New MacBook Air with M2 | Hacker News Reader

New MacBook Air with M2

apple.com

420 pointstodsacerdoti778 comments

This thing is going to sell like hotcakes. The combination of single core CPU and graphics performance, device thinness, battery life in this laptop is unmatched.

It’s funny how Apple came back from the worst the Mac has ever been to the best in a span of few years. Johnny I’ve doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does.

autocorrect spelling error : silicone -> silicon

> the worst the Mac has ever been

Which one was that?

The 2016 MacBook Pro was a turd. The butterfly keyboard would inevitably break. I went through several of these laptops. To add insult to the injury, this model's unique innovations were "Touch Bar" and "no ports"...

I've been buying Macs since 2000, and the 2016 MBP is definitely the worst Mac I ever had. It was enough to drive me to purchase a Surface Book as an alternative.

I refuse to buy a touchbar mac although some have been issued to me by employers. I remember when they came out they raised the price of the MBP for this "feature" that just kinda sucked.

Ended up leaving my MBP closed 95% of the time and using a separate keyboard.

This is why I bought a M1 Air instead of a Pro when it first launched. I don't know how some people can stand the touchbar. "But it can do so much!" Isn't the point of touch typing to never look at the keyboard? It never made sense to me.

The 16" Macbook pro I bought in 2019 has been a source of constant irritation to me - unexpected fan thrashing, overheating, the usual stuff - and the performance and low cost of the new M1-based MacBooks has done nothing to improve my mood.

I don't blame you. That "pinnacle" of hardware design is an Apple poop-bomb.

I have one with 32GB that was provided by my employer. It is bad. I hate using it. The keyboard on it is bad, the performance is bad, and the glitchiness is deeply frustrating.

I loved my 2015 Macbook Pro 15" that it replaced and wondered why I thought it would be any better.

My M1 Macbook Pro 16 is a joy to me.

I put an order in for a 14" one last night to replace my 2019 MBP, this makes me feel better about the price.

Try customizing the fan curves to spin up at lower temps. Not much more noise over all if at all, but much more responsiveness.

> The 16" Macbook pro I bought in 2019 has been a source of constant irritation to me

This. Worst Mac I've ever had to use.

Same situation with mine. Even had to have the battery replaced after showing errors, after a whole ordeal to have it covered under warranty. I suspect this was related to the constant overheating.

I have one of these for work (employer-provided) and it is the worst machine I have ever used. The touchbar is useless. It's heavy and bulky as hell. Just watching a Youtube video or opening a page with some gifs causes the fan to spin up and sound like a jet engine. The dual fan situation was supposed to improve cooling, but it only made it LOUDER.

Incredibly embarrassing to be in a quiet meeting room and accidentally open a slide deck with a gif for 2 minutes and have the machine ramp up its fans to maximum speed. Why?? Meanwhile on my M1 Air I can have the same content open + some Twitch stream + 3D map view open with no fan, no sound at all, and it runs great.

In addition they made the battery smaller despite the CPU not really getting any more efficient so it got less battery life unless literally all you were doing was watching iTunes movies.

I'm grateful for the 'no ports' move. It really helped jump start moving everything on to USB-C. Yes, the implementation details are still being worked out. particularly how the mass manufacturers can cut cost while still the most wanted subset of supported features.

> Yes, the implementation details are still being worked out

We're about 7 years into USB-C and I still had to do a ton of searching to find a dongle that does HDMI at 60 Hz, USB-A and charging (how crazy to want all that, right?!). I also had to buy a shady (AFAIK it violates the spec) extension cable to build a dock setup ("real" docks are in the hundreds of Euros). It cost me about 40€ to get back features I used to get for free and has reliability issues.

USB-C is a blessing for charging, but I'm a bit disappointed by the ecosystem for the rest.

Oh my, the 2018 one I have is a terrible piece of junk, notably the USB subsystem (overheats on one side, prone to interference, regularly resets which kills and connects to some device, may it be mouse, keyboard, or external display) and although I liked the touch of the butterfly keyboard, the arrow keys still trip me up (and of course the reliability)

> "Touch Bar"

The default touch bar UI is terrible, except for a few special cases (e.g Logic Pro / GarageBand sliders/knobs). I did see and try some hacks to customise it but they were quite brittle so I dropped off that train, but it kind of proved to me that there was something to it that could have been really great were it fully programmable for real, and that the actual execution was extremely subpar.

> "no ports"

If by "no ports" you mean USB-C only, I am really enjoying the 4x C port machines, and would rather not go back to mixed ports unless forced to. USB-A/B sockets just need to die.

> except for a few special cases (e.g Logic Pro / GarageBand sliders/knobs).

yeah that .. I enjoy it for quickly setting/sliding brightness and volume. And you can add a screenshot button to it which does not break focus so it allows me to screenshot things the keyboard cmd+shift+3/4 UI can't (ie context menus)

Sheesh, did you skip the MBP 2015? That's the best one they ever made, even to this day. I've been using MBP 2015 since then and just recently "upgraded" to M1. The MBP 2015 is still a better machine, better screen and keyboard.

I can type waayy faster on the 2015 with less errors and the screen is better on the eye strain. The whites on the M1 are BRIGHT. I don't need a flash light shining at my face. Turning down the "brightness" doesn't address the problem. That just makes the whole screen darker or but the whites are still as bright. I'm still learning the laptop, maybe there is a contrast setting.

Oh, and the trackpad on the 2015 doesn't feel like sandpaper. On the M1, the tip of my finger is numb most of the day.

Anyway, for such a fanboi and you skipped the best MBP. Bummer for you. I can't imagine going from 2015 to 2016 and being satisfied with that. I'd have returned it the same day.

You'll definitely want to enable warmer colors

I use that. Been toying with night mode, color filters, and even flux. It's still too extreme, though it helps with the whites the other colors look atrocious.

I have just about identical settings on both models and comparing the two laptops side-by-side, the 2015 looks much better. I still have "vivid" colors but the whites are more grey.

Must be a screen thing, some new IPS technology. I don't know. It's terrible.

I feel like you might be noticing HDR. HDR supersedes your brightness settings.

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

I'm not really that picky about era of MBP, honestly I'd be happy with any of them save for the era with the bad keyboards. But the 2015 vintage was certainly a good one.

I have a late-2015 rMBP as my daily driver. I'm only now starting to run up against its limitations. USB-C, better 4K support, form factor, battery life, overall speed are things I'm looking forward to when I finally upgrade.

I was hitting memory limits and the disk was starting to fill up. I could have worked around the issues but the M1 marketing got me excited and they fixed the blatant faults introduced in the previous generation. If I were to do it again, I'd hold off another two generations, maybe get M3 or M4. The 2015 is that good.

I swapped the battery on my 2015 for like $150 at local computer repair shop. I was starting to hit memory limits but could have held off by using bare-metal dev box for heavy loads.

Hmm I did exactly the same thing. Apple refreshed my whole laptop after a keyboard break, and I have the Surface to my wife. I think we are both going to get these M2 MBAs next.

I am not generally an Apple user, but I had a 2012 MacBook pro for work for a few years, and it seemed pretty nice. I can't remember any complaints. That's while I was working at Google, though, so all I used it for was a web browser and SSH terminal.

Butterfly keyboard era. I have one as a work machine that sits around until I need VPN access. The keyboard is miserable, and the fans spin up when I open Slack. In contrast, my 14" M1 Pro is the best laptop I've ever used. Fans are inaudible, incredible performance, incredible keyboard/trackpad, battery is not a worry.

15”/13” MBPro with the Touch Bar and that horrendous keyboard.

The last Intel Air (early 2020) is the worst Mac I've ever owned by an absolute mile. The fan is permanently on - it's like working on a hairdryer.

Honestly - Pretty much every laptop Apple released from 2018 to 2021 was a complete turd.

I have the 16 inch 2019 model (issued by work, I don't buy apple products) and it's... just not a good machine.

It gets amazingly hot, the fans run ALL the time, the usb-c ports are flakey at best (frequently stop working after a suspend/resume cycle, or if you unplug while the machine is closed).

It's got a shitty touch bar instead of function keys (although at least it reverted to a real esc-key, the touchbar only esc was literally a joke).

It has frequent rendering glitches and artifacts.

The battery life is bad (basically a given for how much power this thing is dumping right into my lap as heat).

----

Before the M line, I was about to go have a real fight with our IT department to get me issued literally anything other than another Mac. The last couple of models they've put out in the intel line are just genuinely bad machines, across both the pro and air lines.

Ugh, I forgot about the battery. I'm lucky if I get a couple of hours out of it. Horrible thing.

90 minutes max for me. Awful machine.

I spent months complaining to them about this laptop. I had an Air for 5 years(!) before this and it was a wonderful machine. For 2k I'd expected a decent machine - but I hate everything about it. Obviously Apple didn't care in the slightest.

I had to resort to using third party software to disable Intel's Turbo boost just so that I can have decent battery life doing mundane tasks.

The one they launched with Touch Bar. By far the worst keyboard I have come across, almost useless Touch Bar, no ports.

For me the Touch Bar wasn't just useless, it was actively annoying.

Any of the 90s Performa models where processors were routinely crippled by having half-width memory buses on them.

M2 is not a single core CPU, albeit it does have stellar single threaded performance. As for having the worst Mac, it's quite probable they were nerfing their last x86 models on purpose to make the jump to Apple Silicon even more impressive. Remember the models that had inadequate thermals? Now magsafe is making a comeback?

I read GP's as "combination of (single core CPU *plus* graphics) performance"

Sure, that's why I mentioned it having stellar single threaded performance -- I figure out what they probably meant, but it's not what is written. And I've been seeing a lot of misinformation lately about many things (in general, and in tech in particular), and people buying that without questioning , which is why I jumped to "correct" this detail.

The point about nerfing their last x86 models stands on its own though.

When you multiply that out it becomes "combination of (single core CPU performance) and (graphics performance)", which seems clear enough and aligns well with your point. It's possible to read it as "combination of (single core CPU) and (graphics performance)", but since the first one isn't much of a benefit (other than possibly power), I think the other is the more natural reading.

Read that sentence as “single core cpu performance and graphics performance” Rather than “a single core cpu. And graphics performance”

Seems like in 2016 Apple was developing thermal designs for Intel’s future promises which ended up being significantly delayed.

And the Apple Silicon Macbook Air has no fan at all.

This is what Apple wanted out of their laptops, and was clearly struggling to achieve it with Intel’s offerings in 2015-2020.

I find it very hard to believe that Apple deliberately sabotaged a multi-billion dollar product line for ~5 years in order to (possibly?) boost sales when their incredibly risky and expensive investment into their own silicon came to market.

People have been shitting on MacBooks since they removed MagSafe and brought in the butterfly keyboard in 2016. The i9 Pros with massive thermal issues came out in 2018. That's a lot of money to lose due to everyone and their mother complaining about the decline in quality and poor value for money of your product.

I wouldn't ascribe to malice what can be more easily be ascribed to incompetence - Apple made questionable regarding the design of the MacBooks, and took the complaints to heart in time for release with their much improved chips.

> I wouldn't ascribe to malice what can be more easily be ascribed to incompetence

While I usually agree with the sentiment, it's hard to believe that one of the most successful companies in the world can be subject to such levels of incompetence on one of their flagship products.

Incompetence is the general state of affairs in the life of us all, unfortunately.

I think the simpler explanation was that for that period of time, the mac wasn't their flagship. They were 100% on mobile devices.

The rust belt is littered with the remains of what were at one time or another some of the most successful companies in the US or the world.

Corporations are ran by fallible people and are perfectly capable of running themselves into the ground. I'd argue it's nearly their natural trajectory to become bloated and inefficient over time. General Motors was largest and most successful auto manufacturer in the world right up until it crashed and burned in 2008 and had to be bailed out by the federal government.

I agree with your overall point, but GM was already widely seen as a has-been for years, maybe even decades, before 2008. They still had a lot of sales volume but apart from their trucks and a few SUVs, most of their products had been well behind those of their competitors in terms of both design and quality. So I don’t think they were really comparable to Apple at that point.

I take you don't know anyone working at Apple.

There is plenty of good and bad, like everywhere.

Apple took tons of questionable decisions and pissed off a lot of customers (me included) but they're redeeming themselves by bringing ARM to the laptop world (which was long overdue).

Personally I'll run my current Mac to the ground and then I'll just have a (non Mac, hopefully ARM) desktop PC.

Given the turnaround that happened when Ives left, I can definitely ascribe a lot of the problems to his push of form over function. Steve Jobs could set him straight in a way that Tim Cook apparently could not.

The point isn't even lost revenue. That Apple can swallow. That's not going to sink them. But they had sufficiently many really _bad_ generations (like 4 or so) that people _had to_ start thinking about how to move out of the Mac-universe. And that requires significant amounts of investment that you cannot easily recover. And that means that once Apple comes up with a non-sucking Mac, it's by no means clear that they get _back_ that business.

If they did that intentionally, then they took a very risky bet that paid off. But I really don't think anyone would make that kind of bet.

It was one generation, the 'touchbar' machines, not four. The third generation Macbook Pro is widely considered one of the best computers Apple ever built.

I'm typing on one now. It's almost ten years old. Original battery, even (though it really should have gotten a new battery about 2-3 years ago.)

> Johnny Ive doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does.

Then how come we never read about those hardware devs, and get only story after story about Ive?

My guess: those hardware devs are just faceless pawns that get replaced as soon as they start having opinions about product design.

So... the last 3-4 Apple events have had minute long segments with Johny Srouji presenting the Apple Silicon chips. He is Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies.

There is an interview with him in the Wall Street Journal here:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-chips-that-rebooted-the-mac...

Ive doesn't even work at Apple anymore.

Long AAPL, you say? Or what else are you saying?

I agree that Ive's influence will not be missed.

Aren't Macs basically a rounding error for the overall company?

And people don't need to replace iphones as much as they used to in the past...

Still a formidable company don't get me wrong.

Apple is virtually the only consumer computer company that has had positive YoY computer growth every year in the past 20 years. Apple is selling way more iPhones, but the Mac has been gradually and steadily gaining growth.

Around 20% of what iphone makes - not the most important category, but not a rounding error either.

Their Mac business is still a Fortune 500 company in terms of revenue by itself. Besides Halo effect, they still make a ton of money off Macs, and now that their chips cross pollinate with the iOS devices, it makes no sense to kill it off.

Not to mention, the Mac platform is effectively the SDK for the iOS/iPadOS platform. And it's a thing which pretty much every single person who works at Apple uses on a daily basis. The Mac is not — I assure you — going anywhere.

Especially not after they made this push into their own silicon where the majority of the benefits reaped so far have been in the Mac line.

Yup. If for some reason Apple didn't make computers, don't think I'd own an iPhone -- the whole ecosystem fitting together is a major part of the appeal for me.

I don't disagree at all. But the context of the comment I was responding to was specifically about whether this would be enough to justify a high conviction bet on AAPL stock.

Even if this model sells like hotcakes (which I'm sure it will), and even if that isn't priced in (which I'm less sure of), don't really see that having a large enough impact on overall earnings to move the needle on the stock. The reality is that small differences in the next Fed announcement probably will move AAPL to a much larger degree than this product.

As others have said, it's about 20% of phone revenue but you need a mac to build an iOS app. THey're also selling a whole ecosystem that needs to be cohesive and technically strong. For a while the mac part of the ecosystem wasn't living up to the quality of the phones, IMHO.

I've brought this up before, and someone responded that they'll move iOS app building and compilation into a web service, and they will no longer need to sell general-purpose computers, and the idea haunts me.

That feels like it cuts against the core of the f what Apple is, but it’s possible if Cook is succeeded by someone with no connection to old leadership.

They've built pieces of that already: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

I'm not personally very excited about living inside that sealed of a bubble.

Even if that's their plan, it will be at least another decade before that service is viable to be a hard requirement, completely replacing local builds.

It's outsourcing a key part of the Apple ecosystem to Google (Chrome), which is why Apple will never do it. Big-tech companies go to extremely great lengths to own every part of the pathway from consumer to developer to hardware. Google first developed a browser, then an OS, then a hardware division just so Microsoft couldn't sit between Search and a microchip. Similarly, Apple has worked extremely hard to develop an App Store, IDE (XCode), and developer machine (Mac) so that neither Google nor Microsoft can come between them and the developer.

Facebook is currently paying the price of not owning their distribution infrastructure - they've been hurt extremely badly by recent privacy changes that Apple and Google have put out, while Apple and Google themselves have been relatively isolated from them.

I don't think Google factors into this plan anywhere. The endpoint is iOS devices able to build iOS apps with full fidelity using Xcode for iPad, not a web based IDE. Total control for Apple.

Besides what other commenters mentioned, it is also the longest running revenue source for Apple.

I would be long AAPL if they didn't have the majority of their production in China. That now poses a significant risk and Apple execs must be sweating bullets right now scrambling to onshore.

Let alone China invading Taiwan.

What’s going on in Ukraine is alteady horrible, add this scenario to the equation and we’re looking at ultimate doom.

There. I said it.

I have a bunch of money ready to spend at a moments notice at my nearby computer shop as soon as I hear Taiwan has been invaded.

I figure whatever I can get at that time will serve me well for the next 10 years.

They’re slowly moving production to Vietnam and India. But I don’t think that’s far enough from China if a war between US and China breaks out.

Honestly the keyboard prevented me from purchasing a MacBook from 2014 until 2020. I still despise the 2020 keyboard but I’ll reluctantly use it to type a password and then plug in a USB keyboard.

The 2022 is a dream come true for me.

It was 2016 when things went wrong for the keyboards. I have a 2015 MacBook Pro and the keyboard is fantastic.

Apple released a 12" MacBook in early 2015 which was the first to have the butterfly keyboards.

A guy I worked with bought one and complained about it relentlessly.

True. In my case I didn't need a laptop for 2015/2016, but I'm typically an "every 2 years" kind of person. When 2016 rolled out I knew I was going to be taking care of that 2013 laptop for a long while.

And mag safe made a comeback? And an HDMI port?! The M1 pro was a no-brainer to me when I was in the market for a new laptop.

How in the world do you invent (or at least properly commercialize on a mass scale) a feature like MagSafe and then remove it from your laptops?

Jonny Ive made a lot good decisions in the days when he worked for Jobs, but my theory is that Jobs kept him from being a complete idiot. Tim Cook lost control of him and it went downhill massively after that.

The lure of only having two ports, both of which are identical, and can be used for absolutely everything, is powerful. It’s pretty cool to take the laptop home and plug in one single cable to hook it up to my desk, though it’s really only a few seconds less than separate power, usb, and audio cables once you figure out how to keep them from getting lost under the desk.

Personally, I think the all-in USB-C was a brilliant one. A better-looking USB-C/A adapter would have made it bearable.

I wasn't missing HDMI at all.

> the worst the Mac has ever been

No. No no no. The worst was the Amelio era.

Amelio did do three good things: * replaced Spindler * failed to buy BeOS * bought NeXT

Spindler's Apple is responsible for the Performa sub-brand (although Amelio didn't kill it).

> After releasing a total of sixty-four different models [in five years], Apple retired the Performa brand in early 1997, shortly after release of the Power Macintosh 5500, 6500, 8600 and 9600, as well as the return of Steve Jobs to the company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa

Yeah, for sure. I'm just grumbling about these kids that don't know how good they have it. Even with unreliable keyboards and Intel failing to deliver, the period leading up to the M1 wasn't even close to "the worst the Mac has ever been". I had to walk to school barefoot!

That era lasted from February 1996 to July 1997. I don’t think you can call it an era. Maybe a transition period.

> but the silicone chips team now does

You mean silicon. Silicone means something else.

https://www.livescience.com/37598-silicon-or-silicone-chips-...

Do you think there is anyone here who didn't understand exactly what they meant?

I'm with you. HN pedants are so god damn annoying.

As one of them, I agree. It's easy to jump to the first thing you notice (something superficially wrong to point out), I often do this. And it's hard to think beyond that and engage with the ideas instead.

But then again, that's why we try to write elegantly so readers don't stumble on the words and instead think about the meaning behind them.

Well, words do matter. This is HN...

Getting grammar and spelling right makes for text that's much easier to read. Helping people remember these things is positive.

Just "silicon*" as a reply should have been enough. There was no need for the additional sentence and certainly no need for the source/link.

