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Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

Macbook Pro 13" is smaller than Macbook Air at 13.6".

What's the point of Macbook Pro 13"?

Feels like it exists for some sort of Enterprise customer that wants to use the old chassis for whatever reason, be it some sort of docking solutions, accessories, cases, whatever. It really doesn't make sense for almost any consumers.

Unless you want a fan and a Touch Bar, there's really not a point...

Why do you drop the "the"?

Apple never uses it, so they're copying them.

Yeah but the people who come up with that marketing garbage are lizardmen wearing human skin. Real people don't talk like that. Presumably parent is human, though this is the internet so they could be a dog, and I'm just wondering why a real person and not a marketing drone would use that artificial, cringe-inducing marketing NewSpeak.

A pretentious naming convention that Apple uses to make their devices seem more important than they really are.

Leaving an unnecessary word out is not a "naming convention".

It's not an unnecessary word, though. To refer to "iPhone" without the article is grammatically nonsensical. It's a phone, not a person.

Pro is a dockable workstation with a small form factor. Pros have insane amount of internal bandwidth. M1 was able to edit 30 4K streams or 7 8K streams simultaneously IIRC.

The M2 air and the M2 13" Pro have the same internal bandwidth - it's the same chip, just one has a fan and one doesn't.

Inclusion of that small fan affects the frequency range and how they handle sustained workloads.

A pro won't blink while an Air will throttle to keep itself from melting. For long video and photo jobs, that really matters (or for long (>24h) running simulation/scientific code or plethora of other examples).

No, it absolutely doesn't matter for video or photo jobs, and no one is running multi-day simulations on one of these devices. If you're running such intense simulations, a theoretical 5% to 15% difference in performance makes no difference at all when you can pay a little bit more to get either a 14"/16" MBP or a Mac Studio and easily get a much more substantial 50%+ performance uplift.

The 13" MBP is a relic that should have been discontinued. It makes no sense for Apple to have kept it around.

You are thinking of the 14 inch. The M1 Air and M1 Pro have only a different cooling solution and it does not really make a difference.

That small cooling difference affects how these CPUs are clocked and how they behave under sustained workloads.

A long video render is easily 2-3h at 100% CPU load. A scientific simulation is >24h at 100% load, with instruction trains optimized to get every ooze of performance, hence hitting the TDP almost instantly.

A MacBook Air M1's body is not an unlimited heatsink attached to M1 SoC. I've succeeded to heat my M1 air to unusual levels when the platform was new and some programs were prone to entering infinite loops.

Indeed they shortly hinted at this in the keynote.

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