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?
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.
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.
I have the M3 Max, and a custom built pc using some Ryzen chip that has roughly equivalent benchmark scores to the M3 Max.
The amount of cooling and power required for such a PC versus the aluminum slab with small fans that almost never turn on is a testament to the insanely good engineering of the M series chips.
I compile large c++ codebases on a daily basis, but the M3 Max never makes me feel like I can “grab a cup of coffee”.
M series mac's are my dream c++ development machines. Just this week I was investigating some potential bugs in Qt's javascript engine and I was recompiling it from source across multiple tags to bisect. On my i9 mac I would compile Qt overnight, on my m3 pro it takes about 10 minutes, on battery, silently. Truly remarkable.
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.
“When we saw that first system and then you sat there and played with it for a few hours and the battery didn’t move, we thought ‘Oh man, that’s a bug, the battery indicator is broken’”
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.
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
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.
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.
In the context of software development, I run Linux on those AMDs and it's a great experience. It's not for everyone and I respect that, but it's not too hard these days.
Also a Windows machine with WSL isn't the worst thing, just treat it well.
The problem is that you pay with battery life. I did some Windows vs Linux laptop battery life testing when I bought my Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4.
The test itself is simple: a Puppeteer script that loads the Reddit front page and scrolls it at 50 px/s for 10 minutes, in a loop until the battery dies. This actually produces a fairly decent load including video decoding (because Reddit autoplays by default, and there are plenty videos in the feed). I also had Thunderbird, Discord, and Telegram running in the background.
On Windows 11, the battery dies in 500 minutes.
On Linux Mint 21.3, it dies in 200 minutes.
Now, this is because Chrome (and Firefox!) disable GPU-accelerated rendering by default on Linux due to "unstable drivers". To be fair, it really is unstable - when I enabled it and watched the test as it was going, I saw the Firefox tab in a crashed state more than once. But even then, with Firefox + GPU acceleration, I got 470 minutes of battery life on Windows vs 340 minutes on Linux.
I had a 2023 ASUS Zephyrus G14 (AMD 6800 + 6900HD dGPU) and I took a battery hit, but not near what you saw. Somewhere closer to 20-25%.
It’s bigger problem was it was far too eager to trigger the dGPU, especially with accelerated graphics in browsers and the like. So I ended up running it in integrated only mode, unless I wanted to play games.
The problem with Apple is there is this awful MacOS along with the walled garden company called apple. The Problem with windows is.. none I can install my own.
I never understand why people are so fixated on battery runtime. If you actually use the device indoors, don't you have a possibility to charge anytime. For me, I alternate between my home office room and the living room. Sometimes I work when on the train. And even less often in national flights and on airports. Except when flying or on very outdated trains, there never is an issue charging.
I like to use my devices without needing to be tethered to an outlet. I don't like having to deal with wires creating trip/pull hazards because my laptop needs charging. Sitting on the porch without needing to run extension cords is also nice.
I have a problem when the laptop doesn't survive 2 days on suspend... My previous T480 never had a problem, even on a 50% battery... but the newer T14 sometimes does.
If I close my lid with 100% battery at the end of the workday, I should be able to open it up the next morning and get at least a few hours of work in before the battery dies.
And this used to work.
But with the same laptop, a certain version of windows has basically eliminated any benefits of shutting the laptop hinge.
Heck the worst part is the same thing happens even if you shut down windows. The only reason it’s now become usable for me is because I learnt if you do shift + power off that does a real shutdown, unlike a regular shutdown.
100% this. My daily driver is a 2015 MacBook Pro that I only have one complaint about: the battery life doesn’t come anywhere close to letting me work on an airplane if there’s no 120V plugs available. I mean… most of the time I don’t mind just sleeping but it would be great to take better advantage of the quiet time with no slack messages.
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.
Yeah, because apple is totally reliable for sleeping when it is supposed to. I love my macbook, but I have dealt with over a decade of macbooks waking when they should not. Love it when my macbook cooks itself in my bag overnight.
I have never met someone with this problem, and have not experienced it myself in over 12 years. Closing the lid and walking away is what MacBooks are (were?) known for, I guess in my circles.
It’s a pretty common issue. Search around and you will find pages and pages of people experiencing the same issues on macrumors, the apple discussion forum, etc. Glad it hasn’t been a problem for you, I envy you!
I assume you’ve turned off “allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer” and “wake on network access” in system preferences? Those are the only things I can think of that can randomly wake up macs
Oh yeah, I’ve turned every single possible thing off. It still randomly dark-wakes. And then, when it does, it will sometimes get into a doom loop of scanning the network and refusing to release its power assertions, meaning it won’t go back to sleep. Eventually it will hit a thermal emergency and then shut down.
