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New MacBook Air with M2

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Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#781

Post by maccard »

pleb_nz wrote: post #562
maccard wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what you'd buy instead?

I had a Lenovo P15 before my current M1Pro. That thing was a machine. I got roughly the same battery life through day of dev work, got to choose my OS, it did everything perfectly. Only thing it lacked on imo was looks. So yeah, in my experience, there are other laptops out there that are as good.

Thanks - my experience with laptop workstations has pretty much universally been huge bulky machines with horrific cooling that is heavily throttled and the battery only lasts 2-4 hours under load. My M1 Mac lasts all day even when compiling which is night and day.

The OS option isn't a problem for me - I'm content running windows/Mac regardles!

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#782

Post by newaccount74 »

dan1234 wrote: post #765
newaccount74 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better webcam? With every model they claim the webcam is better, but once I start Photo Booth I am thoroughly disappointed. In recent years webcam quality has even gone down -- the webcam in the M1 Macbook Air and the M1 Max Macbook Pro from 2020 and 2021 is worse than the webcam from the 2015 Macbook Pro!

I think the camera in my 14" M1 Pro is much, much better than the camera in my 2015 MPB. Also, people on the other end of Zoom etc commented on the improved picture quality.

Have you done side-by-side comparisons? I have compared the picture quality of 2015 MBP vs 2020 MBA vs 2021 MBP (16").

The 2020 MBA and 2021 MBP are pretty similar.

The new cameras have better low light performance and less noise due to pretty agressive smoothing. The consequence is that the picture lacks any detail whatsoever. The image from the 2015 MBP is sharper than the alleged 1080p image from the 2021 MBP.

With the smoothing my girlfriends face looks like she is wearing heavy makeup. My beard looks like it was painted on. In low light there are weird artefacts and glitches (especially in the area around my eyes, probably due to the ML algorithm).

Now maybe on a Zoom call this doesn't matter, if your face is just in a little matchbox-sized box on the screen. But on full screen Facetime calls the lack of detail and low resolution of the MBP webcam is very noticeable.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#783

Post by aarbor989 »

spurgu wrote: post #773
hajile wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the best reason for upgrading is access to 24GB of RAM and maybe the hardware video encoders if that's your thing. Otherwise, M2 is a very solid iteration, but probably not worth dropping that much money if you already own an M1 system.

For me the main reason to upgrade would be Magsafe. I'm constantly afraid of someone stumbling on the cable and destroying the USB-C port. I couldn't find any info on this, is this the same Magsafe as the 2015 devices, i.e. can I use existing old chargers? If so then I might even consider upgrading just due to this (I also have a 12/24V Magsafe charger). 24 GB RAM would be nice compared to 16 GB currently, but it's n…

My 16in M1 Max with MagSafe is not compatible with the older MagSafe chargers

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#784

Post by mehrdada »

deergomoo wrote: post #778
mehrdada wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sad irony of it all is that I bet the vast majority of purchasers were developers like myself, who have absolutely no need for a dedicated GPU. I would seriously doubt that. Mac sales are huge and developers must be a relatively small segment of computer users.

Yeah but how many of those people are buying computers that start at over two grand? The 16” MBP is firmly a power user machine, and I would bet a lot more power users still don’t need a GPU than do. Especially when you consider many of the people that do need a GPU surely need more than was ever offered in Intel MacBooks, considering they were never particularly good chips even by laptop standards. The base config 2…

My response was to the claim that the majority of the customers of that product was developers. It seems unlikely that the majority of the customers of that to be developers simply because of the numbers. Whether they need dGPU or not I don’t know, but I won’t be surprised that the expectation for a 16” Apple customer that doesn’t know much is to have bought a machine capable of video/photo editing and not be surprised by its mediocre performance.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#785

Post by mixmastamyk »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #433
jmyeet wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember it's not 8gb of dedicated RAM. It's 8gb shared with the video subsystem. Let's see how far that goes when you plug it into a 4K monitor and/or do anything that requires GPU acceleration (which can include simply decoding video). I think 8gb is borderline criminally low in the circumstances. At least this thing has the option for 24gb though. I just wish that was a stocked model so you could just walk into a…

>I think 8gb is borderline criminally low in the circumstances. I think Apple has a far better understanding, backed by actual data, of the circumstances than you, or indeed anyone here. My wife is still using her 2015 Air and has yet to plug it into anything, let alone 4k or 5k monitors that appears to be the "end game scenario" for posters here. If you are posting on HN, then 8GB is not enough for you. I bought a 1…

If you mean data from the Finance department, yes.

