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

MacBook Air M4

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

891–900 of 972 posts

Re: MacBook Air M4

#891

Post by int_19h »

trymas wrote: post #5

Anyone can comment on how Apple Silicon (M) MacBook Airs deal with heat? It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips? Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice? UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen…

I have an M3 Air which I occasionally use for AI (image gen & LLMs), gaming, and light dev work, and it never heated up enough to become uncomfortable, exactly as described in reviews. In fact, this was the main reason why I got Air over Pro - the latter apparently can get uncomfortably hot in some cases (although still far less often than your typical Intel laptop), and I wanted something that would truly be a laptop.

Re: MacBook Air M4

#892

Post by int_19h »

solardev wrote: post #106
trymas wrote: post #5

Anyone can comment on how Apple Silicon (M) MacBook Airs deal with heat? It’s fan-less design, so how does it compare with MacBook Pros with same M chips? Does it throttle often? Can you have it comfortably on your lap in summer? Or unless you’re running 1-hour long 4K rendering or machine learning training sessions - you’d never notice? UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen…

I'm a web dev with both a M2 Max (in a Pro) and a M3 (Air). Never heard the fan come on a single time with either machine while developing. Heat has never been an issue. Battery life is superb on both. Pro has better screen but is way heavier. Air is much nicer to bring to a cafe. The only time I've ever heard the fan come on is when playing 3d games, especially non-native Apple Silicon games. If I were getting one o…

M3 Air is fanless, so no wonder that you never hear it spin up on that one. ~

Re: MacBook Air M4

#893

Post by int_19h »

energy123 wrote: post #611

What is the memory bandwidth to the main CPU cores (not the "neural engine")? Is it really 120GB/s like they say in the spec sheet[0]? That's 20GB/s faster than the top dual-channel DDR5 desktops, which makes me think there might be some fine print I'm missing. [0] https://www.apple.com/au/macbook-air/specs/

Memory bandwidth for M series goes up to 800 Gb/s for Ultra (in e.g. Mac Studio). That, combined with the ability to get it loaded with a lot of RAM, is what makes it so desirable for LLMs.

Re: MacBook Air M4

#894

Post by int_19h »

switch007 wrote: post #467

Once you bump the RAM and disk, it's not too much of a leap to a Pro. 13" M4 Air, 24GB, 512GB - £1,399 14" M4 Pro MBP, 24GB, 512GB - £1,779 at Costco. For that you get amazing speakers, way better screen (with correct scaling), more performance, better chip, better battery, better mics, TB5 ports and HDMI/SD ports.

Can you clarify what you mean by "correct scaling"?

Re: MacBook Air M4

#895

Post by elif »

ruuda wrote: post #390
elif wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you want 4k resolution with a 14 inch screen to use commandline tools and a browser. My hunch is that relaxing this seemingly arbitrary requirement will result in many suitable notebooks

Especially for the command line and a browser which are primarily rendering text, pixel density matters so much! Why look at pixelated text when you can have print-quality crisp text? I never want to go back to low pixel density displays! I had an XPS 15 with 4k display in 2016, yet in 2025 it’s somehow difficult to find a laptop with that pixel density? I wonder the same with phones actually, my Nexus 6P from 2015 (…

The reason is because 99% of people care more about battery life and performance than sub-retina-scale imagined problems.

I'm holding my phone as close as I can to my face and I can't see a pixel if I want to

Re: MacBook Air M4

#896

Post by elif »

RetpolineDrama wrote: post #256
elif wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you want 4k resolution with a 14 inch screen to use commandline tools and a browser. My hunch is that relaxing this seemingly arbitrary requirement will result in many suitable notebooks

>I'm not sure why you want 4k resolution with a 14 inch screen You do realize we had 1440p phones in 2015-2016 right? HiDPI is not new, and it's clarity amazing. Stop buying huge low res screens for ripoff prices in 2025

You do realize your battery is dying faster right?

Laptops have had 120hz screens since 2011. Stop limiting yourself to 60hz in 2025

(See how that sounds?)

Re: MacBook Air M4

#897

Post by jnaina »

Joined a new company and requested a MacBook Pro, but they declined and instead issued me a brand-new ThinkPad X1 running Windows.

So, I went ahead and bought a MacBook Pro myself, set up all corporate apps (since the company runs M365 and mostly SaaS apps), and everything works seamlessly. My productivity is great—I don’t have to deal with the frustrations of Windows.

Now, once a week, I power up the ThinkPad X1, install patches and updates, then shut it down. The rest of the time, it just sits in the corner collecting dust along with all my other older Intel based MacBooks.

Out of pocket couple of grand, but the boost in my ability to deliver work more than makes up for that.

Re: MacBook Air M4

#898

Post by easygenes »

tristor wrote: post #835
Endurancee wrote: post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Macbook Pro 14 M3, I do hobby photography and you can get great laptop with excellent color accuracy with better screen than Macbook Pro out of the box, from Asus or Lenovo. There are Yoga Pro 9i, yoga aura Edition and even newer Ideapad pro has OLED options ranging from 2.3k to 4k resolution 1000 nits peak bright, depending on config, factory calibrated which is quite close. I got one from Lenovo with OLED,…

That's very good news, I found a starkly different situation the last time I upgraded my laptop. Do these competitive screens also offer a wide color gamut, with >99% sRGB coverage?

Near-perfect sRGB coverage is relatively common, especially with OLEDs. Now the concern is AdobeRBG, DCI-P3, and Rec.2020 coverage* -- which are still generally lagging (basically nothing short of some $$$$$ laser projectors are anywhere close to full coverage of Rec.2020, which covers ~75% of all visible colors and is an ambitious forward-looking colorspace) .

  * sRGB

Re: MacBook Air M4

#899

Post by kerkeslager »

thombles wrote: post #609
kerkeslager wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm willing to compromise on battery life, and I don't need the fastest CPU, just a good quality work laptop where I can run `cargo build` / `docker pull` without worrying about filling up the disk, and mostly just a browser aside from that. I know this isn't your point but this is exactly why I don't use docker--but I'm a bit surprised to hear you mention `cargo build` as something that might fill up the disk. I'v…

The optimised release binary isn't the issue - it's the many GB of build artifacts produced along the way if you have a lot of dependencies. You can accumulate hundreds of GB in target/ over time working on large projects.

So basically user error.

Re: MacBook Air M4

#900

Post by easygenes »

cogman10 wrote: post #504
thewebguyd wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, there's no one else. It's a sad state of affairs in the laptop world outside of Apple. Used to be primarily a Linux on the desktop user, but have been on macOS since the M1 air, and now typing this from a 14" M4 Pro MBP that will probably last me the next 5+ years easily. I don't love macOS but it's usable, I pretty much live in the terminal anyway, and the ecosystem features are nice - I make heavy use of clipb…

I put a LOT of the blame on ARM chipset manufacturers. The reason you can't get a good ARM laptop that isn't a Mac is because the chipset manufacturers treat them like they treat everything else. They want to have a custom patched kernel that's already 2 decades old and they drop support for it next month. It says a lot that probably the best in the space is the humble Raspberry Pi.

It's beyond that. The CPU designers aren't designing for ACPI or to target the ARM PC-BSA (Base System Architecture for PCs).
Post reply on HN