I suspect the answer to these questions are the same. When different companies are developing the OS, the drivers and the hardware it is much harder to get everything to play together nicely.
harder perhaps, but not impossible, and the market has had decades to figure this out.
My guess is typical PC manufacturers have not felt it worth the time to invest in getting this aspect right.
Ironically, the best non windows trackpad I ever used was when Vizio tried to make computers. They actually got the trackpad right. In fact, those computers were really cut above everyone else, but my guess is they didn't sell well because they were taken off the market almost as fast as they were introduced
I’ve always wondered if the Apple trackpad was just the capacitive part of an iPhone screen. It feels like glass. It responds similarly. And they have a huge user base sample size for improvements.
I think it’s another example of vertical integration making it better. Apple making the hardware plus OS gives them an advantage, making the trackpad experience great is hard if you don’t control both.
Apple has also learned a ton about how to do this well from the iPhone.
It’s less vertical integration than MS not actually taking the steps to control this market.
For example, the Precision touchpad, which was the first actual touchpad tech MS created, with Windows previously testing touchpads as mouses, has been released for a little more than a decade.
Touchpads had been around for over 4 decades and have been standard to laptops since the mid to late 90s.
And the worst part is that MS still allows hardware vendors to ship non Precision touchpads today.
MS won’t allow you to run windows 10, but vendors can ship touchpads that only support decades old software.
It’s very hard to get Windows manufacturers to pay attention to the touchpad when MS itself isn’t interested.
Unfortunately, the Windows domination in the non Apple part of the industry means that serious change is only driven by MS.
A lot of advantages we think Apple has due to vertical integration are more because MS is pretty terrible
The problems you’re describing are largely because they don’t have vertical integration. They don’t have the ability (sometimes legally) to force suppliers to do things they want.
Microsoft tried to prevent crapware from being installed by OEMs a while back and got blocked.
What you’re describing is the effect of not controlling the stack and the only way to really do that is by doing it yourself.
This is seriously the thing I like the most about my 2017 and 2023 macbooks. The trackpad feels so good. Every other manufacturer that I have tried, and no it is not all of them but a lot, they all make my fingers feel bad after using them. I don't know if they are rougher or textured somehow? The only one that does make my finger pads feel sore is the macbook.
It's also the accuracy. I'm able to do light photo editing work right from the trackpad, even basic sketches and airbrushing. Have never been able to do anything remotely close with other laptops
100% this. I use a MacBook at work, and I bought myself a Framework laptop for personal stuff. Overall, the Framework is great, but the touchpad is a letdown.
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
> you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc
If RAM is all you need on a M_ air type of machine sure, but the selling/buying point of apple silicon's unified memory is mainly around GPU/memory bandwidth at a low energy consumption level, which is yet to be rivaled (maybe AMD recently took steps towards there). If one's workload optimises for CPU-only and very high RAM, apple silicon was and probably will be the worst choice cost-wise.
Also, for me, the no-no reason for snapdragon x elites until now is having to use windows, plus, as it turned out, the early unreliability of the actual products sold by laptop manufacturers.
But the market has opened up, so prob we will see more competition towards there, which is great. Apple's good but not doing anything magic that others cannot eventually do to some extent. Though I am far more optimistic for AMD than Qualcomm tbh.
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.
I feel like somehow my big Linux desktop with a Ryzen 7950X and 64 GB of ram feels less "snappy" than my M2 Macbook Air running Asahi when doing lightweight tasks, despite the big Ryzen being obviously much better at compilation and stuff. I'm not sure why and my guess was the RAM latency. But maybe I misconfigured something in my Arch Linux...
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.
If I go look up an arbitrary 850 watt supply (seasonic focus gold), it looks like it wastes about 10% plus 5 watts anywhere from 0-60% load. So extra capacity doesn't hurt that one.
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.
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.
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.
The arm architecture is also optimized for UI-like tasks, quick to start and stop processes on one of many cores with differing power constraints, whereas x86 is more for workstation-type sustained workloads
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.
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.
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.
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.
The power efficiency gap equates to a fan noise gap, and the fan noise/heat of powerful Windows laptops is much more annoying than merely having poor battery life.
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.
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.
When we’re both plugged in and my process finishes 10 minutes faster, it says something. Also the gp post specifically was about performance and specifically not efficiency.
I could get 7+ hours from my work Linux laptops battery and I don’t really care for macOS. The OS quality matters more than the touch pad to me. I’ve come the appreciate a Mat screen. But im glad there is choice.
