Otherwise still looks like an amazing machine so I'm probably still getting one anyway.
supercharged /ˈsuːpətʃɑːdʒd/ Learn to pronounce adjective 1. (of an internal combustion engine) fitted with a supercharger. "a supercharged 3.8-litre V6"
2. extremely powerful or fast. "it's essentially a cutting-edge smartphone with a supercharged camera"
https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m2/specs/
> 3.5 mm headphone jack
Nice.
I am unhappy it's on the righthand side, but I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
* memory is capped at 8GB
* you have to pay ridiculous $300 for a 256GB SSD upgrade
18% is pretty decent, IMHO, for their bottom-most spec, especially given the RAM limit is being extended to 24GB, while the power consumption is still brutally good (18hrs video playback) and the screen is also a bit more spacious at 13.6"...
and it's not like they don't have faster CPUs. it's just the cheapest you can get and even that is getting faster!
tbh, im using an M1 Mac Mini since last December and it's sooo freaking fast and smooth, that I'm not even really motivated to upgrade at all, if it wouldn't be for the extra memory. though the 16GB is surprisingly sufficient too, if i have run browser tab suspender extensions and close my unused electron apps (notion, logseq, slack), while coding (in Clojure, using IntelliJ and Emacs).
1. 2017 3.1GHz Quad i7 clj -M -e 1 1.73s user 0.12s system 232% cpu 0.795 total
2. 2020 M1 Mac Mini clj -M -e 1 0.65s user 0.05s system 157% cpu 0.445 total
and I'm getting a very similar time-ratio, when I'm running our test suite for example. I find these speeds extremely satisfying already!
"Better for the Environment"
No, it is not better for the environment, it is not as bad for the environment.
Can you point to a product that highlights its strengths by framing them in a negative light instead of painting them positively?
I just don't see that line being effective.
There was a time when the earth could handle the CO2 humans created. There was a balance.
They did not give any number for single-thread speed, so it can be expected that there the improvement is much less impressive.
They said that the little cores have been improved substantially, so it is likely that a good part of the 18% comes from the faster little cores.
The contention was that "They should have said it's less bad instead of saying it's better". That is what I was responding to.
You've introduced a different topic, that is tangentially related, but not directly relevant to a discussion about framing things. It'd be relevant in a discussion about the absolute environmental friendliness of the device, but that's another discussion entirely.
I gave the 2011 one away, because I couldn't upgrade it anymore, but it is still used for audio/video editing.
The 2013 one has some issues with its hard-drive and I'm planning to upgrade it to an SSD. It's still a pretty capable machine, though I would probably put Linux on it, since the macOS upgrades for that are discontinued too.
The display panels are "just" 2K in them, but still super sharp, though a bit dusty inside... They are better than most cheaper external monitors I saw ppl using for everyday work...
I think a decade of runtime for Macs is not that uncommon. 2 decades would be even better, but I wouldn't call it a "vicious upgrade cycle"...
I mean, I'm still on an iPhone Xs Max and before that I had an iPhone 7 Pro and I have no intention of upgrading, despite the back-glass being cracked on it. and not because I can't afford it, but because I won't really utilize the extra power of the latest versions.
https://www.apple.com/de/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air
They show two models with 8gb. Period. Nothing say upgradable there, which is bad UX.
> But it is hidde in the fluff text much further down the page. Or on the next page, which you haven't opened yet.
Yeah, bad UX/lying.
They may have used the same five nanometer process, but that doesn't mean Apple's own costs went down. I don't know what their negotiations look like, but TSMC have stated that they'd be raising prices on already-established chip technology. In general, given supply issues for many of the components that go into making a laptop over the past few years, it would be a miracle for Apple's costs not to have risen.
Combine that with general increases in the price level, and 20% is probably not that far off.
A capitalistic company gonna do capitalistic things - shocking. Shocking!
Carbon Neutrality is branding and does nothing to reverse CO2 or climate change. It is all green washing.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article256-the-carbon-ne...
Better for the environment is never buying another computer.
Yes, I am saying that the MacBook Air M1 I am writing on right now should not exist. That what short term gains I am getting from it now will end up causing all your kids to suffer. I am saying you are all sacrificing your children future for novelty and convince. I ams also saying there is no way out of this because we have built this Tower of Babel and what will happen now is out of our hands.
Since we can't just put things back into a box, isn't complaining about marketing like this just barking up entirely the wrong tree? If the premise is that technology ideally shouldn't exist in its current form, then that requires an entirely different discussion built on an entirely different foundation, and Apple's marketing claims are just a small distraction at best.
Really? An older core2 computer uses like 10 times more electricity at idle than a halfway modern one. Also, since it is much less powerful, you might need multiple old computers to manage the sane workload.
I am completely unconvinced that wasting huge amounts of electricity is "better for the environment".
