My 4-year old Dell XPS 15 is up for replacement, but somehow no manufacturer aside from Apple is making laptop with decent specs nowadays? I want 2TB storage, a 4k (or close) HiDPI display, good build quality, and not a bulky gaming laptop. The XPS 15 was perfect, it had those specs, except it only had 1TB storage which is now full. I was expecting that to not be an issue 4 years later ... But now Dell discontinued XPS, and their new Pro/Premium models have worse specs in almost all ways. The only non-Apple thing that I can find that even comes close, is a bulky 16" ThinkPad.

And then there is Apple who pack everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device, plus a very fast CPU and battery life that is years ahead of anything else ... Why is there no competition here? 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. Why is the gap so large?

• fossuser

  yesterday at 9:48 PM

  There's nothing close, Apple has better talent and the vertical integration gives them an edge (especially on performance per watt on their chip designs).

  Since the M series chips, there's been no other option if you care about quality. There are crappy alternatives with serious tradeoffs if for some reason you are forced to not use Apple or choose for non-quality reasons.

  • ericmcer

    yesterday at 10:27 PM

    The leap from intel to the M series chips really left everyone else behind. I can't even use my 2019 Macbook anymore it feels so sluggish.

    I have an M3 Pro and it blows all my old computers out of the water. Can handle pretty insane dev workflows (massive Docker composed environments) without issue and the battery life feels unfair. I can put in an 8 hour workday without my charging cable, I don't think I have turned it fully off in a few months, it just chugs along. It really embodies the "it just works" mindset.

    • Foobar8568

      today at 6:10 AM

      I have a M3 Max as well, 16" iteration, it's the best laptop I had, and it's clearly a desktop replacement for my usage and until I want to generate meme vids with LLM...

      Nowadays I am looking forward to the Nvidia digits+ MacBook Pro duo.

    • teaearlgraycold

      yesterday at 11:36 PM

      I can easily take my M3 MBA on trips, using in on the plane both ways and a couple hours there for a few days, and not charge it once.

      I honestly looked for alternatives when I bought it last summer but there weren’t any competitive options.

      • hypercube33

        today at 2:17 AM

        I mean my AMD T14 G4 gets like 12 hours of battery running windows, 150 browser tabs and a virtual environment. Not sure how the newer ones are and no they aren't as sleek or probably durable as a metal apple or dell XPS but I haven't got any complaints for the price.

        • carlhjerpe

          today at 5:20 AM

          Yeah everyone that went from "old shitty Intel" to M1 or above somehow gaslit themselves into believing nobody could catch up.

          AMD did catch up quickly, it's too bad they had to solder RAM to match but it is what it is...

          • freehorse

            today at 9:45 AM

            I had never really used a mac (or anything from apple) before M1, and since I got an M1 air I never looked back. Not all people who are hyped about apple silicon were previously apple users.

            It is true though that in terms of laptops my only experience to compare it with was with intel chips, but that's because it used to be hard to find an AMD laptop back then.

          • danieldk

            today at 5:47 AM

            T14 Gen 5 AMD has replaceable RAM, SSD, battery, and WWAN. Just got one for Linux (besides my MacBook) and loaded it up with 64GB RAM (which was only 160 Euro) and a 2TB SSD.

          • poink

            today at 5:34 AM

            I don't think they "gaslit themselves," but I do think M1 was good enough a lot of people stopped thinking about hardware and their frame of reference is horribly out of date

            • felixgallo

              today at 7:58 AM

              Also it can’t be understated how bad Windows has gotten and what that trajectory looks like.

        • kombine

          today at 7:13 AM

          I have T14s Gen 3 AMD running Linux and I don't even come close to 12 hours, maybe half of that. That's my biggest complaint.

        • tomcam

          today at 5:45 AM

          Browser tab #89 is running at 120% CPU. Why are you running Daily Mail anyway

        • teaearlgraycold

          today at 9:28 AM

          Looks like they’re decent laptops. Although surprisingly the newest models are hundreds of dollars more than similarly spec’d MBAs. Not sure on how the CPU/GPU performance compares.

  • gargan

    today at 6:33 AM

    In my experience the Snapdragon X Elite is about the same as an M2. It's got slightly worse battery life but still a battery that blows the competition out the water.

    Plus you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc without paying Apples ridiculous prices

    Snapdragon are just getting started. The Snapdragon X2 is coming out later this year with 18 cores

    Apple does have some serious competition now

  • buildfocus

    yesterday at 10:19 PM

    Is the performance gap so huge? Power efficiency yes, absolutely, but for peak performance last I saw the last AMD vs M3 benchmarks were a slightly slower single core, and a little faster in multicore. Doesn't seem as world changing as described.

    • Aeolun

      yesterday at 10:52 PM

      My $2000 linux desktop is still faster and snappier than the $4000 macbook, but it’s the only thing laptop sized that feels even close.

      • wyclif

        today at 5:20 AM

        I'd be interested in hearing about the specs. Planning on building a new Linux desktop soon.

        • Aeolun

          today at 9:04 AM

          It has a Ryzen 9900X, 64GB of DDR5, AMD Radeon RX6600XT, 2x2TB Hanye NVMe, ROG B650 ATX motherboard and 850W power supply.

          I bought the system mostly to increase the single core performance from the Ryzen 5 3600 I had before. As well as to get rid of all the little 256GB SSD disks I had in the previous one.

      • JadeNB

        today at 12:49 AM

        > My $2000 linux desktop is still faster and snappier than the $4000 macbook, but it’s the only thing laptop sized that feels even close.

        What brand?

        • baby_souffle

          today at 2:54 AM

          Probably diy.

          2k buys you a decent thread ripper or 59xx series and as much ram as you can throw at it.

      • KennyBlanken

        today at 4:36 AM

        [flagged]

    • acomjean

      today at 2:53 AM

      I ran some bioinformatics pipelines on an AMD pangolin notebook. Its was faster than the apple M2 (I think it was an M2 or M3) notebook my work neighbor had. My machine had more RAM, but still for workloads that use the extra cores it made a difference.

      • frontfor

        today at 3:52 AM

        The performance alone says nothing. What about the battery life, size, weight, temperature, fan noise, and quality of the touchpad? These are important trade offs in any laptop.

    • danielheath

      today at 2:59 AM

      Most laptops are thermally constrained when it comes to speed - power efficiency means you can run at full speed longer without overheating.

      • brokencode

        today at 4:13 AM

        Also, most laptops will run at significantly worse performance when not plugged in. Macs are much more consistent both thermally and when not plugged in.

    • drodgers

      yesterday at 11:45 PM

      Yes. You need to go to server class chips (eg. threadripper) before beating the raw multi-core performance of a top-spec M4 Max in a Macbook pro, and the battery life is still crazy good!

    • guhidalg

      yesterday at 10:23 PM

      Yes. No other laptop can sustain peak performance as long as the M-series Macs. The only thing that competes is a dedicated desktop with a big cooler and fan.

      Mac laptops feel faster, even if the synthetic benchmarks say otherwise.

      • hnlmorg

        yesterday at 10:55 PM

        I don’t agree. Compile times are definitely and very noticeably quicker on my Intel gaming laptop (that’s actually a few years old now) vs my M3 MBP.

        That said, I’ve never once felt that the M3 MBPs are sluggish. They are definitely super quick machines. And the fact that I can go a full day without charging even when using moderately heavy workloads is truly jaw droppingly impressive.

        I’d definitely take the power performance over that small little extra saved in compile times any day of the week. So Apple have made some really smart judgements there.

        • zitterbewegung

          yesterday at 11:31 PM

          M3 vs other high end intel chips on code compilation generally has the higher clock speed always winning. Only with the M4 is starting to hit clock speeds nearer to high end intel chips . We are 2 generations out to probably 5ghz sustained on Apple chips.

        • kerkeslager

          today at 2:58 AM

          In guhidalg's defense, they did say that the "Mac laptops feel faster" (emphasis mine) not that they are faster. There's a trick here with Macs, which is that their user interfaces for the OS and many programs are tightly integrated with the hardware which makes the UI faster--that's the "feel faster"--it's a software, not hardware thing. In cases where the software is equivalent (i.e. cross-platform compilers like GCC/Clang/Cargo) you're going to see little difference, but your OS experience is definitely snappier on Macs.

      • ddingus

        yesterday at 10:52 PM

        I think this has a whole lot to do with the memory throughput, as well as great efficiency.

        My M1 still holds right up! It is the smallest RAM model, and even that is not the end of things.

        • matwood

          today at 8:21 AM

          I bought an M1 Max with 64gb of ram at release. I'm still not sure what will get me to replace it other than it simply breaking. Maybe an M5 will finally make me want to buy something new. I'm debating getting a cheaper Air and maybe a base Ultra now that I do most of my heavy work at a desk.

      • margorczynski

        yesterday at 10:39 PM

        You mean plugged in or battery?

        • 2muchcoffeeman

          yesterday at 11:57 PM

          You’ll get regular performance on battery.

          I’ve gone entire work days with my Pro on battery because I didn’t notice I hadn’t plugged it in. All my docker containers, IDE etc plugged into my external monitor. It was a good 9hrs before I noticed.

          Macs are easy to beat depending on what trade offs you want to make though.

    • ls612

      yesterday at 11:59 PM

      Yes it is. My M2 Max MBP runs multithreaded workloads in the same ballpark as my water cooled 12900k.

    • Izikiel43

      yesterday at 11:16 PM

      It's a laptop, same performance with higher power efficiency means same performance with a much longer mobile uptime, which makes the Macbooks tiers above their competition.

      And for data centers, same performance at better power efficiency means hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in power.

  • rconti

    today at 2:59 AM

    But it seems the parent's point is there's no reason Dell couldn't have kept making improved XPS models. Maybe they don't compare on a $/watt basis with Apple silicon, but you could presumably have still paid less and gotten something pretty decent.

  • paulddraper

    today at 6:20 AM

    M series really is amazing.

    But if you don’t want Apple, or you want to be able to upgrade, check out Frameworks. [1]

    Really satisfying combination of quality and value for high performance laptops.

    [1] https://frame.work/

    • kombine

      today at 7:56 AM

      Their 16" laptop is extremely bulky. I think this is a category where Macbooks clearly win. Thinkpad and FrameWork have great options for 14", but at larger screen sizes something is always missing for me.

      • mrweasel

        today at 8:12 AM

        To be fair, the 16" MacBook Pro (I have the M1 Max) is also rather bulky. It's to big and to heavy for travel. If you need do a lot of traveling, or just don't work at your desk, I'd recommend against getting a 16" laptop in general.

  • 2c2c2c

    today at 12:11 AM

    I thought this too but I think the amd mobile series chips have mostly caught up

  • tester756

    today at 12:35 AM

    What about Lunar Lake?

    • twilo

      today at 12:57 AM

      Solid, but still I can't find it in a laptop with passive cooling like the macbook air line here, which is a huge plus in a laptop imo

  • ninetyninenine

    yesterday at 9:58 PM

    No vertical integration is what did intel in because they both do fab and design. TSMC won because they aren't vertically integrated into anything.

    Apple is better because of actual superior technology. The chips are custom made and no one can match the technology yet.

    • fossuser

      yesterday at 10:05 PM

      They have superior technology because they control the full stack and have taken more and more ownership of it over the years (most recently building their own modem in the iPhone 16e). They could design chips for an exact set of constraints (originally iPhones) and then expand that to the mac. Intel with x86 had to support legacy and tons of different devices (and bad leadership caused them to ignore efficiency and later ignore gpus). Other laptop manufacturers have to run other people's software and few really make their own underlying hardware to the extent apple does.

      • ninetyninenine

        yesterday at 10:22 PM

        No they don't all their technology is equivalent to what's in the industry save their chips. Which btw is manufactured by TSMC so the chip itself is not vertically integrated.

        • fossuser

          yesterday at 10:37 PM

          My argument is they were able to develop the chip because of their control. The constraints allowed them that freedom and the constraints come from the top down integration and control.

          I'll bow out here because I can just tell this won't be a worthwhile thread.

          • ninetyninenine

            yesterday at 11:13 PM

            But what other advantage did this give them? Like name specific examples. Feel free to leave, but I honestly don't see where you're coming from.

            • alwillis

              today at 1:13 AM

              > But what other advantage did this give them? Like name specific examples. Feel free to leave, but I honestly don't see where you're coming from.

              Back when Apple used Intel processors, they were at the mercy of Intel's roadmap; if Intel missed a deadline for a new chip, Apple had to change plans. Obviously, that's no longer the case.

              Back in the Motorola/IBM days, their G5 processor ran so hot that Apple had to create a special case with 7 fans to cool it. It was an amazing engineering feat, but something Apple would never do unless they had no choice. I've used a Power Mac G5—it sounded like a jet taking off, and the fans stayed on. [2]

              They get to integrate new technologies quicker than being constrained by the industry.

              Apple launched the first 64-bit smartphone, the iPhone 5s, in 2013—at least a year before any Android manufacturer could. And when Qualcomm finally shipped a 64-bit processor, no version of Android supported it. [1]

              There are dozens of examples where Apple's vertical integration has allowed them to stay a step ahead of competitors.

              The latest is the C1 modem that shipped in the iPhone 16e. Because the C1 is much more efficient than Qualcomm's modem, the 16e gets better battery life than the more expensive iPhone 16 with Qualcomm's modem. [3]

              And because Qualcomm's licensing fees are a percentage of the cost of the device it's in, shipping the C1 enables them to put modems in laptops. The Qualcomm fee is significant: an iPad Air starts at $599; the same iPad Air model with one of Qualcomm's modems costs $749.

              Customers have wanted MacBooks with cellular modems forever; now they'll be able to do that, since the modem will become part of Apple's SoC in the near future.

              That's what you can do when you're not constrained by off-the-shelf components.

              [1]: "First 64-bit Android phone has no 64-bit software"—https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/first-64-bit-android...

              [2]: https://thehouseofmoth.com/a-little-known-fact-about-the-pow...

              [3]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/02/27/apples-c1-modem-b...

              • ninetyninenine

                today at 4:18 AM

                excellent answer. thank you.

            • nostrademons

              today at 1:43 AM

              They've been able to reap some real technological efficiencies because of their vertical integration. Notable ones I know about:

              - The integrated on-chip RAM dramatically speeds up memory access. Your full 16 GB of RAM on an M1 functions at cache speeds; meanwhile, the L3 cache on an Intel processor is 1-8M, more than 3 orders of magnitude smaller.

              - Apple takes full advantage of this with their software stack. Objective C and Swift use reference counting. The advantage of refcounting is that it doesn't have slow GC pauses, but the disadvantage is that it has terrible locality properties (requiring that you update refcounts on all sorts of different cache lines when you assign a variable) which often make it significantly slower on real-world Intel hardware. But if your entire RAM operates at cache speeds, this disadvantage goes away.

              - Refcounting is usually significantly more memory-efficient than GC, because with the latter you need to set aside empty space to copy objects into, and as that space fills up your GC becomes significantly less efficient. This lets Apple apps get more out of smaller overall RAM sizes. The 16GB on an M1 would feel very constraining on most modern Wintel computers, but it's plenty for Apple software.

              - The OS is aware of the overall system load, and can use it to determine whether to use the performance or efficiency cores, and to allocate workloads across cores. The efficiency cores are very battery-efficient; that's why Macbooks often have multiple times the battery life of Windows laptops.

              - The stock apps are all designed to take advantage of efficiencies in the OS and not do work that they don't need to, which again makes them faster and more battery efficient.

              • icedchai

                today at 2:37 AM

                Apple M1 (or any M-series) RAM absolutely does NOT function at cache speeds. Do you know how expensive that memory would be? The RAM is not literally "in the CPU", but colocated in the same SoC "system on chip" package as the CPU.

              • saurik

                today at 1:59 AM

                It feels like a core part of your claim--at least half of it--relies on most software for "Wintel computers" being written in garbage collected languages, which would be shocking if it were true.

              • today at 1:58 AM

        • yesterday at 11:40 PM

        • philwelch

          today at 12:01 AM

          You’re treating vertical integration as if it’s this absolute thing. Apple is clearly more vertically integrated than any other laptop brand by virtue of designing everything from the CPU to the OS. That remains true even though Apple doesn’t run their own chip fabs or mine their own bauxite.

    • throwup238

      yesterday at 10:06 PM

      Apple is better because they’re not competing on price which is why they can afford to bring so many things in house. That’s how they can afford the talent and other R&D resources.

      We get what we pay for.

      • indemnity

        yesterday at 11:39 PM

        $899 (edu) or $999 is extremely competitive for what you get.

        Most people buying an entry level computer these days should at least consider stretching to get a MBA than the $300-400 shovelware, they’ll get so much use out of it.

        My wife is still using her 2020 M1 Air and it’s still as snappy as the day we got it, still works for all her use cases.

        Incredible value.

        • krisgenre

          today at 5:08 AM

          My wife is still using her 2020 M1 Air and it’s still as snappy as the day we got it, still works for all her use cases.

          Ah! my early 2015 13" Macbook pro died only few weeks back. I don't think any other laptop will last nearly 10 years (TBF I did replace the battery and speakers for $280 in 2020 though)

          • dgan

            today at 7:51 AM

            I am using my HP Omen from 2016, which is still my main laptop. I gotit for 600 I think? I also upgraded Ram and SSD. The hinges on the lid broke the plastic case, and i am not replacing the dead battery, but it definitely works

          • TsiCClawOfLight

            today at 7:25 AM

            Still using the T450s I got in 2015, so technically the ThinkPad won :D JK, that's a very respectable life span!

        • throwup238

          today at 12:42 AM

          That’s a great point, but I think that’s the result of decades of work enabled by premium pricing culminating in their custom silicon (which is itself a product of their ability to command exclusivity with TSMC nodes). The shareholders demand ever constant growth and Apple is moving down market just like everyone else (looking at you, BMW 3 series).

        • WillPostForFood

          today at 3:01 AM

          While they are still in stock, 13" M2 Macbook Air w/16GB RAM and 256GB SSD are only $799 at Best Buy & Amazon right now.

        • motorest

          today at 1:35 AM

          > Most people buying an entry level computer these days should at least consider stretching to get a MBA than the $300-400 shovelware, they’ll get so much use out of it.

          I don't think that expecting everyone to waste 3x the money to scratch the same itch is an informed take, specially when the $300 shovelware has far better specs in terms of RAM and by far HD.

          Nowadays you can even get better performing miniPCs for half the price than your MacBook Air M3, such as any of the systems packing a AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS.

          I think some people look at the shiny computers and don't look past that.

          • wtallis

            today at 7:03 AM

            > Nowadays you can even get better performing miniPCs for half the price than your MacBook Air M3

            This is a stupid comparison: even a Mac mini pretty much fulfills this, since the M4 is a step up from the M3 and the actively-cooled mini can sustain higher performance than the passively-cooled MacBook Air, and at about half the price of an M3 MacBook Air.

          • chipotle_coyote

            today at 2:01 AM

            And comparing a miniPC to a laptop is an informed take?

          • cpursley

            today at 2:03 AM

            Specs don’t actually mean anything. Jobs was right. People just want their shit to work.

            • pjmlp

              today at 6:56 AM

              Pity that isn't how macOS has been lately.

  • caycep

    yesterday at 11:19 PM

    yes, it's apple and oranges. Apple is making a Veblen good. Dell/Lenovo are making lowest-cost/lowest-bid commodities

    • fossuser

      yesterday at 11:42 PM

      It's not a Veblen good.

      • motorest

        today at 1:37 AM

        > It's not a Veblen good.

        What do you think it is then?

        • frontfor

          today at 3:57 AM

          This is an incredibly lazy comment. I think you and most people would agree on the immense utility of Apple products. There’s also no evidence that demand increases with price in MacBooks.

          • motorest

            today at 6:34 AM

            > This is an incredibly lazy comment.

            It isn't, and it's amusing how people get riled with a simple request to justify why dismissed someone else's opinion without presenting a single argument.

            > I think you and most people would agree on the immense utility of Apple products.

            They are consumer electronics, and laptop manufacturers are a dime a dozen. Why do you believe they are special in that regard? I mean, until recently they even shipped with a below-standard amount of RAM.

            > There’s also no evidence that demand increases with price in MacBooks.

            That's the definition of a Veblen good, something that is not known for being useful beyond serving as a status symbol.

        • yard2010

          today at 5:50 AM

          It's mostly overpriced shit wrapped in a nice cellophane.

          I love it though and I believe there is no better alternative. Everything else is just the shit without the nice package.

          • motorest

            today at 6:29 AM

            > It's mostly overpriced shit wrapped in a nice cellophane.

            That's orthogonal to the concept of a Veblen good. A Veblen good can very much be shit wrapped in cellophane.

            The core trait of a Veblen good is that customers buy it as a status symbol. Also, being overpriced contributes to reduce the number of those who can afford to buy one.

• m01

  yesterday at 5:21 PM

  Can you upgrade the storage of your XPS laptop?

  Maybe check out the Framework laptops? For example the Framework 13's new screen is 2.8k @ 256PPI apparently [1], which has slightly more pixels than the Macbook Air M4[2] (obviously pixels isn't everything), but you can get up to 8TB NVMe storage + an extra storage expansion cards if you're happy to sacrifice ports and up to 96GB RAM. [3]

  [1] https://community.frame.work/t/framework-laptop-13-deep-dive...

  [2] https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/

  [3] https://frame.work/gb/en/products/laptop-diy-13-gen-amd/conf...

  EDIT: typo + formatting

  • reissbaker

    yesterday at 7:39 PM

    Personally I've been a huge fan of my Framework 13, and am planning at some point to swap out the mainboard with the new one they released — it's pretty nice that you can do that (and they sell a desktop case to put the old mainboard in, so you end up with a faster laptop and a spare desktop afterwards!).

    Battery life is the main downside, although it doesn't bother me too much — running manufacturer-supported Linux is very nice and worth having to charge more frequently. It uses USB-C anyway, so it's just one cable for all my devices — doesn't feel like that big of a deal.

    • filmgirlcw

      yesterday at 11:37 PM

      Yeah, I love Framework (disclosure, I invested in their community funding round) and I pre-ordered the desktop and have strongly considered upgrading my Intel laptop of theirs to an AMD mainboard (or just getting a whole new unit since I'll have to get new RAM and would like the higher DPI screen) and compared to other Windows or Linux options right now, I think they are pretty strong for thin and light HOWEVER I would be a liar if I said I think it can compare to a MacBook Air right now.

      Which to be honest, is fine -- plenty of people want something different from a MacBook Air, whether it is the ability to run Windows or Linux without compromises (tho VMs on Apple silicon are pretty good, it's not going to be ideal for everyone), the ability to upgrade storage, or just wanting repairability.

      But the battery life on a MBA is not something Framework or any of the Windows laptops can compete with right now. I thought we might get there with Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips last year -- and maybe the next iteration will (and ARM64 chips have their own trade-offs for Windows and Linux (whereas if you're committed to Mac, those trade-offs don't exist anymore)) -- but right now, unfortunately, Mac is where it is at for the true all-day performance and battery place.

      Even there, however, I would specify that it is the MacBook Airs that have the best battery life. My 16" M4 Pro with 48GB of RAM has great battery too -- don't get me wrong. But my original 14" M1 Max and the 14" M3 Max I replaced it with both have exceptional battery life for what they can do, but I can definitely drain that battery in under 5 hours if I'm working on it hard enough. Whereas the Air just lasts and lasts and lasts.

      • _factor

        today at 3:24 AM

        I would love it if they made it easy to split 16x PCI-e 5 16x/8x/4x slots into gen3 or gen4 breakouts.

        The chips may not have the lanes, but they have the bandwidth if only 10GbE / 4xm.2 / storage controllers could plug in. I wonder if power is an issue.

  • cosmic_cheese

    yesterday at 6:36 PM

    The main problem with the Framework 13 at this point is underwhelming battery life. I have one of the newly announced models reserved in hopes that the new CPU improves that to a reasonable degree, but if reviews come out and that turns out to not be the case there’s a substantial chance I’ll cancel.

    • buildfocus

      yesterday at 10:16 PM

      I upgraded to the AMD board and the larger batteries and this improved significantly - 7/8 hours of real usage now, which for me is fine. On linux with minor tweaking. Depends what you need, but surely for most people a full workday without power is manageable!

      • cosmic_cheese

        yesterday at 10:28 PM

        Are those numbers with power saver mode turned on? For what this laptop is being used for I don’t need much muscle and would rather need to charge less frequently.

        • buildfocus

          yesterday at 10:37 PM

          No, normal usage with no special power saver options. Turning off WiFi+minimal brightness+power saving etc pushes it further, but I'm rarely in a scenario where I want to do that for more than a couple of hours anyway.