Even that's not needed, it's just a shitty spelling-only reply when everyone in question knows what's going on - it added nothing to the discussion.

There is a thin line between times when this is true, and times when people are just being obnoxiously pedantic.

Correcting someone's language is always ok as long as it's done respectfully, which it was. I'm sure people that speak English as a second language really appreciate it, otherwise if nobody tells 'em they're using something incorrectly then they're never get to learn!

Yup - I owe my above-average native fluency to my mother's incessant correcting, and my English proficiency to countless kind strangers on the internet.

> Do you think there is anyone here who didn't understand exactly what they meant?

"Aoccrdrinig to rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be ttaol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

In my grad school AI class I turned in a paper that I ran through a script (that I wrote) that jumbled the letters like this. The topic was related to the power of the human brain. The professor didn’t catch the double meaning and made me resubmit it normally.

Peer pressure matters a little bit. Standardized usage is a good thing.

He could be talking about boobie trapped chips

> This thing is going to sell like hotcakes. The combination of single core CPU and graphics performance, device thinness, battery life in this laptop is unmatched.

Well, except for the small problem that the M1 air exists and is still on sale. Same single core CPU performance and near enough multicore and GPU performance. And it's cheaper by a not insignificant amount.

Which is pretty much why Linus Tech Tips wasn't a fan. If you want an Air, get the M1 version and save a buck. If you want performance, kinda hard to argue with the huge upgrades you get from the not that much more expensive 14" Pro.

I think you are confusing their review of MacBook Pro M2 with the MacBook Air m2.

the air m2 still is $200 more for a fairly small performance improvement

Better webcam, better screen?

Linus offhandedly said the M1 had “disappointing performance” when it first came out. He’s got opinions but he’s not super credible.

The LTT review I was referring to was by Anthony, not Linus. I don't recall Linus ever saying the M1 was "disappointing performance" anyway, nor how they wouldn't be considered a credible review? Just because a reviewer doesn't give the review you want doesn't mean it's not credible.

In addition to all of that, MagSafe is back as well.

Keep it. I want one port to rule them all.

Is the returned MagSafe the only way to charge these new macs? Or can you choose to use either MagSafe or usbc?

Honestly curious.

Not sure about plugging in two chargers at once, but you can definitely use either MagSafe or USB-C to charge. I do it frequently with my MBP. The MagSafe charges faster, but that may be more down to the power brick than the interface, I don’t know.

mag safe is how to get the 67w, usb c will be slower but possible. This i researched too because wanted a USB-C Exclusive EDC and it looks like thats possible albeit slightly slower charging which is fine if you don't rely on 100% battery dumps then full fast charges to operate.

Wrong. It depends on the USB-C charger/cable; it can and will charge at >67W via USB-C if your wall adapter & cable can handle it.

The new 2021 MBPs (14 & 16) as well as the new M2 MBA/MBPs can charge with either Magsafe, OR USB-C.

I've personally charged my 14" off a 100W USB-C, and it does fast charge, faster than the stock 67W adapter.

Wonder how long these M chips were in R&D and meanwhile they were just watching everyone on the internet complain how crappy mac laptops were but they knew this was coming

Probably somewhere around two years before the M1 announcement is when development started.

It’s a lot of work to design one of these parts.

https://anysilicon.com/asic-design-flow-ultimate-guide/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2019/07/26/intel-...

Intel - 4 years.

When Linus Tech tips did a review and tear down of the last Intel MacBook Air the design had no heat pipe and was just passively cooled. The first MacBook Air with the M1 design was equivalent but with an updated motherboard that had an M1.

The A12Z in the DTK is derived from the A12 which came out in 2018 so it probably was earlier than that.

? My M1 MacBook Air is passively cooled, but has a heat pipe that feeds into a heat sink that's at least as large as the M1 system heat spreader.

- Detail image: https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2020/11/19115445/MBA_M...

- iFixit Teardown feature article: https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet...

It's just a big piece of copper with decent thermal mass, not heatpipe.

None of the Intel MacBook Airs were passively cooled. They all had fans.

There was a Macbook however that was passively cooled.

I loved that computer, and I hope they make another one of that size.

AMD and Intel chips take ~5 years from starting work to being available to buy

The architecture is basically frozen 2 years before tapeout, which itself is a year before they go on sale.

Do you have a reference for that? 5 years is a pretty long time but I suppose it depends a lot on how one defines the start of a design.

The M series is a continuation of the A series development that's been going since 2008 when they bought PA Semi, maybe earlier. The M1 could have been branded the A14X but for whatever reason they chose not to, probably to make better marketing buzz. I would guess they've been booting macOS on ARM in the lab since the A7 and after that just a long grind to get to a good enough user experience with sufficient app compatibility to switch. You can see stuff like TSO in the CPU showed up in earlier chips at least a couple years before the M1 launched.

Probably a decade or so. I imagine it was always a possibility, with steps being taken towards it over time, even if it wasn't a well defined goal yet. Requirement of uploading App Store apps as LLVM IR instead of machine code comes to mind.

>watching everyone on the internet complain

What's especially amusing in hindsight are the (then justified) complaints about thermal throttling in the last Intel Macbooks. They knew damn well those chassis would not be good enough for Intel CPUs, but they didn't care, it was designed from ground up for Apple silicon.

My M1 Air is a nearly perfect machine, but I continuously find myself looking at the yellow “memory pressure” graph and swap disk writes.

I wish Apple never offered 8gb version, as I was surprised to find that MacOS wants to use more RAM than a Windows machine with the same amount of RAM.

If they gave us a way to actually disable the macOS features, 8GB would be very usable. But everything from regular wifi/bt scanning to photo tagging to adding all interactions to a giant Siri database so that the OS can suggest what it thinks you’re most likely to open at any given moment. These all need RAM and other resources even if you don’t have any open applications.

There aren't third-party ways to shut some of that stuff off? When I used OSX I remember a great app called OnyX [1] that could customize deeper, system-level stuff.

[1] https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/index.html

Have you checked to see how much they are using? In general it's not much.

Theres no need to watch memory/swap, just use it as it is intended. IME, 8gb is plenty.

I exchanged my 8gb air for 16gb and it's perfect. Really cannot get it bogged down. Definitely now that most things are Apple Silicon compiled; before that it was a bit more problematic.

I would say, is this Ive's fault or Intel's? What the silicon team is doing is more or less what Ive needed to fulfill his visions.

Honestly, there's a lot of PC nerd pushback against Ive, but I think the industry as a whole needs someone like his asking the (to the lay person) obvious questions - i.e. why can't I have this amount of computing power in a human-friendly form factor, vs. the giant, imposing, and ugly monolithic towers of yore?

Single core, huh? It's 8 core

I think they meant single core performance.

My M1 MacBook Air is insanely fast and the battery life is easily the best I've ever experienced. If the M2 is anything like the M1 or better, I agree, these things are going to make Apple a nice chunk of change.

I suspect the best reason for upgrading is access to 24GB of RAM and maybe the hardware video encoders if that's your thing. Otherwise, M2 is a very solid iteration, but probably not worth dropping that much money if you already own an M1 system.

For me it's hardware nested virtualization but I'll be waiting for the M2 Pro.

Could you please provide the link about "hardware nested virtualization"?

While not officially confirmed, it seems likely as the A15 appears too (https://nitter.net/dylan522p/status/1438313107231842304), and VMware seems pretty optimistic (https://nitter.net/denniscdietrich/status/153456512761738035...).

I have no idea why VMware is talking about EL3 access, these chips do not have EL3. They do have nested virtualization but it's not available in the system frameworks yet.

For me the main reason to upgrade would be Magsafe. I'm constantly afraid of someone stumbling on the cable and destroying the USB-C port.

I couldn't find any info on this, is this the same Magsafe as the 2015 devices, i.e. can I use existing old chargers? If so then I might even consider upgrading just due to this (I also have a 12/24V Magsafe charger).

24 GB RAM would be nice compared to 16 GB currently, but it's not something I'd really need.

My 16in M1 Max with MagSafe is not compatible with the older MagSafe chargers

Damn. Then I have no reason to upgrade. Thanks!

> but the silicone chips team now does.

Ah-ha! I knew they were implants!

I wager that 90% of PC buyers don't really look at specs at all and just always buy the latest Mac regardless.

And that 90% of that 90% won't really benefit much from the advanced specs. I had an 11" Chromebook with a Celeron processor for 6 years. Cost less than $200 and weighed almost nothing. If I wasn't coding or gaming, it was the best PC I ever owned.

> It’s funny how Apple came back from the worst the Mac has ever been to the best in a span of few years.

The terrible state of the Mac over the last nine years hardly compares to the dismal state that Apple was in during the 90s. The product line was a mess and they had multiple machines that had common failures (PowerBook 5300c[0] comes to mind as my first laptop). It was so bad that PowerComputing was making better Macs (clones) than Apple.

They've made two incredible comebacks.

[0] > Two early production PowerBook 5300s caught fire, one at an Apple employee's house and another at the factory; it turned out that the Sony-manufactured lithium ion batteries had overheated while recharging. Apple recalled the 5300s sold (around a hundred machines) and replaced the batteries on these and all subsequent 5300s with nickel metal hydride batteries that provided only about 70% the endurance. At the time, the media viewed the problems with the PowerBook 5300 series as yet another example of Apple's decline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_5300#Batteries

> Johnny Ive doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does

That's not how Apple works. If they still work remotely like they did back under Jobs the hardware teams are not the guys calling the shots for future product cycles.

> If they still work remotely like they did back under Jobs the hardware teams are not the guys calling the shots for future product cycles.

There have been a lot of articles about how it doesn't work remotely like it did under Jobs[1]. Tim Cook has been CEO for 11+ years and isn't at all like Jobs.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/technology/jony-ive-apple...

I spent an embarrassing amount on a lackluster early 2019 MBP. It's fine as a general purpose laptop but is just a little too slow for serious dev work, a little too heavy as the main travel laptop, battery life a little too short for my liking.

I got an M1 for my work laptop maybe 4 months ago and it might honestly be the best laptop I've ever used.

In a somewhat similar situation with the 2019 16 inch Intel MBP. I wouldn't say it's too slow, but it does get embarrassingly hot during regular use. Enabling low power mode disables turbo boost and keeps it much, much cooler, but plugging into an external monitor enables the discrete graphics card and the laptop gets hot again.

Going to try to get a few more years out of it hopefully until Imagination Tech's hardware accelerated ray tracing solutions can make it to Apple's GPUs.

Yeah I ditched my 2019 16" for an M1 Max. Was an expensive move but honestly, I couldn't bear to use that thing as a laptop, especially once I knew there was an alternative which doesn't get hot enough to fry eggs on.

For me it was worth it, because I now enjoy using my laptop as a laptop on the sofa or whatever, and do a lot more creative stuff on it than I did with the old one. But definitely not a cheap move!

Mine's gone in the cupboard and never been used since the M1 Pro arrived.

I use these with few or no problems. The heat dissipation is pretty much solved by charging on the right side. My life is full of usability hacks, I don't mind one more.

The biggest frustration for me with a mac now is that it's becoming a toy OS like windows. It becomes more and more cumbersome to run programs that aren't in the app store. As a result I've been cultivating an ubuntu/plasma(kde) practice on a gaming desktop outside of working hours.

I had the same issues with a 2019 16" MBP. Annoying fans as soon as I connected an external display, getting very hot, okay performance. Switched to a M1 Pro 14" and couldn't be happier, as far as work laptops go it's the best I ever used since switching to macs in 2009.

I switched from windows/dell to a 2019 16inch MBP Intel for work as I wanted everything MBPs promised, especially battery life. I was very dissapointed that I get about 2 hours on battery, but I suspect its mostly due to the MS office apps. Is this improved on the M1 versions? Surely high cpu usage there will still waste battery pretty quickly?

The 16 inch Intel MBP was a machine I wanted to love. Big lovely screen, should be fast and capable, I was stoked to get it. But on the occasion where I have to take it off the charger and attend a zoom call, it gives me maybe 90 minutes of battery life, fan going full speed the whole time, trying to melt the desktop.

Fortunately I also have a 13 inch M1 MBP that has no such problem, and is easily my favorite MBP in many years.

I remember having to close down every app before starting a video call in an attempt to keep the fans under control.

The new 16" just does not care! I've owned it since March and haven't heard the fans once. Runs smoothly whatever I try and throw at it.

The 16" MBP would have been a much better machine for most people if it didn't have a dedicated GPU. The CPU got pretty toasty as-is, but adding a dGPU into the mix just turned it into a furnace.

The way the thing was wired up also meant that connecting to an external display engaged the GPU, and some unacknowledged hardware or software flaw set the power/heat floor to about 20W (it's not just the minimum draw of the chip—you can have the GPU active without an external display and it uses a fraction of that). The end result: if you have it plugged into a monitor, you're almost constantly hearing a fan, even when idle.

Mine replaced a 2015 entry-level MacBook Pro which, while it served me well, had long since fallen behind what I needed. I was so excited to have the 16" for about a week, until I realised that I was never going to not be hearing fans screaming. I know laptops (especially big laptops) aren't actually meant to be used on laps for extended periods, but I genuinely couldn't with that thing. Even mild load would make it uncomfortable to be in physical contact with. I don't understand how none of the reviews seemed to pick up on it—perhaps everyone was too distracted by finally having a functional keyboard again to notice.

The sad irony of it all is that I bet the vast majority of purchasers were developers like myself, who have absolutely no need for a dedicated GPU.

In any case I sold mine and bought an M1 Air, which I've been very happy with ever since. As nice as these new ones look (and as great as the new 14" and 16" M1 Pros are), I don't think I could justify it. This thing handles everything I throw at it (though my wife has the 8GB model and it really doesn't seem to be enough with how much RAM stuff guzzles these days).

> The sad irony of it all is that I bet the vast majority of purchasers were developers like myself, who have absolutely no need for a dedicated GPU.

I would seriously doubt that. Mac sales are huge and developers must be a relatively small segment of computer users.

They should have at least put it as an option to not have it. It would be even be cheaper.

That’s why many folks bought a MacBook and maxed it out. You’d get most of the way there firepower wise, just no dGPU/not quite as good of a screen if memory serves (could be missing something though).

Yeah but how many of those people are buying computers that start at over two grand? The 16” MBP is firmly a power user machine, and I would bet a lot more power users still don’t need a GPU than do.

Especially when you consider many of the people that do need a GPU surely need more than was ever offered in Intel MacBooks, considering they were never particularly good chips even by laptop standards.

The base config 2015 15” didn’t have a GPU, seems silly that they removed that option for the 16”.

My response was to the claim that the majority of the customers of that product was developers. It seems unlikely that the majority of the customers of that to be developers simply because of the numbers. Whether they need dGPU or not I don’t know, but I won’t be surprised that the expectation for a 16” Apple customer that doesn’t know much is to have bought a machine capable of video/photo editing and not be surprised by its mediocre performance.

you just gave me flashbacks :( worst purchase ever!

I'm still stuck on a 2019 MBP from work. What garbage hardware. Up for a refresh in December.

Just to put things into perspective, the 2019 MBP might be worse than M1 Macs, but it's still way better than anything I've seen in the PC world (which is why Macs have been able to coast through bad decisions regarding keyboard, ports, and touchbar for so many years). That said, I'm very excited for these new ARM devices.

I don’t believe it’s better than non-mac products.

Curious what you'd buy instead?

I had a Lenovo P15 before my current M1Pro. That thing was a machine. I got roughly the same battery life through day of dev work, got to choose my OS, it did everything perfectly. Only thing it lacked on imo was looks.

So yeah, in my experience, there are other laptops out there that are as good.

I used to work on the similar P51, definitely a nice device for Unix work. I also keep a maxed-out T460s around as a handy little notebook for programming and photo editing. Not as powerful as the P51, but the design feels like a refinement of the "manila envelope" Macbook Airs. Lenovo hardware is starting to find it's footing again, though there's still a number of really Lovecraftian devices they made in the early 2010s (T440p, anyone? How about an X240?).

Thanks - my experience with laptop workstations has pretty much universally been huge bulky machines with horrific cooling that is heavily throttled and the battery only lasts 2-4 hours under load. My M1 Mac lasts all day even when compiling which is night and day.

The OS option isn't a problem for me - I'm content running windows/Mac regardles!

> it's still way better than anything I've seen in the PC world

Man, if the 2019 16" Macbook is better than anything in the PC world, I feel like you don't try many laptops. That 16" laptop is one of the most comically terrible laptops I've ever seen. Nevermind the Touch Bar, the performance envelope on these devices is way off (and probably boils down to the terrible chassis design and logic board layout). I have a friend with the i7 model, and it would regularly hit 90c on completely benign workloads like watching YouTube or browsing through her calendar. The battery life is distinctly worse than most laptops I've seen at that size too, which really left me scratching my head over these machines. Even the 2019 13" model wasn't that bad.

With all fairness though, I've never owned one or driven it full-time. I just remember balking at how poorly thought-out the hardware was at the time, and feeling pretty good about my choice to abandon Macbooks altogether.

I have the 13” model at home and the 16” at work. My work computer runs hot and slow, but that seems to be attributable largely to (or at least confounded by) corporate malware (falcond in particular IIRC).

Last I heard a Mac is a PC. Hey even phones are PCs. They're all personal computers. In fact I would say mac's are more often PC then windows machines. Windows machines are often not personal and are used my many people in big orgs in a shared corporate fashion.

Oh man it's been a while since I've seen this particular flavor of needless pedantry. What a blast from the past!

What's a computer?

Lol. I haven't heard someone define mac's and PCs as different like that in a long time.

Apple did an amazing job to market it as such and create an us and them division. Imagine Tesla started marketing themselves as 'we're not a car, were a Tesla'

Although true, it was some what meant in jest

That may all well be true, but nevertheless, virtually everyone understands and uses the “Mac vs PC” distinction.

Doesn't mean they should never be put right either. Just because something has been called something that it should always be called that. That's seems to be big thing in western society at the moment.

I disagree. Pedantry adds no value, and moralizing semantics seems silly at best. What counts is that people understand clearly, and in this case everyone did.

The XPS9575 was great (with linux). I still use it for laptop tasks despite having a 16 inch m1 mbp and a 13 inch m1 mba.

I got the M1 iMac with only 16gb RAM when it came out and it's incredible how fast it is. My previous machines were top-of-the-line intel Macs and the M1 blows them out of the water, performance-wise.

I can buy the lowest-end M-series models from now on and feel confident I'll have more than enough power. Gonna save a lot of money going forward.

Yeah, basically same here. My work M1 is 16GB and the '19 Intel is basically maxed out, and I'd take the M1 any day.

I have a 2019 pro and my wife got an M1 air and every time I use her computer for anything I kick myself for not waiting a year and getting an M1 for myself.

The resale value of that 2019 will be high. I don’t know the safest place to sell them though. Recommendations welcome! EBay just fills me with dread.

I sold mine at 60%. That's how fed up I was with my 2019 16" MBP after having the M1 Air for about 3 months.

2016 MBP gang rise up! I switched over to the Air M1 a year ago (I think?) and it's faster, lighter and smaller. Best laptop ever.

My M1 Mac mini is, hands down, the greatest computer deal I’ve ever nabbed. 1TB SSD, 16tb memory (I do media production 8gb is a non-starter), all for $1450.00. It’s even a solid gaming machine which I wasn’t expecting.

No complaints at all except the 2 monitor cap.

I'm sorry if this doesn't add anything to the discussion, but one of MKBHD's latest reviews discusses the differences between the MacBook Pro 13 and this new MacBook Air. The video does a great job of shining a light on all of the tradeoffs between the two devices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSdKnNj7ozk

This little device is a beast!

His videos are consistently brilliant. My go-to example for people who think "YouTuber" isn't a legitimate career.

Exactly. I espcecially think his content is extremly well thought out. Like when he compared all the iPhone models from first to last.

What's remarkable is that he's been doing this for over half his life. (He's recently been critiquing some of his early work. Quarter-life crisis perhaps? But he's living proof that putting in the hours, being consistent, and yes a little lucky, really pays off over time.)

> But he's living proof that putting in the hours, being consistent, and yes a little lucky, really pays off over time.

My inner cynic says that he's rather a living proof of survivorship bias of that approach. There's really a lot of talented people out there, he just did it at the right point of time, when not many thought of it. He risked and survived.

