Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely love my (completely base model) M1 Air, and my M1 Pro MBP supplied by work. Both have shockingly amazing battery life.

My work one was replacing a 2016 Macbook Pro which struggled to last more than a couple of hours when I was doing dev work, all whilst trying to reach orbit with its fans. I've never heard the fans kick in on the new one.

As for the Air, I thought I'd be crippling myself a bit by only going fot the basic 8GB RAM model, and other than when I installed a copy of Premier Pro and tried rendering something it's been amazing - even then it rendered fine, just took a fair bit more time than on a pro.

I'm not sure I could go back to an overheating, crappy Intel "Mobile" based laptop - they shouldn't even be allowed to call those things mobile chips at this point, they're utterly shite.

This is actually probably the best comparison Latest Intel Mac MBP to M1/M2 MBP. A lot of discussion here is about windows and OEMs not doing enough. If that were the case, then why couldn't Apple work their magic on intel Macs? They had pretty crap battery life & performance too compared to their new stuff. I doubt they would have gone through the work of developing their own processor if it were just a matter of getting power states and clock boosting right in the software...

The last few years of Apple notebook revisions have been pretty incremental, until the M1 arrived. I was happy using 3-4 year old MBA's because the user experience was not that different, but the M1 models were a night and day difference- better battery life and better performance, cooler operation with no fan.

Seems practically impossible- if not technically then definitely from a business standpoint (why were these potential gains unrealized for so long?)

Same experience here. I have a 16" M1 MBP for work (mostly Go and Rust development), and it's the best computer I've ever had. It's a beast that can handle anything thrown at it without even spinning the fans up, it's insane. It's closely followed by my personal 16GB M1 MBAir which I am currently basically only using as a LaTeX machine to write my PhD thesis on. The Air in particular has AMAZING battery life, I can go days and days without charging it while using it for several hours a day. It's also faster and more responsive than my previous i7 tower with 32GB RAM, and that's saying something.

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