Review: Apple's efficient M3 MacBook Airs are just about as good as laptops get

I think the 256gb storage is an even bigger letdown, esp because small SSDs are slower and the swap writes will likely be focussed to a smaller area, increasing the degradation speed even further.

All in all, 16gb/512 should have been the default a long time ago but why do it when you can sell it for an additional $500

I'm a dev and have a base model m1, it never slowed down, if it's enough for my use it's probably enough for the millions of people who buy it to browse reddit and watch netflix. It's the base model of their entry level laptop, back in the days a macbook air would barely be enough to browse the web

Still sounds like it can get hot and throttle if pushed hard for a long period [0].

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m3-macbook-air...

Some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39595707

All of my Air’s have been the best laptops I’ve ever owned. Current M2 air is an excellent rig.

I'm confident that my M1 Air will last me another few years. It's quite great and I have no major criticism - which is rare for me.

What were you doing that prompted so much throttling? I have a sizablr array of microservices and databases I work on day to day, and it's such brief little

Personally I think the tradeoff is awesome for almost everyone. If you are a high powered user, a laptop fan pad is cheap and will prevent the 33% speed loss of throttling.

There's people who mod these laptops by bridging the heatsink to the case. It improves speed significantly. But it also makes the case uncomfortably hot under heavy use. I think this is a fine tradeoff Apple picked, to not optimize for speed. This is an Air. It should be very performant for most, just not under enduring load. I certainly would not call this an overheating issue.

In my experience, yes, the thermal and energy profiles are vastly improved. I went from an Intel MBP that was constantly throttled due to temp to a 2020 MBP with a M1 (13" 16G of RAM). I've done a bunch of development on it, mostly running Pycharm and Docker. I got the fan to come on once while editing/transcoding using iMovie or ffmpeg (I forget, it's been a while), running a few containers in Docker, and editing code in Pycharm.

The hardware also "feels" better to me. I had issues with the keyboard and video connection with the Intel MBP that I have not had with the 2020 M1 MBP which gets carried in a backpack pretty frequently.

I'm on the M2 MacBook Air, and it's pretty incredible. It runs cool, it's as fast as I could possibly want for daily tasks (I'm not doing video encoding or anything), and it's tiny. It's barely bigger than my iPad.

It's far faster than my top-end Intel MBP was. I haven't seen it struggle with anything yet.

I've found that where I used to take my iPad to do things (on the couch, in the car, etc.), now I take the MBA, because I might as well have my full computer setup. I've found I'm using my iPad a lot less overall.

I've been using Mac laptops since 2005, and it's easily the best I've ever had.

It's actually annoying that the MBPs are so much bigger and heavier for so little of an improvement in real-world usage (for non-gaming, non-video-editing tasks). They seem last-gen in comparison.

I have an M1 Air 16gb and it's the best computer I've ever owned by such a wide margin that it's hard to believe they could improve it. Hard to overstate how dramatic an improvement it is relative to intel machines, especially if you tend to push your computer. It almost never heats up, and the battery lasts forever. Remarkable engineering.

Before Apple Silicon, I'd agree with you - but that was mostly because Intel couldn't produce a low-power chip.

Now with M series, the Airs are quite nice and usable for most people. I'm typing this on a stock M1 Air and it's been perfect for non-professional usage (ie, hobby stuff).

The air line was bad until the m1 imho, now they're basically all you need unless you have very specific requirements

What about usb dongle?

Until Apple finally starts shipping their home-grown modems (which does not seem soon), I wouldn't hold my breath.

>Well, apart from the lack of LTE connectivity.

I have two unused SIMs with unlimited data (Thank you, Sprint/T-Mobile free line promotions), and would love to be able to put one to use.

Menu bar icons? Not too hard to get macOS to have a plethora of menu bar icons especially if your "looks like" resolution is low.

Do you mean the menu bar?

Google Chrome on a 13” MacBook Air almost fills the entire menu bar on its own for me — you don’t need that many notification icons before some start disappearing. (I also think Google Chrome has way too many menu entries, but that’s a different discussion.)

Also, the fact that a menu item that doesn’t fit on the left of the notch by 1px has to move to the right as a whole means that the notch effectively takes up a lot more usable pixels than it seems at first glance.

You can, as long as you close the laptop: https://support.apple.com/en-us/117373

Honestly, that's a pretty niche use case for most people.

If you haven’t tried an ultrawide then give it a go. It’s a game changer.

Why?

I realized recently that my 16" M1 Max MBP is entering its third year of service for me. It still feels fast and I have plenty of disk space. I do wish I had more memory, but I have plenty for what I do now—though I'd want more if I did more with on-device LLMs.

I was tempted by the M3 Max, but I'll wait for M4 Max since my M1 Max is barely breaking a sweat.

For me, The Mx Pro/Max is a must-have since I tend to be a heavier user. For a casual user, though, I think the base Mx Air is a fine machine. In fact, I have a coworker doing SWE work on an M2 Air.

>I'll take the 16" MBP, thanks. I can get more memory, in my case 36GB vs. 24GB

My current and previous MacBooks have had 16GB and I've been fine with it, but given local LLMs I think I'm going to have to go to whatever will be the maximum RAM available for the next model.

Similarly, I am for the first time going to care about how much RAM is in my next iPhone. My iPhone 13's 4GB is suddenly inadequate.