...but you could upgrade components. Yeah, and by now the only component in that computer that is still the same as when bought would be the case. So you threw out and bought 95% of a computer instead of 100%....
Apple and all these companies show no be allowed to use this BS carbon trading. They should be taxed directly for the cost of externalities on the price of the product. It would be so prohibitively expensive very few people could afford it. The profit these companies make is because they are not charging anyone the true cost.
We can put things back into the box. We just do not want to.
You know what my PR would say?
--
This creation and use of our products causes harm to the environment and puts the planet, and your children's future, at risk.
I’ve been burned by Apple hardware faults before. Dodgy keyboard, faulty display, bad battery. It would be cool to see the design velocity slow down a bit for some models so that they can iron out the bugs properly. I’ve no interest in being a Guinea pig for whatever A9999’s problem shakes out to be.
To be fair, Apple will often conclude that the faults are endemic and engage in a replacement program.
The Mini is a true workhorse machine.
I wonder if a M2 mini would have been perceived as competition for the macStudio.
I don't think so. The smallest Studio has twice as many Firestorm cores and the M2 tops out at 24GB.
Woah. Speaking of batteries I've been impressed with the battery life in the new MBPs. They last forever with these new M chips. One of the best features.
Other than that, happy to see magsafe return.
Feels like a cash grab to get people to buy more obsolete MagSafe chargers instead of moving towards a world where chargers are ubiquitous and universal.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that they just didn't have the data capacity to add another USB-C port and wanted to free up one of the USB-C ports, however other manufacturers seem to be coping with this.
Physical footprint doesn't matter for me; my Osprey backpack can easily take a 16" laptop. It's the weight that's the factor for me.
> One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz
For my next work laptop, I've been waiting to see if (sometime soon) there would be a MBP that supported external refresh rates > 60 Hz.
Given that the M2 MBA still has that limitation, I suspect not.
> "You can also connect up to a 6K display."
Possibly they’re moving to the iPhone model of keeping the last gen around as a lower price entry level device.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...
Would love to hear from folks with Apple Silicon experience!
Wanted to upgrade to 32gb ram but max is 24 on the new airs.
Also, the small print is outdated:
> The displays on the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro have rounded corners at the top. When measured as a standard rectangular shape, the screens are 14.2 inches and 16.2 inches diagonally (actual viewable area is less).
Oh that's for the pro
The horizontal display resolution is the same, the vertical resolution has increased by 64px.
Honestly I don't get the limitation. I'm assuming there were trade-offs involved, but it seems like an odd feature to sacrifice.
You have to remember that these are just scaled mobile GPUs. They can't hold a candle to proper dedicated GPU hardware and never will until Apple gets around to designing desktop specific GPU SoCs.
Heck, even the Switch technically has an Nvidia GPU.
https://www.asus.com/us/site/gaming/rog/gaming-laptops/flow-...
It's a very small laptop with the option to utilize a current generation Nvidia GPU.
I’m thinking of switching from PC land but not sure.
The current model will probably not even notice what you throw at it.
I am working on a beat up old Inspiron… I gotta think an Air can handle the work.
The previous one was really comfortable to type on since you didn't feel the 90 degree metal edge digging into your wrist like on the pro models.
Was one of the main reasons I got it.
Hell, they rewrote Google Work, hey, I'm Apple pay me $200 for rewriting software that has existed for 12 years already.
I do some volume purchasing of tech product (Lenovo / Dell Laptops and desktops + poweredge on server side + some networking on other gear). I like those products, they are fine.
That said, my wife has an air. I think folks are seriously underestimating the air if they are thinking it just something to browse the web.
The "pro class" X1 screen resolution is 1920 x 1200 / the "web laptop" Air is 2,560 x 1,600.
I suspect it would probably have issues running 4K @120hz however.
Hard to answer the question regarding 4k+ ultrawides @120hz though, primarily because i dont think there is a display like that in existence yet (googling didn't net much success there for me). The only ultrawide 4k+ display i found that is above 60hz is the LG 5k ultrawide with thunderbolt 4 support, and it maxes out at 70hz (and M1 Max MBP supports it at that refresh rate just fine, that's my current setup).
Back when I had my M1 MBP, I never managed to get above 60Hz, and I found some articles suggesting that nobody could. I'm curious why you had more success.
This was the 27th MBA we deployed, so 26 people only used one external monitor (and I went back and asked if anyone needed an upgrade for dual-monitor use in case they just ignored it). All non engineering roles though.
I've noticed that, too, which I don't quite understand. Dual displays were touted as a productivity multiplier back in the day. Is that not the case anymore?
People aren't productive.. haven't you noticed?
It's not just notifications of the phone. Having to switch between the huge amount of apps and windows is bad even on more screens, let alone on a single screen.
Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I've never been in a position where I thought that having more screen real estate than a large 4k display would be helpful. When I need to have more than one application visible I can do that; when I want to focus on one thing at a time I can do that too.
The upside, he handed off his huge tricked out machine to me. I think especially for folks who are not in one spot (ie, staying with a partner, vacation home etc etc) it works fine.
Over time I've also noticed I no longer care about having the fastest possible laptop, since my job provides me with an MBP and that's where serious work gets done.
I have a feeling this is going to be backordered for a long, long time though.
I wish other manufacturers like Lenovo or Dell tried to compete in terms of fanless design so that there were more options. Lenovo in particular seems quite unfocused as they release tons of devices all the time and good ones are much more expensive than Apple's offerings, at least in EU.
You can already get AMD Zen 3+ machines in this size class, that isn't too far behind in perf & efficiency. Doing so gives you much better Linux compatibility, a touchscreen, and (sometimes) better feeling keyboards. Battery life will always come up short though, x86 laptops just can't match these new macbooks.
There are better keyboards (Thinkpads are great), even comparable screens, fast processors, better dedicated GPUs. But somehow no one can get the touchpad right.
That should be trivial to fix with a battery update. 5-6-7 years is a good run...
In any case I bought a second battery pack from TECHOWL and it seems to be working for a few weeks so far. Fingers crossed...
Like you I'll probably replace it, but not for a couple years once the software catches up and when I can get it cheap refurbed.
It has also survived multiple water spills, and the speakers don't work anymore. It's definitely time for an upgrade :)
Anybody know if the 67W USB-C power adapter is finally stock? Edit: Nope, still gotta wait a month: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MKU63AM/A/67w-usb-c-power... Other (bigger) chargers are a 2 month wait. Looks like Apple is still suffering from supply chain issues.
That's the one thing that's kind of gimped it for me—if I could get more WiFi bandwidth, especially with the ProRes decoding built into the M2, I might be able to edit 4K video over my network wirelessly for the first time. Would be amazing.
To be clear, I still think the M1 Air was the best portable laptop Apple made since the 11" Air before it was discontinued. I just think it being so 'wireless-first', it should have the best wireless speed possible.
I guess I’m selling my brand new M1.
Every time I saw it I felt a little pain -- why did I buy the white one? (Which turned half yellow with time.) I guess it made it easier to give away when it got too slow for coding.
I have the M1 Air and my two complaints are: no MagSafe, no SD Card. Otherwise, I love it, even though it crashes every time it goes to sleep on an external monitor and Apple's in-house software makes me root for Asahi every day. But it does look a little bland.
This new black one fixes 1/2 of my hardware complaints: it'll be hard not to upgrade out of cycle.
on the new m2: i have no complaints with my current m1 (i don't miss magsafe that much?), and the increased price makes the new gen meh for me. good if you're upgrading from intel, but i'll still recommend the m1 air for the foreseeable future.
i'll say this once again: i want a 15"/16" macbook air.
EDIT: and is now the only laptop without MagSafe? There are more ports on the new MBA!
Same for the new M2 Macbook Pro.
A lot of development isn't CPU bound but is memory bound or at least can really benefit from more memory. This upgrade makes the MBA an entirely viable dev machine for many workloads.
I have a MBP (Intel) but it's expensive. Getting a viable machine for $1200 would be great. You feel less bad about losing it or breaking it or upgrading it more often.
Really happy to see this.
As an aside, having 8GB of unified memory even as an option in 2022 is a joke. It should just be 16Gb minimum.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/26/apples-studio-displays-poor-w...
What's the point of Macbook Pro 13"?
MagSafe was one of Apple's best hardware ideas, and I'm really surprised they dropped it for a few generations. I'm glad they realized their mistake and brought it back, though.
As a parent with 2 kids - giving each a Mac laptop that won't cause eyestrain/reduced productivity is a non starter at $1999 each.
I see it there looking right at it... but I'm sure in a few minutes it won't exist in my mind once again. It is simply that out of the way which seems so strange given that it is right in the middle... but that has always been a dead space in macOS.
The only app that I'm aware of that actually helps address this is Bartender, when they should have figured this shit out before they came out. It's possible that they introduced some fix in MacOS Ventura, but there's no indication that this is the case so far.
Looks like it adds active cooling but keeps an old design? Is it for generalists who don't want the 14"? Who is it for?
I’ve got a 16 MacBook Pro and it’s great and all - but soooo thick. Like as thick as my old, old, MacBook Pro from 2012. I was expecting it to be more like a 2015 MacBook Pro when I bought it.
I’d much prefer some of that sweet apple silicon power, in a nice thin 15 inch size please.
