The MacBook Air M2 is so good it's given Apple a problem

I really hope your last sentence is true. I've been running a Macbook Air M1 for awhile now and it feels just as snappy as the day I got it. In 15 years and numerous machines (intel macbooks, lenovos, dells, HPs, etc) , I've never been able to say that about any of them. However, the unfortunate part is, while I believe the hardware will be able to last awhile, it all comes down to the what the business heads at Apple see as the EOL day for supporting newer versions of macOS on it.

10-12 years ago was a sea change for laptops. On the Apple side, the "Retina" MacBook pro was a drastic improvement over its predecessors because of the display as well as the fast flash storage, while preserving a thin(ish) form factor.

Unfortunately Apple followed up with some missteps like the awful "butterfly" keyboard, and the unpopular touch bar which initially removed a physical ESC key.

Keyboard, yes. Trackpad, no. I prefer the smaller trackpad on the smaller laptops. Too much false touching on the larger ones.

Package not chip, ram is soldered on top of cpu. You know who else does that? The other king of performance and expensive computing - Raspberry pi.

It's a big step up from their JEDEC days, that's for sure.

If they're using RAM like that, they're pouring money down the drain. RAM speed matters, but 8GB is such little RAM that most users will experience paging from just using their web browser. It's kind of like those guys that put modified exhausts and spoilers on a 2001 Honda Civic.

Everything on Apple Arcade fits your criteria.

Purely anecdotal, but Minecraft alone takes more of my kids' friends' gaming time than all Switch games combined. "Local multiplayer on the same device" - well, that isn't how the kids play. They all bring their ipads.

I think it's confusing to look at yearly sales because so many of the children already have ipads. You don't need a very new ipad to run Minecraft.

What OS do you run on them?

same manufacturer issue there too lol. like the toyota highlander and toyota sienna share the same factory but you can't find a sienna anywhere and a highlander can be found at dealers.

I think my point was that the commenter above mine complained that Apple pre-produced 90% of the base model. Fact is, 90% of people don't need any more than 256GB local storage or 8GB ram, so I think the distribution ratio is fine.

disclaimer: Sienna owner.

Sounds like they don't know what they're missing with the minivan.

I really don't get your struggles. I bought a crucial 1TB external TB4 SSD - the speeds over TB are fantastic and it's extremely small and reasonably fast (about half the throughput of the builtin drive). Most of my video processing is on this drive, but other than that 256GB is completely usable.

So I’m about to start some long term travelling so I’ve been looking to shrink down my setup as small as possible. The plan is to use some Viture AR glasses for the monitor, a ProtoArc folding keyboard, a Swiftpoint Propoint mouse and then either a Pixel 8 (my first choice if it’s got the rumoured desktop mode) or a Samsung Galaxy S22 with Dex, which will be housed in a QuadLock MAG case which allows you to swap magnetic battery packs on and off really easily. I can then keep the phone in my pocket or a bag with the AR glasses attached and then the peripherals connected over Bluetooth. I personally think this is going to be the best way of doing it because if you have a usb hub connected to the phone for a powerbank or accessories the cables start becoming a mess on your desk, especially as you’ve got one cable that moves about when you do. Depending on where I work I may end up getting a wireless external portable monitor like the Asus Zenscreen Go so I can take meetings because the phone screen might be a bit small and if I’m wearing glasses people might find it a bit jarring. I’d be using the phone as the webcam and get it to eye level using the Quadlock tripod. Another option would be to use a Samsung Galaxy Fold, but they’re crazy expensive and they also have some durability issues so I’m not keen. You also lose the advantage of the being able to use a quadlock and the swappable battery packs.