What annoys me about MKBHD's video is that he complains about an ageing design like it's a bad thing for the general case.

I laud any manufacturer that's come up with a time tested design that doesn't change, which is why the IBM Thinkpads of the day were so popular.

But in this specific case, MKBHD is right, this is an Apple being lazy about design and probably reusing their existing parts and tooling just to slap on an M2 for a laptop that probably shouldn't exist anymore.

I agree with this take. Tools should rarely require style updates. Sometimes you see style updates in hammers for example, but mostly they are gimmicks. A hammer from 89 years ago still hammers or pulls out nails. Some forms may be better for certain jobs (framing hammer, pein hammer, etc), but overall the design does not change very much.

When you introduce things like “titanium” and nail holders, etc., it’s mostly marketing gimmick and is reminiscent of kids’ toys. Kids need to constantly be provoked for new interest.

A Macbook Air is also an accessory and a luxury item, though

I guess to some it is, to me its just a tool. I don't want ti to be a hideous monstrosity but its not a luxury, I have a largely pointless mechanical wrist watch for that purpose. I used a Macbook Air from 2012-2020 and never really cared that it was stylish, my previous computer was a big black brick (aka Thinkpad).

Titanium hammers have half the weight and 10x less recoil to the user for about the same energy imparted to the target.

This translates DIRECTLY into reducing the chances that you wind up with carpal tunnel or jacking up your wrist, elbow, and shoulder.

> he complains about an ageing design like it's a bad thing for the general case

I don't think that statement is true. He speaks to the specific pros/cons of each. It isn't that the design is old--the problem is that that specific design was hobbled from the start, a condition that is especially apparent in comparison to the Air.

In the same video he compares a hypothetical with another laptop vendor deciding to stick to the same design (ASUS). That's why I said general case.

I don't think any part of the old MacBook Pro design was "time-tested" or "popular" though. MagSafe being removed wasn't popular, USB-C ports only wasn't popular, no SD card reader wasn't popular, Touch Bar wasn't popular and the keyboard… Well, the less said, the better.

That's part of the reason why the new MacBook Pro was so liked. Apple did a complete 180° and fixed everything that people hated - but they're still selling the hated one.

At the same time he did seem to suggest that it was a design that is aging quite well.

Personally, when I look back at some of the original MacBook Pros with the milled chassis, I think they still look better than any recent Windows or Chromebook laptop. It really is quite a timeless design.

Timeless design and incredible engineering.

I recently handled a ca. MacBook Pro from 2004, and it feels awful, like a collection of parts barely holding together. My 2008 unibody MacBook still feels nice to the touch and rock solid, even though it has been dead for many years now.

Unibody was a huge investment for the company and my understanding is that this was in part one of Ive’s highest career points.

If I remember correctly, before unibody laptops the chassis was a separate component inside, with everything including the case attached on the outside.

I agree, I just gave away my wife's 2007 macbook from grad school and it was a great piece of engineering. I also really like my 2004 T41p until the magnesium hinges broke in half - otherwise another great laptop. For the people saying these new ones are expensive, both of those machines 15-20 years ago were much more expensive.

Yep - the case was pressed aluminium, which cant be returned back to it’s original shape after it has been deformed or bent, so the fitment around thinner spots near the ports and cd drive would always look a bit off after a few years of use.

Thicker aluminium on the unibody is less prone to bending, and much easier to assemble once you’ve overcome the challenges that come with milling, such tooling, optimising the materials usage and recycling the swarm and scrap.

> What annoys me about MKBHD's video is that he complains about an ageing design like it's a bad thing for the general case.

That's unfair. He does "complain" but praises Apple for sticking with it immediately afterwards, saying "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It is obvious he's playing two characters presenting different arguments.

The term is "brand safe" and it's how major influencers pander to corporations.

They likely could have released the M2 without a year stagger but elected to release the M1 then the M2, because capitalism

But they would have just called it the M1, and we’d be back in 2020, but it would be 2022.

"Being lazy about design", as if the point of this model refresh isn't:

1. an upgrade path for those in the Business Leasing program who are due a replacement for their existing MBP13-with-touchbar, that is careful to not break their use-cases;

2. to use up an existing stock of parts. (See also: most of the reason the iPod Touch existed for so long.) Any touchbars they already cranked out ideally have to go into something, rather than just being left in a warehouse to depreciate.

3. to relieve demand pressure on their limited supply of newer-model parts (which could be fairly important in the middle of a global tech-supply-chain crunch.)

Points 2+3 could theoretically be called "lazy" (or perhaps "selfish") on Apple's part — but there's little real downside for anyone here, since, per point 1, most of the expected consumers of this hardware are business customers doing bulk buys/leases, who don't care about having the "newest and sexiest" designs anyway; and releasing a "retread" model for those customers "frees up" the logistical resources to get new laptops to the customers that do care about those things.

Home users are expected to just get an Air; "individual professionals" are expected to get the MBP14/16. It's only corporate buyers that requirements-checkbox themselves into buying MBPs rather than Airs, but then also economize themselves into the cheapest possible MBPs.

Title "M2 MacBook Pro: Why Does This Exist?" is perfect. This is Apple back in Centra/Performa territory [0]. See also iFixit's "We’re Pretty Sure We Just Tore Down the New M2 MacBook Pro!?" [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJEaAINoQPo&t=223s

iFixIt nearly upgraded their M1 Pro to an M2 Pro by replacing its logic board?! The peripherals didn’t work, but I like this direction and hope Apple embraces the concept so people in their self repair program can give old chassis a new life.

I want a 15" version of this hardware so badly. It would be my perfect personal webdev machine, assuming no significant M2 thermal issues.

My workflows are all lightly threaded and CPU bound, so I don't benefit much from the Pro/Max/Ultra SKUs. So considering the base M1/M2 meets my performance needs, nothing else really comes close when it comes to portability/battery life.

All I really crave is a bit more screen real estate.

I do really hope the competition catches up and we start to see more open alternatives that approach the same perf-per-watt. As it stands, there just isn't anything else I've seen that offers a comparable experience to one of these Apple Silicon machines.

My personal endgame would be an ARM/RISC-V Linux machine from a company like Framework, but I feel like that's a ways off.

There's been rumours for a while now of a 15" Air in the next few years. It would make a lot of sense—not many people looking at the MacBook Air would be willing to pay double the price to jump to a 16" MBP just for a bigger screen.

Also there are probably a lot of people who want a bigger screen but not a thick and heavy laptop

Always wondered, where is the thin line between where you are ok with M2 Air and M1 Pro/Max... would you mind elaborating how you drew it?

I would also like to hear people’s thoughts on this. Considering pulling the trigger on this tomorrow morning or just getting an M1 Pro/Max

It's very tempting, but my MacBook Air M1 has been great and performance wise any improvement is probably barely noticeable in the day to day that I'd end up feeling like I just bought a new chassis. Which could still be nice.. although most of the time it's in clamshell attached to my monitor. I'll have to sleep on this!

I'm in the same position with an M1 Pro. Although the new screens do look nice for dark mode...

maybe I will convince my boss to get me the new one, and I will give the m1 pro to my teammates :)

Other than that I agree (though, as I have stated elsewhere, this is good. less landfill). The m1 pro is just insane - I sold all of my other machines.

As an M1 pro owner, the big non starter for the M2 air is the lack of the high refresh rate screen (pro motion or w/e), I've really gotten spoiled by it.

For M1 owners, just wait for M3. It should be on TSMC 3nm which will be the next true node shrinkage.

Please post more of this. I need an angel on my shoulder whispering.

I have a 16" with the Max chip, and yet . . .

Don’t worry there will be daily rumor stories posted here about the subject along with daily stories about how great recently announced X is. Your challenge is to sail between Scylla and Charybdis.

I mean to be honest if you have a 16' M1 Max, there is no reason to upgrade for the next 2-3 years..

The performance improvements will be marginal at best and in any case, what good is a machine if you can't keep it more than a year?

I just ordered my 16' Max and am not willing to upgrade for a while.. it's not even worth the wait for the M2 Max pros, since it will be basically the same specs and you'll have to wait more than a moth to get it anyway so why delay further?

If you have cash to burn however, then I guess it doesn't matter..

Lol same here

M1 owner but since 2020, so probably the among the longest users.

I'm tempted.

I also think 3nm is going to beset with production problems, I don't think it's coming around anytime near.

I am reading that alot of users had issues with the 8gig model. If you have 8gigs, did you experience any perfomance issues?

I did - I believed all the '8 gig is fine' stuff at the beginning, and didn't like how much Apple charged for RAM. But for my work anyway it often starts having stuttering and slowness issues if I have too many things open. Otherwise it's quite fast.

hm okay so i will maybe get the 16 gig version better

I have the 16 gig version since 2020. Overall its the best machine I have ever owned but even then, maybe in 10% of the cases when too many chrome tabs are opened, VSCode and a bunch of other apps are in, I can sometimes notice the slow down but its not super critical.

I did have severe issues with Kernel Panics, the laptop would just blink a pink pixelated screen and restart but that has been fixed.

I had 16g though. 8g would be horrible.

Yeah, I have the M1 2020 with 8gigs and 512ssd. I encounter some issues when I use it for development.

I expect M2 pro/max/ultra to be on 3nm. TSMC projects first customer product to be shipping end of the year. That matches Apples update cycle and we know Apple always is the first one to snag the new nodes.

Agree. Apple haven't added support for a second external monitor so the extra features are more performance and more battery. The performance of the M1 is incredible so it is not clear why to update.

That's a good thing! The fact that the original version is still going strong is a (huge) selling point for Apple.

I am glad to see a class of device meant to last upwards of 5 years.

I've been using my 2013 MBP for nearly a decade. Finally replaced it with a M1 MBP a few months ago.

Honestly the 2013 still works great for what I do (web, videos, and dev work that doesn't involve spinning up multiple VMs ;) ), I figured it was time to upgrade and the supply chain issues don't seem to be letting up anytime soon. I might replace the battery in the old one. I'm hoping to get at least another decade out of the M1 machine, hopefully more.

Are you sure that you can watch today's VP9/AV1 YouTube videos which would be software-decoded on a 2013 MBP without spinning fans incessantly?

I am sure you cannot since I also have a long-in-the-tooth 2013 MBPr, and YouTube can definitely heat it up.

One thing that bothers me about my M1 Air is that they still haven't fixed the "stuttering cursor" bug...

I'm in the same boat and opting to wait. Sure it'll be a nicer machine, but I don't think we'll really feel the upgrade.

Also on the fence. For me the reason to upgrade would be the 24GB RAM option: more tabs. I'll wait and see what the hands-on reviews say. Not sold on flat slab either, the wedge is very practical. The M1 MBA is going to be hard to beat.

I bought an M1 Air the day of the M2 announcement. $780 shipped on ebay for a mint laptop with 3 battery cycles. Battery life will be about the same, screen is good enough, 20% multicore boost is not worth an extra $450. M2 does look great though.

Looks like M1 prices have dropped even more since I bought.

Are you using the Air for development? How does it hold up?

Docker performance isn't great compared to what I'm used to on windows, but it's usable. Experimental docker features that are billed as potentially increasing performance by huge margins completely break my bind mounts. My stack fits very comfortably in the base 8 gigs of RAM. Some of my dependencies have bugs in the ARM builds that make me use docker overrides to x86 containers instead of aarch64.

I also had to troubleshoot some errors where dotenv operates a bit different between macOS and linux.

Overall, feels slower than what I'm used to. Community has a few rough edges to work out in an Apple silicon world, but half my growing pains are just moving to macOS in general. https://captionsearch.io is my "try new tech" project so it's part of the experience.

Just recently bought a 2020 Intel air. It's very powerful and responsive. Would I notice a difference with an M1 or M2? Maybe, but I doubt it would be enough to justify the investment.

Would be the perfect laptop if it could hook up to 2 external monitors instead of just one. For that reason, I have to go for the M2 Pro.

If the M2 Air supported two displays, I’d have no reason whatsoever to buy the expensive MacBook Pro. The M1/M2 Air is already so ridiculously overpowered for my needs. Which is probably why the Air doesn’t support two displays. Sigh.

Genuinely curious: can I hook up the Air with a single ultra-wide monitor that's exactly as large as two regular monitors side by side, or is the screen resolution limited, too? I'm thinking of something like [1], though it will probably make more sense to get a MacBook Pro instead at that kind of price.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/LG-49WL95C-W-49-Inch-Curved-Ultrawide...

The MacBook Air supports up to 6K resolution displays, your linked display has 60% fewer pixels than that, it will work fine

It should be fine. I'm typing this on an M1 MBP hooked to a Samsung CRG9.

> Which is probably why the Air doesn’t support two displays

I recall reading at least with the M1 that it's actually a physical hardware limitation with the architecture inherited from the fact that the base M1 is pretty close to the A15 which never needed to pump out to more displays.

The irony being that they then made the M1 Pro and M1 Max/Ultra that support more displays. In fact, I would be okay with it running dual displays like the mac mini where the internal display is disabled when two externals are connected. The M2, made after the M1 Pro still does not support multiple displays. It's an odd omission.

The M1 Pro is the same architecture.

If you're not fussed about a bit of extra CPU usage and you are not playing games on it, you can use a DisplayLink-capable hub to run two 4k screens @ 60Hz. E.g. https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m1-mac-dual-displayport-a...

Not meant as a sarcastic question but why not get a mac mini/studio instead?

Not OP, but I work from home and the office, and also take my machine into meetings occasionally. The portability is nice.

I assume the same for just about anyone in my position.

(I'd have two Studios and an Air if it were a utopia scenario, but... that's expensive!)

Presumably because that's not a laptop.

It is a fair question. I've been doing this, with a maxed out 2018 mac mini through the blackmagic eGPU to the XDR Pro display as my main workstation.

I have the 2018 macbook air as my portable. It's abysmal, but I can use it to work on the couch if I have to.

I am going to try the M2 air to replace both the laptop, the mini and the eGPU. Quite a lot of hardware traded out for one single solution.

I don't like keeping multiple machines up to date and spending time doing the same updates or having to go back to one to push some branch I forgot about.

That said, I'm counting on the MBA M2 to deliver graphics to the XDR on par with the blackmagic and if it can't I may return it, get a cheaper M1 MBA and either wait out the M2 mini or pick up a studio.

I do have a second 4k monitor that I'd prefer to be able to drive--I can with the Intel box and eGPU. But I don't really use it and with the XDR it isn't really necessary.

You just convinced me not to buy it (M1 user that are annoyed by the same issue).

I have a hub that lets me use two external monitors. The big downside is that one of them is limited to 30Hz and moving my mouse around it feels wrong compared to the 60Hz main display.

It's such an odd thing to not address. Even the old Intel MacBook Air could drive two.

The M1 Pro was supposed to support dual monitors, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

I just can't understand why it isn't supported. I thought the M1 was an oversight that they would correct with the M2.

it’s a pro feature

-apple

For many in the HN audience, this may not be a good buy. You'd need to buy the 16GB + 512GB version since the bundled 256GB SSD is considerably slower than the previous gen as reported by many people. That bumps the price to $1599, which isn't significantly cheaper than the 14" MacBook Pro - which sells for $1799 on Best Buy.

Thermal issues also mentioned in this thread should be factored in too.

I personally ended up going for the pro over waiting for m2 air because of active cooling and multiple display support

I compared the 14" Pro to the M2 Air and here's how it looks to me:

    MBP 14 base M1 Pro, 32G ram, 512hd = $2400.
    MBA upgraded M2,    24G ram, 512hd = $1900.

Note the Air is almost a pound lighter!

Air also lacks far more ports, MiniLED, 120Hz, the M1 Pro's GPU, 8GB of ram, and cooling. I would expect the M1 Pro's Ram to be faster as well. Finally the M1 Pro supports dual display out while the M2 does not. That $500 still goes pretty far.

It depends on your priorities. Thin and light is the win for me.

I'd be wary of this, until we get to the bottom of the reported thermal throttling issues with the Macbook Pro M2. That at least is actively cooled. This isn't.

Wasn't that about an extreme benchmarking test which is continuously fully utilising CPU and GPU for an extended period, like 30min?

If I recall correctly, that would not influence my decision at all. I also do not select which car to get based on how far it gets with one charge if I load it with one ton of luggage, even if it were theoretically possible. I get the one which suits my needs best most of the time for a good price.

Something about that test rubbed me the wrong way. Like that the Package was pulling more watts than stated or some sort of bad firmware allowing for extreme temps. It's so odd to come from the M1 with nearly unused fans to being able to downright overheat the CPU so aggressively. Even the hottest tests on the M1 13inch MBP never ran the fans that high at all.

MacBook Air M2 will most probably replace my current 2018 MacBook Pro. My only gripe with MacBook Air M1 was crappy RAM which they addressed (24GB). It's still less than what I have (32GB) I expect M2 will make up for that.

My dealbreaker for the MBA is single external monitor support

Single monitor support that's it? Why is that? Seems like an odd limitation.

Have to justify the Pro. Same in regard to the ram

The regular 13" is also limited to a single external output. I feel burned, because I got one before the 14 and 16 inch models were announced.

This is the real problem right here and why I was ready to upgrade day one. Not interested in the M2 Air now. I'm sure it's all very nice but the only thing missing from my Air that I really wanted was multiple display output.

You can have multiple display support with Display Link. It's not ideal because it consumes CPU, but it's working fine with my M1 MBA. If I had to do it again, I'd likely just purchase a real nice single monitor.

Looked into it but the need to grant screen recording permission really made me uncomfortable.

EDIT: not sure why this was downvoted. All DisplayLink devices need to be granted screen recording permission to work on macOS.

There are some work arounds for that limit on the M1. Depending on your situation that might be an acceptable solution.

I'm having no issues running two displays with my MBA M1. The second display does require a DisplayLink adapter though.

I maybe being dumb here - but why can you not plugin a USB-C dock that has dual HDMI output ? I get you cannot dual monitor direct from laptop > screens. I would always use a dock with single cable. e.g https://www.belkin.com/uk/docks-hubs/connect-pro-thunderbolt...

Because that requires DisplayPort MultiStream Transport, which Apple's chipsets for unknown reasons do not support.

with DisplayLink I'm running two external monitors just fine.

MY only gripe with the M1 and M2 Air the lack of support for more than a single external screen. I feel like it's just a pure marketing play to only support more than one external screen on the 14" pro. They have Magsafe and two thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 ports, they could totally support 2 Apple studio displays, at least on the 24GB model.

I switched to a single ultra wide 38 from LG and it was a huge improvement over my dual monitor setup. I’m on M1 Air, and switched my work pc to the same.

The other reason I enjoy my ultrawide is that there are fewer cables to deal with and less hardware needed to mount the monitors. I bought a 34" UW a couple of years back. But I reckon my next upgrade I'm going to the superwides.

I've been really considering an ultra-wide and have heard extremely polarized opinions on it. Is there anything specific that you prefer over two widescreen monitors?

The lack of a center bar was a bigger deal than I expected. Being able to extend my SQL window to the full screen seeing all columns for example, beyond 'just nice'.

Same with code, not always but sometimes I need a wider view.

There are a lot of subtle gains that I'm probably forgetting about and really only one negative that I've run into - games don't play super nice on the ultra-wide, but that's not really what I use this machine for.

Oh another bonus I forgot - watching shows / movies on it is really nice. I have very rarely considered this but with an 18 month old, you find you have to squeeze in time here/there, we had to stop the new batman movie on HBO with 20 minutes left... I probably would not have ever watched the ending (it was pretty good!) if I didn't have that display, it was a nice way to spend 20 minutes during lunch and I've been watching movies/shows on it randomly during lunch since. It's pretty great for this use too.

If you had 3 wide monitors instead, would that make the ultrawide less appealing?

It would solve the “center bar” issue, for example

For me that's just too much screen, but I have guys (DevOps in particular) that do exactly that.

I find it too distracting. When I have multiple screens I spend way too much time thinking about what I should put on which screen.

> They could totally support 2 Apple studio displays, at least on the 24GB model.

What are you basing this assumption on?

Complete hot air. It’s about PCIE lanes

How so?

There's a lot that goes into this and it's not Apples (heh) to Oranges.

a normal Intel machine has some kind of southbridge, this means a traditional CPU that has 16 PCIe lanes total (this is actually the standard for intel) can have more than just 16x lanes, usually a PCH can add another 20 with an internal PCI switch.