          I've heard Windows defaults or more advanced Linux games can do better, but at this stage I don't feel the need.

    • CoolGuySteve

      yesterday at 11:36 PM

      It’s annoying that Asus is shipping 14” laptops with 75Wh batteries while the Framework 13 maxes out at 61Wh and doesn’t use LPDDR. On the other hand, it’s annoying ASUS doesn’t ship models with more ram.

      • user_7832

        today at 3:53 AM

        Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t LPDDR require soldered RAM (or a CAMM module)?

      • cosmic_cheese

        yesterday at 11:53 PM

        It’s also annoying that the latest Intel/AMD Zenbooks don’t offer a non-PWM IPS panel screen option. The OLED panels they use apparently bother some people at low brightness settings with flickering and of course there’s the usual longevity concerns with the technology.

    • alwillis

      today at 1:18 AM

      I was surprised to see the Framework 13 didn't support wide gamut (Display P3) color, compared to the less expensive entry level MacBook Air.

    • intrasight

      yesterday at 9:55 PM

      I honestly don't understand battery complaints. Cafes have plugs. Airplanes have plugs. Were are people working for hours without power?

      • cosmic_cheese

        yesterday at 10:14 PM

        There’s a number of benefits to long battery life besides being able to work for long stretches unplugged.

        - Longer cycles means cycle count accruement and thus degradation is slower (sometimes dramatically so)

        - For longer trips, charging can be done overnight with a tiny trickle-charging phone brick, which is also better for battery health

        - No need to bring a brick, cable, or power bank for shorter trips

        - Impact of phantom drain during standby is greatly mitigated

        - Laptop will more often than not have enough charge to be used whenever you pick it up, without having to leave it plugged in all the time

        - Bluetooth and wifi can be used liberally without fear of chewing through battery too quickly

        - You as a user spend a lot less time thinking about your laptop’s battery

        There’s also secondary effects, like a machine being efficient enough to have long battery life generally also reducing its heat output and making it more practical to keep cool with a slow fan or passive heatsink.

      • turtlebits

        yesterday at 11:16 PM

        Once you can go through a full workday without having to charge, it's a game changer. Same reason why an Apple watch that can't make it a full day would be a dealbreaker.

      • filmgirlcw

        yesterday at 11:43 PM

        As others have said, I think it is more than just "when can I plug in, it is also "what is my performance when I'm not plugged in."

        My Framework and my HP Spectre (that I bought last year) both perform differently if they aren't plugged in and both make more noise than a MacBook Air. Whereas my MacBook Pros are usually silent (tho they can def turn the fan on if I'm pushing them a lot) and I can definitely run the battery down, but I never have to worry about having to have it plugged in just so I can do what I want without worries.

        And on Windows anyway (Linux power management is its own nightmare), having to triage to figure out "how much time do I have before I have to move to a different seat in an airport lounge or find a plug at a coffee shop or snoop around at an office if I'm not at a set desk" to make sure I have enough time left to make that video call is like not a small thing.

        Yeah, you can often find a plug -- but a) sometimes those plugs don't work. and b) sometimes the effort to find and look for one really interrupts your flow, versus just being able to to trust that my laptop has enough power to operate.

        • twilo

          today at 1:00 AM

          MBA is passively cooled. One of it's biggest advantages...

      • saagarjha

        today at 8:11 AM

        It's less so having access to plugs and more not needing to carry a charger.

      • mort96

        yesterday at 11:42 PM

        Being restricted to seats with plugs sucks. Not finding a place to sit because all the places with plugs are already occupied sucks. Needing to take a power brick out of the bag and fumble around on the floor to plug it in sucks. Being unable to use the laptop on plane or train rides without plugs sucks.

      • ivangelion

        yesterday at 10:56 PM

        Not all airplanes have plugs and at cafe's people tend to prioritize seating near the precious outlets. Its a small thing but having to pack up or go home when you are in the zone is a hassle I will pay a little extra to avoid.

      • cheeze

        today at 2:05 AM

        Same reason I like wireless headphones. It makes wires a non-issue a majority of the time.

        Carrying around a charging brick sucks. Now you have to get a table at the cafe by the wall. Or hope the airplane power is functional.

        I want to bring my laptop to work, not think about charging it, and not worry about what I'm doing on the laptop throughout the day (video calls, compiling, etc.)

      • ninetyninenine

        yesterday at 9:59 PM

        its a huge convenience to never need one.

        • lostlogin

          yesterday at 11:18 PM

          Has anyone ever been disappointed to have long battery life?

  • klaas-

    yesterday at 7:06 PM

    I'd say the primary problem of framework is security updates for bios etc

    • noisy_boy

      today at 12:53 AM

      Depending on where you live, the main problem is they don't ship to a lot of places.

    • walterbell

      yesterday at 9:05 PM

      Were they delayed?

• ildon

  today at 7:13 AM

  The way I see it is that Apple competitors have given up on premium portable devices. Apple tech is so far ahead that consumers looking for the best non gaming hardware will most likely choose Apple devices.

  For competitors, spending a huge amount of money in R&D to try to compete with Apple, will be most likely at a loss. At least until some chip manufacturer (read: Intel) doesn't step up their game.

  As a consequence, competition has moved to the middle-low quality segment, one in which they can still compete because of 2 main factors: Apple is not interested in that segment and most companies won't move away from Windows (even if they probably should).

  • Arn_Thor

    today at 7:21 AM

    Does it really require that much R&D? Slap one of the excellent AMD mobile processors with built-in GPU in there, standard cooling (they don't use much more power than they did 5 years ago. They surely have the blueprints for the last XPS machines), and a bigger NVME. It's all more or less commodity hardware in a name-your-preference shell.

    • camillomiller

      today at 7:32 AM

      It’s easy until you can’t really fine tune the software because you use windows and it’ll eat the battery alive for reasons you can’t control as a manufacturer (but customers will still think it’s your fault)

      • eastbound

        today at 7:42 AM

        It’s the year of Linux on the laptop! That would be a serious opportunity.

        • gaazoh

          today at 8:33 AM

          OEMs have been doing basically this for years with their phones for decades at this point, pushing customized builds of Android with every phone they make, this has been successful to close the gap Apple created when they released the iPhone.

          I guess a hurdle smartphones didn't have as they were breaking into a new market is compatibility; outside of the tech world, virtually all of corporate and personal environment is dependent on Windows and Windows-only software. Steam has shown it can work with SteamOS and Proton, making gaming on Linux a reality for a wide audience. What's missing is a major OEM to build a high-spec laptop with a custom Linux build to optimize performance and battery life, with a decent Windows compatibility layer and that would provide software companies an incentive to sell native Linux versions and support. Is Samsung really going to keep their laptop line depend on Windows, and leave it on the side-line as they will never be able to really optimize battery life and performance and compare to the MacBooks?

• enragedcacti

  yesterday at 7:23 PM

  > Why is the gap so large?

  I think it appears large for a couple of reasons. First is that Mac screens are much closer to 3K than 4K. You can find tons of really nice 14" 3K laptops so the gap is pretty much negligible there, especially if you consider how cheap you can get 3K OLEDs on Windows PCs nowadays. Second is that many companies try to limit SKUs for their off-the-shelf products and 2TB or 4TB apparently aren't moving units. People who really want that model can just go buy a bigger drive to drop into it.

  That said, one last thing to consider is that while 14" Macbooks are very capable for their footprint, they are heavier and thicker than some other options. If weight is the concern there are 16" laptops that are thinner and lighter than the 14" macbook. The LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 weighs 0.5lbs less and is 0.10" thinner than an MBP14 and has two ssd slots.

  • tristor

    today at 12:12 AM

    > First is that Mac screens are much closer to 3K than 4K. You can find tons of really nice 14" 3K laptops so the gap is pretty much negligible there, especially if you consider how cheap you can get 3K OLEDs on Windows PCs nowadays.

    You are discounting the quality of a Macbook screen without understanding how it differs from competitors. A Macbook is the only laptop on the market that accurately reproduces colors out of the box to an extent that is sufficient for color grading photographs or video. I'm a hobbyist photographer and primarily do editing on a desktop where I have LG and Ezio displays that are color accurate, but when I'm out and about there is no alternative on the market I can buy other than a Macbook, because while on paper the "resolution" of other laptops may be similar or even superior, in actuality they are somewhat between shit-tier and D tier in actual color reproduction and quality. Macbook displays are MASSIVELY better than anything any other laptop offers at any price point non-Apple.

    I previously used a mixture of different laptops and have over the course of time shifted to using Macbooks for everything because the performance, battery life, power efficiency, display quality, software availability, and annoyance minimization advantages are so large for Apple that it makes no sense to use anything else, except perhaps Linux just to use Linux (which I do on a Framework 13 for personal tinkering projects). I don't see how anyone can honestly recommend that anybody purchase a non-Apple laptop in 2025 for any purpose other than tinkering with Linux, in which case the Frameworks are great.

    There's obviously a cost to that superiority and not everyone can afford it, but that doesn't mean alternatives are /preferable/. They clearly are not, they are a trade-off in every single aspect. Even in the case of weight that you mentioned, that trade-off is in durability, the Macbook weighs more because it has an entirely metal chassis and most non-Apple laptops are cheap plastic monstrosities.

    • rs186

      today at 1:08 AM

      True, but the vast, vast majority of people can't tell and don't care about color accuracy. I am not even talking about 100% sRGB vs P3. I am talking about 45% NTSC vs 72% NTSC. Most people can't tell the difference unless you show two screens side by side and point out the difference to them.

    • panick21_

      today at 1:02 AM

      I jut don't care that much much about color accuracy.

      Software availability is worse for me, as ARM still causes problems. The AMD CPU are pretty nice.

      The ThinkPad still have some advantages to me. There are some design choices I much prefer. Granted, when recommending to other people, they likely wouldn't value those same things.

      I bought a ThinkPad recently, just as I have done for 15+ years now. At the same price point I would say its at least competitive.

      But yeah, if Linux on M-Series continues to make progress, maybe I would would consider it. I'm not using MacOS as I daily driver.

      • cosmic_cheese

        today at 1:58 AM

        The X1 Carbon Aura Edition looks like a nice MBA-class machine, I just wish Lenovo were a bit less stingy on its battery since even the most efficient x86 CPUs are more power hungry than M-series SoCs. They’ve also stated that they don’t intend to support Linux with it which is concerning.

• overgard

  today at 3:48 AM

  Gaming laptops aren't neccessarily bulky, my Razer Blade 14 is about the same dimensions as my macbook pro 14. They're about the same age and price (2022), the main difference is that the Razer is much faster (plugged in) but the MacBook is vastly more efficient. I do respect how fast MacBooks feel subjectively, but in terms of number crunching and graphics processing the Razer is a lot better. I guess my overall point being youre not going to beat a macbook on efficiency, but there are options out there that aren't bulky or tacky.

  • accurrent

    today at 8:41 AM

    I use a razer blade 14 personally... My mileage varies. I love that I can run a lot of stuff on it, but I hate the fact the ram was soldered and the GPU definitely throttles. I recently ran a benchmark for some GPU code I wrote and found that my steamdeck outperforms the Laptop 3060. Its also got terrible battery life and doesnt help that my work laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad P1 beast (FWIW the razer 14 has better battery life with linux than the lenovo) which is great for building code, terrible as a portable. For me the biggest complaint I have about Macs, is well the OS. With the razer at least I can replace windows with ubuntu and most things work. Im really hoping the AMD stuff catches up soon, otherwise I may have to upgrade to a new desktop + macbook air for personal work.

• thewebguyd

  yesterday at 11:20 PM

  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 clipboard sharing between my laptop and phone, iMessage, and universal control with my iPad that's on my desk.

  There's just no other laptop on the market that has this combination of aesthetics, performance, thermals (this thing is cool and silent), screen quality, top notch speakers and microphone for a laptop, and unmatched trackpad. Let alone anything that'll run Linux without some headaches.

  I had hopes for the Snapdragon X elite laptops, but no Linux still, and they still don't hold a candle to the Macbooks.

  • cogman10

    yesterday at 11:39 PM

    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.

    • Applejinx

      today at 9:19 AM

      I'd probably make a point of buying a half-decent Pi laptop. I bought a 400, compile the Pi versions of my audio plugins on it.

      Pi laptop with the most cursory audio I/O? I'm there. Not to live, but to support as a first class production option. There's something very 'sailboat with solar panel' about 'em.

• tredre3

  yesterday at 5:28 PM

  Seems like you haven't actually looked into it if that's the impression you got, because both Thinkpad (X1) and Framework (13) make a laptop that fit your requirements. The X1 carbon even offers a 4k OLED option if you want it.

  • philomath_mn

    today at 3:02 AM

    Going from an X1 Carbon to a MBP felt like stepping 10 years into the future. The seamless lid close, battery life, operating temp, build quality and performance were all _huge_ upgrades.

    I held out on Mac for 20 yrs, no idea what I was thinking.

    • rajamaka

      today at 8:56 AM

      I was also one of those vocal "never mac" people until I actually used one.

  • commandersaki

    today at 9:23 AM

    I have a framework 13” and a few MacBooks. The framework is a really mediocre laptop, even for PC laptops. I don’t even think it really has potential to be honest.

  • Kon-Peki

    yesterday at 5:34 PM

    The original post:

    > everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device

    The X1 carbon we have in our house has a 13” 16:9 screen, which I hate.

    • pja

      yesterday at 5:46 PM

      Latest X1 Carbons have 14" 16:10 OLED screens: https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...

      Or pick up a Framework 13 which has a 13.5" 2880x1800 16:10 screen: https://frame.work/products/laptop-diy-13-gen-amd/configurat...

      • Kon-Peki

        yesterday at 8:31 PM

        > Latest X1 Carbons have 14" 16:10 OLED screens‘

        Ah, that is an excellent improvement!

        • necovek

          today at 6:33 AM

          Latest as in the last ~10 years worth of releases. They are on gen 12 or 13 (I had or still have gen 5, 6, 8, 11).

          The worst problem is they are Intel-only so I moved to T14s which is not as polished (their premium AMD option is too MacBook-like with sharp edges and worse keyboard in Z13 or something), yet AMD is much closer to Macs on thermals, battery life and performance.

      • theodric

        today at 12:21 AM

        Just bought a P14s gen5 AMD with a 16:10 OLED, reconditioned, for about a grand. Two SoDIMM slots and one m.2 NVMe slot. Now rocking 96GB RAM, for which I paid the princely sum of 200 pieces of silver. Loaded openSUSE on it - everything works.

        It feels plasticky (magnesium chassis T/P-series belong to the ages) but it's a damn sight more computer than I could get from Apple for that money. Well, apart from the battery life, RAM bandwidth, OS-hardware integration, and build quality. It's more RAM than I could get from Apple for that money, for sure.

        • panick21_

          today at 1:06 AM

          Exactly what I bought. But then I stupidly smashed the laptop against a wall. And had to wait for many months to get a new screen.

          The battery live is the Macs killer feature. Not sure if it would be ass good with Asahi. I'm not using MacOS.

          The Apple build quality is good, but I honestly do not like to handle to cold slippy smooth aluminum body.

          • theodric

            today at 2:21 AM

            I'll have a Mac any day an employer offers to buy it for me. Lovely hardware, but it's just too glued-down for my current budget and growing frustration with lack of repairability.

            I shall take a good lesson from your case and keep my ThinkPad in its Pelican case whenever I'm not using it. Can't afford to be laptopless for months!

    • dsego

      yesterday at 10:50 PM

      A lot of new windows laptops (finally) have a 16:10 ratio or even 3:2 on microsoft surface.

  • ruuda

    yesterday at 8:08 PM

    I’ve been browsing the Lenovo (and others’) website for weeks, and the only two laptops it shows with 2TB storage and 4k display are the ThinkPad P1 and P16s.

    The ThinkPad X1 and Framework 13 have a much lower resolution display. Also, I appreciate Framework’s mission, but it’s not the build quality that I’m looking for.

    • barake

      yesterday at 10:12 PM

      If you use the product filter it only shows laptops that come pre-configured with 2TB of storage. If you choose a custom build you can configure the latest X1 Carbon with 32 GB RAM, 2 TB storage, and a 2.8k display.

      If you choose the custom build route some even can ship with Fedora or Ubuntu, so presumably Linux support is reasonable.

      • necovek

        today at 6:35 AM

        Latest will do 64GB RAM with some CPUs too.

    • leeman2016

      today at 8:28 AM

      You can even build a P1 with a whopping 8 TB of SSD storage.

      There are also plenty of other P-series thinkpads that you can get with 2 TB or more storage: P14s, P16, P16v

    • cgio

      yesterday at 9:58 PM

      There should be no questioning on matters of personal taste, but I will offer my experience with the 13 FW, which is that build quality is pretty great already, but also you get the option to maintain it longer term, such as changing hinges etc. which gives confidence on longevity. I also have a Macbook M1, and I have found myself reaching for the framework almost exclusively now. It feels great to work on a machine that you feel like you own a bit more than any other. Macbook is also great, I think one of the best machines I ever owned, but it gradually loses first place to Framework.

      • Aeolun

        yesterday at 11:05 PM

        > It feels great to work on a machine that you feel like you own a bit more than any other.

        This is a thing right? You come back to your computer, and it’s exactly as you left it. It didn’t try to magically reboot because of overnight updates, it didn’t prevent you from starting a program because it phoned home to the mothership and it told them that particular dev hasn’t forked over their $100 yet. It’ll tell you there are updates and ask if you want to install them.

        It’s such a relief to work on something not windows or mac in so many ways.

      • ndiddy

        yesterday at 11:57 PM

        I own a Framework 13, my biggest problem with it is the poor build quality. After only a few months of carrying it in a laptop bag (not in a backpack), it stopped being able to sit flat on a table. I have never had this problem before, including with laptops that cost way less than the Framework. I get that I could try to repeatedly buy case components from the site and replace them until it sits flat on a table again, but I don't want to have to do that and then have it start wobbling again in another few months. The fan on mine is also very loud and on a lot, and if you use it on anything besides a flat table (i.e. your lap or a bed), the vents get blocked, causing the fans to go super high and the computer to start thermal throttling. Overall it's nice that the Framework is upgradable long-term, but I don't think it's worth it when the benefit is that I'm just able to use a computer that I don't enjoy using for longer.

• indymike

  yesterday at 7:39 PM

  I've been using LG Gram laptops running linux. They are fantastic. My current daily drive is 3lbs, 17" display, 32GB RAM i7 CPU, and I bumped the SSD to 2TB. It is lighter than my 13" Macbook air and cost $1200 at Costco. Oh, and battery life is 14-16 hours of use.

  • turtlebits

    yesterday at 11:19 PM

    Had to use one for a few weeks. Low DPI screen and horrendous touchpad.

    • sneak

      today at 12:45 AM

      I haven’t used or seen one, but based on this I have a very strong impression about what the built-in speakers sound like.

      Plastic case?

      • knifie_spoonie

        today at 1:44 AM

        No way you're getting that light weight with metal

  • DwnVoteHoneyPot

    yesterday at 7:52 PM

    Yes, LG Gram laptops are amazing. Surprised they're not more popular.

  • hu3

    yesterday at 10:18 PM

    These are great. They run stock linux too and it just works.

    My coworker has one. It will probably be my next portable workstation.

• duchenne

  today at 2:28 AM

  The asus zenbook pro is great. The 16inch version is not really bulky. It is 2.4kg, 2TB, 3.2k resolution, great design and build quality. $2200

  The 14.5 inch version is 1.6kg, 2TB, 2.9k resolution, also great design and build quality. $1700

  https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/zenbook/zenbook-pr...

  https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/zenbook/zenbook-pr...

  • woodson

    today at 2:35 AM

    From what I’ve seen, they overheat a lot just from having a browser and VSCode running.

    • duchenne

      today at 4:38 AM

      I had one for years. Never had overheating issues, except if I put it on my blanket for long.

• sandGorgon

  yesterday at 5:44 PM

  you have the choice to go with the AMD Ryzen AI Max processor which rivals the M4. And gives similar battery life and performance.

  Or the Intel Lunar Lake processor.

  Both have extremely good laptop options - the Lenovo Yoga Aura edition is pretty much macbook quality.

  And runs LLMs (https://github.com/intel/ipex-llm/blob/main/docs/mddocs/Over...)

  • mort96

    yesterday at 11:45 PM

    "Ryzen AI" has to be the worst name for a line of general purpose CPUs ever conceived.

    • ako

      today at 6:00 AM

      Everybody keeps talking about it, must do wonders for marketing. By now everyone must know that AMD has a wonderful chip with a horrible name.

  • paulgerhardt

    yesterday at 8:08 PM

    The Asus ROG Flow Z13 with 128gb unified memory and the AMD Ryzen AI Max amu would be my first non-M4 laptop pick. Surprised how under-reported this device is.

    • noisy_boy

      today at 2:00 AM

      Dave2D did a glowing review of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVbm2a6lVBo

  • ako

    yesterday at 6:25 PM

    Hope lenovo ships the amd max in a P1 type laptop. I have an almost 5 year old thinkpad P1gen2 with Core i9, 64GB, 2.5Tb disk, T2000 discrete GPU, 4K oled touch display running Linux. Something similar that runs LLMs faster would be nice. The GPU is limited by only 4GB. Also, something that does not run out of battery power in less than 2 hours.

  • twilo

    today at 1:02 AM

    Non of these are passively cooled...

• pachico

  yesterday at 5:25 PM

  Can't be any happier with my Framework laptop.

  Give it a read and do a simulation of how much it would cost you to replace the part that forced you to buy a new laptop.

• emrah

  today at 7:12 AM

  The specs on paper do not do Apple justice. The screen alone is worth it. Your eyes are worth it

  • eastbound

    today at 7:59 AM

    I can’t find any good 32” screen for my employees, they’re all below 350cd/m2. I’ve bought one at 450cd, it’s dark as Mordor.

    Apple Retina screens are all 1000cd/m2.

• pjmlp

  today at 6:53 AM

  I am quite happy with Asus and Thinkpad pro graphics laptops, wihout being bulky gaming laptops, and I get more tech per buck with the nice Win32/DirectX and CUDA ecosystems that everyone is "emulating" nowadays.

  Why get the lesser copy, when I can get the original at better price?

• fluidcruft

  yesterday at 5:00 PM

  I also have a 4-year old XPS15. The SSDs and RAM are super easy to upgrade. There are two internal SSD slots (one shipped empty). Dell charges not-quite Apple-scale arms and a legs for RAM/SSD upgrades, so I bought mine Dell-minimal and immediately upgraded them both and have bumped them up as prices come down for new parts. The upgradability was a major reason I went for the XPS15 instead of the XPS13 (my previous machine)

  • RandomBacon

    yesterday at 5:47 PM

    I thought the XPS 17 was the only one with the extra SSD slot?

    • nihilist_t21

      yesterday at 6:12 PM

      Naw I have a 15" one (9510) and it has two M.2 slots.

      • colechristensen

        yesterday at 7:38 PM

        Well you just made my day, I do have that second M.2 slot (XPS 9500) and am very much running out of space.

        • yesterday at 7:58 PM

• ChuckMcM

  today at 4:08 AM

  > Why is the gap so large?

  Good question and probably worth an article or two. My thinking is that Apple is designing silicon that makes for great laptops (M4 in this case) and then building around that. You will be hard pressed to find an x86-64 chipset that does what the Apple chipset does, and without that no matter what laptop you build around it is not going to be competitive. Nimbler companies like Framework are working with more speculative silicon (like the AMD Ryzen AI Max) which people like Dell and Lenovo won't do (yet?) But even there you get closer but not really close to something like the compute complex in the Macbook Air.

  • justincormack

    today at 9:44 AM

    Dell is shipping an AI max mini pc https://www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/z2-mini-a.html at some point. Presumably laptops too.

• ayushnix

  today at 5:39 AM

  I always feel that the kind of laptop I want is a unicorn if I exclude Apple M-series laptops. Is there a laptop out there which is fanless (passively cooled), supports Linux reliably, has great performance per watt, has decent raw performance (anything better than a recent lower end AMD/Intel laptop processor), and has great build quality?

• leeman2016

  today at 8:02 AM

  I think there are good ThinkPads out there.

  P1, P16s, T16, P14s

  Most of which support:

  - Up to 96 GB RAM

  - 8 TB SSD (Dual slots)

  - Upgradable memory and storage

  - 4K OLED displays

  - Excellent build quality

  What more is needed?