Logically, I would like to see the Air be renamed to just “MacBook”, with a 15” variant for those that want a larger screen but don’t need the extra horsepower. The Air name would better fit a spiritual successor to the 2015 MacBook IMO (though with a usable keyboard and a non-gimped CPU).
As for the 13” MacBook Pro—I don’t understand why that thing is still on sale and being refreshed. It makes the lineup incredibly confusing, with 3 different computers in a $200 price range (M1 Air, M2 Air, 13” Pro).
yes
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
That can be a big if, though. And otherwise you are stuck running everything under qemu, which is going to be very slow.
--- edit
Apparently you'll be able to use Rosetta to execute x86 in a Linux VM: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
It took me 4 months to iron out everything with M1+Docker where I work. There's still a question weekly about some oddity in our Docker channel.
Remember that container concepts (i.e. jails for a BSD) aren't natively supported by MacOS. The entire ecosystem is built on the backs of a very awesome community. In some cases, there are other things missing from MacOS that prevent them from creating the type of experience you get with WSL (especially networking).
Rosetta virtualization would resolve one of the biggest headaches I have had: x86 container emulation speed. No idea if it would do anything about the second: most of the x86 containers I have tried immediately segfault (nodejs containers seem to be an exception to that rule).
If you're working with other people, who remain on x86, you will come to experience the hell that is multi-arch builds.
Wait a few months and then decide based on what people are seeing.
Apparently, it retails for $60 alone! https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MNWM3AM/A/35w-dual-usb-c-...
Retailers like Anker sell a similar charger with double the power at that price range.
Even the RAM and SSD stats you cite are apples and oranges - both have gotten dramatically faster in the last decade.
Not to be rude, but a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. Software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years. What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
Unless you want to run VMs. Then more RAM is generally more better.
- the processor has several times more transistors and cores,
- plus several special purposes devices for encoding video, AI tasks, and so on
- the video performance is several times faster
- the battery lasts 4 times as much,
- the RAM is several times faster,
- the SSD is 4-5x faster,
- the display has twice the resolution and extremelly improved brightness and color rendition...
and so on
So dissapointing /s
With inflation, £2000 in 2012 is equal to about £2516 today. I configured an M2 MacBook Air with these specs for £1750 today, so it actually costs less in real terms.
Edit: A 13" MacBook Pro with the same specs is also £1750
Though if you ignore the specs, the M2 air (for 1500 so you get the same storage space), is probably equivalent – 8GB unified RAM and fast SSD seems equivalent to 16GB ram from decade ago.
Together with the improved software capabilities, I think the overall "experience" is "better" and you get more bang for buck.
Historically, if you compare pre-M1 Macs to equivalent PCs, they were very price competitive. There are no equivalents to Apple Silicon Macs.
> MagSafe 3 charging port
> ...
> Two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports with support for:
> Charging
> ...
There is absolutely zero doubt, and as others mentioned, it is the same on the 14" and 16".
I have the 16" M1 Pro MacBook Pro and regularly run it from a small 30W USB-C PD charger. That keeps up with the demand even running Photoshop, Minecraft, Xcode, etc.
Edit:
It is a power supply that came with an XPS 15
The text on the brick claims 5V 1A and 20 V 6.5 A, missing 9V and 15V levels and the current on 20V seems not to be standard. It does charge everything I have plugged it into, but they might all be falling back to 5V1A. The back text could also just not be telling the truth.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08YY5XG4N?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_...
RavPower sells some dual-port models that will do 90W PD if you use one port or 45/45W or 60/30W using both ports. I ran my i9 MBP on the single port and it regularly drew 90W.
It's cheaper than the 96w charger that came with my Macbook.
Good lord, to think of not that many years ago still needing to be firmly attached to an array of spinning rust to get performance for that. Now, we want to (nearly can) do it wirelessly. Just another set of gear adding to the pile of boat anchors I've been collecting
I used to have an 11" Air as a daily driver. The portability was nice but I'd never go back to a computer that small. Too cramped, too little screen real estate, too small a battery. It doesn't surprise me that 11" laptops are rare these days.
-802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 wireless networking
-IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac compatible
I mean, those specs seem to say that it doesn't support Wi-Fi 6E.
(It is not updated for the new models yet).
However, for 2020 & 2021 models is nothing out of ordinary: 2x2 ax, max 80 MHz wide channels. Basically what every other vendor at the market offers.
During 2019, they went a step backwards: from 3x3 MIMO to 2x2 MIMO. Granted, many APs do not support more than 2x2, but there are models on the market that do, and those who care about these things had a choice. Now, it is join the averages.
https://gizmodo.com/you-can-now-get-a-10gbps-ethernet-port-o...