Great in theory, but it does mean you can be constrained in bandwidth since that switch is limited to 16x on the upstream, in fact usually there's only 4! upstream PCIe connections to the CPU and there's some natively attached items (like the USB controller and some lanes of a GPU).

Apple's M-series CPUs do not have any southbridge or PCI switch, you get the full bandwidth of the lanes; this is why Apple M1 can run all of its ports at native speed at the same time, (where most laptops can't).

It also means that when you dedicate PCIe lanes for graphics, they can't just take away bandwidth from inactive ports.

It's only when they increase the die area and add more lanes that they dedicate more lanes to attachable graphics.

It's not a soft limitation, it's a trade-off.

They're banking on the fact that casual consumers won't use more than 2 displays (1 internal, 1 external); and that casual consumers would prefer more ports.

Displays do not connect over PCIe; GPUs do.

As someone who upgraded from an Intel Mac to an M1 mac, the memory is a non-issue. Three years ago I would have laughed if you said I would be happy with "only" 8GB, but now I am.

I thought I'd be happy with 8GB based on benchmarks and sensationalistic videos (thanks, Max Tech), but I absolutely wasn't. Apple silicon Macs or maybe Macs in general handle high memory pressure (graph in the red) terribly. The system will get extremely slow and laggy, develop audio issues and eventually lock up.

I ran into that all the time on the 8GB model (admittedly with multiple RAM-intensive apps and lots of tabs open), while it now happens very rarely on my 16GB model.

Is that high memory pressure slowness issue the same when there is lots of HD space left? Apple devices have had issues with “low” amounts of HD space for a long time, and I’m curious if the M* continue the trend.

Also: this makes a red flag of the recent shift to half-speed drive performance

> MY only gripe with the M1 and M2 Air the lack of support for more than a single external screen.

Officially Apple specs out a single external screen, but using DisplayPort you can do more. The video below shows how to connect an unreasonable number of external monitors to an Apple Silicon laptop, but a two-external-monitor configuration doesn't seem too crazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jLAwSvs7vE

DisplayLink*

I don't have any personal preference (I'm fine with a big single monitor/ultrawide) but from reading around and listening to other experience you're likely to hit performance/compatibility issues with that since it's a software solution.

Small correction; it’s DisplayLink, not DisplayPort. You have to use DisplayLink because they do some part in software as a part of their driver (which you must download and install) whereas the native Apple stuff has some internal hardware limitation.

I run three 1080p monitors off of my M1Pro, and I don’t notice any heavy CPU load from whatever software load the driver may be adding.

> Small correction; it’s DisplayLink, not DisplayPort.

Thanks, staticfloat and ksala_!

Displaylink is lossy software compression of your video stream, and when I last explored using it with Macs in a professional setting ~3 years ago the software was borderline unsupported by the vendor on the Mac platform and absolutely unreliable.

Displaylink doesn't support hidpi monitors on macOS with fractional scaling (unless they fixed it in last month or so). For me this is a deal breaker since I have 27" 4k monitors which IMO work best at 125%-150% scaling

Might you or someone else be able to say why the state of the art Macbook is not capable of driving two monitors? Does this apply to all model or is this only an issue on the 14" MBPs and Airs?

The M1 and M2 have the hardware to drive two displays (the internal counts as one). The M1 Pro and M1 Max support four displays and the M1 Ultra probably supports eight.

> I feel like it's just a pure marketing play to only support more than one external screen on the 14" pro.

I'm convinced it's exactly this. I gave them the benefit of the doubt with the M1 that it's just a first-gen quirk, something that they managed to address with the Pro and Max and would become a non-issue going forward.

But now that M2 has been introduced with the same limitation, it's become crystal clear that this is yet another classic Apple anti-consumer profit-seeking tactic.

Hoping the rest of the industry can eventually catch up to and hopefully overtake Apple silicon in performance/watt and discourage this kind of behavior, but given the sheer amount of resources they have available compared to every other player, I'm not holding my breath.

> MY only gripe with the M1 and M2 Air the lack of support for more than a single external screen.

Definitely the most valid complaint about it. Apple always seems to heavily encourage customers to spend "just a little" more.

It's really hard to justify the M2 Air if you want more than 8/256GB; by the time you upgrade to 16/512GB, you're approaching 14" M1 pro price territory which has a better screen (with MiniLED backlighting & local dimming) and better sound too. I'm very happy with mine and have zero regrets.

> A three-mic array captures clean audio using advanced beamforming algorithms

Oddly, out of the entire press release, this is the part I have trouble believing. Every MBP launch announces the best microphones ever. When the first MPB 16" came out, it's gazillion-mic array was supposed to be amazing, some reviewers asking "can it replace a professional condenser microphone", yet in reality it's made completely useless by the fan noise and people can barely hear you in a call.

I haven't experienced the microphones on the ARM MBP 16", but with its Intel predecessor. And there the microphones are excellent and not drowned by fan noise (assuming of course, you don't run huge compute tasks in the background during the calls, never encountered anyone doing so). I can't imagine the ARM MBP to be more noisy than the Intel one.

But specifically: the MB Air doesn't have a fan, so you won't hear fan noise while using it.

Even on the Intel i9 MBP 16" having a call is a huge compute task that will unleash the fans. Regardless of Zoom, Meet or whatever videoconferencing I use.

That i9 was quite the little heater

I have the i9 16" and not getting fan noise during calls. But of course, I am not doing much else at that time.

The three-mic array on the 2021 M1 Pro is really very good, people have told me it sounds better than my Yeti Blue even with background noise.

Fan noise is effectively non existent on the Apple Silicon based Macbooks. I've got a 14" M1 Pro and it's very difficult to tell the fan is even running, and I think the only time I've ever actually seen the fan run above its lowest speed is when I was running an artificial stress test.

Additionally, like another response mentioned.. I've had people remark that I sound "unusually clear" when using my MBP's onboard mic as opposed to my (high quality) headset that I typically use for voice.

That comment was specifically about the Intel MBP 16” (when the first MBP 16” came out) and it’s accompanying press regarding the mic array.

I’ve also moved on to M1 and it’s miles better. Just don’t trust the release notes anymore.

Very excited about the new Air. The size (& weight!) to performance and battery life is unmatched as far as I can tell. It's literally the laptop I dreamed they would make after I stopped daily-driving my 2012 retina pro in favour of a desktop a few years ago. It's going to be great for traveling.

So strange there's no notch in the main picture on the announcement. The top bezel does not look the same as on the product page either, even aside from the notch, it's too thick.

edit: the very last picture in the article also shows the wrong bezel. So strange...

If you fullscreen an app on a notched Mac it blacks out the area where the menubar would be, making it look like a top bezel the same thickness as a non-notched model. Of course, being an LCD, in person it will be more like a black notch and a very dark grey area either side of it.

There's no notch on the M1 Air. Are you expecting one? Notches are terrible and are enough all alone to make me change what I'll buy.

Have you given a notched device a fair shake? Not suggesting you haven’t, but I never notice the notch on my iPhone<some number here>

I figured it would drive me nuts

Great for you I suppose?

I have a phone with a punch out camera. Usually I don't even think about it, but when it obscures the things what should be in that place on the screen...

I could tolerate it on a phone, although I'd rather just have a rectangular screen with a bezel for the camera. The whole phone UI can be designed to accommodate it, and it's exceedingly rare that I fullscreen anything on a phone. On a monitor, it would drive me insane; I'm regularly running things full-screen.

> it's exceedingly rare that I fullscreen anything on a phone

So, you just use the home screen then?

> I'm regularly running things full-screen.

well then you won't see the notch, full screen apps are letterboxed across the top

The presence of the notch is offset by extra pixels added to the screen height.

Considering the way MacOS's top menu works, notches are a non-issue and you're ultimately getting more screen real estate than the non-notched variants.

There's a notch in pictures where the OS menu bar at the top is light, and it's hidden and looks like a thicker top bezel when it's dark.

I’ve owned a lot of computers and my pre-retina MacBook Air was one of my faves. So much seat time, so many LoC written. I loved the wedge shape of the chassis for actual lap work. Disappointed they moved to the square chassis like other models but it’s so thin it might not be a dealbreaker.

I thought it'd be an issue when my work shipped me the new 14" MacBook Pro, but I found it pretty easy to pick up the laptop thanks to the bigger feet, and the bottom edges of the case that have a rounded shape.

I think with the Air's weight being slightly less than the outgoing model, the shape isn't going to be so much of a concern.

I don't need more than two Thunderbolt ports, but I would have liked to see one of them on the right side of the case.

Yeah, I had a 2012 era MBA, and it was basically the ideal laptop, until it didn't have the power to run XCode (so I bought a 2015 15"). The M1 Air is there again, fast enough, light enough, good enough keyboard, and incredible battery life.

I'm due for a work laptop upgrade soon, and I'm on the fence between a maxed MBA m2 and a 14" M1 Pro with 32G ram. It'll be mainly tethered to one big monitor, but light weight would be nice when commuting, as often as I do that.

I was interested to pick when I saw the price in USD..

Then I realized the starting price in Italy for the 8GB version is 1829 euros, and more than 2100 to get 8 GBs of memory more.

Wow, the euro is just about at parity with the dollar recently. That's a big markup.

Import taxes/customs.

The VAT too (at least in Germany).

All of Europe (or at least the EU) has VAT.

I've only lived in Germany, and while I was doing so, I went back to the States to buy an iPhone to save $600 USD at the time between the German and American prices.

Totally agree. The new Air to my mind is decent value at $1199.

But that then becomes 1499 EUR in Germany, for... some reason. And then you see that the entry level model is specced low, and to get a reasonable 16GB memory and 512GB SSD bumps it up to 1959 EUR, which is a very different level of purchase, and also most of the way to the cost of a comparable 14" M1 MacBook Pro.

"Some reason"? Isn't it pretty obviously taxes?

A tax 20% or more on a computer?

The standard VAT rate in Germany is 19%, so that's not that far off the mark, assuming they include VAT in their pricing.

1199 USD to EUR = 1147 EUR Germany has a 19% VAT so 1147*1.19=1397.06

Still a gap of slightly more than 100€.

It's the 20% VAT.

Having a smaller volume and more power consuming chip than M1[0], I wonder if it will match M1 air performance and battery life on heavy tasks. The media engine will definitely provide smoother experience when working with sound and videos but I kind of suspect that on other tasks it will be about the same as M1, thus prolonging the Apple's software support for the original one.

[0] Early reviews of M2 Macbook Pro indicate that the M2 chip heats up more than the M1 and consumes a more power. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVIknUcCjiQ

M2 Air has a bigger battery pack than M1 Air.

M2 is also just more efficient than M1 because the A15 is much more efficient than the A14.

Anandtech showed this in their A15 review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...

So even if the chip heats up more, it's still going to be more efficient.

Sure but the thinner design might have reduced the thermal envelope, thus increasing the possibility of throttling earlier than the M1 version. For context, my M1 throttles down about %15 at room temperature after about 10 minutes on very heavy load.

I'm curious about the benchmarks and stress tests. Would be very cool if it is actually significantly better than the M1 on everything.

Does anyone have reviews of any comparable ARM-based (good battery backup and speed) Windows laptops? Seems like there should be a transition of the entire laptop market to ARM, given that Apple has demonstrated that ARM processors are viable on the laptop.

The best Windows experience is to virtualize Windows 11 on M1(or M2) Mac.....although you are still running Windows 11 unfortunately. :/

Still its the snappiest Windows I have used in a long time. Microsoft probably hasn't figured out how to use up all the resources of this chip (for dumb features).

Apple proved that their ARM processors work amazingly in a laptop, not that the ARM processors everyone else has access to work well in a laptop.

Apple has demonstrated that ARM processors can be viable on the laptop. The ARM processors on their iPhones and iPads were way faster than other ARM processors before they transitioned their macs. Furthermore, only Apple seems to have the hardware and software tech to allow x86 code to run nearly as fast as native code on an ARM CPU.

When it comes to Windows on ARM, so many reasons to pick a Windows laptop over a Mac are thrown out the door by self-sabotaging compatibility in that way. It's just not a good experience in my mind, unless you plan to use your system like a Chromebook and just stick to browsing the web or using other basic apps.

I would also say that 12th generation Intel is more competitive with Apple's current silicon than it gets credit for. It beats Apple on single and multi-threaded performance. No, you won't get 20 hour battery life, but you can find a respectable balance, and to that point I don't think it's worth making the ARM tradeoff on the Windows side of the house.

For Apple, ARM is great because they're betting the farm on it. For Microsoft, ARM still looks like a bit like a side project to me.

Non-Apple ARM chips are garbage. Half the performance of M1 at best.

€1520 in Europe for 256gb ssd and 8gb ram... The 512/16 version is almost €2000.

Man this is just insane pricing. It sucks because besides ssd/ram everything is fantastic for a laptop. I would buy it almost instantly for $1000

As another kick in the nuts, the 256GB SSD is dog-slow as well, and that's before you'll inevitably hit the swap in mulți tasking thanks to the 8GB RAM.

That entry level model is just there to advertise a starting price but should be avoided.

Inflation is crazy right now, so expect it to only go up.

Not sure what you mean as RAM and SSD prices have been steadily dropping.

Comparable pc laptops have not increased in price nearly as much. Ryzen 6000 laptops, while scare, do not appear more expensive than last gen.

I mean the CPI in some countries is increasing by double digit percentage points. And the value of the euro has fallen so its now close to 1:1 with the USD.

the M1 Air is also still a great option though, the M1 is still really fast.

The base model seems fine, but I'm amazed by how expensive the higher spec models are.

MacBook Air M2, 8/8 cores, 16GB, 1TB: 2189 Euro

MacBook Pro 14, 8/14 cores, 16GB, 1TB: 2479 Euro

That's too small of a difference for how much nicer the Pro is.

Once specced up with memory and a bigger SSD in Australian dollars, the difference turned out to only be about $150, so I got the pro instead. Was really looking forward to the air, so very disappointed in how it turned out price wise.

Is there anything out there that can run linux that has battery life like this?

I'm debating just getting one and running a linux VM full time in it.

AMD 6xxxU has really good battery life.

That’s what I’m doing — I use Canonical’s Multipass and it’s flawless.

How’s the battery life on Linux?

Dunno, haha. It's running on my M1 MacBook Air and I haven't noticed a single affect on battery life. I literally have it open all the time, in addition to probably about a hundred Chrome tabs, and the battery life is still insane.

Do we still need Mighty App?

M2 is significantly faster than Xeon and Epyc in single core speeds which is what matters the most in web browsing speed. There's also no latency that Mighty has.

Just get yourself a 24GB M2 Macbook.

Depends, is Mighty App cheaper than $2099+existing laptop disposal cost per user?

FYI, an M1 will also be significantly faster than Mighty for most web browsing.

If you're willing to pay for Mighty, I presume that you're willing to upgrade your laptop as well.

I'd never heard of this browser before, but, really, for most usages Safari is out-of-the-box good enough isn't it?

Did we ever need Mighty?

I feel Mighty will have to quickly pivot to more value-added features than just streaming browser. I love the founder and I know PG loves them too but I have doubts about their future... I strongly wish I am proved wrong.

This is quite possibly the absolute most perfect portable laptop ever released. Thin, light, no fan, and looks great with great performance and battery life.

Agreed. They're never going to be able to meet demand.

Looks nice but gets expensive adding ram that I'd need to have.

$200 to go from 8GB to 16GB is an atrocity.

Assuming you use the laptop for 5 years that’s $40 a year.

The overall price isn't bad still imo. Apple has always had goofy component upgrade pricing.

These are not ram sticks, these are difference in the M2 chip itself. I'm not a chip designer, but I imagine there are more manufacturing quality challenges with the ones that have more RAM.

Don't they bin the chips? The lower spec chips have the same layout as higher spec ones but they have defects.

I would imagine so, and I would think that out of 100% of their chips, they would have more which passed the lower RAM standards than the higher ones. So the higher RAM chips (which passed) would be more rare, so to speak.

> These are not ram sticks, these are difference in the M2 chip itself.

TSMC fabs don't make DRAM. Apple buys DRAM chips from the same handful of manufacturers that everyone else sources DRAM from.

I don't know much about this topic, but I have read that the RAM in M1/M2 machines is part of the Mx chip itself. Unless I misunderstand, I don't believe it's any kind of separate component - stick or otherwise.

This is incorrect, just looking at the M2 promotional materials the DRAM is quite clearly a separate component[1]. The DRAM modules are combined with the M2 in a single package though, maybe that's what you're thinking of?

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...

Ahh ok, so it's not on the same die, but it's on the same package. Thus, it's not exactly something you can configure after the fact. In advance of configuration and sale, Apple has to decide to commit to some assortment of M2+RAM configurations.

Let's say you're going to use this for 3 years and it becomes worthless after that.

$1,800 / (3 * 365) = $1.64 a day

In reality you could still probably sell it for at least $500 at the end of the term bringing the cost down to $1.19 a day.

And with inflation where it is, you're locking in the current price with today's dollars.

If it's something you'll use every day adding the RAM you need I think is an easy decision.

If it only ran Linux…

Check: https://asahilinux.org/about/

Echoing janandoly's comment, the main force behind Asahi mentioned being close to a release that will support M2 machines: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1543568303725375488

Probably too early to tell, but anyone know how running Asahi Linux on this would be? Is M1 similar to M2 enough that stuff would just work?

I'd love to use Apple hardware again, but I cannot stand the Apple software and UX, so need my laptops and desktops to run Linux.

Follow @AsahiLinux and @marcan42 on Twitter for updates. Looks like it's in progress.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1544408695295328256

> Is M1 similar to M2 enough that stuff would just work?

Apparently so.

> At this point, it's pretty likely that M2 will be at feature parity with M1 with <24h of actual work.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1542957901651685376

In promotional materials they often show pictures of the laptops without the notch.

If the notch is such an obvious eye-sore, why aren't they abondoning it?

The notched area of the screen isn’t used in full screen mode. The remaining non-notched area of the screen is a standard size and ratio.

The notch is a total non-issue during normal use because it only exists in the menu bar area. It basically looks like another item occupying your menu bar. If you go full screen you still have a notch-free experience.

They probably show it that way in promotional materials because people wrongly assume that it’s a bigger deal than it actually is. Virtually nobody actually cares about it when they start using the laptop.

> The notched area of the screen isn’t used in full screen mode.

That’s the default setting. You can choose to have the menu bar there as well in full screen.

...but you can't choose to use it for full-screen content. The distinction the comment was drawing was about the notch interfering in that manner.

Does anyone know how well this works with the M2 Air specifically? My understanding with the M1 Pros was that the notch working seamlessly was dependent on Mini-LED.

Without the ability to produce perfect black around the notch, is the notch not going to be an eyesore even in fullscreen mode? Or is the "Liquid Retina" display close enough that it's basically a non-issue?

How does the notch deal with programs with enough menus to hit that midpoint? Which includes the one I do pretty much all my paying work in. Or people who have enough stuff squatting in the right side of the menu bar to cross the midpoint from the other direction. Which is also me when I'm not hiding most of them with Bartender. So many things just want to plop an icon up there.

I guess I'll find out soon, because one of these M2 Airs will be replacing the 2016 Pro I've been using as soon as I scrape the funds together.

I'm guessing, since the OS handles those menu items and the OS knows about the notch, it'll just skip the notch and continue the menu items to the right.

Apps that have been updated to work with the notch will flow around it.

If you have an old app that hasn't been updated, you can enable the "Scale to fit below built-in camera" option on the executable and it will show the full menu bar under the notch, exactly like it worked before the notch existed.

Best way to think about the notch is that it's not subtracting from your 16:10 screen, it's just pushing the menu bar up into the area on either side of the camera. It's previously wasted space that now takes your menu bar so you get the full 16:10 screen for content.

I'm gonna bet that Illustrator is gonna need that switch flipped. Thanks!

Which promotional material are you referring to?

Even weirder is that according to the rumor mill the notch is already on it's way out in the iPhone, to be replaced with a pill shaped cutout this year, and under-screen cameras in a few years.

I'm excited to get my hands on one of these. I'm a US citizen living in Hungary, and hoping to get my hands on a US version ASAP. I'm debating if it will be easier to order from Apple in the US and ship it via a third party to the EU, or order in the EU and have the keyboard swapped out after I get it. I'm mostly nervous that if I don't order right away, it will be sold out and hard to get my hands on for a few more months. Hungary doesn't have any physical Apple stores and last time I checked, ordering directly from Apple to Hungary wasn't really possible without going through a partner.

