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Comment by throw93232 | Hacker News Reader

Macbook air is like $1000. People can afford it. Problem is shitty hardware. SSD soldered to motherboard, bad cooling, no touchscreen, broken keyboard, no way to replace battery...

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$1000 is a lot of money for a lot of people, including me - I could afford it for sure, but yes - absolutely 0 upgradeability and repairability, even on the more expensive models, makes me never want to spend any of my own money on their products.

I think Framework is going the right way here and their prices are extremely competitive when you compare them with the higher-tier macbooks, especially if you need more storage or RAM. They don't have anything that competes with the $1k Air, which is also sort of crippled by storage and RAM in the $1k configuration, but I'd guess that's a matter of time.

The one thing that keeps me using Macs for my laptop is hardware: the touchpad. If there's a non-Mac laptop out there that has a touchpad that comes even close to rivaling that of a MacBook I'd love to know what it is because I've not found it for myself.

When I'm using my laptop, I'm typically in situations where I'm not using a mouse, and the MacBook touchpad is lightyears ahead of anything else I've ever used. As far as I'm concerned, it's perfect.

In Brazil where I'm from a Macbook Air costs about ~8x the average monthly income. It's out of reach for most people.

I just checked local marketplaces (I'm in Jakarta, BTW): Macbook Air M1 13" 16 GB 256 GB (the minimum configuration for us, mobile devs) is around $1400.

Sure not cheap, but on the otherside lots of us have monthly income > $1000, especially if you are a senior or team lead on unicorn startups. So... still manageable.

Cooling isn’t really an issue on the M1 models. They don’t run particularly hot and don’t throttle unless you run them full-bore (e.g. synthetic benchmarks with all cores maxxed out) for at least 10 minutes straight, which would be a pretty uncommon thing for the vast majority of the target market of the Air.

It’s battery life pretty hard to compete with too. Apple claims 17 hours with typical usage and that mostly holds up in testing.

The M1 Macbook Air is far and away the best laptop I've ever owned. Cooling is great, touchscreens are a waste of time, there's nothing wrong with the keyboard and the built-in battery is industry standard now, like as not.

The issues you raise are about as valid as saying Linux is still not ready for the desktop - facile nonsense, subjective preference dressed as hard fact.

The M1 MacBook air has been on sale for $799 several times.

"shitty hardware" ???

I am not aware of any PC laptop that comes close to the build quality of a MacBook Air for less.

"SSD soldered to motherboard, bad cooling, no touchscreen, broken keyboard, no way to replace battery..."

SSD soldered: It is a bit disappointing, but Apple ships the fastest SSD's in the industry.

Bad cooling: The MacBook air is passively cooled and nobody ever has complained about the M1 Air's cooling.

No touchscreen: I don't care about this.

Broken keyboard: Not an issue on the 2020+ MacBooks

Battery: The MacBook air has best in class battery life. iFixit sells replacement batteries for older MacBooks, It is likely they will sell replacement batteries for the M1 Airs as well.

> Apple ships the fastest SSD's in the industry

Only because they're not standards compliant/cheating and lose data when you e.g. lose power or your kernel panics: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1494213855387734019?lang...

If laptop breaks, I just swap SSD into spare machine. With mac I have to wait days maybe weeks for SSD desoldering and fix. Sorry it is a toy! If Apple can not invest $2 into connector, there is no build quality!

The cheapest MacBook Pro I could find in my country is like 3500 USD and the cheapest Air is like 2000.

I maybe saw like 5 macbooks in 30 years of living here (in a poor EU country, so much richer then the average citizen of the world).

I am in EU country, just seen macbook air for 900 euro.

> Problem is shitty hardware.

Lifetime Windows users do not agree.

>Apple M1 MacBook Air - Long Term User Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i_XWx05FTw

>11 Things My Macbook Does Better Than My Windows Desktop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Xjz5v0jDw

Not sure what you mean about shitty hardware.

Yes, SSD and RAM are soldered so you're limited to what you get at buy time.

Otherwise there's really no need for cooling on an M1 Air. It stays passively cool even at full sustained CPU usage. I suspect the lack of touchscreen is considered good by a majority of users but I might be off here. Broken keyboard? In terms of laptop keyboards, this might lose to the 2015 Macs and maybe Thinkpads but that's it.

Battery can be replaced by any corner IT shop, or by yourself or a knowledgeable friend. I've replaced a few. A friend of mine who's not technical in any way has replaced his.

The MacBook Air has an SOC. It’s literally not possible to socket the ram. It’s all one big package.

>The MacBook Air has an SOC. It’s literally not possible to socket the ram

Hardware engineer here: It is totally technically possible to have a SoC and socketed RAM.

Please stop taking Apple's own proprietary implementation as being some universal technical limitations for the entire industry. It's not.

While it’s possible, wouldn’t it defeat some of the advantages of moving everything closer together?

Has anyone added socketed ram to any of the Qualcomm, Mediatek, Rockchip etc laptops out there?

Ok, but now you're moving the goalposts and switching to whataboutism. The original comment was about whether it's impossible or not to have SoCs with socketed RAM. Just because the rest of the ARM vendors also choose not to (because that's how it is in phones and tablets and because it increases obsolescence and their profits) does not negate this fact.

I was mostly just asking the question, as I'm not an expert in the nuances of DRAM timing/latency/etc nor chip design.

... but we also didn't define whether we were using "possible" in an academic or commercial sense.

What do you mean by "commercial sense"? There are literally Intel and AMD based laptops sold right now with socketed high speed DDR5 sticks, so of course it's commercially possible.

It depends on the market segment of the device. Many of the segments that ARM devices compete with are also segments where sockets aren't common in x86 either. I mean, we all know Ampere devices typically have socketed RAM, but that's because different compromises were made in those devices vs. the compromises made in a thin low-power laptop.

The thin-and-light segment has some pretty tough competition, and the best sellers are not the devices with the most sockets.

If you're choosing to put an ARM processor in a laptop, you're probably doing so because it helps you accomplish some of the things this market wants: a smaller thermal solution, lower power consumption, slick packaging, etc. Adding sockets doesn't really help you commercially position that particular product any better, it only hurts you.

>The thin-and-light segment has some pretty tough competition, and the best sellers are not the devices with the most sockets.

Again, the original comment I addressed was the fallacy that it's technically impossible to have socketed RAM on SoCs, which is false, not whether the device with more sockets is better seller which is probably also false, but again, this was not the main topic and we can continue to discuss forever on the pros and cons of RAM sockets, so, having made my technical point clear, I will end the conversation here.

I think that's an unfair interpretation of that comment. They most likely meant that you couldn't just lift the DRAM off the package and put it on a standard module, all else equal. It would require other significant design compromises to accomplish that. LPDDR4X socketed modules don't even exist.

> Macbook air is like $1000. People can afford it.

Bought Macbook Air in 2019 directly from Apple website. Paid extra for miserable 256GB SSD and 16 RAM. Over EUR 1800 in total, its current resell value is EUR 700. Apple customer service doesn't exist in the EU country where I'm located. Now when I even think of buying Apple product I hear subconscious voice "you will be violated financially".

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