That said, what exactly does E imply? I was really trying to distinguish devices using separate 6ghz backplane, and that was annoyingly opaque to me as a person who writes does code but aggressively avoids anything networking :D
And contrary to yours opinion, I consider that both 4 (-n) and 5 (-ac) brought very nice things (like support for new frequencies, wider channels or multiple streams). I happened to own 3x3 MIMO ac router at the time and together with 2015 MBP, I saw what it was not necessary to provide ethernet port anymore.
So I'm guessing it's the same as the M1 MacBook Air.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/I9wcLIy
It's empty space, and the whole row goes completely black in most fullscreen cases too as the screen is 16:10 BELOW the menu bar.
You forget it as easily as you forget that you have a nose right in the middle of your vision.
Btw, is the mandatory touch bar thingy back? That would be a step back in my book.
It is not. The Touch Bar 13" MBP was updated with the new M2 chip but kept the old design.
This pushes menu and status bars up into the bezel area at the top of your laptop's lid, leaving more room in the primary 16x10 display area for apps and things.
It's free real estate, why not have menus go up there?
It is identical to the M2 MacBook Air, except:
- Worse camera: 720p camera where the Air has a 1080p camera
- Worse speakers: stereo speakers where the Air has four-speakers (I'm assuming stereo is 2-speakers?)
- Bigger battery: 58.2 WHr vs 52.6 WHr (about a 2hr battery life difference)
- Slightly heavier: +0.3 lbs over the Air
- Slightly smaller screen: 13.3" vs the Air's 13.6", although this is probably due to the notch
- Has the touchbar
They are priced the same from what I can tell.
You can't do stereo with fewer than 2 speakers but even if you have 64, you're probably still doing stereo. (Or you are a movie theater.)
Generally speaking, you can probably achieve better stereo sound with the 4 speakers than with the 2, but this is not always the case. Coming from Apple, I would normally expect the Pro to have higher-end speakers and thus probably sound better.
But I could be wrong, since Actual Audio Professionals don't use the onboard speakers for anything serious.
Also: I'm really surprised there are enough TouchBar lovers to justify its continued existence.
It's truly bizarre. They must have 10 million of the old laptop bodies in a warehouse or something?
> They must have 10 million of the old laptop bodies in a warehouse or something?
Mind blown.
Looking forward to upgrading from the 8GB air to a 24GB air now.
If you can guarantee you won't need more, sure it's plenty viable. If you can't make that guarantee, you need to remember there is no upgrade path. You will be selling the machine and buying a new one.
(switch rendering API in JRE used by Intellj/Pycharm to Metal for rendering)
So this, like the M1 supports only ONE external display.. so as long as you live the lopsided big-small life, sure.
Oh no, you're breaking my heart. Is there no adapter you can buy that splits that 6k thunderbolt bandwidth into two smaller external displays? Okay I just googled, and it looks like there are third party DisplayLink which sort of maybe work, but are not officially supported? But people SEEM to have dual 4k monitors working?
If I can not have a big desktop system and just use my daily laptop for developing these hard, CPU bound simulation tasks; I'll be a happy camper.
So, horses for courses.
The trick is not to mix your personal stuff, like movies, photos and music with your work stuff. Also make sure you regularly clean up the older versions of the software you use, including Docker layer caches, brew / nix packages, JetBrains IDEs, browser caches, etc. If you are not doing audio/video work, then removing iMovie and GarageBand frees up 4.5GB. Similarly Keynote/Numbers/Pages 2GB.
> Configurable to: 16GB or 24GB
Store is updated too, 16GB upgrade is 200$ and 24GB is 400$.
Edit: as comments pointed out, I’m wrong - thanks for the corrections.
Yes, it's noticeable.
I once thought the same thing only to realize my settings on the trackpad weren’t quite the same and somehow my brain just glitched and I glossed over that (important) detail.
--
2012 12" Macbook:
Height: 0.52 inch
Width: 11.04 inches
Depth: 7.74 inches
Weight: 2.03 pounds
Volume 44.43 cubic inches
--
2022 13" Air:
Height: 0.44 inch
Width: 11.97 inches
Depth: 8.46 inches
Weight: 2.7 pounds
Volume 44.56 cubic inches
Controlling mobile emulators when developing mobile apps can also benefit from a touchscreen.
> I feel like the screen would get dirty.
It does, but I'd just wipe it down occasionally like I do my phone.
Pinching and scrolling are areas where to me it seems touchscreens have just tried to make up for shortcomings with touchpads.
Side note, massive praise to anyone who has contributed to the windows drivers for the apple trackpads. They are amazing.
and it's freaking buttery smooth. notice the "aarch64" part!
A pro won't blink while an Air will throttle to keep itself from melting. For long video and photo jobs, that really matters (or for long (>24h) running simulation/scientific code or plethora of other examples).
The 13" MBP is a relic that should have been discontinued. It makes no sense for Apple to have kept it around.