What's the difference in keyboards?

European keyboards are often in the ISO layout, think large enter key and additional keys left of it

US keyboards have the narrow enter key and different placements for many symbols

Also in France and Germany you have funny stuff such as azerty and QWERTZ. And have you seen Spanish layout? Horrible for software development

';' is moved, to add the 'Ñ' key:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Spanish.svg

Some European countries (eg. Poland) typically use US layout.

can't speak for op because I don't know what layout his country has. For Germany, vim is not usable beyond basic movements, because for example [ and ] have no dedicated keys. Typing { } on the default german layout is an insult to the typer. I remember a vim-shortcut that would have required to press five keys at the same time.

But that's just about software keyboard layout, isn't it? I've been using US layout since forever (configured in OS), even though my keyboards have Croatian scribbles on some keys.

I do see now that the actual physical layout might be different, having large vs. small enter key and possibly additional key next to the left shift.

This image illustrates the differences: https://appuals.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/1-11.jpg

The difference is that one keyboard is made for humans who touch type, and the other keyboard is made for people who like to lift up their hand and move it every time they want to hit return... or left shift.

The ones with the shorter left shift and narrower/taller return key are just bad designs. They make keys you use frequently less accessible, and the tradeoff is that keys you rarely use are now in reach.

I'm not in the US, so I'm kinda alone in this, and forgot to tell my work I wanted an international one, so I got an M1 pro from work with the international lay-out.

I've been using US layout since I was ~8. And all my other systems have the US layout. I am having such a hard time to get used to it.

I keep hitting ± when I mean ~ (why would I even need a ±/§ key on my keyboard?). I keep hitting \ when I want to hit Return. I keep hitting ~ when I want to hit shift.

Frustrating. Agreed with the "bad design" point.

I had this as well with a previous company work laptop, so I had to use a wireless external keyboard always. Using the built-in keyboard was so frustrating that it made me angry enough to almost destroy the laptop a few times.

It should be noted that on older Macbooks, the aluminum case has actual cutouts for keys. So it's not possible to change the layout of keyboard without also changing the case. I discovered this when I had my personal laptop repaired, and it came back with the wrong keyboard! The shop just instinctively ordered keyboard+case of their usual layout, so I had to have the whole thing redone again (at no extra charge, just a loss of time).

Well there must be at least 3 of us, because I'm another one. I've used the US layout ever since you could save something like 28 KBytes from not loading the UK layout, and I used this with UK keyboards for years. (Very useful having a backslash key for every hand.) Then at some point I acquired an actual US keyboard, and I was an immediate convert. I just really liked the fat Return key.

When I bought my first MBP, I wasn't completely wedded to the idea of getting a Mac necessarily - but when I noticed you could order one with a US keyboard, it tipped the balance in favour.

(For any serious work, I use a USB keyboard and mouse, so in a sense it doesn't really matter. But I use the built-in keyboard often enough that I'd be annoyed being stuck with that tiny Return key...)

(This reminded me: if you go to get a battery replacement, make sure the staff member notes that it's got a US keyboard. I took mine to a UK Apple store for a battery replacement a couple of years ago, and when I went to pick it up a few days later, it had had its keyboard replaced with a UK one! The staff member was very apologetic - perhaps they correctly read my expression of speechless shock after opening it - and it got fixed, but it took a couple more days. So in the end I was without my laptop for over a week.)

That's interesting, the one I'm typing on right now seems to be a hybrid, longer left shift (which is indeed better) but tall enter (which I like because I like to just smack it from time to time).

You can order Macs with US keyboard layouts from the country's Apple Store page. It'll take longer to ship is all.

Could get expensive. Past Macbooks hat a top chassis combo of keyboard, chassis and battery. At least the MacBook air battery replacement was only like 150€, including a new keyboard/top plate. Not sure it will be the same with the new design.

Just order it with US keyboard (that's what I've done -- CEE citizen living in CEE).

My m1 air with us layout was shipped to Germany from Poland within one month, right after M1s were released. The US-layout is faily common in the EU among programmers etc.

In The Netherlands you typically will get US keyboards in your MacBooks. I think keyboards are not easily swappable but I might be mistaken? AFAIK in most European countries (at least in Germany) you can also order macs with US layout.

Ordering in EU is easier especially related to warranty. But the price is steep: it is 1199 USD in the US versus 1519EUR in The Netherlands, including sales tax

No, it's not typical to get US keyboard Macs in NL. All physical stores (and most online stores) including Media Markt and the official Apple store only stock ISO layout.

Fortunately it's simple to order the ANSI (US) layout in the online Apple store these days. (US English, not International English!). Up to maybe 10 years ago or so it was pretty hard to get it with US keyboards in Europe. (I usually imported them from the US via eBay.)

The warranty is really worth considering. I recently had to get a repair on an 18 month old laptop, and even though it was out of Apple warranty, the repair was free under consumer protection laws, and would not have been had I bought it in the US.

I'm honestly not sure why you would ever pay for an extended warranty in Germany.

ISO layout completely sucks, why would you want it?

I always order Macbooks with US keyboards, as default European version with double-row Enter and ~ in the wrong place is unacceptable for me.

If you order from Apple in the EU (to a friends place for example) you get a choice of keyboards. Apple generally ships direct from China for online orders. I have a US keyboard Mac purchased in Spain.

Same old Apple rip-off. Base model with ridiculously low RAM and disk with increments offered at £200 a pop.

I'm sure it's fast coming from previous intel Macs but really the main thing holding me back is seeing how many hurdles my fellow devs run into. There's always talk about something not running or being M1 incompatible.

Well, that and I'd be forced to use OSX.

So far the only real benefit I've seen seems to be for those who code on insanely long train commutes.

Haven't ran into a dev issue since the start of 2021.

macOS is much better to write code on due to its native *nix style terminal and it's far more usable for everything else than Linux.

To me, macOS is the best platform for writing code in 2022.

Linux/WSL is superior to the Mac terminal. Closer to the servers that code tends to run on

Being close but slightly off is a negative for MacOS imo.

The hardware is for sure the best though. I'd run windows/WSL on one of these if I could

Haven't ran into any problems really. Anticipated a ton. I had more trouble with the latest OS version changes.

I solved it by renting x86 VPS and using docker remotely. It's not ideal, but it worked for me.

There's hope that docker virtualization for x86 images will be faster with new virtualization framework features. It probably will take some time to implement, but in a year or two I expect most issues with docker to be resolved.

Just putting this out there for all the “one external display” concerns. I run two 34-inch ultrawides from my M1 Air via a DisplayLink dock. Sure you can’t run Crysis 3 on ultra, but it certainly does the job for browser, terminal, and editor windows

Here is the information I hoped to find in this discussion thread:

11" non-retina MBA dimensions: 11.8" x 7.56" (30 x 19.2 cm)

M2 MBA: 11.97" x 8.46" (30.41 x 21.5 cm)

So, about 15%-ish "deeper" but you get a 13" screen instead of 11" ...

> Additional technical specifications and details on Apple accessories — including the 30W USB-C Power Adapter for $39 (US), 35W Dual USB-C Port Compact Power Adapter for $59 (US), 35W Dual USB-C Port Power Adapter for $59 (US) compatible with the World Travel Adapter Kit for $29 (US), and the 67W USB-C Power Adapter for $59 (US) — are available at apple.com/mac. The 35W Dual USB-C Port Compact Power Adapter is available to customers in Canada, China, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and the US.

Anyone have any idea why one would want a dual usb C power adapter when MagSafe is an option?

The dual power adapter is in addition to, rather than instead of, MagSafe. The cable has the magnetic connector on one end and usb-c on the other. Dual ports just lets you charge your iPhone/iPad etc. at the same time.

I can't see the value in getting the 2-port adapter over the 67w fast charge one. You could always charge your phone through your laptop if you really don't have a second power brick.

Size. It's not apparent in pictures but the 67w is the size of like a deck of playing cards. The dual port is a tiny Gan charger.

Interoperability with every other hardware? Magsafe is only macbook, usb-c is non-Apple laptops, mobile phones, hearing aids, wireless headphones, etc.

And a large, ready to orther set of adapters to other standars. Magsafe doesn't have that yet, and judging from Magsafe 2, it almost won't have any.

I kind of liked having everything run through usb c, including power. Charging from either side was nice, and being able to charge literally everything I own with a single charger was great.

Magsafe is not a 'this or that'. The other end of the magsafe cable is type C with a standard type C power adaptor. You can bring a Type C cable instead and it works just fine.

Not quite sure how they can still sell this with only 8GB RAM and no way to upgrade, several of my colleagues are regularly complaining about running low on memory on their M1 machines. Thermals?

Anyone know anything about SSD performance on the Air?

No samples have made it to reviewers hands, so no. But perhaps it will mimic the M2 Macbook Pro 13", whose SSD performance scaled with size (meh at 256GB, blazing when bigger).

Apple has discontinued the 128 GB NAND chip, so it's very unlikely. The first increase in storage (from 256 GB to 512 GB) also costs twice as much as subsequent increases.

Bad if you get the 256 GB version, since it'll be a single chip. Otherwise it's the same chip they put on all the other ones.

The best feature in my opinion: no fans!

With my other MacBooks that do have fans, I regularly have to clean them, which is increasingly hard with thinner, more integrated designs. I also have to pay attention where to place the laptop in order to not obstruct air flow.

My M1 MacBook Air not having any fans while still being reasonably powerful is my favorite feature.

The fans of my m1 16" max turn on so rarely that I doubt they will get as dirty as previous Macs. If you're working in an area that is so dirty that you have to clean your fans often, imagine what you're breathing. I'd suggest getting an air filter.

How many external displays can this drive

Good question. The M1 can do more than one by using a special hub (don't remember the specifics) - would be nice if the M2 supported multiple natively.

Edit: Doesn't look like things have changed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000299

    At 500 nits of brightness, it is also
    25 percent brighter than before

Still not enought for a reflective screen.

If the screen has no anti-glare coating, it needs to be crazy bright to be usable outside.

My favorite for a new laptop would be the Thinkpad X1 Carbon. It is lighter, has a matte screen and can run Linux.

The X1's matte display is a tradeoff however in it's own way. You introduce grain and lose vibrance making it a worse display in any other use case. I would note that the 14 inch pro has some antiglare coating going on that actually works pretty well.

Nobody here seems to be discussing which colour they like the most, so I'll start that thread.

I am split between the silver, which I have always had since the Powerbook G4. And the new Midnight, which is brand new, and I think the colour of a dark laptop I've always wanted.

Surprised people are optimistic about this given recent reports of M2 throttling with active cooling

Well I know this more related to MacBook Pro M2 but it's not necessarily as amazing compared to M1 as it appears https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZjELZBq7WU

It looks better.

The question is whether you'll want to pay 500€ just for better looks..

It doesn't have enough ports and locks you down with daisy chaining. I agree thinness is a "symbol", but it offers next to nothing advantage to get work done. It's much like an overpriced car in your garage and for virtue signalling.

Although I'm not a Macintosh fan, I got the original macbook m1 air for everybody in my family and it's been an absolute dream for all of them. They definitely engineered the whole device to make a superior product.

If you want one and if it's anything like the M1 devices right now, expect to wait till mid August or later if you want anything beyond the basic specs. Even now, M1 MBPs with 32 or 64GB RAM are a good 5-6 weeks out.

same for Apple Stores?

Apple stores carry basic models and a select few upgraded SKUs in store, though the highest availability will be the two base models they offer.

Thank you

* One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz [1]

[1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m2/specs/

Sorry if I missed it, but I was sure they would have introduced touch screens along with M2. Normally I don't care for touch, but surely it would be good for running iOS apps more seamlessly.

I’m quite in love with this machine. If my corporate IT group offered them over our top spec MacBook Pro options, I would take it in a heartbeat — I don’t care about the loss of compute power.

Is there any loss anyway? I don't see any difference between Macbook Pro M2 and Macbook Air M2.

It's only noticeable when there's a sustained workload. The Pro model can use active cooling (fans) while the air can't.

Sustained performance due to better heat management

The Pro M2 has excessive thermal throttling and significantly lower flash storage throughput.

This Air has the exact same chip as that MBP.. If the M2 in the 13" MBP (not the M2 Pro, which is currently unreleased) gets thermally throttled, we'll have to see how it performs in a device without a fan.

Isn't the SSD only slower on the 256GB models, due to fewer flash chips?

I think the main difference (besides storage and peripherals) is active cooling. MBA's are passive cooled now (since the original M1) whereas MBP's have always had fans. The M1 & M2 chips are so cool that they generally don't need any active cooling most of the time. Where it does make a difference is under heavy sustained compute workloads. The passively-cooled MBA's will start to throttle under these workloads whereas the MBP's will maintain full speed indefinitely by spinning up the fans.

> I think the main difference (besides storage and peripherals) is active cooling

Haha, I read your comment, and my first thought was a dismissive, “who cares about active cooling”. Which really says something about how insanely power efficient these chips are. I’ve had the M1 Air since launch and I’ve yet to observe any thermal throttling under my workloads (I’ve yet to feel the machine even get hot)

Same here. I have never seen any throttling on mine, even when playing games (although admittedly I don't play demanding games). I think the target market for the Pro's active cooling is rendering (3D and video). For programmers I see little reason to get a Pro, unless you're running large C++ or Rust builds.

> difference is under heavy sustained compute workloads

How long can my compile be, before throttling begins? Say using 4 cores? 2 minutes? 5 minutes?

I can't wait for risc equivalent processors to show up in the pc space (besides apple). Using something like M2 with an OS I don't hate with a passion will be a huge upgrade.

It exists. The snapdragon 8cx used in the Microsoft Surface. It can't hold a candle to the M-series though. But then again no CPU can.

Are there any performance comparisons between the new m2 and the m1 pro/max you can get in the 14" form factor (that has three tb4 ports, hdmi, a card reader and MAGSAFE!)?

The M2 MBA has MagSafe too.

However the cat (inflation) got the laptop, in Europe it's now 1500€ instead of the 1050€ previous gen with same specs. I think it's unjustifiable for a normal consumer.

The UK pricing is £1,249, up from £999, so 24% extra for the better CPU, webcam & display[0].

A bit disappointed to see them sticking with 256GB SSD as the base, feel like 512GB should really be the standard nowadays.

[0]https://www.apple.com/uk/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-...

Beyond just the storage constraints, there are performance concerns with the 256GB model [1]. At least with the 13" M2 MBP Apple has switched to using 256GB SSD NAND chips which means that anything less than 512GB has only a single channel of flash to read and write from. It's unclear if the new Air will have this same constraint but it's something to consider.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/01/m2-macbook-pro-slower-t...

It's almost half the speed of the old base model. I think most consumers don't understand how much drive speed effects performance. The cpu is waiting around for the drive most of the time. So this feels like a major downgrade for the base model.

You’re taking about the entry-level consumer notebook model.

For entry-level consumers, they don’t need extra storage. So many kids are online-based nowadays. Younger people are routinely using iCloud/One Drive/Google Drive/Box/Dropbox and other services.

But sure, if you’re working with more and larger files, then you aren’t the target for the entry-level model with 256, and spend extra for more storage.

Better webcam? With every model they claim the webcam is better, but once I start Photo Booth I am thoroughly disappointed. In recent years webcam quality has even gone down -- the webcam in the M1 Macbook Air and the M1 Max Macbook Pro from 2020 and 2021 is worse than the webcam from the 2015 Macbook Pro!

I think the camera in my 14" M1 Pro is much, much better than the camera in my 2015 MPB. Also, people on the other end of Zoom etc commented on the improved picture quality.

Have you done side-by-side comparisons? I have compared the picture quality of 2015 MBP vs 2020 MBA vs 2021 MBP (16").

The 2020 MBA and 2021 MBP are pretty similar.

The new cameras have better low light performance and less noise due to pretty agressive smoothing. The consequence is that the picture lacks any detail whatsoever. The image from the 2015 MBP is sharper than the alleged 1080p image from the 2021 MBP.

With the smoothing my girlfriends face looks like she is wearing heavy makeup. My beard looks like it was painted on. In low light there are weird artefacts and glitches (especially in the area around my eyes, probably due to the ML algorithm).

Now maybe on a Zoom call this doesn't matter, if your face is just in a little matchbox-sized box on the screen. But on full screen Facetime calls the lack of detail and low resolution of the MBP webcam is very noticeable.

And you get half the IOPS, because in the base model they ship it with only one NAND chip. (Apple has stopped making the 128 GB chip)

Pretty sure that Apple isn't manufacturing NAND chips. Now it might be hard to procure the 128GB chips, so Apple may be at the mercy of suppliers, or it might just be cheaper to buy a 256GB chip (and suffer slower perf).

Apple may not manufacture them, but they don't look to be off the shelf components either. So maybe I should be writing "Apple has stopped ordering the 128 GB chips and removed them from all current designs".

This has been coming for some time, the refreshed 14" and 16" Pro models already had their base capacity bumped to 512.

> So maybe I should be writing "Apple has stopped ordering the 128 GB chips and removed them from all current designs".

Is there some reason to assume that Apple isn't just facing the supply chain issues that have been plaguing the other laptop makers?

I disagree. The colorful consumer oriented mac ibook clamshell g3 was USD $1,599 when it came out in 1999. That's $2,800 in today's dollars and it was orders of magnitude less powerful than this Macbook Air. The value per dollar you are getting is simply staggering.

Go back twenty more years are computers were even more expensive. I don't think it makes sense to compare to prices that long ago.

The base model Macbook Air in 2010 was $1299 which means that you get compute and product improvements following Moore's law at deflationary prices. Humans have a hard time understanding the value of power laws. What Apple has done has given us something nothing short of superpowers and we've gotten complacent and feeling entitled to these continuous improvements despite the unbelievable amount of human ingenuity required to make it all work out.

The base MacBook Air had its price dropped to $999 in 2013 and battery life improved to 12 hours. That's what got me onto the Apple bandwagon.

After growing up on a Mac SE and going off to college with a Centris 650, I went through a string of windows PCs until the 2013 MacBook Air brought me back into the fold.

I still use the 2013 MBA almost daily—mostly as an external keyboard and screen for my iPhone notes, but it really slowed down with Mojave, so I’m trying to decide whether to pick up a cheap replacement M1 model now, or wait for sales on the M2. I think I can hold out a little, but won’t quite make the 10 year mark.

BTW, the c. 1993 Mac Centris was able to boot up last year (at 28 years old!), and thanks to an Ethernet adapter I dumpster-dived from work in the early 2000s, I was even able to get online with it without any extra configuration. Netscape Navigator doesn’t do too well with modern websites (and probably made for a baffling entry in some server logs), but I could at least load the Dole/Kemp ‘96 site.

I hope this is supposed to be some kind of joke

It's not just inflation, the Euro has been getting crushed as decades of negligence by the ECB show up. That's not stopping any time soon and the ECB looks like it will be in the position to either destroy the Euro or destroy the bond market.

> It's not just inflation, the Euro has been getting crushed as decades of negligence by the ECB show up.

the stream of anti ECB drones is frankly ridiculous

the price has gone up in pounds as well.

Does the ECB controls them too?

Prices in Europe are taxes included, in US are before taxes.

In Europe you have to add VAT, not only sales taxes, which are much lower in US anyway.

Last but not least, custom duties are a thing.

Look at the EUR-USD chart ser

also look at the export charts from Europe to USA

a strong Euro doesn't automatically makes for a stronger EU economy.

He might be being hyperbolic, but the euro is definitely not doing too hot right now - it's gone from $1.18 to the euro a year ago to $1.02.

The Air in the UK is £1,249, up from £999 - a 25% increase.

The EU price is €1,500, up from €1,050 - a 43% increase.

At least some of that has to be explained by the euro dropping ~14% against the dollar. Take away 14% from the EU price and you get €1,290 - pretty close to the UK price.

Here is an example of data abuse.

You are comparing 2 different products' prices.

The M2 Air is up £49 compared to its US counterpart. A ~5% increase. And its up €200 compared to its US counterpart. An ~18% increase.

Exchange rates explain this easily.

> The Air in the UK is £1,249, up from £999 - a 25% increase.

> The EU price is €1,500, up from €1,050 - a 43% increase.

where did you get these prices?

