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Comment by blehn | Hacker News Reader

I really wanted to love the 13" Air but two things made me switch to the Pro after trying it for a few weeks. One is that the internal speakers suck in comparison to the Pro. I 'm not looking for audiophile quality from laptop speakers, but the Pro speakers are good enough for casually watching youtube videos, TV shows, podcasts, etc, whereas the Air speakers are harsh and tinny. The second is that the default resolution isn't .5x the native resolution, as it is for most Apple desktop/laptop displays. It's some weird in-between resolution that creates aliasing on text and such. If you bump it down to a true .5x, it's 1280x~800, which is borderline unusable for desktop browsing these days.

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I'm curious what your comparison point was for the audio quality of the MacBook Air.

In the Windows world, I rarely if ever come across a laptop where the speakers weren't clearly last in precedence for engineering and BOM consideration. Just astoundingly bad sound quality accepted as normal in the Windows laptop world, even in supposedly premium machines.

In comparison, even the least impressive MacBook Air speakers are good.

But if you were coming from another MacBook Pro when evaluating the Air I can see why you would have come away wanting better. The Pro machines are indeed a clear step up, and the larger 16" models are even better given the extra space they have to work with.

Yep I was coming from an older Intel MBP, so the downgrade to the Air was dramatic enough to be irritating. But I agree, the sound engineering in the Air isn't bad in absolute terms, probably even pretty good... just not close to the Pros.

I have an Air and I felt like its speakers were pretty decent, but my wife bought a Pro and they're just incredible.

Sometimes I hear her watching some movie or show a few rooms away, and I can never know if she's watching it on the TV or on the Pro just by the audio alone. Those speakers do fill the room, and them some.

Do a lot of folks actively watch media content on laptops these days?

I have never really watched more than short content on that form factor. I like a bigger screen and a remote, watching anything like a movie on a laptop feels klunky.

Yeah... My wife adamantly opposes a TV in the bedroom, but watching on my laptop is not a problem =/.

I’m exactly like your wife :)

You’d think it feels small but go ahead and sit in front of your tv and pull out your laptop. In terms of effective size from where I have the tv and the laptop, the laptop screen is bigger in my field of view. 40 inch tv too, no slouch.

anecdotally i know of people who bring their laptops to bed for tv/movies

This is also the case with Pro M1 Max. Font is very blurry. It's funny how they turn off "scaling/sharpening filter" when video is watched. I've tried a bunch of things to fix it and none of them worked.

A 4K monitor I use works perfectly fine on Linux, but with Macbook Pro, even though resolution perfectly matches, it still has blurred font (the filter they apply completely changes the look of the font, even though I use the same one), everything just remains blurry and again, watching video disables it.

What are you comparing the font rendering to? Linux/Windows?

That's one of the things that pushed me to Mac from Linux: fonts finally looked nice. (This was around 2010.) I tried everything I could to get Linux to render decently but eventually gave up. I recognize that this is so much down to personal taste. If you prefer Windows-style ClearType to Mac's rendering, Mac (especially on a non-Retina screen) will look awful. If you like Mac's rendering, Windows tends to look awful at any resolution.

Linux. When I put my face to the screen, Pro M1 Max is blurry, text is visibly smudged, both on my 4K monitor and the laptop display.

I only have 20/15 vision, so my eyes aren't good enough to see the smudging on my 32" 4K monitor. On my laptop, I definitely can't see it.

By any chance, do you have the display preferences to use a different resolution than the hardware's native dimensions?

So you can get the 0.5 resolution without text aliasing (which I agree is annoying) you just get a smaller viewing area. I keep hearing complaints about aliasing on the Air, and I can respect that since the default resolution causes it, but it is fixable at the expense of reduced viewing area.

The speakers on Pro are definitely audiophile range. To me the screen quality alone was enough to drive me away from Air.

Lets not gulp down the koolaid. The speakers on the pro are nice for a laptop but thats it, they are nice for a laptop. A basic bluetooth speaker laps it. Honestly they are balanced poorly and very “boomy” where I feel like I need to turn the volume up more than I have to just to start to discern spoken words from a sort of mumbly bassy sound.

What's the Pro sweet spot currently for RAM/disk/screen?

Edit: nvm, looks like the Air supports two external displays but the Pro only supports one.

- MacBook Pro with M3 chip = one external display

- MacBook Pro with M3 Pro chip = two external displays

- MacBook Pro with M3 Max chip = four external displays

Given that I would personally go for the M3 Pro with 18GB memory, but it depends on your needs of course.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/04/14-inch-m3-macbook-pro-multi-...

This is helpful, thank you!

> It's some weird in-between resolution that creates aliasing on text and such

yeah, the fact that such basics are still broken is the biggest scandal to me in these premium machines with so much tech progress otherwise

As an Air user who pretty passionately hates hearing a laptop fan, my wonderment at the quality of the Pro's audio would end the moment I heard that fan whine.

I haven’t heard the fan on my Pro turn on in _years_.

Isn't that the entire point of PRO?

I've had a similar train of thought, based on my experience with earlier Macbooks -- that I would pick the Air over the Pro specifically because it does _not_ have a fan and therefore could never make fan noise. But like spinningarrow, I don't think I've ever heard the fan on my work-issued M1 Pro MBP.

The M series laptops do not have fan noise. I have a M1-Pro 16" (personal) and M2-Pro 16" (work) and never heard the fans.

Although I'm still using Air with M1 chip and still love. However, that resolution thing, totally annoys me :(

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