In the cheapest M2/disk combo, threads here have said Apple have crippled the storage bandwidth relative to the M1, so relying on fast virtual memory is no longer an option. In that scenario 8GB is even more constraining than it was a year ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31962854

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#786

Post by spurgu »

aarbor989 wrote: post #783
spurgu wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the main reason to upgrade would be Magsafe. I'm constantly afraid of someone stumbling on the cable and destroying the USB-C port. I couldn't find any info on this, is this the same Magsafe as the 2015 devices, i.e. can I use existing old chargers? If so then I might even consider upgrading just due to this (I also have a 12/24V Magsafe charger). 24 GB RAM would be nice compared to 16 GB currently, but it's n…

My 16in M1 Max with MagSafe is not compatible with the older MagSafe chargers

Damn. Then I have no reason to upgrade. Thanks!

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#787

Post by anticensor »

johnfernow wrote: post #530
thrwawy283 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPU is important.. afaik the keyboard and trackpad aren't working yet in Asahi Linux. I don't expect Apple to support the Linux community. It feels like this is trending in one direction. It felt like things stopped being "favorable" to us when they stopped supporting OpenGL and made no effort with Vulkan. The touchbar and some wifi chipsets were poorly supported for years before M1 debuted. What has been impleme…

> Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid. You could triple boot Windows, MacOS and Linux with Intel Macs. A Mac was a great choice because you could develop for and support all 3 of those platforms (plus Android and iOS). Aside from having bad GPUs, expensive storage, and little modularity, they were great machines fo…

Asahi Linux supports Apple M-series processors.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#788

Post by nicoburns »

johnfernow wrote: post #530
thrwawy283 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPU is important.. afaik the keyboard and trackpad aren't working yet in Asahi Linux. I don't expect Apple to support the Linux community. It feels like this is trending in one direction. It felt like things stopped being "favorable" to us when they stopped supporting OpenGL and made no effort with Vulkan. The touchbar and some wifi chipsets were poorly supported for years before M1 debuted. What has been impleme…

> Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid. You could triple boot Windows, MacOS and Linux with Intel Macs. A Mac was a great choice because you could develop for and support all 3 of those platforms (plus Android and iOS). Aside from having bad GPUs, expensive storage, and little modularity, they were great machines fo…

Windows and linux both work in VMs on Apple Silicon macs. I suspect the support for bare metal will come in time (definitely for linux, windows I guess we'll have to see, but I wouldn't be too surprised).

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#789

Post by miav »

conductr wrote: post #392
carlycue wrote: post #39

This thing is going to sell like hotcakes. The combination of single core CPU and graphics performance, device thinness, battery life in this laptop is unmatched. It’s funny how Apple came back from the worst the Mac has ever been to the best in a span of few years. Johnny I’ve doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does.

Wonder how long these M chips were in R&D and meanwhile they were just watching everyone on the internet complain how crappy mac laptops were but they knew this was coming

Probably a decade or so. I imagine it was always a possibility, with steps being taken towards it over time, even if it wasn't a well defined goal yet. Requirement of uploading App Store apps as LLVM IR instead of machine code comes to mind.

>watching everyone on the internet complain

What's especially amusing in hindsight are the (then justified) complaints about thermal throttling in the last Intel Macbooks. They knew damn well those chassis would not be good enough for Intel CPUs, but they didn't care, it was designed from ground up for Apple silicon.

Re: New MacBook Air with M2

#790

Post by luxuryballs »

wmf wrote: post #512
luxuryballs wrote: post #463

I wonder how many casual power users are going to get this and then realize they can’t run their current windows VM anymore…

You can run a Windows VM and x86 apps work.

But not a x86 VM right? Only an ARM build of Windows I thought.
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