my own MBA with me instead. That weight doesn't make a huge difference on your lap. It sure makes a difference in a carryon bag.
Post reply on HN