Apple MacBook Air 15-Inch M3 Review
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But the massive anti-repair propaganda put out by this company, abusive business practices that prevent most people from truly accessing their hardware (unless it’s the Apple way); and soft locking devices via disabling features when parts are replaced/repaired by third party shop.
People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac
You can even find panels on new computers that smoke Apples like the 3k 120hz OLED on the Zephyrus g14. Apple’s screens typically lag behind the competition which is natural given they don’t make their own screens, don’t want to sole source, they are anal about QA, and it’s logistically faster & easier to ship a bleeding edge screen on some premium computer that sees a few hundred thousand in sales than the MacBook that sells millions.
I agree, some campaign around being actually build for real use would be interesting. A whole series of well loved and heavily used machines. Suitably worn and sticker coated.
How have you managed to have so many laptops? Are you a collector? A reviewer who is given a lot of free review units?
Laptops have only been around since about 1980, so even someone who started then and has bought 4 laptops a year on average ever since then would still be a little shy of hundreds, so I'm guessing you must have an interesting story.
I guess today I tend to over focus on the laptop as an end where others see it more as a means. Probably won't ever be satisfied until I sit down and design my own. But the MBA 15 is very nice. Too nice. "manufactured with precision to the micron and delivered to your door straight from the factory in Shenzhen"
They are durable and ubiquitous no-nonsense work machines. I just picked one up for $300 and can do all the dev work I need
The keyboard has that obvious wear on the home row from lots of use but it’s been rock solid
You can get a pretty decent machine for 300-500 on ebay but selecting the correct configuration is key. One area Thinkpads fall short since the Lenovo purchase is the screen quality. But the Pantone 4K option is pretty nice if you can find one. I like the T and P series and dislike the E. X is Ok if you have to carry it everywhere especially for network technicians. But Thinkpads generally aren't light and the battery life can be hit and miss. It's nice there are Xeon options but I'd expect the Intel signature hairdryer whirr on load. Most Thinkpads are quiet enough though. It's a good budget option, excellent value. A tool I think everyone should have kicking around.
What you find as a technician is that manufacturers have very different ideas about how to engineer a laptop. The worst of the worst was the Dell Latitude series which looked like it was put together with lego and superglue. I've never seen cost optimization to that degree, perhaps to their credit.
you have discovered the reason applecare sells well. and frankly the higher the tier of laptop, the more sense it makes - no sense insuring the base-tier model, it's basically disposable, since a non-covered "any other repair" (other than screen) is $700 on (eg) MBP, or $350 (iirc) on a MBA you're basically over halfway to a new unit with a new battery/faster processor/etc. But on a loaded out 64GB/4TB M1 Max MBP ($3k at b+h for a good long while there) then it's worth having it repaired.
arguably on the high-end apple laptops, if you intend to carry them around and actually use them, it's just part of the lifecycle. like, if you have one screen repair in 3 years you break even, if you have one "any other repair" you come out ahead. this is actually constant across all the model lines (MBA screen repairs are cheaper, applecare is still 1/2 of a screen repair).
having insurance on desktops is certainly dumb, but it makes a lot of sense in movable items. people carry around phones and laptops, and they drop them. it happens to wintel PCs too, believe it or not. for the price of prepaying half a screen upfront you basically don't have to worry about your laptop and you also get a 512b memory bus with best-in-class battery life and performance etc.
and I know applecare triggers a lot of haters, "that's a scam, I'm too smart for that!!!", "I won't buy something that I can't repair myself!!!" but like, that generally just speaks to the degree of hostility with which a lot of people approach the apple lifecycle. It's very much designed as a first-party service model, yes of course, but it actually works, and apple laptops actually do achieve long service life with this model. You're not the first person to realize that dropping a $3-4k laptop is gonna feel pretty bad etc, but people tend to systematically dismiss the solutions that have been provided to fix that, because they're not the solutions that the wintel world provides.
And frankly, not having to worry about dropping my laptop is a benefit above and beyond what x86 would provide with the kinds of solutions that are generally quoted, and paying for a premium on-demand business grade warranty on a wintel laptop would probably be roughly as expensive even if it existed on the hardware I'd want (can't get a dell/lenovo/hp business-tier warranty on a redmibook I bought off amazon, right?).
I'm out here carrying my laptop around on a stone patio every evening as I watch the puppy play outside. I'm using it on the toilet above a tile floor. I'm picking it up and moving it every day, and using it on a blanket on the couch. Yesterday I downloaded dolphin-llama3:70b and ran it locally at interactive speeds, I've been doing dolphin-mixtral:8x7b for months now (not full offload so it's not quite as fast). It's a nice laptop and I bought it to use it, $350 up front to simply never worry about it is more than worth it. The same wintel people who told me to get a framework 16 (with no speedstep) are now telling me to wait for strix halo, and I'm out here living the future for almost a full year now, and strix is probably at least a full year from actual real availability (strix halo is coming later than strix point, and AMD paper-launches all their laptop products badly). The $500 I save (maybe) by waiting 2+ years for a comparable x86 solution in 2025 isn't worth it, and I'd still have an expensive laptop with no warranty even if I went PC.
