Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've been using the first generation 12" Retina MacBook (with the 1.1 GHz Core M and Intel HD Graphics 5300) for about a year now, currently running the macOS Sierra Public Beta, and honestly, it doesn't feel crippled at all.

Sure, it's not as fast, but I can run and use Photoshop, Pixelmator, Acorn, GarageBand, Logic, Xcode, Final Cut, and many other apps just fine, along with League of Legends and most other games that the GPU can handle (though it can't handle many and often warns about heating up), while multitasking and plugged into a secondary 1920x1080 screen. It's actually amazing for an entire PC that doesn't even have any fans (as in active cooling.)

I honestly can't see how anyone fails to understand that this is an ultraportable whose use-case is clearly people that travel a lot and prefer to carry around as little as possible.

If you need a beefy CPU/GPU this is not for you. If you need a gajillion ports this is not for you. Why insist on getting something that isn't for you and then complaining about it?

I'm not sure about that. I got my wife the 1st gen MacBook, and I have a 2012 i5 11" MBA. I like the size of the Macbook, I don't mind the keyboard but it's very much laggier than the 2012 MBA. MUCH. Once you have something running it's ok, but sometimes starting an app like FF the MB will sit there for 5 sec with no feedback. I haven't seen Mac's do that since the PPC days.

Well, Firefox currently seems to have the worst performance of all the major browsers on macOS. Try running it in a fresh environment, after backing up and removing ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox

However, while Safari always runs a lot better even with a lot more tabs, Firefox on my 1st-gen MacBook definitely doesn't take a whole 5 seconds to start. Could there be some resident third-party crap running in the background on yours?

What's the use case for the faster macbook air? lol

Lighter, great running time on the battery, fast enough for many use cases, still has active cooling for running batches of ffmpeg or big compile jobs, and inexpensive.

Oh I agree - I was making the point that the use case is the same for the macbook air vs "The Macbook" ... But the Macbook Air is faster and superior.

It's really not.

The MacBook Air is "superior" in two objective specs: speed & price. That's honestly it, and it's not even that much faster. It also has more ports & a more traditional keyboard/trackpad, but those are subjective differences.

The two people I know with them can barely tell the difference between the Air keyboard and their MacBook keyboard, didn't realize the Force Touch trackpad wasn't a physical click, and only ever plug their computer into a charger or a projector which required an adapter on the Air anyways.

The MacBook blows the Air out of the water in every other way. Design, weight, thickness it's not even a contest. The screen is orders of magnitude better. Battery life is better, sleep/wake response is better, power draw is lower, charging is faster.

The active cooling honestly gives the air the edge, as it were. The aggressive throttling when it overheats is frustrating when it occurs.

The plus for the MacBook is that it doesn't occur all that often.

We don't agree to disagree... we just so happen to disagree...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com