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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

#801

Post by jshier »

nodesocket wrote: post #340

I currently have a 16" M1 Max and thinking about picking up a 15" M3 Air. My understanding is the M3 is faster in single core performance but the M1 Max is faster in multi-core because of obviously more cores. Am I really going to see a performance difference switching from M1 Max to M3 or should I splurge and go for M3 Pro or M3 Max?

Depends on what you do. Best bet is to find benchmarks from the various M3 reviews and see if any are similar to your workflow. For Geekbench 6, the M1 Max is about 2400/12700 while the M3 is about 3100/12000, so for CPU constrained tasks they be almost the same, with the Air perhaps throttling a bit if you run at full power for longer periods of time. But an M3 Max gets you a multicore score of 19600, which could be a nice improvement if you do a lot of parallel work.

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

#802

Post by cbsmith »

geodel wrote: post #496
Meninoyo wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that's their gatekeeping. I looked at the price for m3 and if it would have 16gig it would literally be perfect for just 1k but nope 8 more gigs cost you an arm and a leg

You really are in market for Apple laptop and 200 dollar more for extra 8GM RAM is arm and a leg for you?

It's hard to believe, but people can be in the market for a product, but feel that paying 8x markup on the cost of an upgrade is ridiculous.

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

#803

Post by dmitrygr »

goosedragons wrote: post #787
dangus wrote: post #531

Earlier 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…

"Cheapest" but not cheap. A $400 Steam Deck can do 3 external monitors with an inexpensive MST hub and has a single USB C port. The MBA is an extremely close competitor to the Dell XPS line too. And "Pro" doesn't even guarantee you more monitors. The $1600 M3 MBP is just as limited as the "consumer" Air.

> extremely close competitor to the Dell XPS line

Only if you ignore the shitty finger trackpad tracking on dell, windows (shit UX) or Linux (shit battery life and shit sleep/wake), and in general the real life battery duration in real life use cases.

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

#804

Post by datavirtue »

makeitdouble wrote: post #718
dividedbyzero wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 li…

The touchbar got shit on and it was probably expensive at the same time. Worthy innovation perhaps, but the customers didn't value it. I think that was the reason it faded out. I actually used it for audio adjustments, but I didn't need it.

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

#805

Post by goosedragons »

dangus wrote: post #519
itsoktocry wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. They are awesome, but not perfect. Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.

Price: if that’s the major qualm that’s not really a product flaw. The best product usually commands the highest price. Stuck with macOS: technically not true, Asahi Linux exists. Connecting multiple monitors: a legitimate negative limitation unusual at the MacBook Air price point, but still something that only a small fraction of consumer laptop buyers care about.

Asahi Linux is still missing features a lot of people consider key. M1 even STILL doesn't support DP alt mode for example. That's a pretty serious shortcoming on something like a MBA where the only video out is through DP alt mode.

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

#806

Post by skunkworker »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #497
anakaine wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those industry long timers who can and will use just about anything, and has occasionally over the years owned macs of various form factors. For the past decade thanks to corporate work I've been entirely Windows and Linux based. I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery l…

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

I upgraded from a 2015 MBP with 16gb of ram to a M3 Pro with 36gb. It’s a night and day difference, the machine is much more responsive and I mainly use it 30 min a day, or sometimes for a few hours in a row. And charge about once per week, getting about 14hr battery life.

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

#807

Post by datavirtue »

mbreese wrote: post #528
makeitdouble wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple continues to simplify the laptop naming scheme, we're at a point where it's simply: > Air OR Pro > Small screen OR big screen The weird part of that argument to me: to arrive to that point you've already made a ton of choices that need to be educated. You decided on the form factor: you don't want a convertible (neither a Surface like tablet + keyboard, nor something like a Yoga). You decided to forgo touch.…

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…

68 versions of hot garbage until you click on "Business."

Then you have to pay real money and you might as well buy a Mac.

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

#808

Post by WheatMillington »

Repulsion9513 wrote: post #757
richardw wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get this on an M1 Pro with 16GB. It's astounding. It claims to use swap but the trust is broken. I keep the Activity Monitor around and try to guess when it'll go flaky on me, but I never guess it right. I just restarted my machine now to reset whatever stupidity it has going on. Never had it with Windows. Or iPad, or iPhone. Why does the pro computer do this? My guess is 5k external monitor and a few desktops, but…

So what you're saying is you're running multiple browsers (VS Code is a browser), each of which takes anywhere from 1 to several GB of memory, and you're surprised that you're running out of RAM...

I've been using basic Windows laptops for work for many years now, and have never once had it ask me to start terminating applications.

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

#809

Post by nine_k »

anakaine wrote: post #468
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #457

Earlier 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'm one of those industry long timers who can and will use just about anything, and has occasionally over the years owned macs of various form factors. For the past decade thanks to corporate work I've been entirely Windows and Linux based. I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery l…

Good that it works for you and your daughter!

I have to use macbooks at work, and they do bother me. The mirror-finish screen always reflects bright lights into my eyes, be it a window or a ceiling light at a distance. The OS is thankfully a certified Unix, but the GUI, while having a few brilliant features, also has warts like no way to align or snap windows, apps running without a window, with only a menu bar, with a window from a different app showing, etc. This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle.

Of course, Windows is even worse in the GUI department, there's no comparison.

So, sadly, a Macbook remains the most sane computer for non-technical people :(

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

#810

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #657
danpmurray wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much RAM does it have, and have you ever wished you had more?

I have an M2 Air with 24gb and it has no problems running Brave with 800-ish tabs, development workloads (a bunch of VSCode projects, several docker containers, lots of iTerm terminals), low-end CAD and 3D printing apps, CaptureOne and a bunch of Electron apps in parallel with room to spare. I've found I can fit more into those 24gb than into the 32gb of the Intel Mac I had before that (however that's possible).

How are you managing all these? What are you using to search them?

I'm using Vimium for general use and have an Alfred plugin/thing/extension but even that's a bit unwieldy. How many windows is this?

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