Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixmixmix | Hacker News Reader

I got a 2015 Air with 8 gigs of ram. I'm wondering whether to pull the trigger on the 16" or endure more pain for the next several months to see what else comes out.

Has anyone upgraded from an older Air to a 16"? Is the increase in performance more like a "OMG" or "Not bad"?

View on HN

Not from the air... but I hate the 16”. It’s fan is noisy and always powers up under any load. The thermal throttling is horrible. It gets hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch. The cable has coil whine as does the Mac itself. Touchbar... I’m not a fan and generally never used it. The GPU seems flakey and the wifi hates connecting to 2.4 networks, although that could be a software issue. Battery life is far worse than expected.

The screen is wonderful and the new keyboard better than the old one. Touchpad is still good.

I have a MBP 16. 32GB RAM, i9 8-cores. Yes it's powerful, but it does generate a lot of heat, and the fans spin up easily. I run mine with Turbo Boost Switcher Pro, and that helps a lot to keep the fans off.

I do wish it was more power efficient, but I'm also glad to have upgraded from my dual core 2013 MacBook Pro 13".

I had a 2014 retina 13” MacBook Pro and upgraded to the 16” last month. To me the difference is “OMG” fast.

Anecdotal evidence: I have a build script that used to take 30 seconds and now runs in 6 seconds.

My wife recently upgraded from a 2015 (14?) 8GB MBA to a 16GB Pro (don't know processor, 2 USB-C ports) and had a OMG experience, mostly when running R stats analyses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com