  • dagw

    today at 8:54 AM

    My laptop before getting my M2 MPB was a top of line ThinkPad P series with all the best on paper specs. As long as I was running benchmarks on it while it was plugged in and I didn't care about fan noise, performance was fine. Once you tried to use it like an actual laptop it was terrible in just about every way. Performance when on battery was either so throttled as to be barely usable, or would kill the battery in 45 minutes. The noise and heat it spit out when doing anything even moderately taxing was extreme. Despite having the most expensive graphics card they offered at the time, interactive 3D and games was still always stuttering and rarely ran smooth. Sleep was hit and miss, so if I just closed the lid and chucked in my bag, there was good chance it would be both hot and dead when I pulled it out an hour later.

    There is a lot more to a good laptop than specs, and so far only Apple seems to really get that.

• dsego

  today at 8:05 AM

  Have you looked at the new crop of arm-based windows laptops?

• goosedragons

  today at 1:22 AM

  Surface Laptop 7? While they don't technically sell a 2TB config, they do use a 2230 M.2 SSD and there are 2TB versions of those. As a bonus it's WAY cheaper to do it that way than from the factory. The Surface Pro tablets are another option if you can live with the form factor. Even easier to swap the SSD in those too.

  • aquark

    today at 3:49 AM

    I'm very disappointed with my Surface Pro tablet ... battery life sucks, resuming from sleep is really slow and the keycover needs to be disconnected and reconnected for it to 'remember' it is there. I've owned 4 Surfaces over the years and won't buy again.

    I'm not a fan of OS X but seriously considering one of these just for the battery life and it-just-works portable computing.

• MatthewWilkes

  today at 7:46 AM

  I bought an XPS 16 recently. 4K screen, 64 GB RAM (+8 GB VRAM), 2 TB storage (4 TB was an option). It cost about 3/4 as much as a similarly specced MBP.

  I know many people still love MacOS, but it lost me a few years ago. I've also, frankly, had much better milage out of Dell machines than Apple ones over the last ten years.

• kllrnohj

  yesterday at 10:18 PM

  > But now Dell discontinued XPS

  https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/scc/scr/laptops/appref=xps-p... ?

  Sure doesn't seem to be discontinued at all?

  And just checking the XPS 14 it has both 2tb and 4tb storage options, and the 3.2k OLED screen is higher resolution than what Apple's 14" offering contains and it's 120hz.

  • otterley

    yesterday at 10:29 PM

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/the-end-of-an-era-de...

    Current models at the time of the announcement may still be produced and then inventories depleted, but those will be the last of them.

• mFixman

  yesterday at 11:34 PM

  I bought a Thinkpad P16s because I wanted to use Linux but got used to the beautiful Macbook screen. So far I'm very happy with it.

• giancarlostoro

  yesterday at 6:07 PM

  > Why is there no competition here?

  Mobile. A lot of games I played as a kid have mobile apps, and in some cases, I don't know if its the case for all of them, the userbase is mostly on their phones. I can only imagine this is the case for a lot of things.

• fhe

  today at 4:07 AM

  I have the same question. My only answer is that making a sleek product such as the Mac Air really is a lot harder than it seems, even in 2025.

• elif

  yesterday at 4:56 PM

  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

  • ruuda

    yesterday at 8:31 PM

    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 (10 years ago!) had an amazing 518 ppi display. When the modem died I got a Pixel 2 which had only 441 ppi, and the display was a really noticeable downgrade, text looked significantly uglier, I could see the pixels and hinting artifacts again. I expected high pixel densities to become mainstream to the point where every screen has a density at the limit of what the human eye can perceive, yet here we are 10 years later, and Google’s flagship phones have only 495/486 ppi, worse than the Nexus 6P!

  • alpaca128

    yesterday at 6:27 PM

    Pixel density is important for crisp small text, so cli on a 14 inch screen and maybe web browsing would be good reasons for a 4k display - it would be the only reasons for me at least.

    • HDThoreaun

      today at 4:34 AM

      why do you need crisp text for cli? cli works just fine in 180p still

      • saagarjha

        today at 8:12 AM

        Because I like my text to look good

  • RetpolineDrama

    yesterday at 5:03 PM

    >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

• kristianp

  today at 2:15 AM

  I'd get a 14 inch Thinkpad with an upgrade to an Oled screen. A 14 inch X1 Carbon is lighter than a Macbook Air by a large margin.

• today at 12:45 AM

• gargan

  today at 6:25 AM

  There's a lot of misinformation in your post!

  Dell XPS 13 isn't discontinued, its rebranding will be fully rolled out later this year

  In the meantime Dell XPS 13s are currently available with 2TB and 64GB RAM (with a better screen than this Air I might add) and with a Snapdragon X Elite chip (which there are very few compatibility issues with in March 2025 even with gaming)

  If its a 14 inch laptop you want XPS 14s are currently available with upto 4TB. They will also be rebranded later this year. They're on Intel chips and I'm hoping they will switch to Snapdragon on the rebrand to get the Apple like battery life

• matt-p

  today at 1:36 AM

  The framework series are about as good as you get in non apple land in my experience.

  Still MacBook is a better product for most use cases.

• gavinray

  yesterday at 5:28 PM

  Gen question: why do people care how bulky a laptop is?

  I buy gaming laptops because they're the only powerful laptops and their size has never bothered me when traveling

  • mrweasel

    today at 8:22 AM

    Because they are laptops. I can't even use my 16" MacBook Pro on the couch. It's portable sure, but it's not a laptop. You can't take it anyway, only move it from desk to desk. It's the single heaviest thing in my bag when I travel.

    I can do the same work on a MacBook Air when I'm away, and it's basically just a desktop when I'm home. To me it would make way more sense to have a desktop at home and a 12 - 14" laptop, if it wasn't for the cost of having both.

  • giancarlostoro

    yesterday at 6:09 PM

    If you don't travel from your house with it I understand your confusion, the weight is a factor when traveling. I never have back pain, but when I do, its because I'm carrying a heavy laptop around on my back.

    • cosmic_cheese

      yesterday at 6:42 PM

      Even around the house it makes a difference in my opinion. My 12” X1 Nano is much nicer to carry and use around the house than my 16” M1 Max MBP is, and so the Macbook spends most of its life docked. The MBP comes with me when I travel because it’s my primary computer, but reduced size and weight would be welcome. If only the 14” MBP didn’t sacrifice cooling capacity as much as it does.

    • LeifCarrotson

      yesterday at 7:05 PM

      I travel with my laptop a lot, but much prefer a beefy workstation for all the work I do when I get where I'm going. The weight of the laptop is not a big deal, even my big Lenovo P53 (~30mm thick 15.6" black brick) is only 3 kg.

      I do use an Osprey 22L hiking backpack for my daily driver, it's got a waist belt to transfer weight to my hips, a chest strap to keep the shoulder straps together, and internal semi-rigid frame... but that's more for all my other stuff, and for activities I do in the woods far from stuff like 'laptop computers'. Even if it's just in a handheld briefcase, 3 kg is not a lot. That's about as much as a water bottle - which I also have in the backpack, as well as a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that also weighs a few kg.

      I herniated a disk a couple years ago due to a waterskiing accident, but I've fully recovered and even while dealing with that injury, walking around airports and so forth with any laptop is not not strenuous.

      In hindsight, I wish I'd gone for the big P73, I miss the giant 17" screen of my old 40mm thick, 3.5 kg Dell Precision... but the OLED on the P53 is beautiful. 17" UHD OLED when, Lenovo?

    • tasuki

      yesterday at 9:01 PM

      > I never have back pain, but when I do, its because I'm carrying a heavy laptop around on my back.

      Just how heavy is your laptop?

      You need a better backpack I think? I regularly carry 10kg of groceries in my backpack over two kilometers. It never gave me any back pain.

      • adastra22

        yesterday at 10:02 PM

        It will. Just give it 10 years.

      • bloqs

        yesterday at 10:57 PM

        Age my friend. Age.

        • onecommentman

          today at 1:39 AM

          I just schlepped 150 kg (in 30 kg chunks, and not 2km but some distance with lifting) and I’m entering my eighth decade on Earth. No back pain. Did have a little back pain in middle age, but a few years in the gym with a personal trainer fixed that right up. Fitness, my friend, fitness.

          • aucisson_masque

            today at 8:46 AM

            Nicely said.

            People complain they can't lift shit but don't do anything besides taking anti pain pill.

            The secret to growing well is avoiding processed food, cardio 30 min per day minimum and weight lifting.

          • noisy_boy

            today at 2:07 AM

            Some people have not inherited grade A+ genes and have conditions - fitness yes, but genetics too my friend, genetics.

          • bloqs

            today at 5:53 AM

            A wonderful put down, good health to you

  • dayvid

    yesterday at 7:44 PM

    It's really nice to be able to take a laptop out and start working on an idea wherever you are. Macbook Air makes me more productive and home or anywhere because it's less of a hassle to boot up the laptop.

    I have a gaming laptop, even 14", and I can't stand the boot up time and needing a thick power brick cable to get things going. I barely use it as a result and use my Steam Deck more.

  • gloxkiqcza

    yesterday at 6:06 PM

    Do you only ever travel by car? Serious question.

    • gavinray

      yesterday at 8:39 PM

      Mostly, but also take it when I fly, along with a mouse + mouse pad. The weight has never bothered me, usually the backpack with the laptop in it is the lightest bag and then I have a much heavier carry on as well.

      • timeon

        yesterday at 10:36 PM

        So that makes sense it is not issue for you if you mostly travel by car. But it can be for those that use bike or public transport or just walk. (As example last time I used car about two months ago).

  • JOnAgain

    yesterday at 5:39 PM

    I returned my MacBook pro due to weight. After years with an air, I can’t go back. I’ll get the new air.

  • webdever

    yesterday at 9:58 PM

    When I'm walking around S.E. Asia and it's 90 degrees and humid I care about every extra gram.

    Even an Air is too heavy IMO compared to say an LG Gram. But, I need the specs and the screen so I lug around a MacBook Pro 16" at 4.6lbs - often I have to lug around 2, my corp one and my personal one.

    Given an iPad Pro 13" is 1.3lbs they "could" (for some definition of "could") make a 16" device with keyboard closer to 2 lbs.

  • maleldil

    yesterday at 6:46 PM

    Try walking a few kilometres with a 3kg gaming laptop on your back or standing up inside public transport.

    • tasuki

      yesterday at 9:07 PM

      Yes, I'd rather carry a lighter laptop, but that's mostly because of all the other stuff I want to carry in my backpack (eg groceries). If walking "a few kilometres with a 3kg gaming laptop on your back" is a problem for you, you're rather out of shape.

      • windward

        today at 9:24 AM

        >If walking "a few kilometres with a 3kg gaming laptop on your back" is a problem for you

        This is disingenuous. It's not a problem, just less desirable.

    • abdullahkhalids

      yesterday at 10:21 PM

      I weekly carry about 10kg of groceries in my backpack about 2.5 km. Doesn't even register as anything exceptional.

  • jghn

    yesterday at 8:11 PM

    I have (at least) 2 laptops at any given time. They fit into 2 categories:

    1) Is 99% of the time actually on my lap when I'm using it. It's (usually) the one I take with me when I leave the house. I care very, very much about its size and weight. It's an M1 Air and I wouldn't mind if it was a bit smaller/lighter.

    2) Is 99% of the time sitting on my desk, plugged into my KVM. It almost never leaves my house. I don't care how bulky it is. However, I prefer medium-ish form factors in case I do need to travel with it.

    Any laptops I have over 2 will usually be in the 2nd bin, but sometimes the 1st.

  • tverbeure

    yesterday at 11:38 PM

    Other than my work laptop (a horrible, horrible Dell Precision), my laptops hardly ever leave the house: MacBook Air M2, Lenonov X220 (Linux) and HP 17 (Windows). I still prefer the sleek and light one over the others.

  • somanyphotons

    yesterday at 5:32 PM

    The thickness can change wrist ergonomics of typing

  • jamwil

    yesterday at 6:36 PM

    We most certainly do not do the same sort of travelling.

  • pertymcpert

    yesterday at 6:45 PM

    Do you carry your laptop to work every day? If you do, do you have other carry it between meeting rooms or from building to building?

    • gavinray

      yesterday at 8:40 PM

      I did for a few years. The power cord was the only cumbersome part of that since the charging block is so big.

      I'd usually unplug it if I had to move to another room and only bring the laptop itself.

• RohMin

  yesterday at 4:57 PM

  First time I've heard someone say a thinkpad is bulky

  • ruuda

    yesterday at 7:14 PM

    I should have said "large" then, I could only find a 16" model with the specs I want. It's not bulky in the sense that a gaming laptop is.

  • trinix912

    yesterday at 6:29 PM

    Maybe they've only seen the older ones (like the ubiquitous T420) which were admittedly pretty bulky.

• natnatenathan

  today at 1:41 AM

  You can replace that with a 2TB SSD yourself.

• tw04

  yesterday at 6:47 PM

  Why not a surface laptop 7?

  https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/microsoft-surfac...

  Wtf is with the downvotes? It literally hits every requirement he had, and the surface laptops are some of the best windows/nix laptops on the market.

  • rv3392

    yesterday at 11:20 PM

    I don't think the SL7 is a like-for-like comparison even if it seems like it on paper. The SL7 is great if you want/need to run Windows - I convinced my sister to get one and she loves the battery life and low heat (less fain noise) compared to her previous devices.

    If you want a nix experience, Linux support is still a WIP and progress is quite slow because of a lack of help from Snapdragon and OEMs. I expect that it might take a generation or two to get it to the point where it was with the x86 SLs.

    However, at this stage, I'm tired of the quirks of Windows so the lack of nix support pushed me to get the Macbook Air for myself.

    • trizic

      today at 1:49 AM

      Parent post made me search and I found an Intel Lunar Lake version of the SL7. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-laptop-for-busines...

      I am between Lenovo X1 Aura, MSI Prestige 13, and this. All have Lunar Lake so battery life should be exceptional, except of course if there are any issues with battery drain during sleep on Linux. Definitely spoiled by Apple not having battery drain issues, but would love pointers on how to solve it.

  • ruuda

    yesterday at 8:40 PM

    It seems I can configure it with at most 1TB of storage, and the display is lower resolution, but aside from that it does look like a nice device.

    • hollandheese

      today at 3:14 AM

      Just buy a 256 GB model and upgrade the drive yourself to 2TB for $150ish.

      And yes, the screen is slightly lower DPI (201 VS 226) but you do get a better aspect ratio in return.

    • meowkit

      yesterday at 10:29 PM

      I have an M1 for personal use, and recently got a Surface L7 for work. Build quality wise, its the closet thing you're gonna find to a macbook that runs windows.

      I also run a custom Windows desktop and a synology NAS, so I like to consider myself mostly agnostic.

• roncesvalles

  yesterday at 7:17 PM

  I think it's always been that way. The choices for a "flagship" laptop were always MacBook, ThinkPad, or XPS for at least the last 15 years.

• TheSpiceIsLife

  today at 1:23 AM

  My HP Elitebook is six years old and has a 4K display.

  Happy with the build quality.

• panick21_

  today at 1:13 AM

  You can decently build a 14'' ThinkPad that meets these requirements.

  Here is what I am using right now from my fastfetch:

  Display (SDC4193): 2880x1800 @ 90Hz [Built-in]

  CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics (16) @ 5.13 GHz'

  GPU: AMD Device 15BF (VGA compatible) @ 0.80 GHz [Integrated]

  Memory: ---- GiB / 58.51 GiB

  Disk (/): ---- TiB / 1.82 TiB

  You can even go cheaper and get a slower CPU as far as I know. And for that price apple doesn't give out that much RAM.

  What requirement you have is not meet here?

• znpy

  yesterday at 10:23 PM

  > bulky 16" ThinkPad.

  I'm surprised nobody mentioned the thinkpad x1 extreme laptop. It was basically the lenovo/thinkpad response to the xps 15. It's way thinner than the ThinkPad T16/P15 lines.

  they claim it's a 16" laptop but only because they made the bezel smaller enough to fit a larger display in the same space.

  it's usually mostly on par with the dell xps but i'm not sure about the specs though... my personal laptop is a rusty thinkpad x270 (i'm torn between the newly announced m4 macbook air or the upcoming framework 12) and i've been issued a m3 macbook pro for work.

  • noisy_boy

    today at 6:08 AM

    I have an X1 extreme gen 2 - great expandability (two SSD slots), good port selection, not too heavy but runs hot, the GPU is crap and the battery life isn't great. Running pop os with KDE on it; normal usage.

  • ako

    today at 6:13 AM

    Has 32gb of memory max. My current 5 year old thinkpad P1 has 64GB, not going back to 32.

• huang_chung

  yesterday at 7:42 PM

  > My 4-year old Dell XPS 15 is up for replacement, but somehow no manufacturer aside from Apple is making laptop with decent specs nowadays?

  Panasonic Let's Note. Your welcome.

  It's repairable, upgradable, and has a *removable battery* (unheard of in 2025).

  • rafram

    yesterday at 9:53 PM

    Wow, that is an extraordinarily ugly laptop. Reminds me of a classic Onion bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

  • ruuda

    yesterday at 8:35 PM

    From the pictures, it looks like this device does not have the kind of build quality that XPS and MacBook have.

    • scrlk

      yesterday at 10:02 PM

      They use a magnesium alloy chassis, which IMO, is superior to aluminium. Lighter and more dent resistant.

      Frankly, I'm not sure why people think that laptops with CNCed aluminium chassis are the pinnacle of build quality.

• kerkeslager

  today at 2:51 AM

  > 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've been a vocal critic of Rust on Hacker News in the past, but the one thing I always thought they did very, very well, was Cargo and the tight executables it produced for me.

  • thombles

    today at 3:09 AM

    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.

• desireco42

  today at 1:50 AM

  Akhm... Framework... Or Lenovo/Thinkpad.

I really wish Apple would make a MacBook Air variant with display quality on par with the iPad Pro or MacBook Pro (ProMotion/120hz and XDR/HDR, at least). The screen quality is the only reason I currently use the Pro despite its chunkier weight, since the local compute/memory of the Air is already plenty for me (and most users).

The iPad Pro proves that weight and battery life is no excuse here for the lack of state-of-the-art display tech in the MacBook Air. And as for cost — the base 14” MacBook Pro M4 (at $1600) isn’t significantly more expensive than the 15” MacBook Air M4 configured with same CPU/RAM/SSD (at $1400).

It’s really quite a shame that the iPad Pro hardware is in many way a better MacBook Air than the MacBook Air, crippled primarily by iOS rather than hardware.

• overstay8930

  yesterday at 3:30 PM

  I know Apple wants to differentiate ProMotion as a Pro feature, but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Stuff that would be completely unheard of purely because of how noticeable 60hz vs 120hz is.

  Actual reputational damage is going on because of these poor decisions, I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share. They just look like old and slow phones to most normal people now, “look how nice and smooth it looks” is such an easy selling point compared to trying to pretend people care about whatever Apple Intelligence is.

  • crazygringo

    yesterday at 3:46 PM

    > but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Stuff that would be completely unheard of purely because of how noticeable 60hz vs 120hz is.

    Are they? I'm a tech person and I can barely notice it at all. And I don't think I have a single non-tech friend who is even aware of the concept of video refresh rate.

    Whenever there's something that doesn't feel smooth about an interface, it's because the app/CPU isn't keeping up.

    I've honestly never understood why anyone cares about more than 60hZ for screens, for general interfaces/scrolling.

    (Unless it's about video game response time, but that's not about "running smoother".)

    • electrograv

      yesterday at 5:02 PM

      Yes, human visual perception exists along a spectrum of temporal, spatial, and chromatic resolution that varies from person to person — I’ve even met some people who can’t perceive the difference between 30hz and 120hz, while to me and most people I know, the difference between 60hz and 120hz is enormous.

      So you could make the same argument against high DPI displays, superior peak screen brightness, enormously better contrast ratio, color gamut, etc. Also speaker quality, keyboard quality, trackpad quality, etc.

      Where does this argument end? Do you propose we regress to 60hz 1080p displays with brightness, contrast, and viewing angles that are abysmal by modern standards? Or is the claim that the MacBook Air’s current screen is the perfect “sweet spot” beyond which >99% of people can’t tell the difference?

      I think the market data alone disproves this pretty conclusively. Clearly a significant enough percentage of the population cares enough about image quality to vote with their wallets so much so that enormous hardware industries continue to invest billions towards make any incremental progress in advancing the technology here.

      To be fair, I think there’s strong data to support that modern “retina”-grade DPI is good enough for >99% of people. And you can argue that XDR/HDR is not applicable/useful for coding or other tasks outside of photo/video viewing/editing (though for the latter it is enormously noticeable and not even remotely approaching human visual limits yet). But there’s plenty of people who find refresh rate differences extremely noticeable (usually up to at least 120hz), and I think almost anyone can easily notice moderate differences in contrast ratio and max brightness in a brightly lit room.

      • VincentEvans

        yesterday at 6:37 PM

        Lol, reminds me of audiophile discussions when most people listen to youtube streaming a recompressed version of an mp3 someone uploaded.

        • toxik

          yesterday at 6:58 PM

          It’s not imagined though, I use my partner’s phone sometimes and every time I used it I thought it was broken because the UI jitter was so jarring at 60Hz. Actually I’m still not convinced her phone isn’t broken. Also her flashlight resets to the lowest brightness EVERY time it’s cycled.

          • crazygringo

            yesterday at 8:51 PM

            > because the UI jitter was so jarring at 60Hz

            See this is what confuses me.

            If the UI jitter on their phone was "so jarring", it's not because it's 60 Hz. It's because the phone's CPU isn't keeping up.

            Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring". And that's at less than half the rate we're even talking about! Similarly, even if you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz, it's not jarring. It's not jittery. It's pretty subtle, honestly. You can notice it if you're paying attention, but you'd never in a million years call it "jarring".

            I think a lot of people might be confusing 60 Hz with jittery UX that has nothing to do with the display refresh rate. Just because the display operates at a higher refresh rate doesn't mean the CPU is actually refreshing the interface at that rate. And with certain apps or with whatever happening in the background, it isn't.

            • kllrnohj

              yesterday at 10:23 PM

              > Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring". And that's at less than half the rate we're even talking about!

              Those have motion blur.

              > Similarly, even if you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz

              I don't know why you're phrasing this so oddly doubtful? Being able to tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz is hardly uncommon. It's quite a large difference, and this is quite well studied.

              • jbverschoor

                yesterday at 11:29 PM

                It’s especially noticeable when scrolling, when moving windows, and when moving around the cursor

            • klausa

              today at 6:21 AM

              > If the UI jitter on their phone was "so jarring", it's not because it's 60 Hz. It's because the phone's CPU isn't keeping up.

              No, it's not. This isn't about dropped frames or micro-stutters caused by the CPU. It's about _motion clarity_.

              You can follow the objects moving around on the screen much better, and the perceived motion is much smoother because there is literally twice the information hitting your eyes.

              You can make a simple experiment — just change your current monitor to 30hz and move the mouse around.

              Does it _feel_ different? Is the motion less smooth?

              It's not because your computer is suddenly struggling to hit half of the frames it was hitting before; it's because you have less _motion information_ hitting your eyes (and the increased input lag; but that's a separate conversation).

              60->120fps is less noticeable than 30->60fps; but for many, many people it is absolutely very clearly noticable.

              > Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring".

              People absolutely complain about jitter in 24fps content on high-end displays with fast response times; it is especially noticeable in slow panning shots.

              Google "oled 24fps stutter" to see people complaining about this.

              It's literally why motion smoothing exists on TVs.

            • Aeolun

              yesterday at 11:14 PM

              If you switch from 60hz to 30hz you absolutely notice. I wouldn’t think it’s wrong to say it is jarring.

              30hz is still perfectly usable, but you constantly feel as if something is off. Like maybe you have a process running in the background eating all your CPU.

              I imagine going from 120hz to 60hz is the same thing. It should be theoretically indistinguishable, but it’s noticeable.

            • bashwizard

              today at 8:01 AM

              > It's because the phone's CPU isn't keeping up.

              That's bs. You will immediately notice the difference when going from let's say 120 hz down to 60 hz on a fast gaming pc even if you're just dragging windows around. Everything feels jarring to say the least compared to higher refresh rates and it has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU. It's because of the refresh rate.

              It's same thing going from 120 hz to 60 hz on a phone while scrolling and swiping.

              It's quite interesting though that there are people out there who won't notice the huge difference. But hey, at least they don't have to pay premium for the increase performance of the screen.

        • tomjakubowski

          today at 12:54 AM

          It continues to amaze me years later how many people happily enjoyed watching 4:3 content stretched to 16:9, before 4:3 mostly disappeared from broadcasts.

          • carlhjerpe

            today at 5:29 AM

            Black bars?