Everyone values different things and has different requirements, so I’m glad your laptop works out for you. I’m just cautioning against an emphasis on performance: even if the laptop is plugged in, other design considerations will dictate and limit the raw performance.
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!
What gave me pause was when my base-spec M1 Air handily beat my admittedly old server (Xeon E5-2650v2) on a single-core compute-bound task [0] (generating a ton of UUIDs). I know Ivy Bridge is 12 years old at this point, but I didn’t expect it to be 2x slower.
EDIT: Also, I know the code in the link is awful; the point is doing a 1:1 comparison between the architectures.
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.
My M1 Max MBP is a bit slower feeling than a new Lenovo Thinkpad P16s (Ryzen 7 Pro 7840U) I have, when using VS Code in Linux. But a M3 Max MBP I have blows it away. If you run Linux, and care about MacOS apps or need non-dev stuff like Outlook, then a Linux AMD laptop can be a really cheap, fast option. Unfortunately the manufacturers don't want to load them out... like my AMD chip supports 128GB, but no laptop manuf. will lay down more than 64GB.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> (originally iPhones) and then expand that to the mac
Yes and: (as you know) Aggregate volume also benefits Apple's whole product suite.
It's hard for a laptop mfg to justify pushing to next node process for just ~25m units. So competitors have to wait for Qualcomm, Samsung, whomever to transition.
It's easier for Apple with ~250m phones, ~50m tablets, ~25m laptops, etc. per year. (Apple's war chest also enables monosopoly of upcoming node processes.)
Imagine trying to pull off AirPods or Vision without that deep vertical integration. The ridiculously ambitious Vision is just barely feasible, riding on mobile's coattails. A Vision using 3rd party CPUs would be delayed.
--
This all is in addition to the Apple specific optimizations, which you mention.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple is very dependent on using the latest process node from TSMC though.
For that reason and the fact that the US cannot match what TSMC does, it all points to Taiwan dictating what kind of aid the US must provide.
I don't see the current US leadership wanting to put that in jeopardy.
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.
$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.
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).
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)
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don’t think it’s possible to understand what a Veblen good is and also think that Apple makes them. Apple get a brand premium for sure, but a “Veblen good” is something specific, and Apple don’t make those.
> 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.
Apple products have always been status symbols and this Macbook is no different.
One could easily put together a significantly more powerful Linux desktop for a lower price. This has always been the case, but Apple's marketing tries to convince you otherwise. Honestly, I've always been surprised by how effectively their marketing has misled the tech-savvy crowd on HN.
You can’t simply swap OSX for Linux. I heavily use accessibility tools that are just not comparable on Linux. These tools probably cost more than the laptop, even though Apple include it in the OS.
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]
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.
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.
I would love better battery life, but personally, running manufacturer-supported Linux is worth the tradeoff: every Linux tool I'd run in production works for every program on my laptop (no need to set up VMs, and even then, the Linux tools can't work with or inspect what's running on the macOS host...); containers run at full, native performance; games on Steam work much better than macOS (it's literally just a bigger, better Steam Deck!); plus the niceties of upgradeability.
If I usually worked from cafes, or spent many hours a day working on planes or trains, all-day battery life would be at the top of my list. But I usually work in workspaces that have power, so... It would definitely be nice to have better battery life, but other features are higher priority for me.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
I have a Macbook Pro 14 M3, I do hobby photography and you can get great laptop with excellent color accuracy with better screen than Macbook Pro out of the box, from Asus or Lenovo. There are Yoga Pro 9i, yoga aura Edition and even newer Ideapad pro has OLED options ranging from 2.3k to 4k resolution 1000 nits peak bright, depending on config, factory calibrated which is quite close.
I got one from Lenovo with OLED, came pre-calibrated, running X-Rite calibration gave minimal gains.
That's very good news, I found a starkly different situation the last time I upgraded my laptop. Do these competitive screens also offer a wide color gamut, with >99% sRGB coverage?
Near-perfect sRGB coverage is relatively common, especially with OLEDs. Now the concern is AdobeRBG, DCI-P3, and Rec.2020 coverage* -- which are still generally lagging (basically nothing short of some $$$$$ laser projectors are anywhere close to full coverage of Rec.2020, which covers ~75% of all visible colors and is an ambitious forward-looking colorspace) .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I spent weeks last year trying to decide what to get to replace a MBP M2, and while Lenovo's offering was good for enterprise consumers, there was very few laptops with decent perfs and HiDPI screen in a practical form factor.
I think for anyone not caring about gaming perf, the Microsoft Surface line is way ahead of anything Lenovo has to offer.
