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Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

But then these laptops are really expensive, if they’re basically just meant to be chrome books. The other day there was a thread about some pc laptop review with some commenter mentioning how they find it odd that all non Mac hardware is full of weird compromises.

But the MacBook Air with 16g of ram and 500gig hdd costs like 1500$, but is apparently still only „meant“ for light browsing, lacks ports, only comes with a mirror (glossy) screen, and the OS is missing a bunch of basic functionality.

The MacBook seems expensive and full of compromises.

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Depending on your domain they can make decent developer machines at the 16+GB config.

I have been researching this lately. At the 24GB config it is looking like the M3 air puts down about the same real world CPU performance as my 2019 16” i9 MacBook Pro. For light docker and development use cases these look really compelling to me.

That is what we have been rolling out to cloud-native developers as well, they get to choose etc, but when you don't need to run a local Kubernetes cluster with heavy tools, but instead can do something with a container, some FaaS simulation etc. you're pretty much golden with the 24GB configuration. Even 16GB used to be plenty, but with the GPU zero-copy sharing and the runtimes eating a bit more memory, the extra couple of GB do really make a difference.

The amazing thing is that with this iteration, you're really leaving practically all Intels behind (at least Alder Lake and earlier) as you're either just as productive, or more productive, but without the heat, power draw or constant charging.

> but is apparently still only „meant“ for light browsing

Where do you get that idea? The M1 Air was already more than enough for all my web dev needs. I have lots of docker containers running all the time and I don't notice anything.

If you look closely, you might have noticed that I wrote that you might get this type of device when you want something in the ecosystem but don't need much.

To pre-empt people who want to qualify "much" as something else, I even included an edit so you don't get people with a different idea on what "much" might mean in this specific context (as it has for over 10 years, none of this is really new). It appears that did not reach you in time.

You specifically probably don't want something in the ecosystem, and you do need much. As such, you should probably not buy this. Other people do exist, and they might buy it if it fits them. It doesn't matter if the numbers on paper tickle you the wrong way.

My first ARM Mac was an M1 mini with 8 GB of RAM and it worked great, I just wouldn’t want to run VMs on it. You’d be surprised by the performance.

The whole argument of the GP is that you shouldn’t expect much of these machines, meaning the kind of tests the article made are moot.

So which one is it? Is it a device with great performance, or not? It’slike people say „these things have great performance“, then somebody comes along to run some test saying „these machines throttle like crazy if you tax them, they have poor performance“, and then the the first group comes along saying „you expect too much“.

I guess they have great performance, as long as you don’t need it?

Performance in a vacuum doesn't mean much. How something performs depends on the task. If you take all the laptops in the world and ask them to dive to the bottom of the ocean, they all perform badly (because they will not reach the bottom and they also won't survive, double failure).

This is also why a lot of 'tests' doen't really tell you much on the actual use of the machine. Even if we can profile all users, and bucket their tasks in terms of system load you don't get a perfect testing system to compare machines.

How 'good' something is, is almost a quality factor where the only real thing you can describe is "to what degree did the device do what you expected it to do". Good quality would be "meets expectation", bad quality would be "did not do what was expected" (and you can extrapolate from there). This is also where consumer satisfaction is generally measured, people get satisfied with their stuff if they can do what they wanted to do, not because of numbers on paper or tests on a website. Ironically, this is also where building your own PC with some cool GPU, Ryzen, and a bunch of M.2 SSDs tends to be satisfying, not because those component's numbers enabled your day to be better, but because you built something and you can use it, you feel ownership and accomplishment, and that's a quality you can be satisfied about.

For an Air, the best you could probably do is describe what a user wants ("I would like to create some content, consume some media, play the odd game here and there, do some software engineering, some 2D work") and then after a while ask them how close the machine performed to their expectation. And even that will simply vary from user to user.

Even work fleets have this problem, IT departments love to standardise, but unless the work all employees perform is specified to the degree where it could be completely automated you won't be able to construct a homogeneous fleet that covers everyone's needs. So you'll always end up with cases where it's an expensive solution, a cheap solution, a bad fit, a good fit, and that just gets averaged out on a quarterly report so we can call it 'good enough'.

I guess my point is "The Mac mini starts at $600 and even though it has 8 GB RAM you aren't going to find another computer anywhere near as performant in that price range."

It depends on the spec - everyone dumps on the base specs but they are still a crazy powerful Chromebook, and in the higher specs they are legitimately competitive as ultrabooks and developer workstation spec laptops.

In neither configuration are they particularly cheap, but you’re also holistically paying for a first-party supported Unix OS with great third party support, a bandwidth level 2-4x greater than x86 laptops currently deliver (with unified memory and a good gpu for the power), very good screens/keyboards/trackpads and an aluminum chassis, a huge amount of thunderbolt with all ports at full spec, incredible battery life, etc. No, apple doesn’t compete dollar for dollar with an atom based Chromebook with a plastic body or whatever, but you also do get a much nicer machine.

This should go without saying (but seldom does) but different people have different value judgements, and different products exist for these different people. If you want to min/max your life with a $300 chromebook that's fine. Other people prefer to look at it in the "I spend 16 waking hours staring at Screens every day, I want it to be a good one". And if you are otherwise in the market for a well-specced x86 laptop, the apple stuff is not that bad, and while it does have its downsides and weaknesses it also has strengths and unique points over x86 too. You're not going to go run a LLM on that 6840U or 12700H. Have fun getting sleep to work right/waking up to a cooked laptop in your bag. Remember bluetooth problems? Me neither, they disappeared when I got issued a macbook (i9 even but the apple silicon models are better).

You see the same thing in GPUs a lot too. People fucking obsess about some numbers that largely come down to 10-15% one way or another, and you know what? If you want the NVIDIA features or (perceived or real) driver stability/herd immunity, it's fine. If you want the AMD VRAM and perf/$ advantage it's fine. It ultimately doesn't really matter all that much.

People get super wrapped into "but this one is 15% better perf/$!!! that's like half a segment!!!" but that means we might be talking about a whole $50 at the register, and if it doesn't do what you want it to, if it's going to nag and chafe at you, then just spend the money. And for some people, especially with larger purchases, there is also the psychology of "I'm spending $2500 on this Thinkpad anyway, I'm keeping it for years, I don't mind spending a little more to check boxes". Especially for what amounts to craftsmen choosing tools - we are going to stare at these machines for a long time, right?

Anyway like, there's zero question in my mind that the apple stuff smokes the latitudes or thinkpads you'd otherwise get. They're great.

It seems The Macbook is not for you.

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