These will push the price of < $500 windows laptops closer to $100 and the price of $1000 windows laptops to $300. No comparison.
New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
711–720 of 1001 posts
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the $999 you can find Windows laptops with a dGPU and specs upto at least 1TB/32GB. And also maybe OLED screens.
Retina level OLED? Or 1080p? It boggles my mind people still buy 1080p laptops.
It boggles my mind to see colleagues at 20 cm of their 13 inch screens trying to read their emails.
Those who scale up, and aren't photographers... What's the use ?
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#713Earlier quoted context omitted.
> macOS tends to have a better memory compression algorithm Compared to what? Linux? Windows? Are there any published benchmarks anywhere, otherwise this just proves my point above. > Apple tends to have faster RAM (way more bandwidth), faster SSDs Yes, sure, due to its integrated nature, but that does not reduce the RAM requirement. My 8GB M1 MBA, which is used as a home browsing-only laptop, is almost always in yel…
The memory compressor is not higher compressing than Windows, but it is hardware accelerated, so it's much faster.
Again, any published benchmarks that can be referred to?
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Asus zenbook 14 is around that price, has a 1TB disk, and 16GB of ram. I'm sure the processor on the M3 is faster, and probably a fair amount more battery out of it, but now I'm comparing a $1000 zenbook to a $1700 13' macbook once I add disk and memory, without the upgraded cpu.
And it feels like a cheap piece of flexible creaky plastic.
I bought one and it actually feels very well put together. Quiet, pretty 2.8k oled screen, and long battery which is all I really care about.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#715The 24GB memory limit is pathetic in 2024.
I have a 64G '21 M1M and it feels pretty silly. I wouldn't trade the memory back for money, but I would trade half of it for weight or for battery life.
I have 64GB in my Studio. I've never noticed the difference between it and my 24GB MBA. I'm not saying there's not a difference. Just saying, even with running a bunch of stuff in Docker plus BBEdit plus a gazillion browser and terminal tabs, I've personally never noticed the MBA being slower than the Studio.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#716I 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…
Is your system your enemy? Serious question. Having suffered through many Dell laptops (flagships) I'd rather flush the money down the pan than buy one machine from them. What Dell is selling in comparison to Apple is legacy technology with shoddy workmanship.
my sister needed a laptop that runs windows so dell was one of the many options
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#717Earlier 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 think ThinkPads are better than MacBooks. You can get P14 with 32gb of RAM, 1TB SSD, very fast and quiet CPU (AMD U series), decent battery, 2.8k OLED screen and it weights 1.34kg (weight between 13 inch and 15inch new Airs). It also has imo better ports and a track point. The problem is that Windows sucks more and more with every iteration and there is nothing Lenovo or other manufacturers can do about it. Lenovo…
I have a Thinkpad P1 with 64gb. I love that it has a trackpoint. I hate that it had a fan. I guess not so much that it had the fan but that the fan constantly sounds like it is impersonating a helicopter. Not sure where it wants to take the laptop. Also the battery life is horrible, 1 hour or so. And Windows is sluggish. Otherwise, it is a great machine (I occasionally RDP into it when demoing thing for my Windows clients.)
My MacBook on the otherhand lacks a trackpoint (that will never be fixed) but is otherwise snappy and quiet. Sure it had some software/OS issues, but overall it is miles ahead of the Thinkpad.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a volume zones of people who want "a laptop and nothing more", will pay for better materials and Apple has perfected that segment with a few caveats [0]. To your point, then comes the lower end ("just give me something cheap"), the corporate middle ("the same laptop as at work"), and the super high end (gaming, CAD, anything needing special software or a discrete GPU), with the outliers (linux etc) IMHO windo…
> For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple. It's a bit more nuanced. Lenovo/Asus seem to be experimenting a lot more, but more like by throwing (relatively) easy-to-build variations at the wall to see what sticks, then release a few more polished SKUs. Apple doesn't really do that, but they do attack those limits and design aspects they care abo…
One of the issue is laptops aren't a growth angle to Apple. For instance the efforts they made towards the CPU and processing architecture wouldn't have made sense without the other products benefiting from it.
We've seen that with the touchbar: it got a first release, and basically no improvements, no bug fixes, no better support from there. A laptop only feature gets no love from today's Apple.
Even the iPad saw little to no progress in recent years, outside of sharing specs with the mac.
I posit we'd see a foldable/bendable phone from Apple before we ever see something significant form factor change in laptops.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#719Earlier quoted context omitted.
The existence of an 8GB laptop in Apple's product line was also absurd in 2018.
fwiw the memory bandwidth is so high on these devices that it doesn't feel as bad as it should be.
Huh? High memory bandwidth doesn't help at all if you're running out of memory.
Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
Linux. When I put my face to the screen, Pro M1 Max is blurry, text is visibly smudged, both on my 4K monitor and the laptop display.
I only have 20/15 vision, so my eyes aren't good enough to see the smudging on my 32" 4K monitor. On my laptop, I definitely can't see it.
By any chance, do you have the display preferences to use a different resolution than the hardware's native dimensions?