For better perf Asus had a better lineup, and we get form factors like the X13 or Z13 which are just excelent in day to day use (now if only they made 32 or 64G a standard option for all their "gaming" machines I'd have no notes).
I kept a mac for backup, but am seriously waiting for Apple to make more drastic moves (finally a real iPad computer ?) before ever going back.
I've had countless Lenovo laptops over the years. They were amazing up until about 2012 or so. They used to be built like tanks, could survive anything, upgradeable in every way, repairable and affordable (especially used.) There was a span of over a decade where $250ish would buy you a fairly powerful used Thinkpad in decent shape, and it would last you forever because they were indestructible. My Thinkpads went diving with me into canals, oceans, piles of mud, bogs and other non-OEM-recommended-environments and they always survived. Worst case you might have to replace one component, which you could do with a swiss army knife in about thirty seconds. All of those things built tons of goodwill that carries on in people's minds today.
I say 2012 is the dividing line because that's when they released the Yoga, which was a big step in a new direction. I actually owned multiple Yogas, and didn't hate some of them, but they had nothing in common with Thinkpads. In 2012 they also released the X230, which was more locked down than the X220, which the enthusiast community hated. The decline after 2012 was sort of slow - I bought a T440p (released 2014) after my X230 got stolen and I found it was pretty decent, certainly pretty durable - but Lenovo's main focus had clearly shifted towards the new and shiny.
These days they're just another Windows laptop OEM, which is to say: built and engineered like crap, weirdly expensive for what you get, horribly ugly, software full of ads and spyware and AI bullshit, disposable after a few years. The M1 Air was released 5 years ago this year and I still use two on a daily basis for serious tasks; I'll probably be using them years into the future too. They're not really repairable, but they do last. Any five year old Windows laptop is slow as a dog, has small plastic parts breaking off of it, looks somehow even shittier than it did originally, and of course is full of adware and garbage.
Anyway, that's all to say: yes, in 2025 Lenovo is overhyped, but that's just reputational inertia from many years where they were genuinely good.
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.
I've been considering a Framework laptop for some time, but your comment made me reconsider. What do you think are the biggest shortcomings of your Framework 13"? How long ago did you get it?
I got my FW 13 late Sept 2022 when pre-orders were available in Australia. I needed it for work.
Look the modularity and repairability is nice, and I like how it addresses e-waste. However regarding modularity, I would rather have more fixed ports than a choice of changeable ones.
My biggest gripe is battery life, in Linux I can only seem to get 4 hours of usage and that's if I'm lucky. More like 2.5 to 3 hours, and that's usually minimal usage.
My second biggest gripe is the hinges in the laptop. WHen I pick up the laptop with the screen erect at the 90 degree position, it usually falls flat 180 degrees. How this even got past QA annoys me, and the fix is to buy a new hinge kit, but that costs $30 AUD plus $40 AUD shipping, so basically a ripoff.
The keyboard is actually quite decent, but I would've preferred Macbook layout with the fn on the left and half-size inverted T arrow keys. I was hoping a 3rd party would make the keyboard, but the reality is not many 3rd parties are making FW stuff.
The modular ports can be erratic when powering on the laptop, sometimes a usb port doesn't register and I have to eject and reinsert the modular ports, which is annoying.
The display is fine, except mine developed a thin grey line that's noticeable when the pixels aren't lit up. I take care of my laptop carefully, but I feel like this display is weaker than most. Thankfully it's not noticeable when the screen is bright. I also find the screen overly glossy that I had to buy a matte screen protector and apply it, but I believe in newer models you can get a matte display.
The webcam is fine. The speakers are trash. The mic is okay. The trackpad is okayish (for what you can get out of Linux anyways).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I have the opposite experience. First my FW 13 came with the dodgy hinges where picking up the FW the screen flops 180 degrees. The cost to upgrade the hinge is like $30 AUD but costs like $40 AUD in shipping which is bloody ridiculous. Battery life is awful, about 4 hours if I'm lucky in Linux. The speakers are trash. The display quality is bad, I have a grey line of pixels when the screen is dark (thankfully they're not an issue when the screen is lit). The trackpad is trash. Sometimes a modular usb port doesn't work after powering the laptop, you need to eject and reseat it. The fan is really noisy. I just can't stand using the FW over my M-series Macbooks, the difference is night and day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you ran the benchmark on battery, I'd definitely run it plugged in. It's not a power drain thing, if it's not plugged in (with the dedicated plug) the GPU can't run full throttle (it can't pull enough current from the battery I think). I had the thing for like a year before I found that out.
So far I'm 2/2 for ok batteries, but we'll see in a few years! Weirdly I've had more problems with apple products with bloated batteries, I had to replace two macbook batteries and an ipad. The thing I worry most about with the Razer is how hot it gets.