        • electrograv

          yesterday at 7:07 PM

          It’s deeply flawed logic at best (or an intentional red herring at worst) to cite the existence of pseudoscience discussed elsewhere, as an argument against real science being discussed here.

          There is a well-understood science to both auditory and visual perception, even more concretely so for the visual side. The scientific literature on human perception in both categories is actively used in the engineering of almost every modern (audible/visual) device you use every day (both in hardware design, and software such as the design of lossy compression algorithms). We have very precise scientific understanding of the limits (and individual variation) of human visual and (to a slightly lesser extent) auditory perception and preferences.

          • senordevnyc

            yesterday at 10:03 PM

            It's not about whether people can perceive the difference. They don't care.

            • electrograv

              today at 2:23 AM

              That’s why I specifically emphasized “perception and preferences”. Believe it or not, the science covers both - both what people can perceive, and what people care about and value.

      • yesterday at 5:06 PM

      • yesterday at 5:12 PM

    • meindnoch

      yesterday at 4:50 PM

      If you try using a 60hz screen after a 120hz one, it will feel very sluggish and choppy. As long as you don't get used to 120hz, you'll be fine with 60hz.

      • brk

        yesterday at 5:21 PM

        I've never really felt this way, and have used all kinds of screens of various resolutions, sizes, technologies, etc. For 99% of the typical use cases (chats, email, doom scrolling, etc.) there just is not a big enough perceptible difference for most buyers.

        Screen refresh rate arguments are starting to have hints of audiophile discussions.

        • hnuser123456

          yesterday at 5:57 PM

          I flatly will not buy any monitor, laptop, phone, tablet, or TV with a refresh rate below 120hz. I had 120hz 1080p over DVI-dual link in 2010. I can accept graphically demanding games going down to ~50 fps, but for UI interactivity and navigation, I'll take 120hz+ only.

          • mvanbaak

            yesterday at 10:03 PM

            And there you are, watching a movie on that 120p+ tv. You do k ow the movie is only 24p right?

            • hnuser123456

              yesterday at 11:06 PM

              I also (hopefully) don't have to interact with any UI while the movie is playing, but if I did, I'd want that UI running at 120hz. Maybe TV streamers will start advertising 120hz output soon. Maybe I should just replace my streamer with a spare PC that can output 120.

              • volemo

                today at 6:31 AM

                > Maybe TV streamers will start advertising 120hz output soon.

                120 Hz won’t make a difference on a TV box, imo, as abysmal state of their UI is far greater of a problem. High refresh rate is nothing when a transition takes seconds and when scroll is jittery even by 60 Hz standards. :(

            • kbolino

              today at 1:35 AM

              While 3:2 pulldown isn't atrocious, a 120Hz screen does have the advantage that it's a simple multiple of 24 fps, which can't be said of 60Hz.

        • meindnoch

          yesterday at 6:08 PM

          Going 60hz → 120hz: "Meh, I guess it's smoother? Whatever..."

          Going 120hz → 60hz: "WTF? Why is it so choppy? Am I accidentally in low battery mode?"

          It's similar to going back to non-retina displays after getting used to retina resolution.

          • volemo

            today at 6:34 AM

            What conclusion do I draw from this? “Stay away from high refresh rate screens not to spoil myself” :D

            • meindnoch

              today at 9:45 AM

              The key takeaway is: it hurts more to lose something, than it made you happy when you received it.

              From this you may reach enlightenment.

            • nasretdinov

              today at 7:01 AM

              That's actually not a bad recommendation if you want to keep sanity as a tech enthusiast :). Otherwise you start noticing how much stuff still hasn't been upgraded to support high dpi and high refresh rate and you can't go back

          • forty

            yesterday at 11:02 PM

            The good news is that human brain is amazing and will probably revert to reasonable perception if you use your non retina 60Hz screen for long enough :)

      • what-the-grump

        today at 5:44 AM

        I have an iPhone pro, a 120hz LG, and a MacBook Air. At no point has the MacBook felt choppy…

        I switch between various refresh rates daily, it’s barely noticeable.

    • Jcampuzano2

      yesterday at 3:51 PM

      Yeah I think when they say non-tech people they mean a subset of people who know a bit about refresh rates (example being avid PC gamers for instance), but I'd still say the vast majority of people cannot tell 60 to 120. That or its not something they think about.

      Certainly if they had both side by side they may be able to notice a difference, but in everyday use it makes no real difference to the vast majority of people. Anecdotally even though I do use Android myself, everyone around me still think iPhones look the smoothest (albeit most of them have never even touched a quality phone running android)

      • smallmancontrov

        yesterday at 4:35 PM

        They don't know the words but they definitely notice it. "Why is it so smooth/rough?"

      • Ataraxic

        yesterday at 4:34 PM

        It's one of those things where once you have used it, you will notice it. Given most iOS users aren't swapping between pro and non pro models, it's not something you think about.

        • yesterday at 6:10 PM

      • fsckboy

        yesterday at 4:47 PM

        >Yeah I think when they say non-tech people they mean a subset of people who know a bit about refresh rates (example being avid PC gamers for instance)

        no, he didn't say that. he said they comment on the difference between apple and android (their perception). you have to take that as a given.

        that "it's because refresh rate" is his hypothesis, so yes argue that, but not by changing his evidence.

      • pishpash

        yesterday at 6:10 PM

        Just tried ProMotion vs. 60Hz on MBP, no/very little difference I can see. Sure it's just me but for me all the claims here are way exaggerated/psychological, almost like audiophiles being able to "hear" stuff that doesn't exist in a blind test.

        • Toutouxc

          today at 6:22 AM

          In this case it really is just you. I can tell a high-refresh-rate display from across the room. I can tell if someone’s iPhone is a Pro even if the person is sitting five meters away from me on a moving bus.

          On the other hand, my MacBook has a 120 Hz display and both my iPad Mini and iPhone Mini are 60 Hz, and even though the difference is night and day, I don’t really MIND using them. It’s just not that cool.

        • nicoburns

          yesterday at 11:14 PM

          I'm generally ok with 60Hz (the difference isn't that significant to me). But I can definitely see the difference in a head-to-head comparison with fast moving content. The easiest way to see it for me was to move the cursor around quickly. With 60Hz there are much more visible "jumps" between positions. With 120Hz it animates much more smoothly.

        • mort96

          yesterday at 11:49 PM

          It's baffling to me that some people claim to not see the difference. It's literally light and day to me. It's like someone looking at a low DPI screen and a high DPI screen and not being able to tell the difference.

          • jofzar

            today at 1:12 AM

            Yeah I move a window and it's immediately noticable. I'm jealous of people who can't tell.

            • lukevp

              today at 4:44 AM

              Same. The suggestion that it’s like audiophiles totally missed the mark, because lots of audiophile claims do not stand up to double blind tests. I can guarantee that 60 vs 120 hz blind tests would be insanely easy to pass if there was window movement or scrolling or basically anything but static frames.

        • klausa

          yesterday at 6:36 PM

          As one of the upthread comments mentioned, this is something that probably varies with sensitivity between people.

          But I am quite confident I'd be able to tell 60/120hz with a 100% accuracy within 5s of being able to interact with the device.

          Probably under a second on an iPhone, ~2s on a Mac with a built-in display and slightly longer on iPads and bigger displays. Add ~2 extra second if I'm using a mouse instead of a trackpad.

          It is _that_ noticeable to me.

    • cosmic_cheese

      yesterday at 6:46 PM

      I switch between refresh rates ranging from 60hz and 240hz every day and while I certainly notice the difference, unless I’m running games I adjust and forget about it in seconds. While VRR 120hz+ on all Apple device screens would be nice it’s not exactly a dealbreaker… it’s not like rendering my IDE with 2x+ extra frames changes much of anything.

    • alpaca128

      yesterday at 6:19 PM

      On smartphones you interact with the UI in a more direct way, which probably makes the input latency even more obvious.

      For me 120Hz is noticeable immediately when scrolling, though I also don’t find it important enough to warrant a higher price aside from gaming.

      What I find more important is a high pixel density, though on phones that’s less of an issue as with PC screens - I have yet to find one comparable to the ones in current iMacs.

    • jofzar

      today at 1:03 AM

      In seriously surprised you can't tell, it feels significantly smoother for me to see a high refresh rate display. 60hz just looks sluggish/slow and wrong to me now. I had a side by side of the same monitor (was at a lan) and was watching my friend play and couldn't understand why his game looked so laggy untill I realise he had high refresh rate off. Turned on 144hz and it was so much better

      • aardvark179

        today at 8:22 AM

        That may have very little to do with refresh rate itself, and far more to do with the image processing and latency introduced by the monitor in different video modes.

    • seanmcdirmid

      yesterday at 6:02 PM

      It just feels more "fluid" and real, and then you get used to it and 60Hz feels jittery. I have an iPad pro, and its honestly made me consider going with an iPhone Pro (I still have just the non-pro model), although not quite yet. However, I notice a huge difference between scrolling on my phone and scrolling on my ipad.

      Its the same thing about retina vs. the previous resolutions we had put up with. Yes, you don't need them for text, but once you get used to it for text you don't want to go back.

      • yesterday at 6:09 PM

    • yesterday at 4:52 PM

    • declan_roberts

      yesterday at 3:51 PM

      They definitely are not. Not even most tech power users understand refresh rates let alone can easily spot the difference.

      Still a nice to have, which Apple recognizes.

    • klausa

      yesterday at 4:15 PM

      I actually call BS on the "not-being-able-to-tell".

      I will give you that most people outside of this websites audience will not be able to _tell_ it's because of the refresh rate.

      But I am quite confident if you take most of 120hz iPhone users phones out of their hand, turn on low battery mode, most will be immediately able to tell that something _feels_ off.

      • stringsandchars

        yesterday at 6:05 PM

        > I actually call BS on the "not-being-able-to-tell".

        I actually call BS on your BS.

        I don't believe that people are standing with two phones in their hand - an Android and an iPhone - and comparing them the way that people here are suggesting. I don't think I have ever seen anyone do that IRL, and I don't believe anyone actually does it.

        People go to the Apple Store to get their iPhone or to some other store to get their Android phone, because they are interested in either platform, and absolutely not thinking about hopping from one to the other based on some imperceptible screen-refresh 'smoothness'.

        • jjcob

          yesterday at 8:37 PM

          i used an android phone for a year with a 90 fps display. When I switched back to an iphone, it felt slow to me. i couldn't tell what the problem was, the brand new phone just felt sluggish. a year later when using my partners iphone pro, i realised that the sluggishness must be because of the refresh rate.

          i think once you get used to 90 or 120 fps, then 60fps will just feel choppy. no need to compare them side by side.

        • klausa

          yesterday at 6:44 PM

          That's... not what I said at all?

          The only claim I made is that if you toggle between 60/120hz on people's devices, they will be able to tell the difference.

  • whynotminot

    yesterday at 5:31 PM

    Have never heard anyone in my life that isn’t an engineer comment on Pro Motion. Not even in an accidental sort of “hmmm why does my phone just feel faster” kind of way.

    This is a feature that really only matters to the Hacker News crowd, and Apple is very aware of that. They invest their BOM into things the majority of people care about. And they do have the Pro Motion screens for the few that do.

    Even I — an engineer - regularly move between my Pro Motion enabled iPhone and my regular 60Hz iPad and while I notice it a little, I really just don’t see why this is the one hill people choose to die on.

    • electrograv

      yesterday at 7:42 PM

      You have to understand that your own perceptual experience is not identical to that of all other humans. Without recognizing that, we will inevitably end up talking past each other endlessly and writing each other off as { hallucinating, lying, exaggerating, etc } for one of us claiming to perceive something important that the other does not.

      It would be no different than arguing about whether we need all three primary colors (red, green, blue) with someone who is colorblind (and unaware of this). Or like arguing whether speakers benefit from being able to reproduce a certain frequency, with someone who is partially or fully deaf at that frequency. And I truly mean no disrespect to anyone with different perception abilities in these or any other domains.

      Recognizing that large differences exist here is essential to make sense of the reality - that something that seems completely unimportant or barely noticeable to you, could actually be a hugely obvious and important difference to many others (whether it’s a certain screen refresh rate, the presence of a primary color you cannot perceive but others can, an audio frequency you cannot hear but others can, or otherwise).

      • whynotminot

        yesterday at 7:58 PM

        This is why I led with this part, unrelated to my own perception:

        > Have never heard anyone in my life that isn’t an engineer comment on Pro Motion. Not even in an accidental sort of “hmmm why does my phone just feel faster” kind of way.

        I would also argue the crowd that insists everyone needs Pro Motion is doing exactly what you accuse me of -- assuming their needs and perception must also be everyone else's. When clearly the market has said otherwise, given Apple's success for many, many years with 60Hz screens.

        • electrograv

          yesterday at 8:53 PM

          > I would also argue the crowd that insists everyone needs Pro Motion is doing exactly what you accuse me of -- assuming their needs and perception must also be everyone else's.

          I am not seeing this alleged crowd of people insisting that everyone needs 120hz/ProMotion. This seems to be a red herring.

          I am seeing a crowd of people (including myself) saying that we experience 120hz/ProMotion as a huge improvement over 60hz, so much so that we will never buy a product without this ever again (so long as we have the choice).

          I furthermore claim that while not everyone is a member of this crowd (obviously), it represents a sufficiently large share of the device-buying population to justify steering billions of dollars of hardware and software industry to support this, which evidently has happened and increasingly continues to happen.

          If this crowd were an insignificant minority as you seem to imply, then 120hz displays would be a fad that fades away in all but the most niche markets (e.g. pro gaming), and yet we’re seeing precisely the opposite happen — 120hz displays are growing in popularity by expanding broadly into increasingly non-niche consumer device products everywhere, from laptops to tablets to phones.

          > When clearly the market has said otherwise, given Apple's success for many, many years with 60Hz screens.

          Arguing that the market doesn’t want/need it now because Apple succeeded without it in the past, is completely absurd — just as nonsensical as trying to argue that computers don’t ever need any more memory because they sold just fine with less in the past.

          • whynotminot

            yesterday at 9:55 PM

            Well I guess if you don’t see it it doesn’t exist.

            Apple sells Pro Motion displays. If it matters to you, you can buy them. They aren’t refusing to serve this market, they just don’t prioritize it with their lower cost products.

  • 0x457

    yesterday at 7:01 PM

    120Hz on Android IMO is: try once, say "damn that's smooth" and then disable to save battery life.

    I only ever used Pixels as android phones, so my experience is limited to that.

    • Tarball10

      today at 12:24 AM

      120Hz on Snapdragon/Mediatek Android phones works great with little impact to battery life. Pixels are hobbled by the poor power efficiency of their Tensor chips.

    • rizzaxc

      today at 12:23 AM

      genuine question; why would you do that lol? phones easily get full day battery nowadays, and flagships get 2 day battery if your usage is anything but insane

  • wordofx

    today at 5:19 AM

    > but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones.

    Things that never happened.

    Lot of reasons to dislike. iPhone but this story isn’t true in the least.

  • wlesieutre

    yesterday at 5:01 PM

    Rumored to change next year

    https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-17-just-tipp...

    Would be nice if the laptops followed suit

  • turtlesdown11

    yesterday at 4:31 PM

    >I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share

    Apple has >80% of the total operating profit in the smartphone market. The new entry level phone went up in price $200. Why do you think they do/should care about market share?

  • petesergeant

    yesterday at 4:10 PM

    > I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share. They just look like old and slow phones to most normal people now

    Literally the only people I know with non-iPhones are:

    * People who can't afford one

    * People who want a folding screen

    * People who are conceptually anti-Apple

    Apple have over 50% market share in the US, talking about "struggling to obtain new market share" seems bizarre.

    • jltsiren

      today at 5:11 AM

      There are some other common types:

      * People who think a phone is a boring generic device, and it doesn't make sense to prefer any particular brand or pay more than $X.

      * People who are used to Android and have better things to do than migrating to another ecosystem.

      In the past, the lack of proper dual-SIM iPhones was a common enough reason to prefer Android. But it's less of an issue today, as eSIMs have become mainstream.

    • jghn

      yesterday at 4:21 PM

      * People who have been left behind by Apple's push towards phablets

      • nordsieck

        yesterday at 4:34 PM

        > People who have been left behind by Apple's push towards phablets

        It's my impression that Apple really tried to service this market - that last model was probably the iPhone 13 mini. I assume that there just isn't enough demand for smaller phones to justify the effort to develop them.

        I was honestly hoping that we'd get a small phone as the iPhone SE 4. But it seems like that's not to be. At least, if the 16e is the closest we'll get to an SE in the near term.

        • momoschili

          yesterday at 4:50 PM

          yup, I bought a 13 mini and was happy that Apple was one of the companies that supported this form factor. That being said, the 13 mini sales numbers speak for themselves and I understand why this kind of phone isn't released every year. I'm holding out that Apple recognizes that most of the users of the 13 mini aren't serial upgraders and will continue refreshing the segment every 5 years or so

          • alwillis

            today at 1:27 AM

            > I'm holding out that Apple recognizes that most of the users of the 13 mini aren't serial upgraders and will continue refreshing the segment every 5 years or so

            I loved my iPhone 13 mini for the 3-years it was my daily driver. But yeah, the mini line is probably dead.

          • jghn

            yesterday at 5:02 PM

            Yeah I'm holding out that they've decided to just refresh the small form factor on a slower cadence. I also have a 13 mini, we'll see how long I can hold out.

        • tcmart14

          yesterday at 7:08 PM

          I was curious about the SE4 since I had an SE2 and Verizon let me trade in the SE2 for the SE3 for free. Based on the rumors of what the SE4 was going to be, we did get an SE4, it was just rebranded as the 16e. The rumor was they were gonna get rid of the button and go with the more recent iPhone style and such. I wonder if they will rebrand the Apple Watch SE as an Apple Watch 10e or something along those lines.

        • wlesieutre

          yesterday at 5:03 PM

          Unfortunately the 12 and 13 mini were badly timed when stores closed for COVID. Actually holding one of them to use it is really what sells the smaller size, IMO.

          I have my 12 mini still but it’s showing its age. Probably have to suck it up and get a big phone next upgrade.

      • ndiddy

        yesterday at 9:10 PM

        Where do they go? Apart from random Chinese vendors like Unihertz who sell low-spec devices and you're lucky if you get one version update, the smallest Android phones I've seen are Samsung Galaxy phones, which are about the same size as an iPhone 16. Asus and Sony used to make small phones, but they've stopped in the last couple of years in favor of making phablets.

      • yellowapple

        yesterday at 5:42 PM

        * People who like being able to run software outside of the hardware vendor's walled garden

      • petesergeant

        yesterday at 6:12 PM

        Interesting, although in my head I’d class that in the same way as the folding screens; iPhones that don’t have the dimensions you want, one way or another

    • RandomBacon

      yesterday at 5:53 PM

      * People who like to think differently and customize their phones without relying on jailbreaking.

      • petesergeant

        yesterday at 6:11 PM

        That tiny proportion fits nicely into conceptually anti-Apple

        • RandomBacon

          yesterday at 6:43 PM

          Not necessarily. There is some overlap, but not 100%.

    • alwillis

      today at 1:35 AM

      So true.

      A huge factor in this: 87% of US teenagers have iPhones [1] and that's not going to change anytime soon.

      [1]: https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-stock-teens-iphone-e5...

      • carlhjerpe

        today at 5:48 AM

        In a highly competitive environment everyone wants to show their blue upper-middleclass bubble.

        I think it's sad that something kids can't control becomes such a social anxiety inducing thing forcing parents into buying something they might not be able to afford.

        Luckily where I'm from we don't use the "sms app" to communicate

• ragazzina

  yesterday at 3:45 PM

  >I really wish Apple would make a MacBook Air variant with display quality on par with the iPad Pro or MacBook Pro

  >The screen quality is the only reason I currently use the Pro

  Well why should they, you already bought the more expensive one.

  • stetrain

    yesterday at 4:34 PM

    Because some people would pay the same price (or even more) as a MacBook Pro to have a great screen in a thinner, lighter laptop that shouldn't cost Apple that much more to make.

    Like how the MacBook Air was originally a premium-priced product instead of an entry-level product in Apple's lineup.

  • electrograv

    yesterday at 3:52 PM

    I’ve considered trying an ultralight PC laptop with a superior screen. But the sad state of reality is that:

    (1) Windows these days feels like a constant battle against forcibly installed adware / malware.

    (2) Linux would be great, but getting basic laptop essentials like reliable sleep/wake and power management to work even remotely well in Linux continues to be a painful losing battle.

    (3) Apple’s M series chips’ performance and efficiency is still generations ahead of anyone else in the context of portable battery-powered fanless work; nobody else has yet come close to matching apple here, though there is hope Qualcomm will deliver more competition soon (if the silicon’s raw potential is not squandered by Microsoft).

    Just because Apple’s competition has been complacent and lagging for many years, doesn’t render irrelevant any feedback to Apple regarding what professional laptop users would like.

    • olyjohn

      yesterday at 9:03 PM

      You don't buy a PC and try to run MacOS on it do you? Then why do people keep buying random laptops and then complaining when Linux doesn't run on it? You buy a laptop from a vendor who designs them to run Linux out of the box.

      Also, Apple's power management isn't flawless either. It used to be fantastic, but I've never, ever seen a laptop that has to charge for 15 minutes before you can even boot it from a flat battery. This seems to happen if I leave my laptop powered off for more than a few days. Like, turned completely off, not sleeping with the lid shut.

      • saagarjha

        today at 8:17 AM

        The whole point of Linux is that it works on random laptops

      • electrograv

        yesterday at 9:27 PM

        > Then why do people keep buying random laptops and then complaining when Linux doesn't run on it? You buy a laptop from a vendor who designs them to run Linux out of the box.

        Because:

        (1) Laptop models designed to run Linux out of the box are very scarce, with very few options to choose from.

        (2) Of the few that do exist, I’ve never seen any even remotely close to being competitive with Apple’s laptops (in terms of hardware quality, and good performance with excellent power efficiency / fanless / thermals / battery life).

        Part of that is due to Apple’s monopoly on the superiority of their M series chips. But the rest I assume comes from less R&D investment generally in the Linux laptop space due to it being such a small niche, unfortunately.

  • kllrnohj

    yesterday at 10:30 PM

    how about because it's ridiculous that a $2200 laptop cannot correctly show photos taken by the company's own $600 phone? People mentioned being stuck at 60hz, but it's also one of the few remaining non-xdr displays that Apple offers.

• klausa

  yesterday at 3:28 PM

  I wish for that machine too; and the price delta between the Macs is why I expect this will never happen. And unfortunately, I'd rather spend the extra bucks than go back to 60hz.

  Apple seems quite content with making 120hz a feature of "Pro" models across the line (iPads, iPhones, Macs).

  • torstenvl

    yesterday at 5:55 PM

    Portability is a pro feature.

    The truth of the matter is that Apple does not currently sell a single premium device. Every single one requires serious compromises.

• webdever

  yesterday at 5:56 PM

  As others have said, they do this on purpose. It's the same with memory. I'd probably switch from a Pro to an Air if I could get 64gig ram (for LLM work) but they'd rather charge me $4800 instead of ~$3200 (guessing the price given the top end 32gig Air is $2800)

  It's frustrating because I'd prefer a lighter device. In fact, even the Air isn't that light compared to its competition.

  I'd happily pay +$500 ($5300) for Macbook Air PRO if it was effectively the same specs as Macbook Pro but 1.5lbs lighter.

  • electrograv

    yesterday at 6:08 PM

    I have absolutely no problem paying a premium for an upgraded display. The problem is that Apple does not offer that option for the MacBook Air.

    The MacBook Pro has an amazing screen, which is why I bought the MBP. But the MBP compromises increased weight (which I don’t want) in exchange for more performance (that I simply don’t need). And we know this compromise is not needed to host a better display, as evidenced by the existence of the iPad Pro.

    Don’t get me wrong, the MacBook Pro is a fantastic product and I don’t regret buying it. It just feels like a huge missed opportunity on Apple’s part that their only ultra-lightweight laptop is so far behind in display tech vs their other non-laptop products (like the iPad Pro which is lighter still, just crippled due to iOS limitations).

    I would gladly pay even more than the price of my MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air with a screen on par with the iPad Pro or MacBook Pro. Or even for an iPad Pro that runs OSX!

    • justincormack

      today at 9:54 AM

      With the iPads the Pro models are lighter than the Air. So maybe the laptops will end up like that eventually.

  • brandall10

    yesterday at 11:45 PM

    A pro will still be a good 2.5x the speed compared to the Air due to memory bandwidth. It would be rather silly to spring for that amount of memory for that purpose, anything more than say a 14B param model will be painful.