On the software side of things, I’m going to do all my dev work in containers via Codespaces/CodeCatalyst. Apparently someone has made a native android version of vscode now, if not there is the browser version. For gaming, I can use an 8bitdo SN30 Pro/razor kishi and Nvidia GeForce Now which in addition to the standard streaming library allows you to play games you’ve already purchased on Steam. I’m opting for taking two 8bitdos as well as a usb-c to hdmi cable in case I make any friends on the go I have a portable 2 player gaming setup that doesn’t take up much more space than a sunglasses case. If that doesn’t end up happening after a year or so I’ll ditch the 8bitdos and the cable and get a kishi for more convenient solo gaming. I was originally going to do this entire setup with a Steam Deck instead of an android but found it awkward to pack and it’s also not available worldwide so if something happened to my machine in say Australia, I wouldn’t easily be able to get another one without waiting a while and paying through the nose.

If there’s any specialist software I want to use, I’ll spin up a cloud instance for it using AWS/Azure, there’s a few options for this now:

- AWS workspaces and Azure Virtual Desktop if you want a GUI desktop experience in the browser.

- AWS Appstream and Azure RemoteApp if you want to stream just a single application.

- EC2 and Azure VMs if you’re no bothered about a GUI or you want to roll everything yourself.

I don’t expect to have to do this often as I reckon I can get by on mainly android apps. I use Obsidian for notes, there’s Adobe Premiere Rush for video editing etc.

If you want more examples, head over to the Samsung Dex subreddit. There’s quite a few people on there who have ditched their computers and have been using Dex for the last year.

You do not have to agree, you have to experience it firsthand. I travel on a frequent basis and still run into occasional problems. 6GHz frequency bands on 5G are still not supported outside the US, for example.

Granted, 5G is the best we have had so far, 4G was worse, and 3G was even worse. 2G effectively did not exist outside Europe and most Asia, for the US had incompatible TDMA and CDMA networks and only got 2G on a largely unsupported 1.9GHz frequency with exactly one mobile operator, which only the Motorola and a few other handsets could use. To travel to South Korea, one had to acquire a CDMA handset, for the country did not have 2G GSM networks.

I am not claiming that MiFi is a perfect solution. It is a solid compromise, though. I am also aware of the firmware problems (my current 5G MiFi device does not even properly support WPA3), but I can live with that for now and will replace the device at a smaller cost compared to a laptop replacement cost. I am okay with that.

1. Mobile networks do not operate across the entire spectrum, they operate on frequency bands. The bands are country and mobile operator specific. Then there is the modulation which might vary across each frequency band and can be can frequency division based (for rural areas with a low network capacity but a longer range) or time division based (a shorter range but a higher capacity).

On top of that, there is the channel bandwidth that also varies depending on the spectrum channel utilisation. In some areas (or countries), the channel might already be utilised for something else, for example a national train network communication system or by military. Such spectrum channels can't be reallocated, so usually new, country specific, channels are allocated. A capable, laptop integrated modem would have to support them all.

Some regional mobile operators have also extended their networks with non-standard frequencies that are locally important but are not supported outside the home turf (Australia's Telstra and Scandinavian mobile operators are prime examples. Telstra even has its own research division, and they have extended the spectrum with non-standard frequencies more than once. They have also licenced their technology to mobile operators overseas on a small scale, e.g. Hong Kong's CSL and to others). You can check the actual spectrum allocation for 4G and 5G at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands, respectively. It varies from 410MHz to 5.9GHz for 4G and from 600MHz to 71GHz (!) for 5G NR with most 5G frequencies being upward of 2.6GHz – to avoid the interference with 4G.

Most importantly, though, the radio wave interference plays the fundamental role. Whilst 4G and 5G might share parts of the spectrum on the paper (which varies wildly for each), they can't share the same channel at once even if the modulation is different. It is not possible to go against the laws of physics and magically have two different standards to share the same radio frequency. Electromagnetic waves will interfere when the channel utilisation goes up.

Then there is the supply problem. There is exactly one commercial 5G modem vendor in the entire world. It is Qualcomm. And their modems are not known neither for the power efficiency nor for the low heat dissipation – they are both, power hungry and run stinking hot, when in use.

2. That remains to be seen. 6G is already under development and is undergoing the early testing. It is too far away from a world wide deployment, but it will be in the terahertz spectrum == incompatibility with existing technologies.