A long video render is easily 2-3h at 100% CPU load. A scientific simulation is >24h at 100% load, with instruction trains optimized to get every ooze of performance, hence hitting the TDP almost instantly.
A MacBook Air M1's body is not an unlimited heatsink attached to M1 SoC. I've succeeded to heat my M1 air to unusual levels when the platform was new and some programs were prone to entering infinite loops.
If you add it to a laptop, it could actually map the background environment and do some really fancy processing for video calls. Or even improve audio based on the room shape it sees.
https://www.apple.com/in/newsroom/2020/03/apple-unveils-new-...
(They’re not the same kinds of LiDAR, but still…)
Absolutely nobody wants to hear that you have magical oracular powers that enable you to tell us what the secret evil motives are behind Apple's CPU development iteration schedule and product release schedule.
That's not to forget the improvements in network speeds, the screen, the speakers, the battery life, the webcam, etc.
If I did have endless money, or my regular work was heavily IO bound, then it wouldn't change anything, except I'd be much more willing to ignore how much it costs.
Yes, the new naming scheme is way more understandable for normal users.
There are always tradeoffs, and I find the notch to be a trade-off with no real loss. Especially on a Mac where the hardware/software integration is tight enough that the notch never poses an issue. I could see a notch on a windows/linux laptop being a more significant problem given that the OS may not be designed to work around the notch so seamlessly
I also need to mention that this thing is light. Lighter than an iPad pro, lighter than any MBAir.
(But I’m still getting the MBAir, because it’s fanless. Fanless still beats no notch.)
The M2 Air looks great, and the 14" and 16" MBP continue to be great as well (but pricey).
The 13" MBP offers you nothing but an outdated chassis, screen, and keyboard.
Ignore the word "Pro". There was nothing more Pro about the 13" MBP when M1 came out... and it's even less Pro than the M2 MBA this time around.
Anything more than that and it chokes. Too many tabs, it chokes. Too many software updates, woo boy does she choke. That poor machine!
It's perfect segmentation, most people don't care, and those that do will pay.
In a nutshell, not all RAM is created equal.
Edit: 16 -> 32 GB with M1 Pro is $400. 32 -> 64 GB with M1 Max is also $400. 64 -> 128 GB with M1 Ultra is $800. Memory upgrades for the high-end Macs are surprisingly cost-effective.
I also think there is big argument for devs to be developing webaps on consumer gear. How else you can spot the issues with your apps. And tbh if your macbook air has problems running your webapp... well. Good luck.
Usually have like 20-25 tabs open in safari, a VS Code instance (sometimes two), a Nextjs app + express backend running against a local Postgres. This is always in the yellow memory pressure range for me.
If I close the browser or just stick with a few tabs it’s all good, but when each tab can suck 100s of MB it quickly adds up. It’s a workflow my 2014 MBP with 16GB still handles though so I don’t feel like my expectations are too high.
What actually feasts on memory is the various chat apps and project management and knowledge-base management software, in-browser email clients, github pages, JetBrains IDEs.
You should keep these closed, whenever u can and then 8GB is enough comfortably. You will still receive Slack notifications on your phone, then u can fire up Slack to reply or have a discussion. Same with Notion or Logseq. You don't need to have a gmail tab open all the time either. The built-in Mail.app might just be enough for you too, which might eat slightly less memory. You can use Sublime Text or Emacs for editing, instead of VS Code or WebStorm. Install a browser-tab suspender extension. Download technical docs and read them via Dash (or whatever open-source equivalent it has). Have you looked into how much memory does a github.com page eats?
People getting their hands on 8GB M1 MacBook Airs in the early days were saying the memory management and performance were making it snappier than the 16GB Intel MacBooks.
on linux you would have pretty much no overhead from running software in containers.
It's more complicated than that; if you look at the reviews and tests 8GB M1 machines, you'll see there were no issues like the ones you're mentioning.
The pipeline between the unified RAM and the SSD is so fast, it's essentially a L3 cache as apposed to swap as in the way we traditionally think about it.
(Hell, is the central GPU even running the touchbar, or is there a specialized display circuit just for it?)
That said, my reaction to this whole thread is pretty much "I guess multiple external monitors is a reason to upsell you to a Pro machine" so we agree on that point :)
But if it (as it actually is I suspect) a USB connected thing that refreshes very slowly, it's not a display at all.
And the MacBook Air can take a USB "monitor" for whatever that's worth.
Framerate's hard to determine from a youtube video of someone pointing a camera at it, single-stepping has some things seeming to move at the same framerate as the camera but redrawing the whole screen as the player moves around looks more like 1/3 of the camera's framerate to me.
> What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
If the swapping is fast enough not to be noticeable, then speed is all that matters. In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all!
The whole reason why we have all these layers of memory (disk, RAM, L3, L2 and L1 cache, etc) is exactly speed, nothing else. The closer to the CPU, the faster, but also more expensive.