  • seanmcdirmid

    yesterday at 5:59 PM

    I'm not sure a Macbook Air with only passive cooling would be the best machine for running an LLM that would fit into ~40GB of GPU accessible memory.

    > I'd happily pay +$500 ($5300) for Macbook Air PRO if it was effectively the same specs as Macbook Pro but 1.5lbs lighter.

    You basically want a macbook pro. I don't think it could be that thin with active cooling that such a configuration would require.

• jpalomaki

  yesterday at 8:07 PM

  It's actually quite crazy that we need to get those bulky pro models just to get the basics like better screens and more memory. The performance between the Air and Pro is anyways pretty much the same, except for long running tasks where pro benefits from active cooling.

  Wonder if we are going to see some changes here with the upcoming M5 models.

  • jen729w

    today at 8:31 AM

    How else do you propose they differentiate, given that the internals are essentially identical?

• kokada

  yesterday at 5:15 PM

  Hell, I would be happy if Apple at least enabled the virtualization instructions that are already available in the Mx chips inside the iPads, and allowed e.g.: something like UTM in Apple Store with Hypervisor support. It would be a good differentiator between the cheaper iPads running Ax chips vs the more expensive iPads running Mx.

  Considering the powerful hardware, the form factor and the good keyboard (I have a used Apple Magic Keyboard paired with our iPad Air M2), if I could virtualize an actual Linux distro to get some job done in the iPad it would be great. But no, you are restricted to a cripped version of UTM that can't even run JIT and because of that is really slow because of that.

  • gloxkiqcza

    yesterday at 5:59 PM

    If Apple offered macOS VM as a (paid) app for iPads I would buy one.

• r0fl

  yesterday at 4:14 PM

  Price drop

  Double the ram

  And yet a complaining comment makes its way to the top. This blows my mind! People will literally complain no matter what

  • ProZsolt

    yesterday at 6:56 PM

    Doesn't matter to me if I still have to buy the chunky Pro to get a decent display.

    The current Air is great as an entry level device, but there is an underserved segment here.

  • HatchedLake721

    yesterday at 5:39 PM

    Wait until you hear that the new iPad Air doesn't give permission to run a Kubernetes cluster on it. Happens every year

I have considered going back to Mac after about 5-7 years on Windows/WSL, but the storage premium is just too much to swallow. If the $999 was a base 16GB RAM and 512GB storage, I'd consider it. I just added another 32GB of RAM to my 2020 built desktop for $50. You can get a 1TB crucial M.2 drive for $70. I know I'm comparing apples and oranges, but the storage cost is too much, and 256GB is much too little.

Edit: to go to 32GB RAM is $400. To go to 1TB SSD is another $400. That is essentially doubling the $999 cost. $400 buys me between 4 and 6 1TB M.2 drives or 2-3 2TB M.2 drives.

• godelski

  yesterday at 10:48 PM

    > storage premium
  

  I wanted to make a nice comparison chart: (prices are very rough but from NewEgg)

    DDR5 RAM (Single Stick)
    Memory  Apple  Desktop Laptop  Server
      16      -     ~$40    ~$40     ~$60
      24    +$200   ~$200   ~$50    ~$100
      32    +$400   ~$80    ~$80   ~$100-$200
    2 Sticks
      64      -     ~$200   ~$170  ~$150
     128      -     ~$115   ~$310  ~$250
  
    Storage  Apple  NVME (Gen 5)  NVME (Gen 4) SSD     HDD
    256GB     -         -           ~$50       ~$20   ~$20
    512GB   +$200       -           ~$60       ~$30   ~$40
     1T     +$400     ~$150         ~$80       ~$60   ~$50
     2T     +$800     ~$200         ~$150      ~$100  ~$60
     4T       -       ~$400         ~$280      ~$200  ~$80
  

  Side Note: I recently bought a 11T HDD for $120...

  You can AT WORST buy the storage OUTRIGHT for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE. But in most cases you can buy more than double what Apple is offering for cheaper than it is to UPGRADE.

  I boycotted Apple for years because of these issues, but unfortunately I think this battle is lost. I gave up. I have a macbook Air. It is nice, but it is a glorified SSH machine. They must know this, because I'd prefer to get an iPad pro with a keyboard but run an actual fucking desktop OS. But then again, the fucking iPad isn't even good at the one thing it is supposed to be good at: writing... The 3rd party apps are leagues ahead of Apple Notes.

  What I can't figure out is:

    - Why are there no good competitors? 
    - Why are there no good linux laptops with good battery life?

  • mrheosuper

    today at 2:33 AM

    why the heck a 24gb stick on desktop cost $200

    • godelski

      today at 7:34 AM

      It's a really uncommon type so I'm assuming just that. I mean why get 24? Doesn't that number seem weird to you? It should

• natnatenathan

  today at 7:12 AM

  I think you are crazy. The performance difference between MacOS and WSL is like night and day. I was just shopping for a Linux laptop and I have found that the top end models from Microsoft, Lenovo and Dell to be as or more expensive than Apple (with the exception of having user replaceable SSDs). There is nothing in the PC world that compares to Apple Silicon. If the price is too much, look at the refurb or used market where you can get really significant discounts.

  • emrah

    today at 7:16 AM

    100%! I find that folks like this are comparing specs on paper but have no clue what the real life differences are like in practice, hence missing out. Or maybe they are trying to justify not spending the money but still life is short, go for the best

  • ant6n

    today at 8:58 AM

    Apple doesn’t have a lightweight laptop with a matte screen. Their MacBook Air is light but has a reflective screen. The Pro has a matte screen (upgrade option) but is pretty heavy.

    A true portable laptop, one that can be used not just at home where lighting could perhaps be controlled, needs to by lightweight and have a non-reflective screen.

• ndiddy

  yesterday at 3:20 PM

  The whole point of Apple's pricing strategy over the past few years is that since they have a monopoly on storage/RAM upgrades, they can price base model computers at margins below what they'd normally be comfortable with, and then gouge users on the upgrade costs to claw back some of those margins. That's how they're able to charge $400 for an extra 16GB of RAM.

  • kccqzy

    yesterday at 4:29 PM

    I doubt it. In corporate environments I see so many base models being used. Most office workers do everything on SaaS web apps anyway; they only need sufficient RAM to run a browser and browser-based apps. Having small amount of storage is a feature not a bug, because it prevents employees from downloading too much company proprietary information onto their laptops.

    • znpy

      yesterday at 10:35 PM

      > they only need sufficient RAM to run a browser and browser-based apps.

      browser-bases apps are notoriously memory hogs, your point doesn't make much sense.

      the truth is that apple get away with cheating a lot on their OS as they swap aggressively and do very aggressive swap compression.

      the part about swapping aggressively is essentially overlooked by the entire industry: swapping to flash storage will wear it out faster, which is a huge issue when the flash chip is soldered and not replaceable. this will essentially create more e-waste (but they get to (happily) sell you a new laptop). so long for being green.

  • sunshowers

    yesterday at 5:25 PM

    Everyone already knows this is what they do, they're just pointing out that it's abusive.

    • usefulcat

      yesterday at 7:07 PM

      Abusive is a stretch. If you don't like it.. you're free to not buy from them?

      • TheDong

        today at 4:15 AM

        I'd be free to not buy from them if they released iMessage and facetime for android so people wouldn't get kicked from groupchats and prevented from being able to video call their grandmother when they switched phones.

        Google hangouts / gmail works fine on iOS and android. Same for whatsapp, zoom, signal, etc. Heck, even microsoft teams.

        Apple has more money than any of those companies, and yet also has the wildly most anti-competitive restrictive software, ensuring almost all of its services (apple music/books/iMessage/facetime/etc etc) more or less require all your devices to be apple devices.

        I don't know if it's abusive, but it's certainly putting more chains on the user than any of the other similar ecosystems.

        • TheSpiceIsLife

          today at 7:15 AM

          This seems wildly overblown.

          I'm running Windows laptops / desktops these days, and drive an iPhone and the sun hasn't exploded.

      • sunshowers

        yesterday at 11:43 PM

        I don't buy from them and consider it abusive at the same time. What a concept.

        • usefulcat

          today at 1:02 AM

          I think "egregious" would be a fairer, more accurate adjective.

          I know people who have been victims of actual abuse; it's not remotely the same thing as paying too much for a laptop.

          • sunshowers

            today at 3:07 AM

            I've been repeatedly abused for big parts of my life, and I have a CPTSD diagnosis from it.

            It's not just paying too much, it's one of the world's most valuable mega-corporations asking you to pay too much. If it were a boutique shop I wouldn't call it abusive. It's a combination of the bad behavior and the exercise of raw power that makes it so.

            • dijit

              today at 7:03 AM

              The network effects of Apple devices are really tiny, compared to say: Microsoft, which holds nearly every company in Europe ransom in effect because Excel is a default tool you need to interact with your government in nearly every country as a business.

              Sure, your iPhone doesn't connect as seamlessly to your Windows computer as it would a Mac, but those aren't network effects, thats vertical integration.

              Nobody is forcing you to buy a Mac, and Apple themselves are intentionally overcharging for upgrades on the basis that: "If you really need it, you'll pay for it". Most people don't need it but will buy the upgrades anyway then complain that they're too expensive.

              I'm aware that it limits the longevity of the devices, but that might also be intentional here, not abusive though. Just a bit bare-faced profit seeking. Which seems to be working because, as you point out, it's one of the worlds most valuable mega-corporations.

              If someone else comes out with good premium laptops I'll move over happily, but for now the best laptop you can buy is unfortunately a macbook, and they've decided that upgrades are worth this money, if you don't agree then the answer is to simply not upgrade, or avoid the devices entirely.

              • sunshowers

                today at 7:16 AM

                Yes, the whole point of abuse, and why there's a social taboo against it, is that it works. It achieves its desired effect.

                Microsoft is also a deeply abusive corporation. The discussion was not about them, though.

                • dijit

                  today at 7:42 AM

                  So, any profiting and market segmentation is abuse?

                  The same word we use for raping kids?

                  Give off.

                  • sunshowers

                    today at 9:10 AM

                    No, not any profiting is abuse. I thought I made that quite clear. With apologies for quoting myself:

                    > If it were a boutique shop I wouldn't call it abusive. It's a combination of the bad behavior and the exercise of raw power that makes it so.

                    I was raped as a kid, friend. Many times.

      • webdever

        yesterday at 10:12 PM

        [flagged]

        • usefulcat

          today at 12:41 AM

          Oh I totally agree that Apple's RAM and storage pricing is egregious, but really, "abusive"?

          My point was that we shouldn't be so quick to water down the meaning of the word "abusive". If you've ever known anyone who has actually been abused you might understand better.

          "Don't buy it if you don't like it" is a perfectly reasonable thing to point out whenever alternatives exist, and in this case most certainly do. It's just a laptop.

        • wepple

          yesterday at 10:22 PM

          The first 3 break expectations or norms. Clearly labeled price and specs doesn’t.

          • righthand

            today at 1:40 AM

            So then the notch is abusive. I knew it.

        • ed_mercer

          yesterday at 10:23 PM

          The same solution applies: don’t buy from them. Vote with your money.

          • sunshowers

            yesterday at 11:44 PM

            You can vote with your money and exercise your right to speech at the same time!

      • ivanmontillam

        yesterday at 7:15 PM

        Yes, but it's perceived as abusive when two of the most feared devils come into play against you in a two-flanked attack: Network Effects and Vendor Lock-in.

        I feel cornered when my social circle all use iPhones and then they want to Airdrop me something and I just can't receive it. I'm an Android man, I cannot stand the blue pill Apple feels to me.

        Peer pressure is a serious threat, presented in the form of... abusive behaviour indeed.

• Keyframe

  yesterday at 3:47 PM

  I'm in another, bizarre camp. I'd pay double whatever they're charging for if I could run linux on it utilizing all of the hardware. Also, if notch went away, but that's another story. Unless someone knows of laptop hardware that comes close to both performance, comfort, and battery which can run linux.

  • vvillena

    yesterday at 7:24 PM

    You can make the notch go away with third-party apps. On the Pro laptops the screen has miniLED backlighting, so the dark area stays purely black. Removing the notch this way leaves you with a 16:10 screen, so you still have more screen real state than in most other laptops.

    • Kerrick

      yesterday at 8:00 PM

      Yep, it's not a notch cut into your available space. It's "wings" of extra pixels taking up what would otherwise be unused space.

      • russelg

        today at 12:50 AM

        This point is normally conveniently ignored by notch detractors.

      • mrheosuper

        today at 2:36 AM

        no, it cuts into your available space, because every other premium laptop makes use of that space

        • creddit

          today at 5:27 AM

          Where do they put the camera?

        • today at 5:00 AM

    • achandlerwhite

      yesterday at 11:06 PM

      don't even need third party apps -- just pick a 16:10 resolution and the menu bar will shift down.

  • fenced_load

    today at 1:06 AM

    xps 13? Comes with linux and has comparable battery to m3 (at least on windows).

    This review says it beats M3 by 2 hours: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/dell-xps-13-9350-review

  • usefulcat

    yesterday at 9:32 PM

    The notch has gone away, at least as of Sonoma on a 15" M3 Air, but at the cost of some real estate at the top of the screen. Basically they just don't draw anything at or above the lower edge of the notch, so it looks like the screen ends there even when it doesn't.

    I actually wanted to get the notch back so I could have as much vertical screen real estate as possible and was disappointed to find that there doesn't appear to be any reliable way of doing this.

    • rafram

      yesterday at 10:16 PM

      It sounds like you've changed your screen resolution to a 16:10 aspect ratio: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/17j5zo5/i_think_ive_fo...

      The notch is definitely still there by default.

      • usefulcat

        today at 12:29 AM

        No, from the time I bought it last year I never changed the resolution until I noticed the notch was gone and was trying to get it back, but to no avail. I also don't have anything unusual installed, definitely nothing display-related. It's pretty much as I received it from Apple, modulo whatever updates have been released since then.

        Currently it's set to 1710 x 1107, which is labeled "Default", and no notch. When I look closely at the right angle I can clearly see the notch dipping into the screen, but the OS does not use any of the area to either side of the notch--it's completely dark there.

        Just now I ticked "Show all resolutions" and tried at least a dozen other available resolutions and none of them use the screen above the notch bottom. Sonoma 14.6.1, 15" M3 Air.

        • culopatin

          today at 5:24 AM

          That’s not normal. Are you sure you don’t have an app that’s doing that or toggled a setting in so,etching like Onyx and forgot?

        • rafram

          today at 1:25 AM

          OK, I have no idea what setting you could have set, but this is not stock behavior on any MacBook with a notch.

    • adastra22

      yesterday at 10:08 PM

      I have exactly that setup, and I see a notch. Are we talking about something different?

  • chippiewill

    yesterday at 5:43 PM

    You really don't notice the notch on the macbooks, I can't even see it normally. Might be different on a Linux DE though.

  • sfcl33t

    yesterday at 8:44 PM

    I used Asahi on my company's M2 MacBook pro and it was incredibly nice. Had to return the laptop to them and Asahi is not supported on m3+...

  • Tteriffic

    yesterday at 7:28 PM

    The notch was a big reason I was reluctant to upgrade from my M1 Air. But I hardly notice it. Only when it splits the menu bar items.

  • petesergeant

    yesterday at 4:13 PM

    Oddly enough I'd probably accept a much cheaper, shittier laptop if it ran OS X, but, I've been all-in on Apple hardware since 2006, so maybe I don't understand how bad the non-Apple laptops really are. Conceptually I'd be fine with Linux on the desktop -- hell I used to use OpenBSD as a daily driver -- but OS X is in my veins now.

    • carlosjobim

      yesterday at 4:27 PM

      Hackintosh

• glial

  yesterday at 5:40 PM

  It's true that seeing that number next to $400 next to 16GB is agony, but a 32GB 1TB 15" M4 Air for $2k is a hell of a deal. I have the upgraded M1 Air and after using it for a few years, (1) I still have no reason to upgrade and (2) it's worth more to me than whatever paid.

  • nsbk

    yesterday at 9:58 PM

    I’d love to buy that config as my personal laptop, but the problem is that my 512/16 M1 Air still works so well for my use case that I can’t find enough reasons to justify the expense. M6 Air maybe!

• kccqzy

  yesterday at 2:59 PM

  Of course. Apple wants you to purchase their iCloud offerings and put your documents on iCloud Drive.

  I just buy lots of storage on my desktop and access it remotely. Tailscale makes it easy to do so.

  • mcgrath_sh

    yesterday at 3:10 PM

    True, I guess they do want to push iCloud. I just can't justify the pricing. Comparing the 15" to System 76, I get a bigger screen, TWO 2TB M.2 drives, and 64 GB RAM for $150 cheaper than a 15" with one 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. And the System 76 comes with a bunch of ports, too.

    • cosmic_cheese

      yesterday at 3:18 PM

      As someone who’s been laptop shopping recently, the problem with most non-Apple options is that in exchange for RAM and storage been cheap and/or upgradable, they make significant sacrifices in various areas compared to MacBooks. This is insanely frustrating to me, I don’t know why generic PC manufacturers can’t seem to manage to build a small laptop that is as good of an all-rounder as the Air is and not also come with aspects that suck for no good reason.

      • mcgrath_sh

        yesterday at 3:30 PM

        I still occasionally use a 2013 Air when I need a laptop. How no PC manufacturer has been able to get close to Apple's touchpad in two decades is crazy to me.

        • cosmic_cheese

          yesterday at 4:27 PM

          Near-MacBook trackpads can be found in nicer x86 laptops these days, but as always the monkey’s paw curls and some other aspect(s) of these laptops invariably sucks. Fan runs too often and/or is noisy, heat isn’t effectively managed, battery life is bad, screen becomes a flickery mess at low brightness, build quality is poor, laptop uses off the wall chipsets that Linux doesn’t like… it’s always something.

        • chippiewill

          yesterday at 5:45 PM

          Most premium laptops these days have decentish touchpads. I can barely tell the difference between my Dell XPS touchpad and my macbook touchpad.

      • sleepybrett

        yesterday at 3:22 PM

        the fact that a macbook doesn't have storage on an m.2 slot is incredibly frustrating. My m1 drive failed and they had to replace the whole damn motherboard because they soldered the storage in. Just incredibly wasteful practice just to, i guess, shave a mm or two off the things depth.

        • benterix

          yesterday at 3:42 PM

          Since their whole pricing strategy depends on users not being able to do RAM and storage upgrades, you can be sure they'd rather make the integration even more tight in the next models.

          • sleepybrett

            yesterday at 5:42 PM

            My understanding is that the ram is basically in the Mseries die and therefore can't really be upgraded. The storage is pure malice or marketing pushing for 'thinnest laptop'

            • cosmic_cheese

              yesterday at 6:28 PM

              > The storage is pure malice or marketing pushing for 'thinnest laptop’

              Kinda, the SSD controller is integrated into the M-series SoC so even if the storage were slotted (as it is in the Macs mini, Studio, and Pro) you wouldn’t be able to use an off-the-shelf M.2 SSD since the storage is little more than raw flash on a card for those models.

              • sleepybrett

                yesterday at 7:59 PM

                Sure they could make their own new standard slot or whatever. Tossing out a perfectly good motherboard and cpu to replace some flash is god damned ridiculous.

        • cosmic_cheese

          yesterday at 4:31 PM

          My preference is for slotted storage too, but it seems difficult to get that without trading off any number of other qualities in the process.

  • ed_mercer

    yesterday at 10:25 PM

    What if your desktop fails?

• bufferoverflow

  yesterday at 4:52 PM

  With thunderbolt 5 you can use fast external SSD enclosures. They end up working nearly as well as internal SSDs. And much cheaper.

  • sfilmeyer

    yesterday at 5:05 PM

    Yeah, but I don't want my hard drive in an external enclosure for my laptop. I'm writing this comment from a macbook air, which is comfortably in my lap, thankfully only plugged into power.

• znpy

  yesterday at 10:29 PM

  Not sure about your use-case, but nowadays i don't do anything fancy with my laptop.

  So far I've decided that going forward I'll likely be getting a cheap baseline laptop (curretly eyeing a 16gb/512gb macbook air m4 or the upcoming framework 12) and then get some beefier desktop to remote into. i don't even need a gpu, the heavy stuff i do largely revolves around running virtual machines.

  I did most of my work in a screen session running emacs on a 48cpu/192gb ram machine in a previous job, and I did some tests and remote desktop nowadays is pretty good (way above the "usable" threshold).

  > That is essentially doubling the $999 cost.

  yeah, it sucks.

• 12345hn6789

  yesterday at 3:04 PM

  You're comparing desktop prices to laptop prices. Yes they're ridiculous but you're not the target market.

  • p_ing

    yesterday at 3:27 PM

    No, they're not. SODIMM prices aren't radically different from DIMM prices and laptops (usually) use the same M.2280 NVMe drives desktops do.

    • LuciOfStars

      yesterday at 3:42 PM

      [flagged]

      • p_ing

        yesterday at 3:50 PM

        Personal attacks are not OK.

        I opened my MSI GS66 to install a second M.2280 NVMe and upgrade both DIMMs from 32GB to 64GB RAM. It was easy... I think about six screws or so.

        (Typed on my M2 Air)

        • LuciOfStars

          yesterday at 5:27 PM

          Yeah, sorry about that. Having a nasty day and haven't had my meds thanks to the scam that is insurance. Gotta watch myself. Have a nice timezone.

  • kllrnohj

    yesterday at 10:43 PM

    Lenovo charges $70 to go from 16gb to 32gb LPDDR5x and $45 to go from 512gb to 1tb nvme.

  • mcgrath_sh

    yesterday at 3:15 PM

    Fair. A better comparison would be System 76. Comparing the 15" to System 76, I get a bigger screen (16"), TWO 2TB M.2 drives, and 64 GB RAM for $150 cheaper than a 15" with one 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. And the System 76 comes with a bunch of ports, too. For the same specs, it is $550 cheaper.

    • gefriertrockner

      yesterday at 4:13 PM

      What comparison are you trying to make? You are not painting a full picture, leaving the weight, CPU and battery life out of the equation. If you personally care about neither, yes the Air will not be the machine for you.

    • knowaveragejoe

      yesterday at 3:44 PM

      I've yet to find a non-apple laptop that's as ergonomically comfortable _as a laptop_ as the recent Airs. That's a premium unto itself, I don't know if it's $500 worth, but that's a less tangible part of the equation over raw horsepower.

      • mcgrath_sh

        yesterday at 4:03 PM

        I don't even necessarily object to paying a premium. If it was $200 to go to 1TB or 32GB RAM I'd probably be annoyed but still pay it. There is a difference between paying a premium and wholly unjustifiable prices.

  • lastgeniusua

    yesterday at 3:20 PM

    most non-Mac laptops have a spare slot for an SSD (and the original one is likely replaceable), with RAM being replaceable too. Why wouldn't the desktop prices apply here too?

• carlosjobim

  yesterday at 4:24 PM

  The purpose of a professional machine is that it pays for itself when you make money using it. If that's not your case, then why do you need professional equipment?

  • mcgrath_sh

    yesterday at 4:29 PM

    I don't think 1TB of storage makes something professional equipment. I have well over 500 GB of photos. I want each of those stored locally where I control the data. Nor do I think 32 GB of RAM makes something professional. I'd prefer to future proof such a large purchase, and because I can't even go back to Apple in 3 years and purchase more RAM I have to decide right now what might be useful in 5-7 years.

    • dsego

      yesterday at 11:01 PM

      You can always use portable drives, cloud, or a NAS to store photos. In either case you need a backup, storing everything on one laptop is a bit limiting.

      • mcgrath_sh

        today at 12:41 AM

        I do use portable drives, Dropbox, and Amazon Glacier. I have four copies of my photos. They are, by leaps and bounds, my most irreplaceable data. I want every single one of them on my main machine, which makes automating backups to the external drives and Glacier infinitely easier. It is a dealbreaker for me, and I don't find $400 an acceptable price to pay to get past said dealbreaker. Well, realistically, $800, seeing as my personal Dropbox is at 850 GB, it would be silly of me to buy an un-upgradeable drive that would be teetering on storage space issues from the jump. Apple thinks it is reasonable to pay $199 less than it would cost for an entire second MacBook Air to upgrade drive space to 2TB.

    • carlosjobim

      yesterday at 5:30 PM

      That's absolutely professional levels that you are demanding both in storage and RAM.

      Apple sells computers in the premium/professional market segment. They're not going to change that. If you're not making money from the equipment or if you can't afford it for consumer use, there's probably nothing that they will do for you, you're not in the intended customer segment.