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).
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.
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)
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?
sure, you'll have some unhappy customers but that's not new. They used to sell just fine. I wonder if it's the neverending hunger for bigger margins that's really doing them in. It's not enough to make SOME profits when you need to show shareholders you're making MORE profits.
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.
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.
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.
Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition is in fact lighter than the Macbook Air, has Lunar Lake, up to 2 TB storage, great battery life, and a 2880 x 1800 OLED display. It's pricy, though.
An M4 air will run circles around Lunar Lake being over 30% faster at geekbench (both single and multe-core) and over 40% faster at Cinebench 24. The GPU is 25-35% faster too. Air is also 60-80% faster at Geekbench AI.
People spent a decade upgrading laptops for a mere 5-10% increase in performance (sometimes less). I can't see someone giving up that much of a performance jump unless Windows is absolutely the only option.
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)
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?
I don’t think there are any fanless x86 but I had a system76 pangolin for work. It was quite well built (I bought the next gen one for myself). They OEM the notebooks though, so the quality is decent (I’m coming from a 2015 Mac book, pretty much the gold standard of Macs)
I wanted an XPS15 for a while, but they kept getting relatively worse than my 2017 one. I ended up just replacing the battery on it and kept the 1080p screen that wasn't great anymore, but I was not going to buy a laptop with a worse battery for a higher price than what I got the old laptop for.
Later I bought a new Malibal laptop, but mostly for the screen, usb-c ports and lower weight,but had to compromise on getting an unnecessary nVidia GPU that I just blacklist right away because the right laptop just didn't exist. I like the laptop, but I can't recommend Malibal laptops though, they are a weird company and getting things to work alright took way more effort than on my old XPS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, my ThinkPad P14 Gen5 is pretty much this. Small, lightweight, 64gig RAM, 2TB SSD, and a pretty darn good screen. But yeah it's black and has a coating and you won't feel like a genius machinist when you touch it, plus no apple logo, so I guess Apple wins again. How do they keep doing it?
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?
The thing that irks me, is the premium price for storage. Everyone has a cloud storage package to sell, so the air model that has amazing features but small storage will cost you in the long run. Storage should be easy to replace and plentiful!
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.
I own couple of ThinkPads myself: an old L-series one, a T490 and lately a P16s. They all are fine. 45 mins on battery on best performance mode is very bad.
I am currently using a P16s with an Intel's meteor lake CPU and an RTX 500 Ada dGPU. I would say it is not that bad. Linux Mint worked OOB perfectly. I get 5-6 hrs of battery life which is fine for me (considering it has a 4K OLED display). The dGPU is mostly idle and the machine is mostly silent unless I am gaming.
The only times I hear the fans going are when using it on my lap or playing games. I do run Windows VM for a big .NET Framework project (coding on JetBrains Rider) and at the same time some coding on Linux. The CPU handles those fine.
These are my personal experiences though. The only issue I can pick is sometimes Chrome shows some artifacts (I think, related the iGPU driver)
I bet you had an Intel CPU. Intel is almost always the worse option since the first Ryzens were released in 2017 or so.
(Intel has to have some sketchy deals with manufacturers, otherwise why design a product like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon line only to put these Intel energy hogs in there?)
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!
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.
For the same reason your PC screen likely has more than 480p resolution even though you technically don’t need more than that, why you have stereo instead of mono sound, and more than one CPU core.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Only answering for myself here, but when I already have 10+ lbs of camera gear in my backpack, a huge gaming laptop makes a big difference compared to an ultrabook. And I'm not talking about an excessive amount of gear either. One body plus one lens plus a couple extra batteries, etc, easily gets me to 10 lbs. And then I still have to get on a plane with it.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. :(
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
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 :)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you sure the underlying application and the OS are even rendering 120Hz all the time? The panel being able to was enough to convince some people they're seeing "smooth scrolling" when it was actually 60Hz saving battery. That's the analogy to audiophiles.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
I run Windows daily at work on a 60Hz display. I recently got my son a gaming PC complete with a 144Hz monitor. I was genuinely confused why Windows itself “felt” so much better. Just dragging windows around seemed like magic. It’s not that the UI is lagging on my machine, it’s more the smoothness of things when they move around. It makes everything seem faster, despite us timing various things and finding no actual performance differences.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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'.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
>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?
Their stock price is currently suffering because of how poorly iPhones are doing in places with real competition (i.e. China), the iPhone 16 when put side by side with Chinese phones just makes the iPhone look like a cheap knock-off. Even 90hz would fix most of these problems (and the panel is more than capable of it).
