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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

#721

Post by ambichook »

askonomm wrote: post #511
dodslaser wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried a DisplayLink dock once with my M1 Max MBP. It was incredibly laggy, pegged my cpu at 40%, and didn't let me set the correct resolution/scaling level for either of my monitors (horizontal 4k 32" and a vertical 4k 27", nothing exotic). A TB4 dock fixes most problems, but I have to hack the EDID to disable YCbCr and force RGB, or the colors look like absolute shit. The external monitors still look significantly…

> External display handling is easily the worst part of using a Mac for me. Using more than is explicitly mentioned that is supported, you mean? I mean yeah, duh.

i think the fact that so few are supported is part of the issue (not parent commenter, also not a user of apple products so i admittedly do lack experience in this area)

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

#722

Post by ben-schaaf »

lynguist wrote: post #464
yumraj wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what’s worse is Apple, or is it random self-styled influencers , spreading the false narrative that Apple Silicon magically requires less RAM and people actually believing that.

No, but Apple tends to have faster RAM (way more bandwidth), faster SSDs, and macOS tends to have a better memory compression algorithm.

SSD performance scales somewhat linearly with capacity, and modern 1TB drives are capable of 6+GB/s reads. The 256GB M2 does a measly 1.4GB/s, and from what I've seen the 1TB is also lackluster at ~5GB/s.

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

#723

Post by nerdbert »

piva00 wrote: post #565
danpmurray wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mine has 16GB and I regularly use some Mistral LLM as well as OpenHermes.

The only things that ever seems to get my fan going are transcoding a video or a really long compile.

Never once has the fan run during web browsing or any of the many everyday tasks that used to bring my previous one to its knees.

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

#724

Post by paulmd »

Dah00n wrote: post #651
mbreese wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re going about your decision tree backwards. People don’t say “I don’t want a touchscreen” or “I don’t want to game”. You don’t make decisions based upon what you don’t want to do… you make them based upon what you do want to do. I was talking with my dad recently, and he wanted a new computer that could handle email, a little Excel, Facebook, and some other light web browsing that didn’t get stuck in an infinite…

>If a Mac fits your requirements, then you have far fewer decisions. That's what OP said? Because now you have already decided you don't want to game, etc. >Even if you say you want a Dell laptop — have you ever tried to browse their site? This is the iPhone versus Android discussion all over again. Yes, many will be happy with the iPhone, but they also often didn't know they had the option to buy an Android phone th…

> do something the iPhone couldn't that they'd like to be able to do (like copy&paste or whatever)

it is amazing how much the android crowd loves to shit on apple "brainless sheeple" etc given how little they clearly know about the products themselves.

I keep bringing it up over and over and it's never not true, the android crowd is just so utterly uncivil and it's completely normalized and accepted as public discourse. The AMD fanbase has the exact same problem. It's constant "brainless sheep" and "the ONLY reason anyone buys [not my brand] is [infantilizing and insulting remark goes here]".

If anyone on the other side did anything remotely like that they'd be slapped with a mod comment etc. But if you point it out, that people are misbehaving and acting out, you're the bad guy, because acknowledging the constant microaggressions is the greatest crime of all.

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

#725

Post by brigadier132 »

anneessens wrote: post #384
brigadier132 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro I don't know why you bought a new one. You can have two ways to look at this, one way is your ultra pessimistic view, my view is I don't need to upgrade my laptop ever 2 years anymore. Before the M1 Max I was upgrading so often because intel macbooks sucked so much. Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a deca…

'Just don't be exploited' by people who are literally paid to figure out how to exploit your psychological weaknesses?

Yes. They actually don't have control over you.

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

#726

Post by TMWNN »

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 current and previous MacBooks have had 16GB and I've been fine with it, but given local LLMs I think I'm going to have to go to whatever will be the maximum RAM available for the next model.

Similarly, I am for the first time going to care about how much RAM is in my next iPhone. My iPhone 13's 4GB is suddenly inadequate.

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

#727

Post by xetplan »

eurekin wrote: post #304
jm4 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think even worse than that is that they still only put 8 GB RAM in the base and middle options.

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.

It is really outrageous looking at the price of 2 X 8 gig sticks right now.

It is exactly why I haven't bought anything from Apple since the ipod.

Everything sounds amazing/wonderful and then one mind boggling deal breaker that doesn't even seem to make economic sense but just feels petty.

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

#728

Post by r00fus »

mort96 wrote: post #699
r00fus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Cloud storage is a thing. I don't run games on my hobby laptop. I also have external storage for sensitive docs (encrypted). I use like 50% of the storage right now.

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

#729

Post by rockdoe »

vilunov wrote: post #544
threeseed wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video transcoding is done on the GPU and has nothing to do with memory/storage. And there isn't a trend towards more Electron apps. Increasingly developers are using Tauri which is Rust based and extremely lightweight.

Tauri is not that much different from Electron honestly.

Yeah not sure how it qualifies as lightweight...

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

#730

Post by Solvency »

izacus wrote: post #389
Solvency wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why has it been so utterly impossible for a single Windows laptop manufacturer to match the build quality? Just matching the body itself would at last be SOMETHING.

Because you're not looking hard enough.

Right, it's actually all my fault.
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