From Apple store Italy

  M1
  8 core CPU
  7 Core GPU
  8GB RAM
  € 1.229,00

  ---

  M2
  8 core CPU
  8 Core GPU
  8GB RAM
  € 1.529,00

€ 1.529 from € 1.229 it's a ~25% increase

You just listed a bunch of things which have not changed between the last model and this one, to brush off the new model being much more expensive.

The parsimonious explanation is that the Euro went from 120¢ to 98¢ in the intervening time. I have no opinion on why that happened, I will pretend I don't even know what the ECB is.

> to brush off the new model being much more expensive

I'm never going to buy an Apple M* at actual price points.

I was merely pointing out that ECB has nothing to do with the prices of Apple products, compared to equivalent in the US.

Apple raised the prices outside the USA and kept the same prices in the US.

That's all.

Compared to the M1 Macbook Air, the M2 Macbook Air has: a £50 premium in the UK vs US. A €200 Euro premium in Ireland (for example) vs US.

So, you are right. Apple raised prices. I suspect exchange rates. It is easier to account for unfavorable exchange rates in new products than in raising prices of existing products.

On Apple.co.uk M1 is listed at £999.00 and M2 at £1,249.00 (respectively € 1,168 and € 1,460, not far from the actual prices in Europe)

The same difference exists in European Apple stores (~+25%).

They simply kept lower prices in US in my opinion, but obviously comparing US prices with non-US prices for a US manufacturer it's not going to work in favor of the non-US market.

Europe bad. Euro is getting crushed. Europe destroying itself. ECB is enemy of the people. Europe will destroy civilization.

We must destroy Europe before it’s too late!

I'm pretty sure that's EUR/USD exchange rate, not inflation. I bought the first gen when it came out, base model, for $1199. The price today, for 2nd gen base model, is $1199.

Tim Apple isn't going to take a haircut on a weak Euro

Had to check, but one of the top questions on a google search:

“Is Tim Apple a billionaire?”

It's the exchange rate I'd bet. $1 is around 0.98€ right now

$1200 * 0.98 EUR/USD * 20% VAT ~= 1411EUR. M1 Air was $1000 * ~0.85 EUR/USD * 20% VAT ~= 1020EUR.

The pricing outside the US is outrageous though. Those are very expensive laptops.

€1520 for the base version with only 8GB lol

are you a new mac user or something?

2-3 years ago the price was less than 1000€. 1500 for the base model is ridiculous

Maybe you can snatch up some on sale. I picked up my dad a base model M1 Air for 880€ last autumn. Should be good value, since he got 10 years out of the last one.

Inflation, and also the dollar is basically at par with the Euro now. Throw in VAT and there you have it.

Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram, the college student with 50 tabs open and Spotify in the background?

People complaining about low ram sound like the bros asking how many cylinders a car has. Doesn't matter for most people.

Just complain about price, yeah, it is expensive!

---

This is coming from someone who does light gaming on an 8gb m1 MacBook Air and has plenty of tabs open. I don't see lag.

Then again, I use safari, maybe Chrome it'd be different.

> Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram

The developer for whom a macbook air brings a huge amount of power?

I mean, they aren't low-end when compared to the general laptop market, they're awesome!

You responded to a comment about the "typical Air buyer". A developer is really not the typical Air buyer and more the target audience for a Pro line product even if that specific model is plenty fast.

For what it's worth, I bought my partner an 8gb Air a couple months ago. I had reservations about that amount of memory but she insisted on not spending more money. As far as she's told me she's experienced no performance issues whatsoever as a non-developer (she uses her laptop for video conferencing, email, and web browsing).

I use my 8GB one for development (mostly web and Cocoa, but also some 3d stuff w/Metal) and the only issues are with things like Microsoft Teams or some other memory hog, but even my co-workers with 32GB machines suffer with those, so I guess it's alright.

I switched to running MS teams in safari as the app was terribly resource intensive. Unfortunately it’s only safari that works with voice/video calls.

I might accept your advice and do the same. It's really mind boggling how slow it is for me lately after some upgrades :(

I think the high price actually means that is a typical user. The original casual user type this has been designed for likely use iPads or Chromebooks at this point.

> A developer is really not the typical Air buyer

They may be the target of the pro line, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the performance of the M1 attracted more developers to the Air line. I saw no reason to go to the 'Pro' when I got mine.

Having had an M1 Air with 8GB of RAM--under very light use it was great, but under anything a little more taxing (a good number of tabs, having Discord open, a relatively "light" creative app like Logic or Fusion 360) it would very rapidly not just get bad, but get stop-the-world awful. (edit: and as a sibling poster notes, plugging it into an external monitor made things a lot worse!)

I don't know if MacOS's low-RAM behavior has anything particular to it that makes it act so erratically, but it's the only time using a Mac in the last ten years where I've gone "oh, this sucks." Going to 16GB of RAM is a way better spot, I think, for folks who want more than strictly web-browser-and-keyboard. (And those folks are probably better off with an iPad in 2022 I think? The current iPads are great.)

I have a M1 with 16G ram. I don't think 8GB ram is even feasible - and that's coming from a user whose primary interface is terminal.

16GB is great though, never had a problem with RAM issue.

Usually it’s what’s being run inside the terminal that matters. ssh? no big deal. ffmpeg? can slow a machine down and can have a significant memory footprint.

YMMV

Why is that though? I have a ten year old machine at home with 8gigs of ram and it smoothly runs with alot of chrome tabs open?

M1 GPU also lives with the same RAM.

Fusion is anything but light, and still not optimized for M1 (still a Rosetta app). Even on a beefy Workstation, it’s no fun. Logic is better but not exactly light if you have multiple track, AU plug-in…

So that’s not surprising - heck, with 16gb or ram it’s not a walk in the park. I’ve discussed with owner a Mac studio, and they were not happy for Fusion either, that’s with 64gb of ram so…

In my experience, Fusion and Logic both quite well on M1s with 16GB of RAM, no other changes. One variable makes a ton of difference.

Remember it's not 8gb of dedicated RAM. It's 8gb shared with the video subsystem. Let's see how far that goes when you plug it into a 4K monitor and/or do anything that requires GPU acceleration (which can include simply decoding video).

I think 8gb is borderline criminally low in the circumstances. At least this thing has the option for 24gb though. I just wish that was a stocked model so you could just walk into a store and buy one without having to order it.

For what it's worth--when I had an 8GB Air, decoding video in a browser didn't seem to really impact performance. Plugging in an external monitor, though, was not a fun time.

I have a 32Gb M1 Pro as a work laptop and connecting a retina 4K external display is not a fun experience for me either. It was very surprising to see it fail to maintain 60fps in the OS’ own animations.

That seems like something is wrong - if this is a known issue with such capable hardware I'd find that shocking

Are you using the built-in HDMI port, or a dongle? I had the same issue before switching off the dongle.

This is through USBC which also charges the laptop.

Is the connection handling HDMI natively, or via DisplayLink? I could definitely see performance issues being accentuated for DisplayLink.

I use my 8 GB M1 Air with a 5K display regularly and the only situation where it struggles is gaming. Browsing with zillions of tabs, video, etc is beautiful and lag free.

The SoC contains hardware decoders and external monitors don't require a lot of video memory per se.

> and external monitors don't require a lot of video memory per se.

That depends. Your average 1080p display doesn't really use a ton of video memory, but a 5k display connected to an internal 1440p display? That's a pretty huge framebuffer. AFAIK, Quartz also has a separate video buffer for each individual window, ranging from 50-150mb for the average application. Add it all up, and I agree that 8gb is pretty low, even with swap. Macs are memory-hungry devices, limiting your physical memory to 8gb is going to be really difficult to work with on anything that isn't text editing or light web browsing.

I agree you hit memory limits per application if you run a lot at once, but WindowServer roughly uses about 10-20% more memory on 4-5k vs. 2k, running the same applications. The 1080 plus the external, perhaps 15-25%. I'm not saying this means 8GB is the right amount of RAM for you.

How many people are using external display on an entry level laptop? Think of all you family members and friends who aren’t in the software field. I don’t even use an external monitor on my personal laptop and its MBP 16” Pro with 32GB of ram. At most I side car an Ipad but that is more power user stuff.

Air with 8 GM of ram is perfect for a personal laptop where your primary focus is web browsing, watching media and occasional video/photo editing.

> Air with 8 GM of ram is perfect for a personal laptop where your primary focus is web browsing, watching media and occasional video/photo editing.

I hear people say that today, but how is it going to feel in 2025, when you try loading up MacOS 16 on it? Given the trend of Apple's development, I don't think 8 gigs is going to be sufficient for most people going forward. That's basically iPad-tier memory constraints on a desktop-class operating system.

Do people upgrade? I still see a bunch of old safari versions in our web traffic. It’s the biggest thorn in my side supporting them.

One thing that is a problem is that web pages get bigger and bigger and more resource intense. I doubt my 2011 air could handle a modern day web page with videos and a bunch of css transforms like on the apple site.

> Do people upgrade? I still see a bunch of old safari versions in our web traffic. It’s the biggest thorn in my side supporting them.

I believe Apple is pretty good about keeping people on the latest versions of their software, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were a few stragglers or people using EOL devices that are stranded on an older build. I can definitely believe that it's a PITA supporting them, though. Working around MacOS shenanigans is the most frustrating part of my job too.

> One thing that is a problem is that web pages get bigger and bigger and more resource intense.

Eh... I'm not sure if I agree with that sentiment. In the early 2000s there were also people saying "desktop apps are going to get bigger and more resource-intensive", but that never really happened. In fact, the Java runtimes people used in that era were usually heavier than modern applications today, or evestn Electron-bundled programs. IMO, the web has been resource-intensive ever since Javascript became the lingua franca. Nowadays, I think we're making progress to reduce the resources used on websites. Things like WASM and lighter JS frameworks are going to make all the difference here. In fact, I can even see ourselves in another Web2 golden age in a few years. I personally don't think the SAAS landscape is long for this earth, and once it fades away, there will be less incentive to make bloated, broken applications and more of a focus on refining user experience and performance.

Do normal people not use their laptops like an iPad with a slightly less painful word processor experience?

I have a Pro Display XDR for working at home w/ a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max. I use it with my personal MacBook Air M1, too. I like my spreadsheets for personal finance BIG.

It's not just the GPU that shares memory with the CPU. The "media engine" buffers are in there, too at 18 megabytes per frame for 4k reference pictures in the decoded picture buffer. The decoder, scaler, GPU, and DRAM are fast enough to have several tracks of 4k (which even the iPhone 11 & SE can shoot), so don't let RAM size be your limit. I'm happy to see a max of 24GB vs. the M1's 16GB.

> How many people are using external display on an entry level laptop?

Everyone from the sounds of it. Half the threads on /r/mac are from people that want to connect 2/3 monitors to their M1 MacBooks

This just occurred to me: They should add DRAM interface to M chips. Or maybe a RAM over PCIe device. Those RAM chips are gigantic off-die cache, can't replace RAM.

I have an 8gb M1 Air, and use it plugged into a 1440p monitor while watching video or in video calls. Maybe 4k would make a difference, I don't know—but most people don't have 4k monitors. 8gb is perfectly fine for me, and I'm probably in the top 10% of users as far as being a power user goes.

>I think 8gb is borderline criminally low in the circumstances.

I think Apple has a far better understanding, backed by actual data, of the circumstances than you, or indeed anyone here. My wife is still using her 2015 Air and has yet to plug it into anything, let alone 4k or 5k monitors that appears to be the "end game scenario" for posters here.

If you are posting on HN, then 8GB is not enough for you. I bought a 16GB M1 Air and it was great, and the day it came out I bought a 64GB M1 Max. But 8GB is more than enough for most of Apple's customers, and I'm sure they have the data to back that up.

I think you’re overstating the technical weight going into this decision. I think it’s almost all marketing.

Remember the 16gb iPhone? It really just existed to make the 32/64gb models look more reasonable and so Apple could say “From $lower_price_point”.

Confused by your reply. It is absolutely all marketing. Driven by data. They know their market, and the market for an 8GB M2 Air is not the HN crowd. Further, they know that the HN market exists, and will pay more for 16GB.

If you mean data from the Finance department, yes.

In the cheapest M2/disk combo, threads here have said Apple have crippled the storage bandwidth relative to the M1, so relying on fast virtual memory is no longer an option. In that scenario 8GB is even more constraining than it was a year ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31962854

For a frame of reference, one full frame buffer for a 4K monitor is around 32MB. Put another way, you can have about 32 of them per GB of RAM.

Not that you can’t use plenty of GPU RAM, but 8GB gives you a lot of room to work with. (Video decoding need all that much — probably three buffers worth per stream, and at the size of the video, not the screen.)

If you think a compositor only holds a single frame buffer (or even up to three), boy do I have some news for you about the last 30 years.

I think you're misunderstanding my comment.

> Remember it's not 8gb of dedicated RAM. It's 8gb shared with the video subsystem.

Just as it was before, with the Intel chips. Sure you had 64MB of eDRAM or whatever they called it as a cache but you were still using system memory for video.

Sounds like Apple. For a premium price they give you only bare minimum and if you want anything more you can pay thousands of dollars in pure premium and profit for Apple.

Of course sheep will keep buying these things.

There's no reason to insult people.

There is when they are paying $200 for 8GB of ram.

> Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram

Typical Air user would be fine performance-wise with any laptop made in last 10 years TBH.

It's a premium product that is priced accordingly, so it's fine to complain about substandard specs.

We had to replace my wife’s intel MBP with 8G of memory because it was just not sufficient. She just does simple stuff with her laptop, web browsing, occasional videos, google spreadsheets and email. The thing would just grind to a halt. We bought a 16G MBP and she’s been fine.

I’m sure the ARM laptops are better with only 8G but I’m not going to test that idea. 16G is the bottom line for us from now on.

My super light and thin [1] Carbon X1 Thinkpad from about 5 years ago has 16gb ram, half TB SSD and still runs like a champ with 200 tabs open.

It's just strange to see a premium brand product not being able to compete with same-category class products from a half-decade ago.

[1]: Lighter, in fact, than this MB Air M2

You can spec it with or 16 or 24 GB and the CPU is going to be miles faster than your Thinkpad.

Sometimes I think people just want to feel good about their purchases… It’s 5 years old, it’s okay if it’s not top of the line anymore.

I disagree, RAM is super important. But I went from win10 with 32 GB + dedicated nvidia with 4 GB to M1 on a mbp with just 16 GB. The M1 is still so much faster it’s like swapping a forklift with a fighter jet. I don’t think the numbers are comparable without more analysis of the workload and OS. FWIW I’m doing coding and data analysis with python and 99 tabs in 3 different browsers on both machines.

Yes. In college I had many tabs and many word documents open, a few IDEs, horribly inefficient LMS or video sharing sites, and massive lecture videos. Maybe a few chat apps to keep in touch with classmates.

If you’ve used google chrome with messenger dot com, that’s already eating into the ram budget a good amount.

>Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram, the college student with 50 tabs open and Spotify in the background?

If we're going to play that game, which college student requires a new MacBook Air at all?

I'm an industry professional and do my development on used ThinkPads. Sure there are are some people out there who need more processing power than I do, but not many, and certainly not in college.

> Which typical Air buyer needs 16gb ram, the college student with 50 tabs open and Spotify in the background?

How about a college student who contributes to large open source projects? (eg. Chromium or Firefox — I don't know if their memory footprint situation improved so these examples might not be valid today, but they definitely were back in the day). Don't underestimate college students ;)

People who complain about 8 GB being too low probably have a good reason.

I know I needed more than 8 GB because my 8 GB memory laptop always had it full (and was using swap) whenever I was using it for software development (and this laptop was already an upgrade from 4 GB).

However, I also know that I don't need more than 24 GB, because my utilization never reach anywhere close to that in practice.

The problem is more pronounced on computers with memory that cannot be upgraded.

> asking how many cylinders a car has. Doesn't matter for most people.

Where I'm at, the F10 BMW 525d used to come with a creamy smooth 6 cylinder straight six motor. Made a little over 200 hp and 460 Nm of torque.

Later, they changed the engine to a highly tuned 4 cylinder with nearly identical power and torque (still called "525d"). Infact, the 4 cyl motor has a little over 10 horses more than the 6 cyl, but it came at a higher rpm.

The driving experience was noticeably different. The 6 cylinder engine just felt effortless; in-gear acceleration (which matters during overtakes) was simply better. The 4 cyl motor felt strained.

Also, there's the other point that you'd know if you're into engines — straight 6 engines are inherently balanced and yadda yadda (=> no engine vibrations => very smooth), while other configurations need balancer shafts (which can't really be perfected), so the straight 6 engines are slightly more "clean" from an engineering perspective.

Sure, 120 km/h is 120 km/h regardless of cylinder count, but that's not the point. Environmental considerations are also a different matter.

My feeling is that 8GB is barely adequate in 2020 for light or medium-light usage, a couple of MacOS updates and a few more apps switching to Electron and you're going to be chugging hard. This wouldn't be a problem except that the RAM can't be upgraded so you have a laptop that would probably last 6-8 years easy likely being kneecapped in 2-4 years instead.

As an owner of an 8gb M1 Air, I now think that a machine for “light usage” that can barely handle a half dozen of open tabs and 1 Docker container shouldn’t cost even half as much. I bought it for about $1700 with 512Gb SSD.

In fact, Apple should stop offering 8GB versions at this point as MacOS is very memory hungry compared to Windows. That yellow “memory pressure” graph is irritating.

8GB results in lots of swapping with the SSD which greatly shortens SSD lifespan. That alone was reason enough to have 16GB.

I have an air for work with 16GB and frequently bump up against the amount of memory. I'm currently just waiting on reviews to decide between a 24GB Air and a 32GB Pro.

Considering the shared GPU memory, 8 GB is going to be very limiting going forward. Also, this Mac is very likely going to have the same slower SSD like the recently released 13 inch M2 MBP. This means you have to upgrade the SSD as well, if you care about performance. I would not recommend buying an MBA with base specs.

And once you spec it up to the 16 / 512 that it minimally needs to be for any serious work, you are close to the (now discounted) price for the base 14 inch macbook pro at third party resellers. This air is currently way overpriced. At the price it was released it should have had 512 gb storage, which also would have avoided the performance issues. It is still going to sell really well though, so maybe the previous model was just underpriced.

the air is thinner and lighter though. i think a lot of people (including myself) would consider that tradeoff worth it.

I agree. I'm torn between the already discounted 14" Pro model and the new MBA. The weight difference is quite considerable, so it's a tough choice if you value portability. I'll have to compare them in the store before I decide.

For reference, the slower speed seems to be around 1500 MB/s read and write, compared to 3000 MB/s read speeds for the M1 MBP [0]. While there are definitely applications that would benefit from the extra speed, I wouldn't call 1500 MB/s - ~2.5x the speed of the fastest SATA SSDs - a "performance issue."

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/26/base-m2-13-inch-macbook...

Why on earth would you compare it to SATA SSDs?

Common ~$100-150 1 TB M.2 SSDs read 7000 MB/s and write 5000 MB/s.

> Considering the shared GPU memory

Shared memory and unified memory are very, veeery different things.

I have a base M1 MBA, I've been running k8s clusters, building stuff with elixir, python and go, doing web dev, all without any issues at all

Because the $ is currently so strong against Euro, and others.

Is that going to change anytime soon? Genuinely interested because all currencies, other than USD are depreciating.

USD is the global reserve currency - when shit goes sideways everyone jumps on the dollar and that pushes it's value up and the value of the other currencies down.

In the case of the EU/Euro you've also got an active shooting war, massive inflation and the economic damage that the UK did both to itself and the EU and a bunch of other stuff.

Unless Western leaders or US particularly, want a severe global recession to persist, I think they will eventually pursue whatever means necessary to weaken $ and help Europe, rest of world, perhaps with a new "Plaza Accord" type arrangement[0].

This is if one believes they actually care about stabilizing European industry and economy and not rather that they are keen on seeing global chaos for a period of time and a weaker Europe dependent on US instead of having close trade relations with Russia and a thriving domestic industrial sector (which they have with cheap Russian energy, which they don't with sanction and less supplied more expensive substitutes), in service to US's own relative position becoming stronger and maintenance of global hegemony.