They're fixing it on the iPhone 17 because of the above reasons, but it shows how badly their market research teams are doing that they even remotely thought it was acceptable on the 15, let alone the 16.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I have an Android phone. I could afford an iPhone, I don't care about folding screens, and my laptop is a MacBook Pro. I have an Android phone (1) because a substantial fraction of what I do on my phone is browsing the web, and Android lets me run Firefox which has markedly better ad-blocking, (2) because the phone I had before this one was an Android phone (mostly for reason 1, as it happens, but that's not particularly important here) and switching is inconvenient, and (3) because one of the reasons why I could easily afford an iPhone if I wanted one is that I have always preferred not to spend money for which I don't get substantial benefit, and it doesn't look to me as if iPhones are so much better than Android phones as to be worth paying a premium for.
This may be partly because I'm not in the US; my impression is that "people who can afford iPhones buy iPhones so if you don't you're impoverished or weird" is much more a thing in the US than in Europe.)
(I also thought "struggling to obtain new market share" was a weird take, and ditto "just look like old and slow phones". I am not disagreeing with that part of what you posted.)
* 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.
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
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.
> (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.
This comment shows up in every single thread about Linux laptops, but my Thinkpd X1 Nano gen 1 with an intel i5 running arch Linux KDE Plasma had this issue solved out of the box when I purchased it in 2021. The only thing that didn’t work was the 5G modem, but I believe that has been implemented now. Surely 4 years later we can agree that the complaint is outdated right?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
I don't think they really need to. You can have the base model with the same specs, but let me configure it with a better display. I can currently spec up a Mac Mini without any problem.
The second option is to bring back the MacBook brand for entry level devices and use the Air brand for "Pro" devices that don't require active cooling.
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.
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.
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?
I use Goodnotes, but people really like notability. For me, the most obtuse missing feature from Apple notes is that you can't fucking pinch to zoom...
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.
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.
I do something similar with my personal laptops/PCs too — any actual files are in cloud storage[1], and mounted[2] so that they don't actually sync to the device, therefore not taking up space...
Honestly it feels very freeing having your data just be in server(s) somewhere, not having to worry about moving it between devices, or having to copy it over if you need to format/get rid of the device, or forgetting to copy over a file you need to your phone when going out, etc...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think I'd be in much more agreement with you if we were talking about people being forced to buy Apple products, but that's rarely if ever the case.
By and large, the people who buy these products are freely choosing to do so. To claim that, for those people, the price is "too high" is equivalent to telling them "you shouldn't be willing to pay that much for that product".
I think it's perfectly fine for me or any other individual to hold the opinion that their products are overpriced, but I think it would be at best borderline presumptuous for me to attempt to tell someone else what they should or should not value.
I think it is safe to assume that nobody particularly likes being on the cashcow end of price discrimination though, however valuable they perceive the product to be. This sort of pricing strategy cannot be good for consumers overall in some economic sense under certain assumptions, right?
Not to mention that design decisions have surely been made to ensure this segmentation works that destroy repairability - so much for environmental friendliness. It is difficult not to feel Apple's contempt for its customers when it has been actively crippling the usefulness of its devices to squeeze some more profits.
To Apple's credit, it has established an effective monopoly over the market of _decent_ laptops fair and square and OS X seems to be less of a malware than whatever is Windows 10/11. I am not _that_ salty to pay the premium.
I don't believe in free will, so I don't believe anyone freely chooses to do anything. I think genetic and environmental luck determines everything in life.
I'm far more interested in improving our lot by altering the environment (e.g. by promoting memory-safe programming languages, or by pressuring corporations to not be abusive) than in appealing to notions like choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quite sure. SyncThing and mosh are the two most unusual apps that are installed. And I've spent a fair amount of time researching to find out what setting could cause this. The only thing I've found that could supposedly affect the notch is the display resolution, and changing that makes no difference for the notch.
One thing that did occur to me though is that it was a 'refurbished' MacBook. Bought it from Apple, and it looked brand new, but it does seem possible that someone could have done who-knows-what to it before I got it. Or perhaps there is some defect in the display near the top and Apple did this intentionally to conceal it.
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.
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!
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.