NVME is around two orders of magnitude slower than DDR3 RAM, so as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall.
As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
There's no need for personal attacks.
> as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall.
Yes, probably. Two points though:
1. My comment was that _if_ SSD performance was comparable to RAM, there would be no need for the latter.
2. I have very rarely swapped on my 16Gb M1 Air, and when I did I only noticed later when looking back at graphs. I'm sure there was a performance hit but I never felt it.
> Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
I do plenty of actual, professional use on my 16Gb M1 Air. Right now I have 3 VS Code windows open compiling Go code, running acceptance tests and whatnot. I also have Mail, Safari (with tens of tabs) and Firefox (with >100 tabs) open. A few minutes ago I also had Slack open on it. I regularly start iTerm to do terminal tasks.
You must have an Intel machine. I had a powerful fully specced 32Gb i9 16" MBP. This cheap and humble 16Gb passively cooled M1 blows it right out of the water in every single aspect. It's even better at running Intel Docker images!
Well, I use my M1 (16 GB) for heavy video editing and music sessions, plus professional programming, with IDEA, VMs, and so on. And I don't seem to ever need even close to 16GB, much less "way north", or even saw it be slow.
>As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
Maybe it's time to come over to M1 and 12.4?
No. Dual channel DDR3 went up to about 18 GB/s read and 14 GB/s write. [1]
The latest NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD are about 13 GB/s read and 12 GB/s write. [2]
Apple SSD are about half that now, but most DDR3 users didn't have highest clocked dual channel RAM either. So roughly a factor of 2 or so at best, about a 50x difference compared to two orders of magnitude :-)
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/2792/5
[2] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/86395/apacer-is-first-with-pc...
I'm sitting here on an M1 MacBook Pro with 64GB of memory. I'm running Chrome with a few dozen tabs open, Slack, VS Code, and Terminal. Apparently 32GB of memory is being "used".
Do you believe I would experience noticeable performance loss if I was running 16GB of memory?
Plenty of people will be more than happy with 8GB of RAM on an M1. I had a base model M1 Mac Mini and it worked great even for gaming.
Obviously if you're running VMs or editing video or doing any other memory intense workload you're going to need more memory. But for anyone who doesn't need an absurd (>16gb) amount of memory (college students, many programmers, those who use computers just for web browsing and Netflix), 8GB or 16GB will feel snappy.
Just in case anyone was curious, I looked into this recently, assuming 7-8GB/s was pretty darn fast, but dual channel DDR2 RAM was doing such speeds in 2002. So a high end SSD is about as fast as 20 year old memory, if you ignore latency.
The idea that Mx swapping to NVME is essentially no-op from performance perspective is patently wrong.
I was interested until I saw it tops out at 8gb. My environment typically needs just over 16gb.
I never said it was. I said _if_ it was, we wouldn't need RAM.
That's just some handwaving complain that doesn't mean much.
>What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
Try
- opening 2 Linux/Windows VMs on that 2012 laptop
- or opening a big Logic project with 100 tracks, convolution reverbs, high end AU/VSTs, and so on
- or opening and editing several 8K, ney, 4K video streams, and slap some VFX nodes on them...
- or running a programming IDE like Idea
- or compiling a large C++ codebase
... and several other tasks, and compare running the same on the 2022 machine.
Since "software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years" it should be comparable, right?
My point is rather, "16GB in 2012, 16GB in 2022, no difference". And I say: try doing any of those things on your 2012 machine and a 16GB M1, and you'll immediately see the difference.
Over 22GB of that is cache. I’m sure some of that is useful but the overwhelming majority of it is just being used because the memory is freely available so why not? If it improves performance it’s not in anything I’ve ever managed to notice between my 16GB work machine and 64GB personal one (which are used for largely similar tasks, though I’d say the work one is a bit more heavily stressed).
Sure some cleanroom laboratory benchmark will say the 64GB version is faster. And for some workloads I’m sure it’s a bigger deal. But a human just isn’t going to perceive much practical benefit from a full Chrome restart being 5% faster or whatever.
This is the very type of bamboozlement I was alluding to - instruction set and/or silicon architecture doesn't actually change the amount of data you use.
Citrix will still need to buffer the same (compressed?) 4K worth of pixels and Edge will still to load up the full DOM, cache all the sources, stand up a sandbox with javascript virtual machine etc.
There's nothing magical there... a single frame of 16 bit 8K RAW will allocate the exactly same amount of heap on M1, M2, Intel or anything else for that matter.
I'm now playing a 4K movie on Plex. It's using a little over 1Gb RAM for that. After I started it, my computer swapped ~250Mb to the SSD. Firefox is still snappy. Safari is still running normally. VS Code is still doing its thing. I even started a `brew update` on iTerm, and I have the App Store installing a couple apps. Mail still runs fine, sends and receives, and I can switch between mail accounts and messages.
