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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

This looks like what the Macbook (2015) wanted to be. Keyboard and single port aside, it was a fantastic form factor, albeit crushingly slow. Mine no longer holds a charge, and am eagerly awaiting replacing it with one of these.

Over time I've also noticed I no longer care about having the fastest possible laptop, since my job provides me with an MBP and that's where serious work gets done.

I have a feeling this is going to be backordered for a long, long time though.

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I own a 12" Retina MacBook and I am sad that none of the new laptops can really replace it. They're all significantly larger and heavier. The new MacBook Air is a replacement for the old MacBook Air, not the MacBook. It's a shame Apple have given up on the ultra-ultra-lightweight MacBook concept, considering that the M1 would be perfect for it.

I own a MacBook Air 11'', and it's also a pretty unique machine in terms of small form factor and silent operation. I feel current MacBook Airs finally serve as a good replacement. However, the 11'' Late 2012 model was also quite unique in terms of being a perfect PC citizen. So one could run other OSes with zero effort. In fact, it was Linus' daily driver for a few years.

I wish other manufacturers like Lenovo or Dell tried to compete in terms of fanless design so that there were more options. Lenovo in particular seems quite unfocused as they release tons of devices all the time and good ones are much more expensive than Apple's offerings, at least in EU.

Totally agree. It’s just other CPUs don’t come close to the M1/M2. That’s what really makes the new MacBooks unique. It’s going to be like that for quite some time I think.

I think some Intel / AMD options are pretty similar. However, their performance per Watt is inferior which makes it tricky to come up with nice silent machines.

The new Air is significantly smaller in volume, though.

The new Air is thinner, but still slightly larger in volume, and ~35% heavier than the last gen of 12" Macbooks.

2012 12" Macbook:

Height: 0.52 inch

Width: 11.04 inches

Depth: 7.74 inches

Weight: 2.03 pounds

Volume 44.43 cubic inches

2022 13" Air:

Height: 0.44 inch

Width: 11.97 inches

Depth: 8.46 inches

Weight: 2.7 pounds

Volume 44.56 cubic inches

Sorry, I meant in comparison to the previous MB Air, not the 12" Macbook. I apologize for the lack of clarity. :)

To be honest I don’t think the Mx platform in the 12 inch form factor will be good enough to be in an ultra lightweight class. I also own a 12 inch retina and while I really like that it is slient and very lightweight we probably need another generation to get that far to have good passive cooling and performance given that the form factor will have to put the battery and motherboard on top of each other. A bezel shrink with a notch would still work out though but it would need a high ppi and 500 nits brightness will further tax the battery.

Given that the M1 doesn't throttle in a 10 inch ipad with passive cooling I think Apple absolutely could build a M1/M2 11 inch air or 12 inch macbook. They either haven't gotten to it or are deliberately avoiding going down into ipad size territory with macbooks.

Or they just found that there's no enough market for lightweight Macbook, similar story as iPhone mini series. It's sad.

According to their page the Macbook Air is the world's best selling laptop so presumably there's some market. I also went from an 11" air to the M1 and miss the smallness of the 11".

The 11 was never a big seller though. I loved my 11 inch, but rarely every saw someone else with one. The 13 is the true hit.

I'd rather buy a similarly light laptop, that has a touchscreen.

You can already get AMD Zen 3+ machines in this size class, that isn't too far behind in perf & efficiency. Doing so gives you much better Linux compatibility, a touchscreen, and (sometimes) better feeling keyboards. Battery life will always come up short though, x86 laptops just can't match these new macbooks.

Why do you need a touchscreen? What are some of the applications? I feel like the screen would get dirty.

For casual web browsing, on some sites I find it more efficient to click links directly on the screen instead of using a cursor. A big one for me, pinch to zoom for images/charts/maps is a lot more natural to me on a touchscreen.

Controlling mobile emulators when developing mobile apps can also benefit from a touchscreen.

> I feel like the screen would get dirty.

It does, but I'd just wipe it down occasionally like I do my phone.

Mobile emulators seems like a good use case.

Pinching and scrolling are areas where to me it seems touchscreens have just tried to make up for shortcomings with touchpads.

I recently used a friend's touchscreen laptop to reinstall Windows on it. The touchscreen was handy to scroll with while we waited for Windows Update to find his touchpad driver, but once that was installed, I don't think I even felt tempted to touch the screen again.

I'm yet to find a single non-Apple laptop that comes even close to Macbook's touchpad.

There are better keyboards (Thinkpads are great), even comparable screens, fast processors, better dedicated GPUs. But somehow no one can get the touchpad right.

I don’t really see a difference in trackpads anymore. It used to be a huge deal. The old windows laptops were garbage. Now it’s more or less the same. People keep talking about the apple ones but side by side it’s the same same for general use.

Haptic touchpads vs a hinge click is a big deal. I switched to a magic trackpad 2 because of RSI in my right hand and no other trackpad is close.

Side note, massive praise to anyone who has contributed to the windows drivers for the apple trackpads. They are amazing.

https://github.com/imbushuo/mac-precision-touchpad

I really want laptop manufacturers to copy Apple's "click-everywhere" feature (called Force Touch). Maybe patented?

Isn’t that what dell just made? In the dell XPS 13?

https://youtu.be/6fPj6mj-M_k

It's good to know! But with annoying touch bar.. I wish they expand it to other models.

Examples?

I am still in love with my xps 13 9360 laptop. 4k oled touchscreen 14 inch ultra book, the form factor just works.

New one is heavy, much more so than 12" one

It's only a half pound lighter than the macbook pro

"Heavy"

As far as I’m concerned, basically all of these computers are light compared to the multi kg 14” Toshiba I lugged around in the 2000s

agree, still hold out hope for a new 12 inch at some point, apple silicon makes me optimistic ^^

12" was 0.92kg. New MBA is 1.24kg.

>Mine no longer holds a charge

That should be trivial to fix with a battery update. 5-6-7 years is a good run...

my older macbooks (air and pro) had a swollen battery which ruined the main boards and were no longer replaceable in practical terms. I'd get it replaced sooner than later if you're planning on doing so.

We got a SIKER battery replacement for a 2012 MacBook Pro, but one cell swelled up and the battery wouldn't hold a charge. One Amazon reviewer for one of the replacement MacBook battery packs says that they might be building replacement battery packs out of old worn damaged, or mismatched cells. I don't know if that's the case.

In any case I bought a second battery pack from TECHOWL and it seems to be working for a few weeks so far. Fingers crossed...

I’ve changed half a dozen MacBook batteries with Anker over the years, and all worked flawlessly. One I thought was swollen and they promptly moved to send a replacement, but turned out it was my case that was warped.

I remember when they were making cell phone battery replacements (when that was a thing) -- are they still doing this with laptops today?

Mine (2017) is still going strong. My only complaints are the lack of a video-out thunderbolt port and the relatively week camera. I find it plenty snappy and not at all 'crushingly slow', but then again I'm not compiling on it—just happily browsing and chatting.

Like you I'll probably replace it, but not for a couple years once the software catches up and when I can get it cheap refurbed.

All it needs is 2 external display support, a 120Hz screen, and we're golden

I swapped out the battery on mine. It now gets a few hours of life per charge but it's still fairly big and the fan fires up when barely anything is happening. Might just have to jump on this MBA too.

I think we're talking about two different machines, I have a fanless MacBook from ~2015, with the ultra low voltage intel CPU that is way, way too slow these days.

It has also survived multiple water spills, and the speakers don't work anymore. It's definitely time for an upgrade :)

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