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
If I am spending $1700+ on a machine, it is going to be my primary machine. I know exactly what "the real life difference" is between 256 GB storage on my primary machine and 2TB storage on my primary machine. My personal Dropbox sits at 850 GB. It is simple math. It is egregious that going to 2TB storage costs $199 less than buying an entire second laptop. No thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To add to the litany of failures by laptop PC makers:
Utterly garbage speakers, poor microphones, inferior screen hinges, coil whine, structural flex, light leak from the keyboard backlights, poor keyboard PWM dimming, poor keyboard switches (admittedly, butterfly keyboards were a bad era for Apple), slow or missing sleep management, terrible idle power usage, slow wake time, poor weight distribution, more ports but they're stupidly placed or don't work as you'd expect or want, uneven heat distribution, strange aesthetic choices (like fake vents) and dumb case designs that snags when slipping it into a bag.
In my experience with PC laptops for every hardware spec benchmark that exceeds something Apple does, you'll lose out on three other aspects of the laptop that aren't commonly discussed in reviews. The most frustrating part is that besides buying from Apple, money cannot solve this problem. There just isn't a PC maker that gives a shit.
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.
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.
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'
> 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.
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.
There are kits to upgrade the mini and studio to max out storage for reasonable prices. I've watched YT videos on the process and it doesn't look too hard.
As for the laptops, probably not feasible.
I will say that unlike laptops/desktops I used to buy before I went Apple, I use them for a really long time. When I ran Windows, I'd upgrade every few years. I had my Mac Pro 2012 for 9 years before upgrading to a Studio. Yes, I maxed out the storage, and it was annoying how expensive, but amortized over 9 years? Not as bad.
EDIT: if I was purchasing a Studio now, I'd likely do the 3rd party upgrade to 8TB (what I saw in a YT video). That's double what my M1 Studio maxed out at.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
"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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I can't imagine 147 tabs. I have 9 pinned tabs and maybe ... 6 other tabs open if I'm particularly busy. I also turn off my work laptop at the end of the day, because all of my state is restored when this handful of tabs comes back.
Maybe this is just me managing my ADHD, but when I see people with hundreds of tabs open I just can't imagine how they work. Every tab has been mashed down to its favicon and I watch them struggle to find the right one. It seems insane to me.
There are two kinds of people. <10 open tabs and >100 open tabs. Nothing in between.
I think of the >100 ones as people who have completely lost control of their lives. I'm sure they think of me as someone who needs everything to be just so and can't deal with the messiness of real life.
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.
In Safari, tabs get small up to a point, then they are scrollable. Sure, there are duplicates but it's usually the homepage of HN or Twitter. I close those when encountered.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t know when that time was. Hardware and software requirements have been moving fast for just about forever, until actually maybe the past 5 years.
There was never a time when laptops were expected to last 10+ years.
I'm still happily using an 8GB M1 running Firefox in OSX + Firefox/VSCode/NodeJS in a Debian VM. Lots of tabs open. Both OSX and Debian can use compressed RAM.
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
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
If those don't look like a problem for you, I'd definitely suggest giving it a try. MacOS 13 should give you at least 3 more years of use out of it.
Going beyond MacOS 13 I don't think is worth it. MacOS 14 is noticeably slower on my 2010 iMac, and there aren't any new features it can take advantage of anyways.
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.
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.
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).
The issue with the touch bar is that it replaced the F keys which are (at least for me) my most used short cuts. I don't use the track pad gestures, never really got the hang of them. So the F keys were used a lot.
They should have added the touch bar, not replacement the F keys with it.
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.
I actually enjoy the Touch Bar on my 2018 MacBook Pro. The screen brightness slider offers more granular control. On my M1 air there is often a brightness gap where the screen is either too bright or too dark when using the keyboard to adjust brightness. Then I have to go to the menu bar to get the brightness level I actually want.
It's even better on the 2019+ models when they brought back the escape key.
I would agree that the added expense of that oled touchscreen isn't worth it tho. The M series Macs often go on sale at pretty large discounts (seemingly even more than the Intel Macs), and removing the oled touchscreen and the T2 chip that controlled it probably contributes to that.
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.
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.
An odd take. How can you downplay the iPod and then jump over the iPhone? They also got the iPad, Air Pods, Apple Watch, and Face ID just right. Not always as era-defining as the phone, but certainly pushing their own category.
Of course, the VR thing is a remarkably well engineered thing nobody needs.
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.
And butterfly keyboards. Don’t forget their innovative trash can MacPro. Hockey puck mouse anyone? Apple has an impressive history of missing the mark.
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.
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.
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.
I bought a 13 Pro Max on launch day and I am still using it today. I have never kept a phone this long in my life. The cameras and performance are still fantastic. The only thing that would be nice is USB-C and USB 3.0 transfer speeds. But that is not enough for me to upgrade.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> - 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).
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
you can remap modifier keys if you so inclined in keyboard settings, without additional software, and have separate settings per internal and external keyboard.
