Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

The M1 is basically what would Apple would call A14X / A14Z if it was on iPad Pro.

So they decided to reuse the A14X / M1 across all three products. And the only differentiation are their TDP cooling. The MacBook Air is 10W TDP, and both Mac Mini and MacBook Pro are likely ~35W range.

The did mention MacBook Air's SSD performances is now twice as fast, so this isn't exactly an iPad Pro with Keyboard. That is great except I suddenly remember the 2019 MacBook Air actually had a slower SSD than the 2018 MacBook Air. Where the 2018 do Read at 2GB/s, 2019 could only do 1.3GB/s. So even at 2x / 2.6GB/s it is still only slightly better than 2018. And considering modern day NVME SSD, this is barely good enough.

Pricing kept at $999, and same old ridiculous upgrade pricing of RAM and Storage. Although they did lower the Education Pricing to $899, a little bit better than previous ~$829. But for MacBook Pro, You are essentially paying $300 more for a Fan and Touch Bar. And Pro still limited to 16GB Memory ( because it is now using the LPDDR RAM as used on iPad ).

I guess may be this is exciting for many, but extremely underwhelming to me.

A Quote from Steve Jobs:

“When you have a monopoly market share, the people who can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies, the product people get driven out of the decision making forums. Companies forget what it takes to make great products. The product sensibility, the product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position is rotted out... The people running these companies have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They've got no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. They really have no feeling in their heart about wanting to really help the customers”

And my small rant and wishes, Dear Tim Cook / Apple, Please Stop Saying you LOVE something. There is no need for you to tell me that, because if you did love something; We will know. Steve never said anything along those lines, but we all know he cares way more than any of us could even imagine.

I was hopeful they'd weigh less. An iPad Pro 12.9 inches weighs 1.4lbs. The 13.3 inch MacBook Air M1 is 2.8lbs. I'm sure there are reasons but there are companies, LG for instance, that make 2 lbs 13.3 inch notebooks and 3 lbs 16 inch notebooks. No I don't want an LG but I was hopeful for a 16" Arm Macbook Pro that weight 3 lbs. Now I'm pretty confident it will be the same as an Intel Macbook Pro 16" at 4.4lbs (heavy enough my messenger bag leaves marks on my shoulder and gives me muscle pains if I have to lug it around all day) Somehow, getting it down to under 3.lbs removes that pain. Maybe because it includes the power supply which is also bigger.

To put another way. They could have taken an iPad Pro, expanded the screen to 13.3 inches, added a keyboard and put MacOS on it instead of iOS and it would be probably 1.8lbs. I don't know what the tradeoffs would be but I was excited by that possibility. It didn't happen though.

The 12.9” iPad Pro plus Magic Keyboard weighs 3lbs. Subtract a little weight for the wrapper and you are basically equivalent to an air with screen + keyboard + trackpad.

not according to apple's home page.

    iPad Pro 12.9"   1.391 lbs
    Magic Keyboard   0.5 lbs
    Total            1.891 lbs

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLA22LL/A/magic-keyboard-...

Apple doesn't list the weight of an iPad Pro but wikipedia does

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Pro#Fourth_generation#Mod...

Wrong Magic Keyboard. Look at the one for iPad Pro 12.9”.

> LG for instance, that make 2 lbs 13.3 inch notebooks and 3 lbs 16 inch notebooks

Those are the Gram series, right? They use a magnesium alloy chassis that feels like flimsy plastic. They are light, but they feel like a something that's going to imminently break compared to Apple's aluminum unibody.

In my view, the Gram trades off too much stiffness and chassis robustness for weight to be palatable to a non-niche audience.

I thought I was in the niche of users that prized weight over all else but I had concerns that a light on-the-go laptop that was so flimsy would last. I returned my Gram due to the fact that I just couldn't get used to Windows (after using Linux and Mac for >10 years) so the build robustness and weight ended up being a moot point

I agree the LG feels bad. I don't agree that Apple doesn't have the talent to solve this and make 30% lighter laptops.

As for weight, carrying a 4.4lbs notebook to and from work and to meetings never bothered me. Carrying the same notebook for days on end as a digital nomad, especially in hot and humid weather did.

The LG grams go out of their way to be lightweight and they prioritize it above just about everything else. What you get is a magnesium alloy (?) chassis that feels very flimsy, a screen that flexes a LOT, and a battery that is far smaller than the chassis can support [1] to meet their weight goals.

Apple isn't really hellbent on making the lightest laptop and don't really have the luxury of creating SKUs just for these niche needs.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/LG+Gram+15-Inch+Repairability+A...

You know, honestly, I think it's just time to stop making comments like this and admit that Apple isn't making products that you are interested in.

Stop letting them live rent free in your head.

It's a consumer product. WHO. CARES.

For the average user, these are fantastic. A laptop that lasts beyond the number of waking hours in a day and has no noisy fans with basically untouchable performance in that form factor. And YOU'RE STILL MAD...about the vocabulary that Tim Cook speaks with compared to Steve Jobs, who has been scientifically verified as being a completely different person. (I highly doubt Steve never said anything about loving Apple products, either)

In other words, Steve Jobs has been dead for almost 10 years, it's time to leave his personality cult. If you liked what he said better, it's probably because he was one of the best salespeople who has ever lived - that doesn't change what the product actually IS.

And oh my goodness, stop getting worked up about specs and industry-standard price segmentation practices. 99% of customers DO. NOT. CARE. The VAST majority of MacBook Air buyers buy the base model and don't need anything more than that. macOS is perfectly usable on 8GB, heck my parents are using 4GB on theirs and it works fine - yes, with Catalina. No joke, you need to open up something like 40 chrome tabs before it matters. RAM requirements have completely stagnated for anything but the most exotic workloads.

I have to agree. While I'm sure the processors themselves are great, the anemic RAM and storage provided on base models (8GB in 2020, seriously?) is outrageous. Especially considering that the M1 chips should be much cheaper for them than the pricy intel processors.

That quote has summed up whats going on at Apple for quite a while now. Under Tim Cook we've seen what was once a product line with each archetype having it's place and having meaningful difference and care put into it fragment into many different tiers designed to milk a few more hundred dollars while also trying to reduce the BOM at every step.

Long time Apple fans who would in the past have championed how much care and vision Apple puts into their products now champion how working this way is so important because apparently building shareholder value is something an end customer should care about.

> But for MacBook Pro, You are essentially paying $300 more for a Fan and Touch Bar.

More than that. Better screen. Bigger battery. Better speakers. Better mics (although I don't know how much I would buy this one as 'studio quality' is silly). A "USB Power Port". The fan will make the MBP perform without throttling a lot longer than the air.

The price difference is minor for all that IMO.

Is the screen better on the MBP? I see "2560-by-1600 native resolution at 227 pixels per inch" for both:

https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/

500nits vs 400nits is only difference I'm spotting.

Steve Jobs called things "insanely great". Stop mythologizing him.

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