Many analysts, particularly leaders form China, have opined on the nature of US periodic "harvesting" through dollar strengthening policy which crushes developing (and now even developed) countries so as to maintain their reserve currency status and relative global strength (even conceding that in short term everyone experiences pain as result). Great speech from Qiao Liang, a Chinese PLA Major-General articulating the nature of the reserve $ and the way US uses it as financial weapon particularly when they strengthen it to temporarily crush world economy [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord

[1] http://chinascope.org/archives/6458

^From link General Qio Lian quote: "Not many people had a clear understanding of this at the time. People, including economists and financial experts, didn’t realize that the most important thing in the 20th century was not World War I, World War II, or the disintegration of the USSR, but rather the August 15, 1971, disconnection between the U.S. dollar and gold."

Precient insight into developing Ukraine crises, (speech made in 2015):

"Where else did [US] target? Ukraine, the connection between the EU and Russia. Of course there were some problems under Ukraine President Yanukovych’s administration, but the reason that the Americans picked it was not simply because of his problem. They had three goals: teach a lesson to Yanukovych who didn’t listen to the U.S., prevent the EU from getting too close to Russia, and create a bad investment environment in Europe."

^In the context of recent financial sanctions against Russian trade and currency, this is exactly what is happening across Europe right now.

> whatever means necessary to weaken $ and help Europe, rest of world

I might be misunderstanding something here, but wouldn't a weak dollar strengthen the US economy (in terms of exports) relative to other peer economies (e.g. Euro area, the UK, Japan)?

Yes and I think there are often conflicting interests around who gains and who loses even within the US from a strong or weak dollar.

But this is why I noted that, every so often US for geopolitical reason seems willing to except even domestic pain for some period of time if the relative position of US increases due to the rest of world suffering more during strong-dollar periods.

Give that article a read to understand what I'm saying regarding periodic "harvesting" of rest of world economy (for one, via financial flows into $ and assets as safe haven). Arguably Volcker's extreme tightening in 1970's, with his willingness to crush even the domestic economy for a time, was due to geopolitical interests to maintain trust in the $ as reserve currency and to crush USSR economy by destroying commodity prices and bankrupting their economy partially due to their inability to print the currency of which they had some external debts in.

But I think this is a complex topic you can find many arguments both ways. And US policy has gone back at forth at times pursing both strong and weak for their own interest.

Though I didn't mean to imply weak dollar wouldn't also boost US domestic economy. But to the thrust of my post which way US regime wants to go depends on current geopolitical context.

How is that last part prescient? That's a year after Euromaidan. Ever since then, 2014, critics have always lambasted any US/EU in support of the Ukrainian people. Why? Because geopolitically Ukraine was meant to be another Belarus, a patsy state, for Russia and its allies. That statement is the opposite of prescient, in that we now see the mask off and the devil that patsy Ukrainian governments were actually making a deal with.

Ukraine is a patsy regardless of who dominates that region, as allying with US has led to the complete destruction of their country. They picked the wrong horse to follow. If they stuck with Russia, they wouldn't be in this situation (would US have invaded?).

It's prescient because it hints as US long term interest in keeping Europe and Russia apart (in recent times seen most clearly with meddling with Nord Stream 2 pipeline agreement, and encouraging sanctions that are on their way to destroying European industrial power and impoverishing their citizens on account of lack of cheap energy).

> allying with US

and Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, France, UK, Spain, Slovakia, Georgia, and everyone else who understands what a bloody nightmare Russia has been the last 100 years. Ask any closest neighbor: Pole, Slovak, or Georgian 10 years ago how much they trust anything Russia says.

> They picked the wrong horse to follow. If they stuck with Russia, they wouldn't be in this situation (would US have invaded?).

Seriously? They picked the wrong ally because the other would invade and murder them? Should France have allied with Germany against UK in WW2 instead too? We already know US won't invade with the script flipped; Belarus exists.

> seen most clearly with meddling with Nord Stream 2 pipeline agreement

Are you living under a rock? Every civilized country now unanimously realizes how stupid trying to Nord Stream 2 with Russia was, including Germany.

I am so sick and tired of the goalposts being moved for Russian apologetics. Invasion of Georgia, Donbas, and now full scale invasion of Ukraine. I thought, surely, surely if Russia invades all of Ukraine, there's no possible way some fool can try to make these arguments anymore.

>how stupid trying to Nord Stream 2

No. In fact, soon they will see how stupid cancelling it was and reopen it willingly.

Look around at all the industrial heads telling you their production will collapse soon without oil and gas imports. This was self inflicted from sanctions and confiscating Russian reserves.

>because the other would invade and murder them

Russia is incapable of invading the rest of Europe. They don't have enough troops or power to do this. And they don't have any national interest in pursuing this. Invading half of Ukraine is difficult enough. Encroachment of NATO forces and weapons along a strategic position on Russia's border (they said for years Ukraine was existential and could never align with NATO) was a terrible decision that Europe went along with while it was only in US's interest to cause chaos and threaten Russia's security interest that way.

Now all of Europe pays the price.

This is real politik. No I do not think it was in Germany's interest to destroy their own domestic economy by backing US's NATO schemes.

It is in Germany and rest of Europe's interest to have good relations with Russia and stop NATO expansion on their border. To have a cheap plentiful energy supply right nearby not import expensive gas from far away.

Lavrov? Is that you?

Currency depreciation forecast from oecd: https://data.oecd.org/price/inflation-forecast.htm#indicator...

It’s basically the exact same pricing as the US. $1 ≈ €1 today and $1200 * 1.25 for VAT equals $1500.

And the US price is also only $100 more than the nominal price of the base model of the original MacBook in early 2008, and $300 less adjusted for inflation.

I think those had 4GB and complaints about not enough memory. 14 years later, we have 8 GB and complaints about not enough memory.

The previous M1 base model was (still is) 899€ I believe?

I think you can get it a lot cheaper at a lot of retailers now

I gave the iPhone a try after a long time on Android (since the nexus) and I’ve been very happy.

I’m going to give the Air M2 a spin for a work/ personal device too.

Im excited.

Oh, man, you're in for a treat.

Make sure to enable Handoff - copy on your phone (Google Authenticator, for example), CMD+V on your laptop. CMD+Tab to something on your phone (a Safari tab, for instance) from your laptop, and vice versa. A lot of other neat stuff awaits you!

Will do.

I’m really excited for all the differences.

Who knows long term (I expect ups and downs) but I plan on geeking out over all the little differences.

It's not like you can't do that with Android, though.

Don't be silly. Everyone knows apple invented that /s

Anybody got their head around why the new 13 Mac Book Pro M2 is more expensive than the Mac Air M2?

Is it the (in my opinion negative UX) touchbar?

Larger battery, active cooling, afaik the storage options go higher.

If you’re doing anything heavy that will put sustained stress on the machine, active cooling is the important difference. While the laptops may have identical CPUs, with only passive cooling the Air is going to get throttled down after a bit whereas the Pro won’t have to. If you’re going to do something like video rendering you’d notice the difference.

The conspiracy theorist in me wants to believe that the M2 MBP only exists to make the increased price on the Mac Book Air look more competitive.

It’s an old sales trick. Show the customer three products in different price ranges to get them to buy the middle one.

Slightly higher capacity battery is the only strictly better feature I can see in the MBP 13". Usually the MBP is a poor buy anyway. Better the 13" MBA or on the other side the 14" MBP.

That machine shouldn’t exist - I don’t know why they kept it around. Maybe they just had lots of old hardware they wanted to try to unload.

They kept it around because:

1. They don't have something to slot between the Air and the 14" Pro. The much rumored 15" Macbook Air isn't ready yet.

2. With how wacky supply chains are, it makes sense to rely on a supply chain that has been working since 2016, the year the 13" MBP came out.

3. Apple needed a device with active cooling to show off the power of the M2.

Thanks for giving a heads up on the 15" Air on the horizon.

This would be the perfect computer for me, and probably most other pros in the current landscape - 13,4 is just too small for a lot of work, but few people need more power than an M1/M2.

I can see it's rumoured for spring next year, so a year is probably realistic.

You mean the lowest-specced M2 model for each? The ones that are $1199 for Air and $1299 for 13" MBP?

I noticed the tech specs for the lower-end air have a slightly lower M2 -- 8 GPU cores vs 10... and in the Air price tool, it's a $100 upgrade to go from 8-core GPU to 10-core.

So I guess that's it -- the low-end Air is a little lower-end and a little cheaper.

Especially with the Mac, Apple has this odd tendency to keep moribund parts of their lineup around while simultaneously going for a take-no-prisoners approach to rebuilding other lines. The bottom of their laptop offering seems to be the part that suffers the most from this — the Air has always sort of see-sawed between being the premium thin-and-light offering or the entry-level offering (with the 12" MacBook carrying the thin-and-light torch for a while).

Looks like right now the Air and the "proper" (14"/16") MBPs are the ones being propelled forward, while the 13" MBP is the moribund one.

I wonder how many casual power users are going to get this and then realize they can’t run their current windows VM anymore…

You can run a Windows VM and x86 apps work.

But not a x86 VM right? Only an ARM build of Windows I thought.

If it has all the inherent flaws of the M2 MBP then its base config is gonna get slaughtered in the reviews.

I'm hoping to order a higher-specced version soon. I hope the wait time isn't too bad!

Such a tough choice, do I spend the extra 300 on a bigger SSD?

I definitely intend to buy one by years end.

Of course this comes out just four months after I buy an M1 Air.

people getting the new MBA, how much RAM would you be getting?

more than 16 gigs is my recommendation. As the electron apps are proliferating RAM will always be bottleneck.

Please don’t get less than 16.

I have now had two (work and personal) - my work m1 air was specced with 8GB, and had major memory pressure and issues with an external monitor. My personal 14” MBP has 16GB - same workload, same monitor, never skipped a beat.

Ended up sending the air back and swapping for one of the old dev ex MBP (intel based).

At least 16G, them having a 8G offering is customer hostile.

They pay like $40 for the difference, while making it a $200 upgrade, same with the SSD. - Especially since the SSD is apparently really slow with the 256G model.

Eh. I bought a base model M1 Air on a whim because they were in stock, and I can count on one hand the times I wished for more RAM. I have a Kubernetes cluster at home I can run things in, which also hosts a Jupyter instance.

My next one I'll get 16G simply because those few times (namely, creating Kubernetes labs intended to be ran on Apple Silicon) were annoying to deal with. But for I would wager 90+% of their customer base, 8G is absolutely fine. I've never once had it stutter with heavy Chrome usage, video streaming, or even gaming (not AAA titles, granted) out to an external monitor.

I have the 8GB M1 mini, which I bought as soon as it went on sale, so it's a year and a half old. In general the 8GB thing has been fine, and the notion that it can swap pretty quickly has been fine, but it's definitely noticeable now that the swapping is no longer fine, whether because the flash is wearing out or because there was a software update. These days I regularly reboot the thing just to clear the decks after the machine comes to a crawl. And I don't do anything stressful with it. VS Code, Chrome, and Terminal at the same time is about as extreme as it gets. All the real work is happening on adjacent Linux box.

I can't imagine the SSD having worn out yet; that's very odd. Mine hasn't quite hit a year yet, so I'll definitely keep an eye on it, but I haven't noticed any slowdowns.

A change in the software is more likely, but Apple doesn’t ship the tools to read out SSD health indicators so I can’t rule that out.

Excessive swapping due to ram pressure can wear out an SSD pretty fast.

I'm definitely going to be an outlier but 8 for me.

Never get less than 16, since you cannot upgrade it later. Yes, it's obviously a sales technique to get you to pay a lot more than the main price they like to put in ads.

I have 8GB on my M1 air and will definitely be paying extra for 16 or 24 GB next time. Memory pressure is real especially because I have a second user on the laptop for my spouse - if both our accounts are logged in with apps open it can slow down and freeze for 30 seconds or more.

Absolutely skip the 8 GB. I tried my luck with M1 Air, but returned it after two days for 16 GB version. Some Xcode, Sketch and web development.

Once you start swapping, you easily get multi-second delays where a system is totally unresponsive.

A 24 GB M2 Air would be great, but I expect my current M1 to last gracefully for years.

Am I the only one around here that doesn't like MacBooks? The hardware is fine, yes, except the glossy screen but the software is horrible. Everything is a pain in the a*.

Yes, you're the only one.

As a software engineer, the software is pleasant. I have a Unix OS for development tooling and the standard set of applications (browser, preview, file management, IDE tooling) just work. It seems far more likely that something works first time than my desktop that runs either Windows or Linux (Windows example: clock somehow ends up 1 hour out of sync every week or two, computer sometimes locks up leaving me no control over mouse, screen flickers whenever my VR headset comes out of sleep moode. Linux example: I now have to enter my password 3 times in order to fully get into the operating system). Mostly I'm disappointed with the hardware - my late-2018 model is extremely slow for what it is.

Pick an operating system—you can be confident that plenty of people on HN hate it. It’s true now, it was true on Slashdot twenty years ago, it was true on Usenet thirty years ago.

The difference: everyone on Usenet was right.

If you're coming from Windows or another OS it definitely takes time to get used to the "Apple way" of doing things. Also you need to expect that a lot of the applications you're used to being free in other OS cost $10-35+ each on Apple. Apps like SetApp are great for this and trying new applications out but that's a $10 monthly fee. It'd still take me awhile (a year+) to buy the apps I use at $10/mo so I just pay the monthly.

I still have to look at my (unlabeled) keyboard to figure out what the Apple Cmd Shift Up etc heiroglyphs are and it'll always be weird closing windows on the left instead of right side but beyond that after about 3 months of forcing myself to use OSX 5 years ago OSX is now by far my favorite OS. The continuity and interoperability between my other Apple devices is amazing. Yesterday I was working on my jeep and I just dragged a PDF of instructions over to my Ipad from my Macbook and immediately had it to look at downstairs. You can do that in other systems with pushbullet, dropbox, etc but it's just fluid and built in here.

I've always only owned a MBP through work, the M1 max w/64gb 14" is the first MBP I've ever bought for myself and it just hums. I hope it'll be "fast" for 5+ years for the price I paid.

I come from linux and I feel like I've been given a machine for computer illiterate people who are going to do some office work at Starbucks. Stereotypical, yes, but that's how I feel.

I need this basic software feature. Yeah? Too bad, the OS won't allow you to do that. Maybe you'll find a paid app that does it. I do pay for software but when you have to pay for basic stuff that should come out of the box, it's a no for me. To cover the basics you need to pay a lot of money.

Then there's the weird behaviour. Example. You have 2 Chrome windows on two different monitors. You're focusing one of them and on that same monitor witch to a fullscreen app and then go back. Now it'll raise and focus the Chrome window on the other monitor. In the worst case I just have to manually change the window, on the worst case, I'll use some shortcut on a windows that I'm not supposed to and break something. I wouldn't be the only one breaking/changing something in Jira because of this.

The file manager is a joke. Again, something fancy but useless if you need a bit of functionality. At least the OS has a good shell that you can use instead.

When I'm told to learn to use it "the Apple way" what I understand is, "shut up and get used to it, you have no saying in how your machine or you should work".

If I leave my current job it'll be because of the Macbook.

> When I'm told to learn to use it "the Apple way" what I understand is, "shut up and get used to it, you have no saying in how your machine or you should work".

Well yeah that is kind of the philosophy - a single simple way to do things. Cutting down on customisation makes the system more stable and I think allows them to innovate more quickly. Don't confuse it with lack of power - it's a fully certified UNIX unlike most Linux distributions.

They do have incredible support for accessibility, so they do accommodate people who genuinely need things to work differently, not just a preference.

What they're not keen on is adding knobs and bells and whistles for the sake of it, as it's clutter.

    > Well yeah that is kind of the philosophy - a single simple way to do things.

Not being able to do something is very different from what you're saying. Not being able to do something, in fact, makes it more complicated because you need workarounds.

    > Cutting down on customisation makes the system more stable and I think allows them to innovate more quickly

Nobody is talking about customization. Missing features does not equal a simple way to do things.

    > Cutting down on customisation makes the system more stable and I think allows them to innovate more quickly.

How? How does that allow them to innovate more quickly? There has been no innovation in their UI for ages.

    > Don't confuse it with lack of power - it's a fully certified UNIX unlike most Linux distributions.

Don't confuse lacking a POSIX certification with the lack of power. The certification is just a badge you pay money for. Nothing else. It can't even run Docker properly.

I've not really encountered not being able to do something I needed to do with my Mac before that I can recall.

You don't give many concrete examples of things you're unable to do, so I can't help you figure them out. The file manager is a joke? Well it lets you manage files not sure what else you need.

I'd done my whole career doing PhD-level systems research on my Macs - hasn't held me back from doing anything.

> Don't confuse lacking a POSIX certification with the lack of power.

Don't confuse POSIX for UNIX!

> It can't even run Docker properly.

What are you missing with Docker? I use Docker all the time. It's fine what's wrong?

Yeah I've literally got Docker desktop running in the background with multiple containers running seamlessly on my M1 max. I think he's just looking for a place to vent.

You're saying it like you're the only one running docker.

I use it daily too and it sucks. Containers needs rebooting a few times a day or the changes I make in the code won't work. Then there's the massive ram consumption. Emulated crap.

Sorry if I hurt you feelings.

> Emulated crap.

Docker is virtualisation, not emulation.

Yes, which is worse.

Slower and more RAM hungry.

No you've got it the wrong way around - virtualisation is lightweight - it's got very good hardware support - emulation is CPU and memory hungry - it's done in software.

What does being a "certified UNIX" have to do with power?

People talk about macOS as being a toy and say it's not a real UNIX like Linux - but it's actually one of very few real UNIX implementations, which only includes a couple of Linux distributions.

Who says it's not a "real UNIX"? More importantly, who cares about that? Something being a "real UNIX" or not matters very little.

I certainly think it is a "real UNIX", but I also think it's very much a toy. It doesn't even have a good tiling wm (yabai is janky af).

yeah finder is pretty annoying. I don't know how to just get the path of where I'm at a lot of the time.

I hate Finder and use Forklift, but if you alt-click (or command/ctrl, I can't tell on my keyboard) the top where it says the file name you'll be shown a tree of the path you're in. It's not the full file path in a text window unfortunately.

There’s a toggle to enable a path bar in the View menu, along with an option to enable a status bar and a bunch of other things.

It pays to explore the menus of apps under macOS — it’s not like under GNOME or Windows where menubars are vestigial and paltry if they exist at all, Mac apps actually put a lot of useful things in them.

What are your issues with Finder specifically? I use Windows and Linux on a regular basis in addition to macOS and after a few basics (like enabling the path bar and setting the search field to search the current directory), I don’t find it any worse than Windows Explorer, and in fact preferable to something like Nautilus.

Meh I don't think I've ever really needed to rely on finder, when I do most of my file manipulation I just drop down to a bash shell.

"To cover the basic" --> I think this is a situation where our personal preferences are being conflated with the basics because I've certainly never really had to pay out any significant amount of money to be able to do all the basic things I need from an OS.

I'm a full-time software engineer and the quality control that Apple puts into their new MacBook M1 has easily made it my best and most productive system (before being on Debian, and before that on a windows 10 machine).

Unlike a lot of people, I don't really give a crap about spending tons of time "accessorizing" my OS. To me it's merely a means to launch the applications and tools in which I can get work done (photoshop, blender, Clion, bitwig, vs code, etc).

What kind of functionality do you want from your file manager?

I use Linux most of the time, but the file manager on Linux is so bad that I sometimes manage my files from a Mac using SMB or NFS. I've tried a couple different file managers on Linux, and have settled with the default GNOME file manager (formerly Nautilus), but it lags far behind the file managers on both Mac and Windows in terms of both features and basic usability.

At least Mac and Windows file managers are reasonably easy to navigate by keyboard. If you have a directory open and want to select a file, you can just start typing the name. Easy, intuitive, and fast. This feature used to work in GNOME, but not any more. It's been abandoned. The Mac also has the column view, and I don't understand why other operating systems haven't adopted it.

The GNOME file manager also maintains its own "shadow" set of mount points through GNOME's ill-conceived VFS mechanism. So if you want to mount a file share, you can see it in the browser, but you can't look at the files in a terminal window. It's weird and surprising.

considering the price, wonder if base M1 PRO is actually a better deal considering the HW, Display & Sound.

I wish they did a 15” air.

Air M2 and Pro M2, one of them should just crash and burn, and you know which.