      • mcgrath_sh

        yesterday at 6:39 PM

        Charging a 400+% markup for storage and RAM does not suddenly make a laptop professional. Sure, if there was a significant difference between screen size, chip, battery life, etc, you could argue the $999 one is a prosumer device and the $1799 laptop is a professional device. The only difference between a $999 laptop and a $1799 laptop is 768 GB of storage and 16 GB of RAM. I will even be generous and say that is a $700 difference because Apple tosses in two more GPU cores ($100) when you go over a certain amount of RAM. On Amazon, I can get a 1TB M.2 drive and 32 GB of DDR4 SODIMM RAM for $150 total. A premium from Apple on those components would be $300-$400. They are at $700-$800.

        • carlosjobim

          yesterday at 7:09 PM

          If you are buying professional work equipment, a difference of a few hundred dollars does not matter. Professionals in any field usually have equipment worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

          And if you're buying a computer as a consumer because it is a premium machine, well then you eat the price if you really want the machine, or you have to go for non-premium competitors.

          You're comparing McDonalds to a nice steak in a good restaurant. The good restaurant will charge dearly for a bottle of water while McDonalds gives you free refills, and so on. The business models are different and the market segments are different.

          • mcgrath_sh

            yesterday at 7:29 PM

            Odd, every steakhouse I have been to gives me as much water as I'd like, free of charge.

            I'm not comparing a hamburger from my local go-to to a steak from a steakhouse. I'm comparing the cost of the mash potatoes that comes with my hamburger ($5) and what they cost at a non-Apple steakhouse ($15). I don't go to the Apple steakhouse not because I find their steak unreasonably priced (it is a great value, actually), but because I refuse to pay $60 for mash potatoes, and if I don't get the mash potatoes, the steak has no value to me.

            • carlosjobim

              yesterday at 8:03 PM

              What I'm saying is that you're comparing apples to oranges.

              A steak in a nice restaurant and its accessories will always be more expensive than a burger meal at McDonalds.

              Apple has invested enormous effort into making high quality software. They offer the only operating system on the market which is any good at all. But their business model is selling hardware, so that's where they have to bake in all their costs. And their hardware is top notch as well. They could change their offerings to charge a high basic price on all their devices and then offer RAM and SSD upgrades for the low prices you are mentioning. But they choose instead to have a lower base price, knowing that the only people who need more RAM or storage (need, not want), are professionals who can pay for it.

              It's the same in a nice restaurant. You're not paying for the ingredients, but everything around it including staff, the environment and so on. That's why a beer is so god damned expensive when you go out.

  • sunshowers

    yesterday at 5:29 PM

    A lot of consumers prefer high refresh rates.

This is amazing, yet silly to state "Up to 23x faster performance [4]"

[4] against, 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air

• latexr

  yesterday at 3:22 PM

  You’re making it seem like they’re hiding that information under a footnote. The real text on the page, which is quite visible, is:

  > Up to 23x faster than fastest Intel‑based MacBook Air

  And right next to it:

  > Up to 2x faster than MacBook Air (M1)

  The footnotes are there to expand on the conditions of the measurements.

  So not exactly misleading. On the contrary, it seems to me they’re quite clearly saying “if you have an Intel or M1 MacBook Air you have reason to upgrade. Otherwise, don’t”.

  https://i.imgur.com/pEWPXzK.png

  • bitwize

    yesterday at 7:46 PM

    "Up to" is still doing a lot of work there. What kinds of workloads are we talking that get the big numbers, and what can we realistically expect on real workloads?

    I'm reminded of 90s advertisements in which the new G3 processor was supposed to be so many times faster than the Pentium or even Pentium II. Their chosen benchmark: how long it takes to run a Photoshop plugin. On Mac OS pre-X, a Photoshop plugin got 100% of the CPU because there was no preemptive multitasking. Windows 9x versions of Photoshop had to share the CPU with whatever else was running.

    • saagarjha

      today at 8:21 AM

      > Testing conducted by Apple in January 2025 using preproduction 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and 32GB of RAM, as well as production 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air systems with Intel Iris Plus Graphics and 16GB of RAM, all configured with 2TB SSD. Tested using Super Resolution with Pixelmator Pro 3.6.14 and a 4.4MB image. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Air.

    • WrongAssumption

      today at 3:46 AM

      Yeah, it is doing a lot of work, as it should be. It's a summary in marketing material, not a research report.

• kotaKat

  yesterday at 2:41 PM

  As someone that migrated to the M1 Macbook Air from a Mid-2014 Macbook Pro... the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target, amusingly.

  If they'd just give me onboard mobile connectivity, I'd upgrade to the next Air sooner, otherwise this thing will run until it dies... and maybe some day they'll start comparing performance against their original M1.

  • whstl

    yesterday at 3:19 PM

    > the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target

    Definitely. I have ZERO rational reasons to upgrade from my lowest-spec first-gen Air M1. I use it everyday and speed and battery life are still way more than I need.

    • bartvk

      yesterday at 3:23 PM

      I had someone tell me "an Air? You're a developer, you need a Pro" and I thought to myself, well this Air is frankly amazing.

      • alabastervlog

        yesterday at 3:41 PM

        Literally the only material difference between using my M1 Air and my work M1 Pro is the somewhat-better port selection on the Pro. Though even that doesn't have the single-most-useful port it could (aside from USB-C): a USB-A port.

      • baq

        yesterday at 3:55 PM

        The extra ram in a pro comes in handy at a certain scale, but the price tag is oof.

      • boogieknite

        yesterday at 4:42 PM

        few weeks back a professional ios dev looked at my m1 pro and ask why i had an air instead of pro. i might go air when i finally upgrade bc the new pros are giant compared to the m1

        • brandall10

          today at 2:08 AM

          You mean you have an Intel Pro? There's been no changes to the pro chassis for Apple silicon, M1 Pro 14/16 are the exact same as the M4 Pros.

          • saagarjha

            today at 8:22 AM

            I assume they had a M1 MacBook Pro rather than a M1 Pro MacBook Pro

        • svachalek

          yesterday at 6:23 PM

          Really? I have both an M1 Pro and M4 pro and never really noticed a size difference.

          • boogieknite

            yesterday at 7:35 PM

            on reflection they had one with an HDMI port. maybe that was the difference

    • auto

      yesterday at 9:10 PM

      This mimics my experience. I bought the absolute bottom barrel M1 when they launched to replace my 2014 MBP, 8gb RAM and 128gb of space. The HD space is annoying, but otherwise this machine is untouchable. I do game dev work bouncing between the MBA and my gaming rig, which is Ryzen 7 2700, 64gb RAM and a 3070, and with certain benchmarks, the MBA still wins, silently, on battery for hours. Still blows my mind.

    • cph123

      yesterday at 3:42 PM

      I'm at exactly the same point with mine, it still feels like new even though it is nearly 5 years old.

      I have yet to update beyond Monterey though (even though I really should) in case it slows down a bit or the battery life isn't as good.

  • dlachausse

    yesterday at 2:51 PM

    I see a lot of people requesting cellular modems in MacBooks, but the integration with iPhone hotspot connectivity is so good that I don’t really see the point of it for most people.

    • jpalomaki

      yesterday at 7:53 PM

      One benefit is that computer stays connected even if you go somewhere else with your phone.

      It's one of those small things that makes like a bit easier. On Lenovo/HP these have been around for years and they don't cost that much.

    • mschuster91

      yesterday at 4:19 PM

      Battery consumption and antenna efficiency are two major pain points. iPhones suck battery like a horse drinks water when in hotspot mode, and the large surface area of even a small MacBook Air would allow for some pretty interesting antenna design.

      And it isn't really ironed out to behave in Germany where on a train you have frequent losses of phone connectivity. Every time it loses signal, the hotspot drops out and disconnects.

      • snowwrestler

        yesterday at 4:32 PM

        You can save battery in hotspot mode by using Bluetooth instead of WiFI, or even better connect the phone and laptop with a cord.

      • reustle

        yesterday at 4:47 PM

        But that’s an ok tradeoff. They offer a cellular iPad, why not MacBook.

        • achandlerwhite

          yesterday at 9:14 PM

          They might once they are off Qualcomm modems (the new 16e is now an Apple modem). Qualcomm charges them a royalty fee per device sold.

          • bgnn

            yesterday at 10:43 PM

            This is a weak argument. Qualcomm is charging for iphone and ipad too. They could do it if they wanted.

            The real reason is Apple wants you to buy an ipad for on the road. Laptops, according to them, are strictly for office/home usage where wifi is available.

    • youngtaff

      yesterday at 3:48 PM

      Different battery, different bills

    • antasvara

      yesterday at 3:57 PM

      The integration is fine, but it's not perfect. It kicks my wife off her iPhone Hotspot every time she closes the lid on her laptop. It also burns the battery on her iPhone, which is a concern in the exact situation you'd want cellular connection (places with no wifi often don't have outlets either).

      Anecdotally, I've also seen her get issues when going from an area with bad connection to an area with good connection (iPhone will disconnect).

      The experience with a non-iphone is also not seamless, though that's to be expected.

      Point being that reliable and easy cellular access on a MacBook would be a pretty nice improvement. This is especially true given how much of what people do on computers relies on the internet these days.

      • disgruntledphd2

        yesterday at 4:55 PM

        > The experience with a non-iphone is also not seamless, though that's to be expected.

        Dunno about that, I've been using Androids for hotspotting for years, and haven't noticed any issues.

  • WonderAlmighty

    yesterday at 2:45 PM

    The page up to 2x faster than M1, but it's not worth upgrading from for the average person, your laptop should last longer than 4 years hence why they market to Intel Mac users.

  • Cthulhu_

    yesterday at 3:34 PM

    I think that was around the time when macbooks were "fast enough", especially since that was when SSDs became the default. I remember I got my first macbook around 2011/12 and at the time doing your own upgrade of memory and replacing the hard drive with an SSD was a pretty popular DIY upgrade (N=1).

  • chasd00

    yesterday at 2:49 PM

    > the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target, amusingly

    yeah i just checked mine, it says MacBook Pro 16" 2019 and the cpu is an intel i7. i don't know what to say, it still meets all my requirements, i don't feel any need to upgrade.

    • icedchai

      today at 2:49 AM

      If it works for you... but I had an Intel MacBook Pro (2019, 16", i9) for a work machine and the fans would sound like a jet engine. Installing NPM dependencies was particularly bad, since all the writes would make the corporate file scanning spyware go crazy. It ran like crap.

      I have an M1 Pro (which is considered old now) and it's like night and day.

    • sleepybrett

      yesterday at 3:14 PM

      My work laptop is a 2019 i7, my personal is a m3. There is a huge - very very noticeable difference. The thing that actually annoys me the worst with the intel though isn't the 'speed' per se but it's the shitty battery life and heat it generates (and the fan noise that causes).

  • bartvk

    yesterday at 3:22 PM

    Mid-2014 MBP, that's amazing. Did you buy it new? And actually used it since 2014?

    • alabastervlog

      yesterday at 3:47 PM

      My 2014 got a little screwy around 2022 and eventually wifi stopped working entirely (I suspect battery swelling putting pressure on something) but if not for that I'd still be using it. Hell, I probably could have gotten it fixed, though I'd prefer to put that money toward another machine that'll last me 8+ years.

      I'm on a 2020 [edit: I got it as part of comp for a contracting gig, is why the overlap in years with my 2014 MBP ownership, but didn't switch to using it for personal stuff until after that was over and my MPB wifi broke] M1 Air now, so close to or in year 6 for that. No issues yet and battery life still stellar, should get at least 2-3 more years.

      (Folks who are like "LOL who even needs 18 hours of battery life?", which is a common sort of post on Apple laptop announcements: well for one thing it's extremely nice to be hunting for outlets even less often, and to maybe go on a whole light-laptop-use 3-day trip and not charge it the whole time and it's still alive at the end of it, or to have that battery as reserve for charging your phone, but also and perhaps most importantly, it means that a 30% degraded battery after several years of ownership still gets you 10+ hours of real-world use)

    • kotaKat

      yesterday at 3:40 PM

      Bought new since 2014, used all the way to launchday M1.

      I was riding the 'service battery' indicator all the way to the bloody end. 1148 cycles, max capacity 3735 mAh.

      • bartvk

        yesterday at 6:12 PM

        Fantastic... seriously, kudos. I love it when people use up every last ounce of their hardware.

    • transcriptase

      yesterday at 3:39 PM

      Not who you replied to but I’m on a Mid-2014 15 inch MBP retina, bought new and used nearly every day since and taken on dozens of trips.

      I had the battery replaced, the tab key replaced, and the screen refinished (anti-glare coating removed) for about $240 a couple years ago and aside from the fact it can’t be updated beyond Big Sur 11.7.10 I have no issues.

    • rozenmd

      yesterday at 10:44 PM

      MacBooks last a ridiculously long time.

      I used my 2011 MBP daily until upgrading to a 2020 M1 air.

      I kinda miss the ridiculous heat output on winter mornings.

      • jkestner

        today at 6:27 AM

        Same, except my 2009 Mac Pro made for a better space heater, until I replaced it with an MBP M1 that doesn't have the decency to make noise to let me know it's working. Only downside of upgrading is that I had to get off of Mojave.

    • Toutouxc

      yesterday at 3:46 PM

      I have a Late 2013 MBP still going strong. Original battery, original charger, no repairs whatsoever, hours of battery life still. Wife stopped using it just two months ago when I upgraded her to my M1 Air.

  • rsynnott

    yesterday at 3:58 PM

    > the Intel customers are still the ones they're trying to target, amusingly.

    Yeah, particularly for the Air that makes complete sense, though. Consumer laptops tend to get replaced pretty slowly. I'll be upgrading from a _2016_ MBP (though not to the Air, given the lack of the 120hz screen; going to go for the Pro).

  • hwc

    yesterday at 2:50 PM

    I still love my M2 MacBook. I can't see any reason at all to upgrade.

    But I am glad that they continue to refine the technology.

    • sleepybrett

      yesterday at 3:16 PM

      Yeah, I have a personal m2max. The only thing that might get me to upgrade to the m4 is just being able to hand this laptop down to my sister or my parents for whom it is severe overkill for but they will use it for like 10 more years.

  • wil421

    yesterday at 2:48 PM

    Why would you need onboard mobile? It’s 2 clicks to trigger a mobile hotspot from your iPhone and there are very cheap LTE dongles on eBay. Not sure how much service would cost, most of us have reasonable download caps on our mobile plans. The dongles have better data plans than phones.

    • addicted

      yesterday at 2:51 PM

      Why wouldn’t I want onboard cellular connection instead of having to be dependent on the more finicky and less reliable Hotspot connection, hurting my ability to use my phone freely, and burning both my laptop and my phone’s batteries at the same time.

      Besides, having a cellular modem also allows you to tap into both WiFi and Cellular seamlessly like your phone does to make your overall connection much more reliable.

    • kotaKat

      yesterday at 2:51 PM

      Convenience, security, and power-savings. I currently also use a Thinkpad X13s with onboard 5G and it's nice to not have to screw with it when you want connectivity.

      On my Verizon plan (Unlimited Ultimate), I qualify for two 'connected devices' to be discounted. My Thinkpad is $10/mo extra on my account for unlimited LTE. I'm not a heavy data user by any means and this works out well for me.

  • hk1337

    yesterday at 2:55 PM

    > If they'd just give me onboard mobile connectivity

    I don't even want that on my iPad Pro. I would rather tether it with my phone, mobile hotspot, or some other wifi connection.

    • alabastervlog

      yesterday at 3:17 PM

      Yeah, they trash idle/sleep battery life—or, at least, used to, back when I had access to lots of differently-configured iPads for my job—so you don’t want it on there unless you really need it.

• dijit

  yesterday at 2:47 PM

  To be clear:

  1) Apple releases incremental upgrades! Why won't they make huge strides every year so I can upgrade!

  2) People who upgrade every year are sheeps!

  3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice! (yes, not Windows though).

  4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!

  Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.

  "Hey, you noticed things are slow? Well, this thing is a lot faster" is pretty good marketing if it's true, nobody except the very wealthy are dropping thousands of euros/dollars on a new device for 10% performance gains, however if it's twenty-three times the performance of the Mac I currently own? Maybe it's enough to convince me or someone like my Mum to splurge on a new device.

  Maybe my current Mac is not "good enough" anymore when 23x is the number on the box if I buy new.

  It's fair to compare with devices that you expect actual people to actually upgrade from, there's a lot of Intel macbook airs in the field.

  Heck, even some professionals are still on Intel macs: https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/25-of-...

  • throw0101d

    yesterday at 2:50 PM

    > 2) People who upgrade every year are sheeps!

    > 3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice!

    > 4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!

    2 and 4 kind of contradict each other.

    I wouldn't be surprised that the average upgrade cycle for a lot of folks is in that 3-5 year range, for both personal and corporate buyers.

    • stringsandchars

      yesterday at 2:56 PM

      > I wouldn't be surprised that the average upgrade cycle for a lot of folks is in that 3-5 year range, for both personal and corporate buyers.

      My personal laptop is a 2014 MacBook Pro. I'll be buying one of these new M4 Airs, and comparing to an 11-year-old computer.

      • karlshea

        yesterday at 3:18 PM

        As someone that had a 2011 MacBook Pro for I think 9 years and loved it, be glad you’ve skipped over the whole butterfly keyboard/Touch Bar era.

        I now have an M2 Air and have zero complaints, it’s the best computing device I’ve ever owned. You’re going to really enjoy the M4.

      • ownagefool

        yesterday at 2:59 PM

        yeah, managed to eeek about 10 years from minimum spec 2013 mbp

    • WillAdams

      yesterday at 2:58 PM

      Since graduating from college in 1993, working in the graphic design industry full-time through 2019, I had two brand-new Macs (a PowerMac G3/800MHz, and a G5), the balance were hand-me-downs from other employees --- the G5 in particular was especially long-lasting, though ultimately it was supplemented by an Intel iMac.

      Each year when Apple came out with new machines, we would make a game of putting together a dream machine --- ages ago, that could easily hit 6 figures, these days, well, a fully-configured Mac Studio is $14,099 and a Pro Display w/ stand and nano texture adds $6,998 or so.

      • pqtyw

        yesterday at 3:11 PM

        > these days, well, a fully-configured Mac Studio is $14,099

        Not surprising considering the CPU in the fastest "desktop" Mac before today was slower than an old Intel chips you can buy for ~$350 (e.g. the 14700k).

    • mrexroad

      yesterday at 7:44 PM

      TBH, for non-tech folks that upgrade cycle has likely stretched a good bit beyond 3-5 years. 3-5 was the norm 10 years ago, but I’d wager needs-driven upgrades, opposed to marketing driven, are closer to 7-10 years outside of obvious niches.

      Sample size one: My spouse is using either a 2013 MBA and wants to upgrade, mostly b/c the enshitification of web sites. Basic productivity was okay-ish for her work (document creation, pdfs, spreadsheets, etc), but even Gmail now suffers with more than a tab.

      Edit: thinking more, I don’t know if I agree with myself here.

  • pqtyw

    yesterday at 3:06 PM

    > Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.

    It still makes claims like that arbitrary and meaningless. What does "23x faster" even mean, it's not like there are that many people who are upgrading from an Intel MBA yet are also fulltime Cinebench/etc. testers.

    > It's fair to compare

    Well yes. It's reasonably fair (realistically its not like any of those people this is targeted at would feel a difference between 10x, 15x or 30x) and obviously smart.

    • latexr

      yesterday at 3:36 PM

      > What does "23x faster" even mean

      The measurements are in the linked footnote, they tested the “Super Resolution” upscaling feature of Pixelmator Pro.

      • Spunkie

        yesterday at 3:50 PM

        The point is that benchmark is pretty useless and likely does not line up to what a user that is still running a intel air would expect the word "faster" even means.

        When normal users are thinking "faster" they are really thinking about snappiness/responsiveness, not number crunching.

        • pqtyw

          yesterday at 3:56 PM

          Those benchmarks seem to be more GPU based as well. e.g. something like Geekbench (not that it's necessarily that representative either) is just 2-3x faster.

          https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-intel_...

      • pqtyw

        yesterday at 3:44 PM

        Well yeah, I understand that this is based on some specific benchmark. Yet it's still some random arbitrary number effectively picked to mislead consumers.

        Especially when for the M1 (2x faster) they decided to use an entirely different Photoshop benchmark YET they they still show it alongside the 23x for the Pixelmator one (presumably the M4 is NOT 2x faster than the M1 there..).

        That's just objectively slimy (even if mostly harmless) marketing...

        Also presumably Pixelmator's "Super Resolution" and Photoshop's "radial blur, content aware scale, diffuse, find edges" are also mostly GPU bound these days? Which again.. might not be the best indicator for "performance" for most consumers.

        Edit: Looking at some more general benchmarks the the i7 (I7-1060NG7) from the last Intel MBA is "only" 4x (Geekbench MT), ~2.7x (Single-Core) or 2x (Cinebench single core) slower than the M4. Picking some highly specific "benchmark" that's several times higher than that is just dishonest.

  • kimbernator

    yesterday at 3:07 PM

    It's hardly the same person saying all of these things, though. Are you just annoyed at the variety of opinions that come from people on the internet?

• isoprophlex

  yesterday at 2:40 PM

  Ten million times faster! (Compared to the Apollo 11 guidance computer)

  • HPsquared

    yesterday at 2:48 PM

    Depends what you mean by 'faster' ... I wouldn't be surprised if the AGC was more responsive (faster response on the screen to user input) than a modern computer. Early computers were often quite snappy.

    https://danluu.com/input-lag/

  • johnklos

    yesterday at 8:27 PM

    Considering that a modern Ryzen is 1375 times faster than a VAXstation 4000/60, and a VAXstation 4000/60 is around 1280 times faster, at least in clock, than an AGC, that would mean the M4 would need to be about 5.6 times faster than that modern Ryzen.

    Hmmm... The M4 might be ten million times faster than the AGC, depending on the instructions per clock of the AGC and the VAXstation 4000/60 with which we're comparing it.

    https://zia.io/notice/ApcPNCgTyrYXpUQU2S

  • attractivechaos

    yesterday at 5:20 PM

    The hardware may be ten million times faster, but the software...

  • tr3ntg

    yesterday at 2:45 PM

    This gave me a chuckle

• crazygringo

  yesterday at 3:49 PM

  It makes sense because that's who's upgrading.

  I've got an M1 Air and there's still no really compelling reason to upgrade. MagSafe and a nicer camera don't really justify it, especially when Continuity Camera is better than on the M1 or M4.

  • turtlebits

    yesterday at 11:27 PM

    I'm in the same boat. My base model M1 air is the longest I've owned a laptop without upgrading. And it's perfectly fine. (and yes it only has 8gb)

  • walthamstow

    yesterday at 4:36 PM

    In the days before USB-C, MagSafe was great. Tripping on the cable and it snapping off safely was really cool.

    These days, it's an anti-feature. I have USB-C for everything, why would I give that up?

    • gloxkiqcza

      yesterday at 6:12 PM

      You don’t give it up. USB C charging still works just fine.

      • walthamstow

        today at 12:59 AM

        Maybe I was unclear - the MagSafe cable is still in the box. It's pointless to me, I have USB-C cables all over my house, I'm not using anything else.

• p_ing

  yesterday at 3:12 PM

  Everyone who has been around since at least the Snail ads should be used to Apple's fluff and promptly ignoring it until benchmarks are released.

  • LtWorf

    yesterday at 3:35 PM

    As I said in another comment, probably the benchmark is done just using some hardware instruction that didn't exist on those models and gets compiled to several instructions (possibly by a very very old compiler, while we're at it) vs something handwritten in assembly for the purpose of one specific benchmark.

    Does this mean it's 23x faster for normal workloads? Nah.

    Apple when they were pumping clang were also claiming that binaries produced with clang were much faster than those made with gcc. This was because they used a 15 years old version of gcc that didn't have any vector instructions (because they didn't exist at the time) and benchmarking using some code that was solely doing vector stuff.

    In short, they don't lie, but it's a lie :D

• jmull

  yesterday at 6:27 PM

  I don't think it's silly to state. That message is probably for intel macbook air users who may be considering an upgrade.

  (Anyway, I just ordered one for my wife, a soon-to-be-ex-intel-mac user. She'll probably be pretty happy about this, especially since she doesn't have an intel air as powerful as that one.)

• bee_rider

  yesterday at 2:48 PM

  Haha. Well, I guess it kind of makes sense in some way, Apple doesn’t want to say anything negative about any generation of “M” processor, maybe?

  Up to 23x faster. Of course, the fastest Intel MacBook Air is pretty old. But 23X is pretty crazy, right? I wonder what they are comparing against. Int-8 matrix multiplications or something else that’s gotten acceleration lately, maybe?

