Comment by Dudemeister_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dudemeister_ | Hacker News Reader

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Have you tried an LG Gram? I got myself one, it is one of the closest laptops to a macbook air M1:

- extremely light (my 14 inch is a little under 1kg), you'll absolutely feel the difference when holding it vs holding a macbook air M1, and it is very significant.

- great screen

- amazing keyboard

- the fan is very quiet, but the laptop can get a bit warm under load

- the touchpad is lacking on windows but is amazing on linux (I mainly use ubuntu / pop os)

- expect 9-10 hours battery life in most use cases, it sometimes goes as high as 14h+ if you're simply surfing the web/reading or as low as 6 hours on heavy use

When installing a linux distro, in some rare cases you might need to tweak a few bios option just to start the installation, but everything after that works out of the box.

That battery life is impressive! Thunderbolt 4 and a better selection of ports than the MacBook Air M1, also.

But, as great as the screen is, looks like it falls short of the 12" MacBook screen. Same 8GB of RAM in the base model as the M1, but memory bandwidth not the same. And the processor isn't going to keep up.

I mean, it's nice, but I picked the base model M1 Air about a year ago for $750 - still seems like the laptop to beat, if you can live with MacOS.

I quite like my work M1 Pro, but (to help coworkers with Mac problems while I was using a ThinkPad) I had an M1 Air 8GB from work for a while and I honestly found it really pretty bad because of the RAM limits. It seems like there's a floor against which MacOS bumps pretty hard if you want to use the machine for development-ish stuff and it reacts really poorly to memory starvation if you get ahead of yourself.

Having 16GB and up, though, an M1's fantastic. If I had to be resource constrained, though, I think I'd prefer something that handled Linux well.

Agreed, 8 GB is just not enough even for basic needs in the era of remote work and electron apps. I don’t know why they are continuing that as the base in this year’s MacBook Air M2, because it is just a worse user experience. These are already premium computers, even at the base models. I wish Apple would be a little bit more forward thinking about keeping users happy rather than saving a few pennies in the short term.

I’ll certainly look into them.

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