Pass for me.

I want either a 15" MacBook Air or a 12".

Looks like a neat laptop.

I don't really understand why apple feels the need to forgoe articles for their devices, however. For instance, they write "MacBook Air features..." rather than "The MacBook Air features..." as would be grammatically correct in English.

They’ve been doing this with a lot of products for a long time. “Today we announce iPhone … with iPhone you can do anything!”

I think it is very strange.

One of the first ways a cult gets everyone on the same page is altered language and speech patterns.

I mean, apple knows their customer base. It wouldn't be unlikely that their writing is somehow catered to who they know would buy their devices.

Fortunately I have free-thinking windows installed on my desktop to counteract my Apple cultist indoctrination.

For me it's android. As long as I can replace the default apps like the sms app and the launcher. I will continue to use android.

It really does seem very cult-like with the way Apple wants everyone to change up English for their product specifically...

If you think this is changing up English, you may not be speaking English as a first language? Referring to products as a proper noun is very common. E.g. Ford will tell you "Mustang offers a powerful engine... blah blah blah" not "The Mustang offers..."

English is my first language, and yes to me that sentence would sound odd. Perhaps that's something common in American advertisement and not elsewhere

Maybe it's just that I'm a car guy, and I watch a lot of presentations about cars. They constantly refer to their models like this. Like it's a person, not an object.

https://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/

> Hear the roar of a Mustang as the ground starts to tremble and your legs start to shake. As always, Mustang draws upon its performance roots with features for enhanced handling, high-powered engine options and a classic Mustang design. For 2022, the soul-stirring Mustang Mach 1 and Mach 1 Premium stand at the pinnacle of 5.0L performance. The personally customizable Mach 1 continues its legacy, engineered specifically for quick turns and spirited drives.

Confusingly, they use Mustang both with an article and without.

This comment makes me sigh. I know you will defend yourself with "what? I'm just stating a fact!" but saying stuff like this makes me really dislike you. I really like Apple products, does that make me a part of a cult? If yes, why? I wouldn't die for them, I wouldn't go through pain for them.

The fact that my comment on the internet makes you "really dislike me" is probably all the confirmation you need.

This comment sent from my iPhone SE 2016.

One thing apple does very well is marketing. Just ask an average person what company they think does phones/laptops the best and they would say apple. Most people don't care about the specifications tech details but just the ease of use and looks, which apple (arguably) does well to optimize for.

-- doesn't the imply there are others of similar? maybe what apple is saying is that there is no other iPhone except the iPhone so the is redundant? - just a guess - i agree it's odd --

It certainly sounds weird to english speakers. I imagine they shorten sentences to not lose people's attention.

It's deliberate. I guarantee that it's about building a "brand mindset." They've been playing with text copy for decades.

If you say "iPhone," instead of "The iPhone," you've turned "iPhone" into a pronoun. That has a different "connection" to people that hear it.

Branding seems to be something that a lot of tecchies (including Yours Truly) have difficulty with. There's a lot of subtle psychological games that aren't easy to quantify.

Do you mean common noun instead of pronoun?

I think of it as a “pronoun.” It makes it into a “person,” or some kind of major deal, like we call localities (usually) by their single pronouns. Sometimes, “The” becomes part of the pronoun, like “The Netherlands,” or “The Bronx.”

Usually, though, we assign pronouns (I’m not an English major, though, so the proper term may be different).

Like, you can’t have “a brooklyn,” or “an amsterdam.”

They want to make it so we can’t have “an iPhone.”

Good luck with that…

The term you want is Proper Noun.

That makes sense.

Thanks!

>Like, you can't have "a brooklyn"

Every Brooklyn outside of the one in NYC is just "a Brooklyn" and not "THE Brookyln"

Fair point.

Then you also have Brookline, in Bastin.

It's already a proper noun (not a pronoun!), but it's being treated almost as though the name of every individual Apple device is the product brand name, which is weird. Using a product brand name without an article is normally only done for uncountable/mass noun things like "gorilla glue" or many food/drink products.

Would it be equally weird or correct to write the macOS? After all, it’s short for “Mac Operating System”.

I’m not a native speaker so I’m genuinely curious.

Only if you don't pay much attention to PR. Lots of manufacturers talk this way when referring to their own products. Apple isn't blazing a new trail here.

Even they find it hard to keep up this stupid convention. Ppl who work there of course say “the iPhone” but you even see it slip out frequently on stage at the big events. Even Steve Jobs, the originator of this convention and supposed stickler for detail used to say “the iphone” quite a bit.

They're treating "MacBook Air" as a proper noun. It's to personify their products, presumably with the idea that people will "connect" to them, for some hollow, tech-oriented definition of "connect".

Just wait until the devices wake up, then it’ll be correct

"MacBook Air" is an idea. A concept.

"The MacBook Air" is a thing. How mundane.

Or something like that.

Exactly, it's just Apple's style of copywriting.

That sounds almost verbatim from one of the Jony Ive design marketing videos around ~2011 or so.

It's to prevent people from pluralizing the product name.

Good point, should it be “iPhones” and “MacBook airs” or “is phone” and “macbooks air”?

Apple needs to speak out on this issue. Why the coverup?

Phil Schiller actually answered this a few years ago

https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/30/11541268/apple-grammar-is...

https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/725791354769399808

https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/725937759022514176

https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/725938369826414592

I still get occasionally likes for my tweet in that thread, 6 years later.

Definitely “MacBooks Air".

Just like LEGO, which demands that you always capitalize the brand name and never pluralise it, likely so that their trademark doesn't become generic. "I have lots of LEGO bricks", not " I have lots of Legos".

Of course, that's corporate BS and everyone can feel free to use it however they want.

John Gruber in shambles. Driving through Cupertino begging (thru iMessage) for Tim Cook's home address.

Maybe they want to think about their products more like a platform than an actual product? Would that explain that difference in language?

edit: What @grumple said further below.

Ooo yes, it's so stilted and unnatural and transparently done on purpose.

It's nearly as bad as people referring to a baby as just "baby" rather than "the baby" or "your baby".

Referring to their products as a proper noun is an old Jobs-ism that he intentionally did. I'm pretty sure it goes all the way back to the original Macintosh, that he wanted to be referred to as just "Macintosh" in all the marketing material, and his on-stage announcement.

It also predates Apple by a long time. Steve Jobs didn't invent this, though he did use it.

"Think Different"

Missing "ly" transforms two words from humdrum imperative verb/adjective pairing to action whose object is enigmatic, provocative and whose verb stands strong, without qualification.

(I attempted to write this without articles. I don't really agree with using "whose" but needed a replacement to "for which the")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)

They just took a page from the Columbo[1] playbook. Why use names when you just can call it "baby". :D

[1] https://youtu.be/pZ0PzRuAv0Y?t=108

Because Steve Jobs used to do this, e.g. introduction of Macintosh.[1]

[1]: https://youtu.be/2B-XwPjn9YY?t=23

Heh, my mother was recently alarmed by the following iOS notification:

(password-at-risk-blah-blah)... 'iPad can help you re-secure your account.'

She associates poor grammar with phishing attempts, so assumed this could not have been a genuine notification from Apple. When I checked my own devices, it seems clear that their approach is at least consistent.

Think Differently would also be grammatically correct in English. But Think Different was what Apple went with. When you write, you make the decisions.

Another way to think about this is that when introducing a friend you wouldn't say, "Hi, this is the Kelly." You'd say, "Hi, this is Kelly."

Steve Jobs wanted to anthropomorphize the devices. It’s already in the Lisa manual: https://farm2.static.flickr.com/1413/712113879_a7079d8cc8.jp...

Or here for the original Macintosh: https://www.flickr.com/photos/peterme/1253692391/

That has always bothered me, and I swear no one ever seems to notice. I see it everywhere, and it clearly must work, since you can even see it being said by owner of devices.

It’s interesting where our language goes.

I do not say “The Windows” etc. when talking about software, but I definitely say “The iPad” etc. when talking about hardware.

I agree, that's very interesting! I also omit articles when talking about software, except when talking about a particular instantiation of the software; for example "Windows supports Nvidia hardware", but "the Windows installation on this device is broken". (And, indeed, "Windows installation is broken in the presence of NVMe drives" would mean, to me, that _all_ new Windows installers are broken for NVMe drives.)

I remember thinking that about the way Jobs introduced the ipad 2: https://www.google.com/search?q=ipad+2+jobs+speech&oq=ipad+2...

I believe it’s also a branding and copyright protection tactic to prevent diluting the name.

I want it, but I'm not getting it until all the hardware works under Linux.

MacOS is great, but someday they will stop updating MacOS for this. I see it as a device with incredible longevity because of the fanless thermals and how it sips energy. I could see myself using it 10 years later. I want to run MacOS or Fedora Silverblue, with Silverblue being my true love. Immutable OS images <3

HAH, downvoted in seconds. Would not be surprised if there are Apple employees brigading this.

I don't think you're downvoted because of fanboys.

I think you're downvoted because:

1. Linux is coming to Apple Silicon sooner or later. You can buy now, enjoy macOS, and then install Linux later.

2. It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years. Even if Apple stops supporting it, you can still use it. In addition, Macs have insane resale value. So you can sell it in 5 years, and then buy a new one. This is a more reasonable approach than yours.

3. Apple tends to support their laptops for a long time. Usually 7-8 years. And given that this is their own chip and it's extremely powerful, I can see it being supported for 8 years at least.

1) We are now 2 generations in without full Linux support for the hardware.

2) I used my Powerbook G4 for 12 years; this is mostly because I was a kid with no money. When I got something else, my sister used it for another 3 years. With thermals as they are in this device, instead of selling it after 4-5 years I'd rather keep it for one-off projects as a server like a Mac Mini. I know laptops aren't designed for server work, but I love that it's a server with a builtin terminal. Also a device I'd use for hiking, because I could charge it from backpack solar.

3) The worst experience I've had was telling my dad MacOS Catalina couldn't be installed on his $3.5k iMac.

As you said in your other comment, M3 will be 3nm TSMC? Maybe Linux will look good on Apple Silicon then.

> The worst experience I've had was telling my dad MacOS Catalina couldn't be installed on his $3.5k iMac.

Just in case you'd be ok with unofficial way - there are patchers to enable macOS install on older machines:

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/install-macos-catalina-unsu...

This is something I'd be comfortable with maintaining, but I couldn't leave with my dad. (I work on the road for months, and it's unpredictable when I come back. Longest I was out was 2 years..)

Isn’t that backwards? He wants to install Catalina on M1/M2 hardware. So do I :(

You have pretty good support except for the GPU at this point (admittedly I'm waiting for this until I install it on my machine). They've had to write all the drivers from scratch, so it was bound to take a while. But on the plus side the hardware interfaces seem to be stable across generations. M2 parity with M1 was implemented in 48 hours! So I'm pretty confident it will mostly be case of linux support continuously improving rather than resetting with each new generation.

The GPU is important.. afaik the keyboard and trackpad aren't working yet in Asahi Linux.

I don't expect Apple to support the Linux community. It feels like this is trending in one direction. It felt like things stopped being "favorable" to us when they stopped supporting OpenGL and made no effort with Vulkan. The touchbar and some wifi chipsets were poorly supported for years before M1 debuted.

What has been implemented in Asahi is impressive, but it's not ready to be a daily driver. I hope this becomes my mobile device of choice someday. I'd use MacOS for work-work, and I would choose Linux every time for fun-work. So tired of everything having telemetry and vendor lock-in and basic pieces of software moving to subscription models.

Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid.

Hector has the keyboard working now https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1544408695295328256?s=21...

I might have missed a trackpad update but I don't think it will take them long.

> Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid.

You could triple boot Windows, MacOS and Linux with Intel Macs. A Mac was a great choice because you could develop for and support all 3 of those platforms (plus Android and iOS). Aside from having bad GPUs, expensive storage, and little modularity, they were great machines for development.

Now, with no Linux or Windows support, not so much (unless you don't need to use anything but MacOS.) Unfortunately, if you need to support MacOS or iOS, you don't have much of a choice. Just really unfortunate that what used to be possible with one machine may soon require two. So long as Apple supports any Intel Mac, many Macs will be able to get OS updates thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. I'm not sure when Apple will drop Intel Macs though. The last Mac to use an Intel processor released in 2020, so there will hopefully still be quite a few years left of support for Intel Macs for the time being.

1. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/START.htm...

Asahi Linux supports Apple M-series processors.

Windows and linux both work in VMs on Apple Silicon macs. I suspect the support for bare metal will come in time (definitely for linux, windows I guess we'll have to see, but I wouldn't be too surprised).

"2 generations" sounds a lot more dramatic than "2 years" (and it's not even 2 years yet, the first M1 Macs were released in November)

2 years is a big chunk of a lifetime in tech.

Plus there is no guarantee that Apple will ever allow Linux again.

>enjoy macOS

If you're wanting to use your laptop for development work, you're going to pick the best job for the task. Moving to OSX would not only slow things down due to how slow non-native Docker is (no it is not negligible, yes I have an M1 Mac and I have tested it in a side-by-side comparison), but you have much less control over your environment compared to Linux.

The vast majority of the people I've worked with choose to use Linux laptops over Macs, and I don't think CPU efficiency is something that's going to get them to change. While working from home, I can think of zero scenarios where I need more than 8 hours of battery life, which my x86 Intel laptop already exceeds.

I think we're getting faster at iterating on bringing up dev environments.

Silverblue is my favorite, but it's becoming common for me to develop everything within a docker image. As quickly as we're committing to a project, we're updating the env and rebuilding that image at the same time? I'm new to this.

I have a friend who's really big into k8s and ansible. Right now it feels like I'm toying around in 1 pod. He can bring up a set of services around the thing he's developing in a few minutes. I want his power. :x

It's called docker-compose, and it's really simple compared to even a 1 pod k8s. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by bringing up a set of services.

Yeah seconding the recommendation for docker-compose, it's a great way to start up multiple services and once you know the syntax, pretty straightforward to use in my limited experience. You can essentially declaratively define which other Docker containers you want to start up (in which order), which volumes they can use, and which ports should be exposed.

> due to how slow non-native Docker is

Are you running arm64 containers? Is x86 a requirement for you?

I don't enjoy macOS but I enjoy the hardware.

All of my work goes into (local/alpha/beta) production linux box that's why the mac is technically just a display.

And when I say local, I refer to a linux server, the mac connects to it. the macOS terminal does a nice work doing that, don't think there would be any difference in that regard if the laptop was running linux.

The new mac checks all of the hardware boxes that I wanted. Even occasional gaming if I felt like it.

> 2. It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years. Even if Apple stops supporting it, you can still use it. In addition, Macs have insane resale value. So you can sell it in 5 years, and then buy a new one. This is a more reasonable approach than yours.

Why is that? I still use my 2015 15" MacBook Pro which released 7 years ago, and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. This isn't the 70s, 80s, 90s or early 2000s: the improvements in performance from one year to the next are far more modest and the utility of further improvements are far less impactful than they once were. My 2015 MBP is still as capable of browsing the web, writing code, and video editing as it was back in 2016 when I got it. It's not in any way slow doing any of those tasks.

The performance of an M2 MacBook would undoubtedly be much better, but am I actually going to be able to browse the web faster or write code any faster? Probably not.

A new 16-inch MacBook Pro with 1TB storage emits approximately 620kg of CO2e in its manufacturing process (The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee, 2020 second edition, page 140). Why should someone emit more than half a ton of CO2e for a new laptop unless they really need it?

If you have a Mac that no longer gets OS updates by Apple, as long as it was released within the past decade you should be able to use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to update it to macOS Monterey (and later Ventura when it releases) without much issue. If it's older than that, you might run into some issues, but generally speaking everything from late 2008 and beyond is supported, with everything from late 2012 and beyond being fully supported.

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/START.htm...

> Why should someone emit more than half a ton of CO2e for a new laptop unless they really need it?

If this is a serious concern for anyone, it looks like carbon capture runs around $22/ton. So this is an $11 problem.

Do you mean offsets (which don’t really do anything)? Because carbon capture is more expensive than that.

For reference, carbon capture and sequestration goes for >$250/ton at the moment from reputable suppliers.

> The performance of an M2 MacBook would undoubtedly be much better, but am I actually going to be able to browse the web faster or write code any faster?

I split my coding time between a 2017 retina MacBook and a 2018 Mac Mini. Code compiles very much faster on the Mini -> faster iterations. So yes, you may literally code faster on a faster computer.

I switched to surface book when mac jumped the shark in '16.

Went through a few generations of that, it was "ok".

Bought the cheapest 13" M1 I could because I had to debug some stuff on the iPhone, I was pretty angry about it.

That day I switched over to it as my daily driver.

The performance absolutely blew my mind.

Stuff I'd wait for one to two minutes to build on the SB would build in a few seconds on the M1.

Debugging + video call + building went from crushing my laptop to being not really noticable.

I was using it heavily for two days and realized I forgot to plug it in. Was only down to 50% battery.

I'm very far from being an apple fan boy, but this little laptop has completely blown my mind. Simply the best hardware I've ever owned, and makes me easily 2x as productive.

And that's all with the cheapest 8 gig of memory model.

> I still use my 2015 15" MacBook Pro which released 7 years ago, and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon.

Understandable. Great vintage year!

I just checked several online auction sites and my 10 year old 2012 quad core Mac Mini can be sold for about $300 while my 5 year old 2017 retina MacBook can be sold for around $500.

That is insane.

* values converted to USD. Prices may differ in countries actually using USD.

Why are 10 years not reasonable? Like ebay is full of 2013 laptops and people buy these.

If it is not reasonable why can you resell it for a large amount after 5 years?

> It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years.

Why ever not? I have 14 year old laptops that run fully up to date Linux just fine. Why can unpaid volunteers do better than one of the most profitable companies on earth?

> So you can sell it in 5 years

That just makes the looming end of support someone else's problem, it doesn't actually solve anything.

> enjoy macOS

This is not something, a person that wants Linux, will enjoy.

> It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years. Even if Apple stops supporting it, you can still use it

I'm not sure, my friend has M1 Macbook Air and he complains that it looses performance after a year.

What does that mean, that it loses performance?

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm a current Linux Desktop (plasma) user, who is really tempted by this machine, given my 6 year old thinkpad is showing it's age. I'm not sure I can get used to MacOS's window management, even though the rest of the OS looks great. I'm definitely not a power user on linux (mostly sticking to defaults), but things like not being able to adjust the green button to maximize a window? Ugh.

I use rectangle (app) for snapping windows around. I think CMD F will full screen just about every app, if not it’s another keyboard shortcut. You can also assign your own shortcuts in the keyboard preferences.

There are a number of utilities to improve window management on MacOS. I find rectangle[0] works reliably, without trying to do too much. Easy keyboard shortcuts to maximize, snap to 50% left/right, or quadrants.

[0]: https://rectangleapp.com/

https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

> HAH, downvoted in seconds. Would not be surprised if there are Apple employees brigading this.

You broke more than one site guideline with this. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? We'd appreciate it.

other than promoting the laptop, is there a point to the announcement?

This is THE MACHINE to buy.

I really didn't like the Intel macbook air I had before. It was slow as hell. I ended up only using my macbook pro. Are the new macbook air with M1/M2 better?

yes, much better

And now the old ones will start getting slower with new Mac updates coming in. This somehow happens. Strange.

Comments like this are so reliable around Apple product releases that we could use them to replace NTP. Over time, machines get slower. New code favors new instructions. But it's not like the machine gets 10% slower the day the new ones start shipping.

I am not denying the existence of planned obsolescence but My 2013 Macbook Air lasted almost until now, better durability than any other machine I have ever owned.

I’m still using that! 4 gigs is pretty weak but it runs Linux and is still smooth if there is no ram pressure.

Same situation here. My 2015 is still going, and I've put that little guy through the ringer. Awesome laptop. I caved and bought an M1 Air last year and it's just amazing. I seem to have luckily missed the problem years of the Macs in between.

I bought a Mac Mini in 2018 to replace my 2010 Macbook Pro. So that laptop lasted 8 years. The only reason I didn't buy a laptop instead of the Mini is I refused to buy anything with a touch bar. This is my first new personal laptop in 12 years and I'm so excited.

I had exactly the same experience with my 2013 Macbook Air. It is still perfectly fine, but I wanted something that was actually faster for couch surfing. Which took until now.

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