• Moto7451

  yesterday at 3:28 PM

  That’s roughly the Air I have still. I hate using it (prior to recently adding the cooler shim mod, it would thermal throttle constantly) but between a Hackintosh and my work Mac I haven’t felt the need to upgrade. I think sometime in this M4/M5 gen is when I’ll pull the trigger and retire the Hackintosh to gaming rig only status.

• thiht

  yesterday at 4:10 PM

  People don't upgrade every year. I still have an Intel MacBook Pro (2020 I think?) that I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon because it still works great.

• totaldude87

  yesterday at 3:18 PM

  Also to note, a typical macbooks' life span is more than ~5years - so are the target audience

• zurfer

  yesterday at 3:02 PM

  M4 2x faster than M1.

  M3 1.6x faster than M1 (1 year ago).

  = M4 1.2x faster than M3.

  not bad, but Moore's law is dead for CPUs.

• factorialboy

  yesterday at 3:00 PM

  I love how even fair and justifiable critique of Apple needs to be hedged with the "Apple is great" prefix, such is the terror of the Apple downvote mafia on HN.

  /typed from my Macbook Pro M4 — Love Apple — This is great!

• LtWorf

  yesterday at 3:29 PM

  And the benchmark is probably jut using one hw instruction that didn't exist on that model and now exists, and is not representative of anything at all.

• vultour

  yesterday at 4:18 PM

  The first thing I noticed in all of these announcements is that every main comparison is against M1. Why are they comparing with hardware 2-3 generations ago? I don't care whether my Intel i9 has 50x the performance of a Pentium processor from the 90s, it seems like a disingenuous attempt to make the numbers as high as possible.

After getting the initial M1 Air, I am still struggling to find a reason to replace it. Still going strong with no hiccups!

• mrtksn

  yesterday at 2:48 PM

  With M1 Air, Apple had to blow us away. People, including me, had hard time believing Apple's claims and many people were coping by looking at the Keynote charts and assuming that Apple must have tricked everyone by not giving proper scale metrics etc.

  When people put their hands on the real device, it was slaying almost everything on the market and soon it was clear that this thing is a revolution.

  You don't one up this easily. Apple claims 2X performance improvement over M1 Air and I am sure its mostly true but that M1 Air was so ahead that for a lot of people workloads didn't catch up yet.

  At this very moment I have 3 Xcode projects open, Safari has 147 tabs open and its consuming 11GB of my 16GB Ram and my SSD lifetime dropped to 98% due to frequent swap hits and yet I'm perfectly fine with the performance at this very moment and I'm not looking for immediate replacement.

  • financetechbro

    yesterday at 5:43 PM

    How do you manage 147 open tabs and why have them all open at once?

    • apparent

      yesterday at 10:07 PM

      I have several hundred open on my M2 MBA and have no problem. Maybe it's because I use Brave? I don't know but have never had to think too much about it. I also don't have much RAM (either the base amount or up a little).

      I do restart my browser once a month or so, if things ever feel less snappy than normal.

    • mrtksn

      yesterday at 6:36 PM

      Really bad habit, when I’m into something I open some tabs and if I switch to something else I keep opening new bunch of tabs.

      Once I no longer remember the older tabs I create a tab group from the current tabs in case there’s a tab I care about and start fresh.

• ramijames

  today at 8:46 AM

  This is where I am, too. I have an M1 Pro and I have never loved a computer more. This thing is a beast and just about anything I throw at it is fine. I can't imagine how much better the M4 is. Unless this computer gets stolen or doused with water, I'll probably have it for at least another 3-4 years. Absolutely amazing value for my money.

• jghn

  yesterday at 2:40 PM

  Same. Each year I tell myself I'll get the new one. Each year when the new one comes out I notice that for what I use it for my M1 Air is still completely fine.

  • mettamage

    yesterday at 2:44 PM

    The real win for me is that Macbook Pro M1 64 GB are now sold on market places within my price range.

    So yea, same.

    • dmazin

      yesterday at 2:46 PM

      What do you feel is a good price for that?

    • coolThingsFirst

      yesterday at 5:13 PM

      Hey, as for OMSCS.

      I did some research and I'm deferring for a semester but tbh my motivation is pretty low. As per perception it seems decent but depending on circumstances it's def a much better idea to do an on campus programme.

• paxys

  yesterday at 6:44 PM

  Nor should you have a reason to replace it. The device is barely 4 years old. There was a time until very recently when laptops would be expected to last 10+ years minimum with minor RAM and SSD updates.

• ohgr

  yesterday at 2:41 PM

  Yeah that. I only got rid of mine because I wanted the nice mini-LED screen on the 14" MBP. No plans to replace that one any time soon!

• netcraft

  yesterday at 3:10 PM

  agreed, which is awesome, the only thing that worries me is that they will drop support for it earlier than they have to when they want to force people to upgrade eventually. I hope to get 10 years out of my M1

• Spunkie

  yesterday at 4:00 PM

  Everyone I know that got an M1 cheaped out on the 8gb model and are now struggling to use a browser with heavy sites and multitasking(zoom) at the same time.

  But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.

  • potatoman22

    yesterday at 11:15 PM

    Totally an anecdote, but my 8gb M1 runs fine with multiple browsers/tabs, VS Code, and Spotify all open. Usually performance is only an issue for me when working with larger ML models. I wonder why others are getting worse performance? Maybe it's the specific sites they're using?

  • famahar

    today at 1:54 AM

    That's me. It's brutal trying to do Unity game dev on this. Constantly run out of memory and can't do much multitasking.

  • postexitus

    yesterday at 4:09 PM

    Cries in 4Gb Macbook Air 2013 /s

    I am fine(ish) with the above setup, I don't know what you are talking about. 8Gb is plenty for website browsing.

    • Spunkie

      yesterday at 6:07 PM

      It isn't depending on what "web browsing" someone is doing, which can be a pretty wide range now.

      1 persons "web browsing" is no browser extensions, a couple of gmail tabs, some light blog reading, and maybe something as heavy as reddit.

      While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.

      8gb is quickly becoming unworkable for people that fall closer to the latter group.

      • skydhash

        today at 2:23 AM

        > While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.

        That's computing, not web browsing. And on not so great platform than that.

    • snovymgodym

      yesterday at 4:33 PM

      That's a rough era, new enough to have soldered RAM and old enough that Apple felt ok with 4GB in a base model.

• Hamuko

  yesterday at 3:21 PM

  My M1 Max Mac Studio also feels very good even though it's probably full of dust and cleaning it isn't reasonable.

• kome

  yesterday at 2:59 PM

  After getting my 2015 macbook air 11' I am still struggling to find a reason to replace it. Still going strong with no hiccups!

  • knowaveragejoe

    yesterday at 3:58 PM

    Do you use it as a laptop, or is it hooked up as a desktop for the most part? If the former, I'd try one of the M series in the same role and see if you notice a difference in ergonomics.

    • kome

      yesterday at 4:09 PM

      At this time (and historically), I mostly use it as a laptop, but I have also used it as a desktop for long periods with an external monitor. As a laptop, I love that it's so tiny. It’s working very well so far... but I’m afraid that at some point, I’ll have to switch to Linux or OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I’m still on macOS 11 (Big Sur).

      MS Office has already stopped updating, along with some other software (though not much, most still updates without issues). As long as Firefox keeps receiving updates for my system, most things will be fine.

      • knowaveragejoe

        yesterday at 9:52 PM

        The battery life and performance improvements alone would be worth the upgrade to me at that point.

They don't always hit the mark but I sort of miss the times when Apple would innovate more boldly with their devices.

Apple Intelligence isn't it - it's just playing catch-up with a market that tries to slap AI onto everything it can think of.

The hardware upgrades are always nice but there's nothing 'out there' like a touch bar or even a 'dynamic island'. Just more safe iterations.

• CountHackulus

  yesterday at 3:18 PM

  The last time they "innovated" on macbooks we got a touch bar (ignoring M chips). I'm good with incremental improvements if we can avoid those gigantic blunders.

  • swat535

    yesterday at 3:24 PM

    Right and I'm not sure consumers are willing to tolerate innovation.

    I recall the amount of hate touch bar got on HN and everyone asking Apple to revert back to building normal machines (which they did with Macbook Pro).

  • DwnVoteHoneyPot

    yesterday at 5:54 PM

    They should do their "touch bar, delete ports, flat keyboard" innovations on a new Macbook Max or Ultra product line and see how it goes. The Air and Pro can stay traditional and keep the HDMI and headphone jacks etc.

  • ljm

    yesterday at 5:31 PM

    Didn't know it was a blunder until afterwards though right?

    Hence, innovation. Now you just get risk-averse updates that offer little reason to upgrade from previous models.

  • jmyeet

    yesterday at 3:27 PM

    Don't forget this also came with the awful butterfly keyboard, allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness. It had terrible reliability, Apple was forced to do replacements and IIRC required a motherboard replacement to actually replace.

    And why did Apple do all this? To increase the Average Selling Price ("ASP") of Macs. That's literally it.

    the new M4 Macbook Air for $999 is incredible value and that's what I want the Air to be: a good compromise of power and price. For example, the 12" Macbook made too compromises to be just a little bit thinner.

• zactato

  yesterday at 7:51 PM

  I think the M1 was a pretty huge innovation. It's the first time a laptop felt portable and without compromise. I can get a full day of work out of my laptop without plugging it in. It's pretty wild.

  Before this laptops were simply things that were small enough that you could carry one from point A to point B, but they were still effectively tethered to a wall and desk for any non-trivial usecases.

• dmix

  yesterday at 3:05 PM

  I don't want innovation on Macbook hardware. It's perfectly good as it is.

  The only thing I'd want is something that'd make it last even longer like waterproofing the top keyboard layer.

• bee_rider

  yesterday at 3:21 PM

  Apple’s innovation strategy is not to take risky moves. They are more of a fast, competent follower company. Even iPods were a slightly conservative implementation of MP3 players, which were already becoming a thing at the time (you could even get mp3 players with solid state, albeit flash, drives while Apple’s iPods were still spinning rust).

  Of course iPods became very popular because they put it all in a package that gave it a UX that non-nerds wanted to use. The flash drive style MP3 players… had tiny capacities, they had to be “managed” by the users. iPods, just dump your whole hard drive on the thing. That solid state memory is much better in a mobile device… I mean, my Sandisk player, I’ll give it an A+ on reliability. C- on capacity. Apple always gets a B in every field.

  Their next thing was supposed to be VR. But nobody could find an application for VR, so Apple’s gimmick of taking something with a perfect idea and making a copy that is almost as good at the thing it does right, but which doesn’t have any massive downsides, didn’t work.

  They are in a tough spot now, the tech sector seems to have lost its dreamers and so nobody is making these A+/C- devices for them to level out.

• madeofpalk

  yesterday at 2:48 PM

  What innovation is there from a laptop these days? Apple Silicon chips were the innovation we needed (better performance for better battery).

  Last time people cried for Apple to innovate they added the touch bar to laptops. Computers (and phones) are a mature product category where I don't want innovation, I just want them to be functional.

  • dylan604

    yesterday at 3:00 PM

    And butterfly keyboards. Don’t forget their innovative trash can MacPro. Hockey puck mouse anyone? Apple has an impressive history of missing the mark.

• mhh__

  yesterday at 10:34 PM

  This is what happens when you put the logistics guy in charge of the whole thing

• lifefeed

  yesterday at 2:54 PM

  It's been a while since they made a bold choice. When I bought an iPhone a couple years ago, even the apple store employee kinda shrugged his shoulders when I asked if the new 14 phone was better, besides the camera, than the cheaper 13.

  • dghlsakjg

    yesterday at 3:01 PM

    The iPhone 14 added emergency satellite connectivity.

    That seems like a pretty big deal to me?

    • sleepybrett

      yesterday at 3:19 PM

      .. if you are someone that even ventures into areas that lack proper cell coverage. I don't think most people do.

      • dghlsakjg

        yesterday at 4:33 PM

        If you live west of the great plains, you will always hit dead zones if you ever leave the city, even on the major interstates you will hit dead zones. This is an incredibly nice feature to have for tens (hundreds?) of millions of people in the just the US, let alone other countries. (this may hold true in the east as well, I don't live there)

        Extrapolating your personal experience to all use cases is generally a bad idea.

      • saagarjha

        today at 8:26 AM

        You can drive from Apple's headquarters to zero bars of cell service in 10 minutes.

      • alabastervlog

        yesterday at 3:24 PM

        This is me when I go to a state forest 20 minutes away, and about 2.5hrs drive from Manhattan. Anywhere with even a little elevation has abundant cell dead zones.

• Cthulhu_

  yesterday at 3:41 PM

  For me as a professional, that's just fine; I never used the touch bar, but the fingerprint sensor was a great addition. Not worth upgrading for on its own, but a neat upgrade.

  I think a macbook with a much better front facing camera would be good, teleconferencing is a multiple times a day use case for us. They did an in-between with the system that allows you to use your iphone camera(s) which do support more wide angles, but that doesn't work on my current work laptop as it's locked down and I'd have to lock down my personal iphone as well if I want the two to connect.

  • alabastervlog

    yesterday at 4:03 PM

    The touchbar was a downgrade for me. Turns out my fingers go slightly above the key when typing certain symbols that are [shift]+[number key]. It took me a while to figure out why my laptop kept opening a music player seemingly at random a couple times per day, but it was because the touchbar was so sensitive that slightly brushing it was triggering the "play" button.

    I ended up having to disable almost the whole bar to keep it from happening, just fill it with "blank" zones.

    I also can't reliably drag-n-drop with force-sensitivity turned on for the touchpad, so there's another "innovation" I have to turn off. I don't even have, like, dexterity issues or a disability or something, but it makes it so damn fiddly that my drag-n-drops drop too early about half the time.

• bananapub

  yesterday at 2:57 PM

  what do you mean? they cut prices, improved battery life and improved performance, like they do almost every year. every few years they do something big like a new form factor or a new CPU architecture!

  • foobarian

    yesterday at 3:16 PM

    > or a new CPU architecture!

    Ah maybe RISC-V! Wouldn't that be fun

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 or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.

• maxsilver

  yesterday at 4:27 PM

  > - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.

  If you are doing normal developer things, the MacBook Air is 100% fine. I use mine daily (M3 Air 13in, 24GB RAM), it handles Rails + Postgres, it handles JS (Next.js + React), it handles Flutter (for desktop and mobile), it handles IntelliJ and RubyMine and DataGrip, it handles Android Studio and Xcode for iOS apps -- including Android/iPhone software emulators. I can load up large Docker projects with 12+ containers, totally fine. I occasionally play with LM Studio, no issues.

  Under all of the above, no throttling, no heat issues, works fine on laps, etc. Half the time, it's barely warm to the touch.

  ---

  The only time it gets hot for me, is running the CPU + GPU max'd out hard, for long periods of time. If I try to run FF14 or Warframe via Crossover/Codeweavers for an hour or two, for example, it gets warm and throttles a bit. (Still works, no crashes, no issues, but it does get warm and throttle).

  99%+ of developers are fine with a MacBook Air.

• codesnik

  yesterday at 2:44 PM

  I have M2 Air and using it for rails development, sometimes with multiple docker containers, but the most hungry usually is just chrome with 500+ tabs. It usually does not throttle at all and is barely warm. Unless in direct sunlight (it's black) or unless I put it on top of a blanket without an air gap below for half an hour. I'd say that's coolest macbook I ever owned, no burns or anything near it even on bare skin, unlike some older intel macbooks.

  • cmrx64

    yesterday at 3:07 PM

    The 2011 Intel macbook air I used when visiting home throughout college was downright _dangerous_ on a lap, but performed so much better than my Atom-based Aspire One that I felt compelled to learn to tolerate OSX, as a longtime Linux nerd.

    I eventually got the M1 Air for serious ocaml and rust development and found it would get quite toasty (tho never concerning) during big compile/test cycles, but generally only over several dozen seconds of full load.

    I upgraded to a 14” pro with an M2 Max and am reasonably happy with it and think it was an important upgrade for my productivity. In daily use, fans kick in rarely but when needed for a speciality job like TLA model checking, they can reject a lot of heat (= performance margin). Of course it would be nice if it weighed less (mine is 1.8kg after including a case), but as a side benefit the machine can play games (even emulated x86 ones inside Parallels!) so it’s hard to say I’m worse off than my previous status quo of VSCode remoting into my big Linux desktop :)

    • LuciOfStars

      yesterday at 3:46 PM

      Warning about the case: MacBooks are not built to handle hard cases and you will destroy the hinge, screen, or both.

      • TMWNN

        yesterday at 5:40 PM

        I have had a good experience with the KECC case. <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PYVK6P4> Two years and counting without issues.

    • whstl

      yesterday at 3:33 PM

      The only time I got my M1 Air to actually somewhat heat up was when I was compiling Node.js from scratch, right after I bought it (prebuilt binaries weren't available yet apparently). So my experience matches yours.

      I also do a lot of AI + Audio stuff, and it gets somewhat warm but not as much as when compiling heavy stuff.

• ezfe

  yesterday at 2:42 PM

  If you’re doing continuous tasks that max out the CPU/GPU it will eventually throttle. That’s when you need a MacBook Pro

• s_dev

  yesterday at 2:51 PM

  I have a M4 128GB RAM MacBook Pro -- it gets very hot after playing Civ VI or Civ VII for a couple of hours. If I limit the fps to 30 it's stone cold.

  Nothing else seems to make it sweat. Just games and presumably mining Bitcoin or other very intensive tasks.

  Devs/Gamers should always go for a Pro machine.

• earthnail

  yesterday at 2:40 PM

  Have an M2 Air. Never think about heat. In my experience it‘s just not an issue.

  • TMWNN

    yesterday at 5:41 PM

    Agreed. It is wonderful to no longer have to use a "laptop desk" while in bed.

• wil421

  yesterday at 2:53 PM

  When I tested a 15” MBP with an i7 and touch bar vs my M1 Air the Intel Mac throttled down 30% immediately and the M1 barely throttled towards the end. The test was a 4K transcode in handbrake and the M1 air was only 10-15 minutes behind.

  I’ll try to replicate the test with an M3 13” vs the 15” touchbar intel. Don’t have my MBPs at work.

• huijzer

  yesterday at 2:52 PM

  > UPDATE: what I am getting at - if you are developer and don’t care about screen or battery differences - should you go for same spec macbook pro instead of same spec macbook air.

  Depends on how much you care about the last bit of performance and how often you expect running into throttling. In my experience, it takes the M2 Pro multiple minutes of full load before the fan starts. I do a lot of Rust programming on smaller projects and I think the air would have been fine for me. Compilation takes at most a few minutes on the first run. For doing larger projects like LLVM, the pro is a better option. MLIR took 10 minutes to compile each time I pulled in new commits on main. Then throttling becomes an issue.

• alberth

  today at 12:42 AM

  From what I’ve experienced, the only thing that will cause your M-Series warm/hot is using the GPU.

  So if you’re not gaming nor have tons of UI windows open (since macOS UI is rendered with GPU) - you’ll never experience your M-series getting hot.

• ge96

  yesterday at 2:41 PM

  I have a 2020 Macbook Air M1, use it for xcode, it struggles to build a basic react native based app with watch-widget, but man it is slick, I love thin laptops. I have a carbon X1 too

  Struggle as in the build takes 3+ mins

  In general though it's cool, maybe when charging it gets warm but I use it on a desk mostly

  A general gripe I have switching devices is the keyboard layout ha cmd+c vs. ctrl+c

  Stick to an ext keyboard I guess

  Edit: 16GB RAM is what I have I sometimes get the "out of application memory" message

  Anyway I use my computer for freelancing/working on multiple platforms, it was a good buy (used), alternatively I could have went with a mini but that screen is so good on a mac (although I develop with an ultrawide external monitor).

  • codesnik

    yesterday at 2:45 PM

    you can remap modifier keys if you so inclined in keyboard settings, without additional software, and have separate settings per internal and external keyboard.

    • ge96

      yesterday at 2:46 PM

      Right, but physically I think the Mac left-most bottom button is fn or something instead of control but yeah just one of those things to deal with

      • kccqzy

        yesterday at 2:56 PM

        You can remap that as well.

• hk1337

  yesterday at 2:49 PM

  I went from the 2019 16" MacBook Pro (Intel i9) to 2023 16" MacBook Pro M2 Max.

  It's basically the same without the fan noise, it's a lot cooler, and it seems to handle whatever tasks I throw at it just fine.

  I would probably go with the Air if I was a project manager, development manager, or someone that did not have to do much work with code.

• onei

  yesterday at 3:18 PM

  I can't speak to the Airs, but I went from an Intel Pro to a M3 Pro in a previous job and the battery life improved massively. I used to be able to heat my study by running a linter, but after the switch I remained chilly. I'm now on a M2 and have broadly observed the same.

• Velorivox

  yesterday at 2:42 PM

  I have an M2 air. It gets a bit warm when I compile iOS apps, but otherwise I never notice any heat. If I open a few too many tabs or apps, though, I notice a bit of slowdown since I only have 8 GB ram.

  However, it is surprisingly functional and I don’t strictly need any additional ram, which was surprising to me.

• walthamstow

  yesterday at 4:41 PM

  I play Football Manager on my M1 Air and I've never felt heat. This is a game that used to turn my Intel MacBook Pro into a testicle roaster with 2 hour battery life.

• codewhsprr

  yesterday at 2:40 PM

  Ran the Mac native copy of No Man’s Sky on a 16GB m3 Air last year. 1080p and on default visual settings

  The laptop never got hot, game never stuttered (beyond NMS glitching engine which exists on windows too). Slight bit of increased warmth, but my phones gotten hotter browsing bloated websites.

  I don’t blame Microsoft for looking at bailing on consoles. iPhones will be more powerful in a couple more cycles.

• kubb

  yesterday at 2:40 PM

  My M2 Air doesn’t even get hot. But I’m not running intensive computing on it.

  • thoughtpalette

    yesterday at 3:04 PM

    Also have an M2. I don't have any issues running multiple web servers, running vite builds etc. Usually 20 tabs open and Affinity Photo or something as well.

    No complaints whatsoever.

• solardev

  yesterday at 3:03 PM

  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 only for development, I'd get an Air. If it were meant to be a desktop replacement workstation for work and gaming and movies and such, then the Pro.

  Both are easily more than fast enough for web dev. Not sure about other stacks (especially with heavy compiles or virtualization). I have a few services in Docker and that's fine (on both machines).

  It's just so so much better than the shitty old Wintel days that I don't even worry about it anymore. Lightyears ahead of any ThinkPad or Latitude, etc.

• nicky0

  yesterday at 3:25 PM

  As a developer, I say Air all the way.

  Never noticed any thermal issues at all. It barely gets warm for me.

  Make sure to get at least 16GB RAM.

  • mikailk

    yesterday at 9:17 PM

    I think all Macs come with 16 GB at minimum now, so that should be easy! [1]

    [1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/30/24270669/apple-macbook-p...

• whalesalad

  yesterday at 3:00 PM

  I have an M2 Air and it's a pretty capable mobile dev machine. I do not notice any heat issues whatsoever.

• throawayonthe

  yesterday at 2:49 PM

  it throttles when not limited to bursty tasks; some people mod theirs by simply placing a thermal pad between the bottom of the laptop and the heatspreader to get performance identical to the MBP - but then you can not have it comfortably on your lap

The 13” model is only $300 more than the M4 Mac Mini whether comparing the base models or the 32GB RAM options. That’s a pretty good value for a battery, screen, webcam, trackpad, and keyboard. The main thing you give up is the ability to connect a third large display when at your desktop, a few ports, and support for higher than 60Hz refresh rate on an external display.

• apparent

  today at 1:48 AM

  I don't know the refresh rate, but my M2 MBA is plugged to a 70" TV with no problem. Perhaps it's not at the highest resolution possible, but I can't see pixels from where I sit.

• ericpauley

  yesterday at 4:48 PM

  I think it's highly unlikely that the M4 mac is actually limited to 60Hz for all external displays. I'm running a 1440 ultrawide at 100Hz on an M2 right now. Instead this is likely the maximum px*Hz configuration supported, and smaller or fewer monitors are supported at higher Hz.

  • r00fus

    yesterday at 10:03 PM

    I run a 49" 32x9 screen at 120hz on my M1 Air perfectly fine.

I would go for it but the subpar OS I'm forced to use with the computer puts me off completely. But I understand the logic behind it and that you don't make margins like Apple just peddling good hardware, that's a quick recipe to end up like IBM.