I have an M3 Air which I occasionally use for AI (image gen & LLMs), gaming, and light dev work, and it never heated up enough to become uncomfortable, exactly as described in reviews. In fact, this was the main reason why I got Air over Pro - the latter apparently can get uncomfortably hot in some cases (although still far less often than your typical Intel laptop), and I wanted something that would truly be a laptop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It never gets hot to the touch either (which wasn't the case with my old ThinkPads, for example, or the Intel MacBook Pro I had immediately prior). Apple Silicon is just incredible and I don't think I can ever go back now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Joined a new company and requested a MacBook Pro, but they declined and instead issued me a brand-new ThinkPad X1 running Windows.
So, I went ahead and bought a MacBook Pro myself, set up all corporate apps (since the company runs M365 and mostly SaaS apps), and everything works seamlessly. My productivity is great—I don’t have to deal with the frustrations of Windows.
Now, once a week, I power up the ThinkPad X1, install patches and updates, then shut it down. The rest of the time, it just sits in the corner collecting dust along with all my other older Intel based MacBooks.
Out of pocket couple of grand, but the boost in my ability to deliver work more than makes up for that.
It is, though pales in comparison to the MacBook in terms of whole (working) day battery like. The real non-start is their insistence that I'm not allowed to re-image it to run Linux.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Most crucial improvement in this one per my scoreboard is that the new MBA supports 2 external screens AND the builtin one at the same time. Only reason I bothered with a Pro.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Memory bandwidth for M series goes up to 800 Gb/s for Ultra (in e.g. Mac Studio). That, combined with the ability to get it loaded with a lot of RAM, is what makes it so desirable for LLMs.
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.
Get a high-quality (well-reviewed; not cheap) matte glass. Mine has no noticeable degradation of the image quality, and it's the best portable screen in my house (my OLED TV is a little better, but of course).
I know, I know, it doesn't feel nice to stick glass in front of it -- but seriously, try it. I didn't believe it at first, but it's great.
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).
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:
> 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.
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.
Interesting. I have to admit that I generally consider fractional bitmap scaling to be deficient as well when I see it. But I do have a 15" M3 Air, and it never even occurred to me that it might be fractionally scaled (i.e. it's not readily perceivable for me).
[EDIT] I looked up at settings. Mystery partially resolved: I manually changed the default setting one notch down to get perfect integer scaling, i.e. my Air is running at virtual 1440x932 resolution, which is exactly 1/2 of its native 2880x1864 matrix. The default setting, though, is 1710x1107, which is 19/32. That said, if I set it back to the default, I find that text is too small - probably why I changed it in the first place - but things still look pretty crisp otherwise.
> 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.
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.
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....
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.
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)
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.
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.
4: 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.
What a garbage piece of marketing, I can't believe they posted this on their official website. I used to like Apple, but virtually everything they've done over the past few years has made me despise them more and more. Excited to ditch my iPhone.
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.
The biggest difference between this model and the M1 is that ...
All* software now has native Apple Silicon builds.
* Except abandonware**, of course, but Rosetta is so good you need not notice. That said, I personally recommend never triggering Rosetta which helps you avoid accidentally running legacy drivers etc.
** For some reason, including Steam's installer, even though the games it wraps are universal/native ARM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Glad to be in Australia. M1 Air motherboard failed after close to 3 years. Went to the store, muttered the words "Australian Consumer Law" and "not of acceptable quality", repaired for free with no question.
The M4 Air is A$1699 here, when you subtract the 10% GST (our prices include GST), that converts to US$967. So we're not even paying a premium (although Apple hedging against US tariffs may play a part).
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.
Lunar Lake is pretty good, yeah. But generally, even premium Windows laptops feel less complete. Speakers sound worse, trackpad isn't as nice, usually worse thermal design / fan noise, it's the little things.
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? :)
No you can’t. At least not practically. iOS turns of hot spot after like 60s of activity, meaning working over an iPhone means constantly turning on hot spot. It’s one of those eternal software bugs in the Apple eco system. The general poor state of software of apple products was discussed some time ago:
I know that. I use it often and know how flaky it is. I want my laptop to have an always on Internet connection, just like my phone, tablet, and watch. I want to open my laptop and have my email already downloaded. I want my MacBook Pro to have the same option for a cellular modem that is available for a Dell laptop. I do a lot of work away from home. It is okay that you do not need such a thing.
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.
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
If only Apple could make a laptop that could last more than two days with the clamshell closed and energy settings set to the most conservative. I have an Asus ROG Z13 and Lasts over three weeks when asleep. I have had an M1, M2, and now an M4 MacBook Pro, and all of them suffer from this problem, even after setting them up from scratch.
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?