So, you may be technically right about the memory usage and the need for swapping. What you're missing is the fact that it doesn't hurt the user experience.
This is not marketing or bamboozlement. This is me on the same laptop I'm typing this answer.
You should probably do a deep inspection of your beliefs and stop denying the actual, practical experience of many people who are responding to you with real world experience.
Oh, but it does when it has a hardware memory compression engine. The very different GPU design also means it can use less (or more) memory in different situations.
Even more so for other pipelines, involving CPU+GPU.
MacOS also has memory compression, assisted by the CPU.
And there are other ways an OS can use to keep memory usage lower given a different CPU architecture...
I am aware that macOS is better than Linux with low memory conditions but I can’t imagine this, granted I have an older (2020) MacBook Pro, but I have ran out of ram and I specifically opted for the 32G one.
As in: I got the infamous “your system is low on memory” dialog.
All it took was teams, slack, chrome, MS word, docker (vm with default config) and 2 1G VMs invirtualbox
That also brings issue with networking. Sure, if you are using the bridged (in Docker's parlance) networks, you won't notice. If you need to use host/ipvlan/macvlan, you will.
The M1/M2 apple hardware specifically seems to be around an order of magnitude from what I've seen (ddr4x 60-70gb/sec vs 7gb/sec for the NVME or thereabouts).
The obvious observation here is that the fab yields for high memory apple silicone must not be all that great, which is why they're mostly shipping 8 and 16gb versions.
You were wrong, it's ok...welcome to the SSD future :-)
Never mind comparing bleeding edge NVMe with (by now) decade-old DDR3, while the current bleeding edge DDR5 is now trickling out at 100GB/s+ pretty easily.
Never mind DDR memory latencies of ~50ns, vs NVMe at 50uS+.
Just because the user doesn't notice GUI problems doesn't mean it's not going to be a catastrophic bottleneck in any memory-intensive application.
Except I have two M1 MacBook Pros (one 16GB, one 64GB). I frankly don't notice the difference between the two on any workload. This involves compiling multiple projects, running multiple docker containers locally in virtual machines, running VS Code, Slack, Chrome, and other productivity tools.
These machines frankly feel like alien fucking technology and I don't say that lightly. I'm used to year-over-year improvements being almost unnoticeable. These machines feel like I've jumped ten or more years forward in performance and responsiveness. And they do so while barely generating heat. My previous Intel MBP would make my home office hot just by being in a Zoom call. When I first got my M1 MBP, I left it running all night performing a SIMD-heavy pure math workload pegging every core at 100%. Not only was it faster, but the room wasn't even perceptibly warmer than ambient.
I have a gaming PC next to my work area. Zen 9 3950X, GeForce 3080, 64GB of DDR-4000 RAM, and Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. The fans go blazing and I start sweating just booting Windows. And unless I'm doing something in VR, it performs comparably to the MacBook Pro. I barely turn the damn thing on these days.
Alien technology.
It's really impressive what Apple has managed to do with the M1 and M2 chips. If an Apple M chip ever offers comparable performance on AAA games, I'll get rid of my desktop computer.
I doubt that AAA game devs would develop for the MacOS/Metal platform anytime soon.
If I go to their store website it shows me only two options:
- 8 core, 8 core gpu, 8gb, 256
- 8 core, 10 core gpu, 8gb, 512
No indication whatsoever that this 8gb is not fixed. Nor is the storage fixed. But the only way to find out is to try and buy it, at which point I can just turn the first model into the second or something else entirely. Also, none of the presented options is anywhere close in price to the top spec model.
I thought apple was supposed to be good at UX?
> how would you know that ram is confugurable?
2 options:
- Scroll down a little, and under "Gemeinsamer Arbeitsspeicher" it says:
"Der M2 hat einen schnelleren Arbeitsspeicher als der M1, mit 50 Prozent mehr Speicherbandbreite. Er kann mit bis zu 24 GB konfiguriert werden – 8 GB mehr als beim M1 – für flüssigeres Multitasking und einfaches Arbeiten mit großen Dateien."
- Click on the "Wählen" button under the chosen model. It's very obvious in the next screen that you can configure RAM.
That is the whole point and I said that already...
If you look through this thread you see quite a few peopke thinking you can only get 8gb of ram because the only two models shown feature 8gb and no text next to that indicating otherwise. Only if you think that apple might be lying, you go to the next page and see that they offer more than 8.
> Scroll down a little, and...
No, scroll down a lot and then it is hidden in the fluff text. Great, doesn't change that it is missing in the central place people actually look at.
All the "well technically you can find out by jumping through these hoops" does not change that this is bad UX.