• natnatenathan

  today at 7:17 AM

  Try Asahi Linux

  • _zoltan_

    today at 9:25 AM

    he was already talking about it, given he mentioned subpar OS ;)

    enjoy not having suspend, a webcam, a microphone... at that point it's just a useless paper weight.

    just enjoy MacOS on it.

Nice to see a $1000 Air again in spite of inflation. For comparison, M2 Air was released in 2022 at $1200 with 8 GB RAM.

I really was hoping for nano-texture on MacBook Air. The cynic in me thinks this is intentional as I'm now purchasing the 14" MBP with nano-texture. It's 42,000 JPY ($282 USD) more then a near equivalent MacBook Air. But the matte display is the killer feature for me.

And this is to finally replace my trusty 2025 MBPr. It's had an extremely good run. May this one also be a ten year laptop.

• ant6n

  today at 4:59 AM

  I agree a matte screen is necessary. I haven’t updated my 2013 mbp, but also not been using it for like 5 years, either. I don’t like Apple trying to upsell me just to have non-mirror screen, and the mbp is pretty heavy too.

  I think I’ll pass..

Nice to see they're finally supporting dual external displays even out of clamshell mode on the Air!

I think the most exciting thing is that the M4 model is $999 and not some older model.

• stetrain

  yesterday at 4:52 PM

  Yep. $999 for the latest M4 with the full 10 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM is a pretty good deal in Apple hardware terms.

I love that the base model starts with 16GB of RAM here. The value of these computers is incredible - I purchased a Macbook Pro in 2021 and it's still powering through every task I throw at it. Before Apple started making their own chips, I felt like I had to upgrade every 2-3 years to prevent my laptop from becoming a hurdle in completing every day tasks (remember when tab management was a thing?). Really happy with these machines.

• BonoboIO

  yesterday at 2:58 PM

  AI is finally forcing them to do it

Apple should bring back the 12" MacBook and put the M-series processor in it. Miss that form factor a lot.

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/

• teaearlgraycold

  today at 9:40 AM

  It uses HBM. It’s faster because it’s millimeters from the CPU/GPU and has a wide bus. If you think 120GB/s is high you should look up the Max/Ultra chips’ specs.

It’s not enough of an upgrade from my M2 Air. I’m happy to wait for the next generations. But I wouldn’t consider any other personal laptop than this one.

• knowaveragejoe

  yesterday at 3:37 PM

  I'm in the same boat and trying to suss out how much of a jump it'd be to the M4s, or if it's worth jumping to the pro.

> Up to 23x faster than fastest Intel‑based MacBook Air

Comparing it to a 6 year old laptop.

> Up to 2x faster than MacBook Air (M1)

Comparing it to a 5 year old laptop.

Love these comparisons.

Man, Apple laptops even with all their quirks are light-years ahead of the median. I have a reasonably modern ThinkPad and MacBook Air M3 with similar specs, so I can feel the difference.

• jhasse

  yesterday at 4:15 PM

  Why wouldn't they, when the pricing is ahead of the median, too?

  • d_silin

    yesterday at 6:48 PM

    M4 Air pricing is very competitive too. At $1200, 16GB/512GB configuration feels right on money. Pros, yes definitely more pricey.

They completely got rid of the M1 or M2 whatever baseline MacBook Air, and instead having the latest M4 at $999.

That is along with their recent upgrade which bump All Mac model to 16GB Baseline. In Apple's History, the M4 Mac mini and M4 MacBook Air are perhaps the best value for money in the entire History of Mac. I actually dont even record anything that came close.

In summer 2022 I picked up an M2 Air (24GB/1TB/10-core GPU) for 1939USD with edu discount. Today the M4 equivalent is 1479USD, and the M4 (aside from being faster) can go to 32GB RAM instead of 24GB, and has Wifi 6E instead of just 6 (why not 7?).

I said I'd buy the next Air as long as it had 6GHz wifi support (6E, eventually 7) but now that it's out it's just not enough of an upgrade for me (a lot of money for 25% more RAM, CPU performance, and 6GHz wifi).

Was hoping for the rumored 24 hours of battery life, but it looks like the M4 couldn't squeeze that. Still 18 hours stated, like the M3 Air:

https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-M3,...

Looks like the only arguments for the M4 Air are:

- 32GB RAM option

- 2 more CPU cores

- 100GB/s vs 120GB/s memory bandwidth

• klausa

  yesterday at 2:54 PM

  The CPU stays the same, it's the GPU cores that are upgradable on the baseline 13".

  There's a BTO 24GB RAM option.

I'd be tempted, but the MacBook Air M1 still kicks ass. I don't care if this is 2x faster. The M1 is still very fast.

• malthaus

  today at 7:06 AM

  same here. it even runs most of my demanding ableton projects just fine.

  i need more compute? using a saas solution i need more storage? tiny external ssd or cloud storage

  the 8gigs of ram also aren't holding me back, i think most people just cry based on principle and would be fine with it in a double-blind test

• dabbz

  yesterday at 5:21 PM

  I need them to get rid of the notch. It's so obnoxious. I'll run my M1 Air into the ground until they get rid of the notch.

  • chippiewill

    yesterday at 5:52 PM

    I don't get it. I don't even notice the notch, I'm not even sure how it's possible to see the notch considering it's in the middle of a black bar?

    • teaearlgraycold

      today at 9:43 AM

      You need to carefully select your wallpaper to get the menu bar to be black.

I guess Apple has moved enough production out of China to supply US customers without needing to fear tarrifs, given the price cut.

• seanmcdirmid

  yesterday at 10:29 PM

  Apple hasn't priced in tariffs yet, if the 20% tariff in China stays, then it will definitely affect their prices eventually. If they just have to move final assembly to another country though, they should be able to recover in a year or so as FoxConn opens up a factory in Vietnam (assuming Trump doesn't get specific about Chinese made components, but those should pale in comparison to South Korea/Taiwan's supplied products).

  • GeekyBear

    yesterday at 10:42 PM

    > If they just have to move final assembly to another country

    They started shifting production out of China several years ago.

    For instance this 2023 news item.

    > Apple is continuing to reduce its reliance on China for production of its most popular products, moving to India and Thailand for key manufacturing.

    https://www.channelnews.com.au/apple-moves-iphone-macbook-pr...

    Things have only accelerated since.

    • seanmcdirmid

      yesterday at 11:33 PM

      Brazil and India production are just to satisfy Brazil and India requirements (they will tariff heavily or not allowed to be sold otherwise).

      I don't think Apple has enough final assembly in Thailand or Vietnam yet. US-bound product should still coming from China unless I'm missing something here. I just wouldn't put too much faith in to a one year old article with no followup and then assume that things have actually been accelerating without anyone noticing. The most I could find is:

      https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/apples-production-stra...

      I can't find anything at all on Thailand beyond hopeful articles.

      • GeekyBear

        today at 12:23 AM

        > Brazil and India production are just to satisfy Brazil and India requirements

        I agree that this was initially the case, but China's zero Covid policy factory shutdowns led Apple (and others) to start moving production out of China in earnest.

        India, for example, is now producing current generation iPhones for export, not just makung the cheaper variants for sale inside India.

        > One of the biggest shifts in manufacturing has been reducing dependence on China. The magnitude of that move was reinforced today with news that India-made iPhone exports were said to have jumped by a third to nearly $6 billion in value in the six months to September.

        https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-10-29/apple-...

        Apple has been moving to shift a significant portion of manufacturing out of China for some time now.

        > Apple Aims to Make a Quarter of the World’s iPhones in India

        https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-aims-to-make-a-quarter-of-the...

        • seanmcdirmid

          today at 4:13 AM

          These are still future looking and it will take Apple awhile to get there. They won't be there next month, or even a year from now, so American consumers are going to have to eat the tariff for a year, probably two, while supply chains are reformed. This isn't going to happen overnight. All the other phone makers are going to be in the same boat, so the pricing power will be there to pass tariffs on to consumers (and the few that can avoid them will take the extra profit like American steel companies are now).

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.

I absolutely love my MacBook Air M3 15”. Of course I’d love it to be faster but I’ll probably upgrade to an M5 or M6 at this point as the marginal improvement isn’t sufficient to warrant upgrading this soon after purchase.

Lets hope this isn't like the M1 version which has been dropping like flies.

• Toutouxc

  today at 7:08 AM

  What are you talking about?

Everything is cool although it's too bad they had changed the Air design. I have MBA M1 and I have to admit I'm a big fan of that design.

Looking at this entire Apple product launch day, I'm struck by how Apple's silicon strategy keeps extending in both directions.

16 GB RAM included in base model. For $200 more i can bump it to 24 GB RAM, So that i can open Chrome and firefox at the same time.

The best thing about "Apple intelligence" so far is that it made Apple eat their shoe and upgrade their base model's memory to something usable

> And with groundbreaking Private Cloud Compute, Apple Intelligence can draw on larger server-based models, running on Apple silicon, to handle more complex requests for you while protecting your privacy.

Most interesting part of it.

Wonder if someone can verify this?

• paxys

  yesterday at 5:38 PM

  This doesn't have anything specifically to do with the new hardware. They've had the ability to securely offload operations to their cloud-based LLM since the launch of Apple Intelligence.

Apple Intelligence is a complete dud in my view, but fortunately it doesn’t bother you if you don’t use it, and it’s all worth it for Apple to start shipping base configurations with a decent amount of RAM.

• sccxy

  yesterday at 2:39 PM

  But once you activate AI, then you are not able to uninstall this AI crap from your computer.

  • spwa4

    yesterday at 2:58 PM

    I don't know. On the one hand I kind of agree that AI products currently suck, especially the ones built into OSes.

    On the other hand, both using ChatGPT myself and the few usage figures they have released are very impressive.

Biggest question for me is how does it compare to AMD Strix Halo? I mean the Max 395 just seems very impressive.

I mean I like Apple hardware, but I also prefer to run Linux.

I just bought the m4 mac mini at Costco about a month ago. I have been slightly irked I didn't wait for this so I can walk it away from my desk sometimes. I really hate the idea of a return since I'm still in the window but....

• jkcchan

  yesterday at 2:56 PM

  costco returns are notoriously generous, no questions asked. electronics might be a shorter window but i think it's very accepted to return

• spwa4

  yesterday at 2:57 PM

  I wonder if this macbook air will finally come with "replaceable" storage, like the m4 mac mini did.

Pretty incredible how timeless the design still is.

• mabedan

  today at 7:21 AM

  Isn’t it a couple years only ?

  • maxglute

    today at 7:35 AM

    I meant pretty small tweaks to geometry and form since first gen like 15 years ago.

    • jahewson

      today at 8:59 AM

      Wait, no... they changed it radically last year. It no longer has the wedge shape.

      https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/03/04/after-14-years-ap...

      • maxglute

        today at 9:13 AM

        TIL!

Why does an extra 16 GB of memory add $400 to the price?

• 2809

  today at 4:46 AM

  They add additional markup to storage and memory upgrades because they know you don't have a choice.

• Synaesthesia

  yesterday at 6:50 PM

  Because it's GPU and CPU ram.

Is this the first Macbook Air to support multiple monitors? I'm kind of surprised that's not highlighted instead of buried down in the page.

• stetrain

  yesterday at 4:40 PM

  The M3 series was able to support two external displays with the laptop closed.

  M4 can do two external displays with the laptop screen active as well.

  • bdcravens

    yesterday at 6:02 PM

    Doing it with the laptop open is what I'd be interested in, as that's been my working style for years. I've had a couple of Airs, but ended up having to use a Display Link hub and software to support multiple displays, which wasn't ideal.

• LuciOfStars

  yesterday at 3:45 PM

  Nope, M3 did too.

This is actually reasonable.

I just brought 2 laptops in the last 12 months, so I'm not rushing to buy this, but it's a great deal for the typical person.

Other than battery mass and screen size, is there a significant difference between the new Macbook Air and the low-end Macbook Pro?

• AdamN

  yesterday at 2:44 PM

  There are quite a few little differences like screen brightness, number of displays in can drive, faster unified memory, etc...

  https://www.macrumors.com/guide/macbook-air-vs-macbook-pro/

  • whynotminot

    yesterday at 2:46 PM

    There is no difference in the number of screens supported when it comes to the base M4 chip.

• stetrain

  yesterday at 4:50 PM

  Compared to the M4 MacBook Air, the base M4 MacBook Pro has

  - Larger display with higher resolution and DPI

  - Brighter display (1000nits vs 500nits) with mini-LED backlight, local dimming, and HDR

  - 120Hz display

  - 24hr battery life vs 18hr

  - Active fan cooling vs passive cooling

  - 6 speakers vs 4 speakers

  - 3 TB4/USB-C ports vs 2

  - HDMI port

  - SDXC card reader

  https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-M4,...

• whynotminot

  yesterday at 2:45 PM

  The better screen and better keyboard are probably the most day to day practical reasons to upgrade. But that’s countered by the extra weight and thickness of the Pro, too. So it’s really a choice of mobility versus usage ergonomics.

  The Pro is also fan cooled, but with Apple Silicon I’m not sure that matters all that much at this performance band. If you need fan cooled performance you probably want to start thinking about a Pro level SoC, at which point you’re all in on a Pro machine anyway.

  • hwc

    yesterday at 2:51 PM

    Is the Pro fan cooled? I have never heard a fan on my M2 Pro.

    • klausa

      yesterday at 2:56 PM

      Yes.

• methyl

  yesterday at 2:46 PM

  120hz display

• djaychela

  yesterday at 2:41 PM

  Active cooling on the pro.

I wish the M4 Macbook Air models would have a nano texture display option.

> Support for up to two external displays

In the base model. Finally.

I have a MacBook Pro from 2017 2.3 GHZ, and I am considering an upgrade. Is it worth it?

• bombcar

  yesterday at 3:15 PM

  The jump from Intel to M* is huge.

  Whether that's worth it for you - hard to say.

  You can get a good deal on a refurbished or used M* MBP and try it out. My 2021 M1 Max MBP is still going strong; so strong I just can't justify a new one.

  Biggest thing to note is how many external displays you want to drive. I got the M1 Max to drive my 2-4.

• _fzslm

  yesterday at 3:16 PM

  Absolutely. I had a 2017 machine and any Apple Silicon machine will run circles around what you already have.

• tosh

  yesterday at 4:08 PM

  night and day @ noise and battery life

The trackpad on my Macbook Air stopped working after 2.5 years. The Apple warranty in only 1 measly year. Apple wanted nearly £500 to fix it. Caveat emptor.

• turtlebits

  yesterday at 11:35 PM

  Most if not all consumer laptops have a baseline 1 year warranty. If it's too expensive to repair from the manufacturer, repair it yourself? $80 from ifixit.

• hermitcrab

  yesterday at 10:54 PM

  Did I upset the Apple fan boys?

The price point seems quite interesting, a framework laptop costs more...

• oblio

  today at 8:26 AM

  You can't upgrade the MacBook.

I hope apple starts adding more colors to the lineup, the blue looks great

Still no cellular modem.

• SG-

  today at 12:51 AM

  it turns out you can simply tether this thing called an iPhone that almost everyone over wifi.

  • fenced_load

    today at 1:10 AM

    Not sure if this was a serious response. But tethering kills battery life on your phone, which especially sucks if you are travelling.

    • aurareturn

      today at 6:20 AM

      Plug the phone into the laptop.

      5G on a laptop also hurts battery life.

But no Space Grey?

is there an active linux support for the hardware?

• bigyabai

  yesterday at 2:47 PM

  Not for M3/M4, as far as I'm aware.

• yesterday at 2:46 PM

• 12345hn6789

  yesterday at 3:07 PM

  Active Linux support has grinded to a halt. Hector Martin (the developer of asahi Linux) has ceased development. Umid temper your expectations. M3+ will likely never be supported https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/

  • chippiewill

    yesterday at 5:53 PM

    It's not ground to a halt, Hector is a single developer out of many

the latest intel ultra chips are also pretty good, and so are the laptops using them, such as the asus zenbooks

16GB base!

Been using Airs since 2011, 2012 model lasted me to 2018 upgrade (Retina finally) but now I snagged the m4 pro Mini and it’s so small I brought it to the birthing inn with me and (with the help of a universal remote) just used the room TVs as a monitor. It’s so small that I can just throw it in a bag with a mouse/keyboard/HDMI and even a PS5 controller which I do appreciate my wife tolerating Jedi Cal joining us in the postpartum wing over PS5 streaming from the console at home, quite doable and the Mini’s built in speaker is quite a charmer all things considered! I ran it from inside a drawer under the baby “kiosk” and it definitely outgunned the in-room speakers that were clearly gimped (similar to putting your phone into the right enclosure amplifies the sound).

At home when not at my desk I’ve been using screen share to remote in from the 2018 Air, this is the first time since 2018 I bought a new computer and it’s oddly nice having it not be a laptop, don’t have to worry about the precious built-in screen or keyboard.

Caveat may be if I wasn’t working remote perhaps it would be different but not sure, using the 2018 Air as a client for the M4 Pro has been pretty solid for my current purposes and it’s nice still having an Intel Mac for the edge case backwards compatibility development needs.

Whoops didn’t mean to make a blog post in here…

If you have an Air and use Intellij IDEA or any other Jetbrains IDE can you let me know how the performance is?

This really looks like an amazing computer if it can handle long IDEA hours on medium projects.

• isoprophlex

  yesterday at 2:48 PM

  I use a 13 inch M3 Air (16 GB ram) with goland and pycharm. It's the best dev machine I ever owned, everything is a breeze, and the machine is super lightweight. I don't really notice thermal throttling... but then again i dont run LLMs locally or anything like that.

• volkadav

  yesterday at 2:57 PM

  I used[1] jetbrains tooling quite a bit on my m1 air and never had problems, though I did opt for the 16gb ram version. The newer models are presumably at least as performant if not better?

  ([1] These days my daily driver is an m1 mbp of some whizzbang 32gb variety, which only replaced the mba because my spouse wanted a travel machine and the mbp came for the low low cost of being caught in the late 2022 startup crash. For day to day ordinary backend dev work there really isn't a noticeable difference in my experience, except I guess the mbp is more awkward when working-from-couch. arm vs x86 was sometimes a little awkward around launch, but I can't remember the last time it was an actual hassle.)

• ezfe

  yesterday at 2:43 PM

  It’s totally fine, so long as your build doesn’t take so long (10+ min to throttle)

• artimaeis

  yesterday at 3:12 PM

  Using Rider on an Macbook Air M2 (24 GB RAM) -- admittedly, pretty small/simple code-bases for the most part. Great performance. Only issues come when I need a lot of docker containers running too, especially if they're not ARM images. With that I don't notice performance issues - but the battery drain is noticeable at that point.

• jghn

  yesterday at 2:45 PM

  I have an M1 for reference, with only 8GB RAM which is the real limiter here. I *can* use Jetbrains IDEs and I *can* build/develop software on it. It's a bit sluggish but doable. I try to not code on that machine, but sometimes it's the only machine I have available when I need to look at something.

  • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs

    yesterday at 2:51 PM

    Yeah, having just 8GB ram was the reason I never bought the older versions. This one starts at 16 so it picks my interest.

    • jghn

      yesterday at 3:16 PM

      I do regret the 8GB with some frequency. There was a 2-3 week shipping difference when they came out and I was impatient.

      That said, the fact that a 5 year old laptop with 8GB RAM is usable even for coding situations is astounding.

• earthnail

  yesterday at 2:41 PM

  Using RubyMine on an M2. Performance is great.

Official post: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/03/apple-introduces-the-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43266521)

No Nano-Texture Option. I actually returned an M3 Macbook Air I got for xmas because I find it too reflective, waiting and hoping for a non-reflective Macbook Air.

If Apple had made it clear they weren't gonna release a non-reflective screen for the Macbook air, I might've just kept the M3 or perhaps gotten the heavy Pro. Now I don't feel like getting any of these.

Why are we back to MagSafe? I liked just having the usb-c on my air.

• paxys

  yesterday at 3:05 PM

  Yeah, while I don't mind MagSafe, I'd 100% want an extra USB-C port instead.

  • atonse

    yesterday at 5:27 PM

    Is there a particular use case where you'd need the extra (I'm assuming you're wanting this for on the go use cases, otherwise you'd probably use a hub at your "home" location)

    • paxys

      yesterday at 5:32 PM

      Any hub actually worth using (Thunderbolt ports, high enough charging wattage, dual displays, 2.5Gb Ethernet) will run you like $300-$400, which is almost half the price of the Macbook. I'd rather have a couple more ports on the device.

      • jamespo

        yesterday at 7:02 PM

        But if the extra usb-c port is taken up by a charger what's the benefit?

        Also the air physically can't accomodate USB-A, ethernet, hdmi etc.

        • paxys

          yesterday at 8:17 PM

          You're not charging your laptop 100% of the time. The Air runs like 12 hours or more on a single charge. A Magsafe port is useless all that time.

• s_dev

  yesterday at 3:12 PM

  You can charge with both. The USB-C stuff is due to EU regulations and MagSafe because people love it as a charging cable type.

  • klausa

    yesterday at 3:36 PM

    USB-C on Macs is literally 10 years old this year, this has nothing to do with EU.

• kome

  yesterday at 3:00 PM

  magasafe saved my laptop several times in the last 10 years

• ZeroCool2u

  yesterday at 3:18 PM

  Both work fine for charging, so seems like best of both worlds to me.

Now I regret buying that Air M3 last year...

• xutopia

  today at 1:03 AM

  The good thing about these frequent upgrades by them is that you'll soon be able to just get a new device whenever you need it, without worrying about upgrade cycles.

• 0x1ceb00da

  today at 5:03 AM

  Upgrade now and you'll feel buyers remorse again when m5 comes out

no nano texture? :(

Looks good.

[dead]

For all the talk of the "Apple Tax", point me to a comparable laptop from another company at this price point. I don't think there has been one since Apple started the M series.

• ylee

  yesterday at 5:48 PM

  20 years ago, when I helped cover IT hardware including AAPL for a large investment bank, our analyses consistently showed that Apple products were comparable in price to competing products with comparable specs.

  I agree that Apple Silicon has given Apple an additional leg up on the competition, even aside from the more-than-competitive price.

  • insane_dreamer

    yesterday at 5:59 PM

    Agreed. My (former) x86 Macbook was the best out there at that price. The only other laptop I found that was comparable (this was ~10 years ago) was the Thinkpad Carbon X1 (and the Thinkpads in general back when they were still high quality; not sure I would buy one now), but it was similar in price to the Macbook.

• jpalomaki

  yesterday at 8:18 PM

  I don't think you can find anything in this form factor that would match the single core performance of M4.

Air is my favorite laptop of all time. Portable, durable, and now powerful enough to be a semi-workstation.

But why on earth Apple, your logos are filled with masonic and Babylonian symbology? Apple intelligence? Reversed Babalon? Mother of abominations? Really? Enough of this Thelema Crowley bullshit already. You are insulting my intelligence. We are reasonably educated people in Eastern Europe.

You don't have enough intellectual capital to generate more adequate geometry? And what is the message here? You are summoning the demons? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babalon

[dead]

Where does this obsession of making it as thin as possible even come from?

I am pretty sure almost everyone will gladly trade the "thinness" for a few standard USB and HDMI ports.

• janetmissed

  yesterday at 2:47 PM

  I used to hold the same opinion as you, but since getting a m2 air I’ve really enjoyed how thin and light it is. It really is a noticeable quality of life improvement. Once you have a decent stockpile of usb c cables the port thing isn’t really an issue anyways

• nickthegreek

  yesterday at 2:46 PM

  On the Air model? Its whole thing is being light and thin. On the Pro model, sure.

• ericpauley

  yesterday at 5:07 PM

  Macbooks have been USB-C for 10 years. All my devices have been replaced since then. USB-C is the standard USB port.

• AdamN

  yesterday at 2:55 PM

  That's what the MBP product line is for. More ports and performance for more expense and weight/size.

  I know it seems like a champagne problem but the Pro really can get annoyingly heavy when traveling and the Air is dreamy how light it is.

• cyanmagenta

  yesterday at 2:50 PM

  > I am pretty sure almost everyone will gladly trade the "thinness" for a few standard USB and HDMI ports.

  I think there’s a lot of people that want something as light and thin as possible to slip into your purse and take to the cafe.

  • dartharva

    yesterday at 2:55 PM

    Light, sure. Thin?

    I have never seen any instance where a laptop's thinness ended up factoring in ease of portability.

• hwc

  yesterday at 2:52 PM

  I care more about total mass than thinness. But those things tend to be correlated.

  • dartharva

    yesterday at 2:57 PM

    I doubt a few ports can add any significant weight difference to it.

• Apocryphon

  yesterday at 7:10 PM

  Steve Jobs.