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

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

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

971–980 of 1001 posts

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

#971

Post by fennecbutt »

gs17 wrote: post #341
w0m wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's also $999 for 8gb of ram (!!!), which will clearly throttle under any actual use.

Newer macOS is actually really good about running with less RAM. The only problem is then your SSD will suddenly fill up. If either was upgradable, this would be no problem.

Think about what ram is used for.

App binaries, sure. But most of what is stored in memory is content, video, image, file cache. These will not differ much from OS to OS, the only difference would be baseline memory usage before I start opening YouTube tabs.

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

#972

Post by fennecbutt »

pama wrote: post #15
retskrad wrote: post #3

I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. Corporations have become pros at exploiting our human psychology. Their ads can make you believe that the smallest bump in improvements will make your older computer appear useless in comparison. That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.

An interesting difference with the new pro models, if you want to pay around $5k, is that you can have 128Gb unified Ram in them and run inference locally with exciting LLMs.

What a waste. Build a 4090 desktop for that price, sheesh. Or spend the money renting spot 4090 instances whenever you need to via a MB air or whatever other laptop. And you'd probably still not end up spending the full amount.

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

#973

Post by hnfong »

skybrian wrote: post #172
pama wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting difference with the new pro models, if you want to pay around $5k, is that you can have 128Gb unified Ram in them and run inference locally with exciting LLMs.

It seems like a pretty speculative use. That much money would go a long way on a $20/month subscription, and the field is changing rapidly. Unless you’re an AI researcher, might as well wait a year or two and see what changes?

Using M1/2/3 Max for LLM inference isn't at all "speculative", it's a thing today and high end Apple Silicon being an option for LLM inference is becoming general knowledge among the local inference community. The original author of llama.cpp (one of the leading LLM inference projects) developed it on a Mac and it has full Metal acceleration support.

The $20/month subscription is going to give you access to commercial models, but generally you have to run the open weight models yourself. With the unified RAM you can trivially run the larger 70B+ models.

AI researchers generally have to use CUDA due to how the ecosystem is still mostly CUDA-only for training and fine tuning, but those who need to occasionally use custom/local models for inference will likely find high end Macs being a good fit for their use cases.

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

#974

Post by gnicholas »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #944
gnicholas wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Framed differently: it's 37% taller and 25% heavier. In the context of laptops, this is pretty hard not to notice. I have an MBA and my wife has an MBP — the difference is very easy to see/feel.

Its not like killing you lifting a little bit more, its already so light. Its certainly appreciably much lighter than the 15 inch 2012 mac still kicking around my house. It feels easy to hold one handed even.

I wouldn't mind that much, but my petite wife sure wishes that she could swap her MBP for an MBA! She takes her laptop in purses and other bags, so it's both about size and weight.

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

#975

Post by ben-schaaf »

lynguist wrote: post #940
yumraj wrote: post #500

Earlier 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…

But that’s what I said: My post starts with “no”. The other points in the “but” are all still true. The RAM or SSD are specifically not faster because of its “integrated nature”. The RAM is faster because Apple engineered an actually wide bus + multiple channels for memory access. The fatter Macs have the equivalent of up to 8-channel memory, which not even server CPUs of the competition provide. The SSD gets easily…

> The fatter Macs have the equivalent of up to 8-channel memory, which not even server CPUs of the competition provide.

8 channels has been standard in Epyc chips since they released in 2017, the latest Epyc Genoa does 12 channels. They're also not splitting that memory bandwidth with a bandwidth hungry GPU.

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

#976

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

Liskni_si wrote: post #908
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible to buy an external keyboard with a trackpoint: not as convenient as having it builtin, but it’s great if you’re mostly using the laptop at your desk anyway

Imagine buying a MacBook Air only to need an external keyboard to be able to use it comfortably…

I like the modern MacBook keyboards just fine. I still use my mechanical keyboard when I’m using my laptop with an external monitor. In part because my desk setup makes using the builtin keyboard awkward

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

#977

Post by kirso »

iddan wrote: post #143

Since October, I've replaced my M-series 14" Macbook Pro for a M-series Macbook Air and I'm pretty glad with it. I can do almost anything I could have done with my Pro (Figma, coding, Docker) with so much less weight on my shoulders (commuting to work, working in cafes, etc).

Do you ever push it to the limits? Think without sustained workloads - PRO seems like a waste of money.

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

#978

Post by kirso »

dml2135 wrote: post #212
kjkjadksj wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 14 inch is already so light imo its probably worth it to splurge just to get things like the non gimped screen

I have an M2 13" air for a personal computer and a 14" pro for work. The Air is noticeably lighter and much easier to throw in a bag without thinking about managing weight. The Pro is a fine weight for commuting, but for traveling longer distances, the weight definitely makes a difference. To the point where I'm seriously considering setting up a work partition on my personal machine so I don't need to lug the pro ar…

Probably depends how big and muscular are you. I don't feel 14' PRO in my backpack at all, 16 PRO barely. Its not a flex but it definitely matters if you are a 5'1 female or 6'2 male.

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

#979

Post by diffeomorphism »

015a wrote: post #938
diffeomorphism wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, HP elitebook with current AMD chip, 2560xwhatever, 120Hz screen, 1TB of storage, 32GB of ram, both replaceable, 1200€. Comparable macs cost at least twice that, so color me highly unimpressed that twice the price gets you a nice machine.

An HP Elitebook 645 G10 with an AMD Ryzen 5, 1080p display, and 32gb of memory costs exactly $1,919 US Dollars. They're running a sale on the 830, so you could get that for only $100 more than an entry-level Macbook Air, but you'd get a much less powerful CPU, worse battery life, larger frame, and worse screen [1] Again, I think a lot of people on here have this bubble-sense that laptops are cheaper than they actuall…

Just bought the 845 g10 for that price, so nope.

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

#980

Post by indrora »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #457
numbers wrote: post #355

I 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…

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…

> Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops.

The plateau of 6 hours is less Microsoft's fault here and more a combination of stinginess by OEMs and their willingness to reduce cost by taking money to have extra installed software out of the gate.

> The trackpads are downright unusable.

This varies wildly by OEM and price point. Below some weird gulf, this is the truth. Above some arbitrary shore, there is a plateau of goodness, of which some rival the historic best from macs.

> The keyboards are a hit or a miss.

Again this comes down to the choices made by the OEM during their costing. I recently picked up a Chromebook from Acer just to have something that was not "very Computer" when I found myself needing An Computer to look something up with. It had surprisingly little flex to the chassis, and I found myself quite enjoying the deck, minus...

well

> And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.

Or 1366x768, the Devil's Resolution. The reasons for this are weird and varied but the short form is that economies of scale have yet to make it more profitable for companies to standardize on higher density panels. It actually makes me insanely mad that the laptop I started college with (a dell c600 hand-me-down I'd been tinkering with since high school) had a better resolution at 1400x1050 and that the 2560x1600 beast that I carried after that... that in 2012 would define the lower side of "retina".

Post reply on HN