(and that's assuming strix halo is a drop-in replacement - I think people are going to be more disappointed by cost+ battery life than they realize, socketed quad-channel memory with a big stacked cache to improve performance is not cheap in either dollars or watts, those are going to be $3k+ laptops too.)
similarly to how people whine about drop risk and then just ignore the mechanism provided to solve that problem... people do the same thing with turning the parts program into a negative too. Literally apple will sell you the part and the first-party tooling to fix your screen, or even just rent you the tooling... and that's bad because "it comes in three pelican cases!!!" or something. Like people literally insist it's "all for show" or something and it's actually just part of the secret plan to undermine right-to-repair, because Apple will sell you the tools if you want. there is nothing that people can't spin into a negative somehow. There are very few companies with a more real "hater" phenomenon than Apple, and it just colors every discussion on the topic. People forget that there's two sides to every transaction, there is no forced anything, I am making my choices about my own risks and benefits, just not the ones they make. There are scenarios where it makes sense - and probably not as few as the haters want there to be. They just get shouted down by a fairly dedicated/active hater crowd.
I wish Apple wasn’t as stingy with RAM upgrade options considering this can’t be upgraded later. For all the talk on the part of Apple of being more sustainable and green, allowing more competitive memory options would help extend the useful life of these products.
All is about the bottom line, and that's why they're stingy with the ram as well.
Now, every successful company have to have a great bottom-line and that should be a focus as well yes. Not sure how to balance that for a big company like Apple, and I am happy I am not in that position.
And the idea seems for it to be more of an LAM with fallback to OpenAI for the LLM.
With current models the latency comes from processing, not from the network — going from a high-power remote server to a low-power local phone is likely to increase latency more than it reduces it
what ?!!!!??????!!! there is absolutely nothing sustainable or green about apple, it's products, or its business practices.
> The MacBook Air is made with over 50 percent recycled content overall, a first for the company. This includes 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100% recycled tin in the solder and gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards, 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets (which is 99% of the rare earth elements in the device), 100% recycled cobalt in the MagSafe connector’s battery and magnets, 100% recycled copper in the main logic board (also a first), 90% recycled steel in the battery tray, keyboard feature plate, and trackpad beam plate, and 35% or more recycled plastic in other components.
> Additionally, over 25 percent of the electricity used to manufacture the device was sourced from supplier clean energy projects. And 100 percent of the wood fiber used in the packaging is recycled, as is 99 percent of the fiber-based plastic.
They design their laptops in such way that they are not (easily) repairable, and the failure of one component could mean replacement of the entire logic board. And echoing the parent comment, if you think 8G/256GB is good enough at the time of purchase but find it unusable because of a change in the way you use your computer, the only option is to trade-in/sell it instead of just upgrading them. (The vast majority ofWindows laptops on the market has a replaceable SSD.)
(and Apple holding onto a device that is traded in doesn't help when the device could be used by the original owner with an upgrade)
For example, my old MacBook Pro was from mid-2015, I only replaced it with a new M2 Pro early last year - it was my primary machine for almost eight years, with just one battery replacement. The current iPhone I’m writing this on is from late 2020 (12 Pro) and still in fine working condition, I can’t see myself having any reason to upgrade this year.
i always sell my apple products. i usually get at least 50% back on what i paid.
And one of the bonuses of a Mac is that they all come with TB4 so no compromise on performance.
In the case of Apple, the primary (and maybe only?) difference is the number of external displays supported: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mh35952/mac
since macbook airs don't have multi-display capability, you can't call it thunderbolt. you can call it usb4, or usb-c 40gbps, or whatever, but it's not technically thunderbolt - thunderbolt is the brand for the full-capability standard.
this is not something consumers normally bump up against since x86 laptops generally either have multi-display support or don't exist in a product tier where 40gbps is a thing. Stuff like chromebooks falls into the latter, too cheap to have 40gbps, and the entire x86 space is dominated by literally two companies both of which happen to support multi-display. but you'll probably see this show up more in ARM notebooks once other vendors have a shot at releasing processors besides just those 2.
like idk what you expect anyone to say here - usb standards are kind of a shitty free-for-all and always have been. usb gives you the freedom to make a confusing port that doesn't support everything. The simple fact of the matter is the base-tier Mx processors don't support multi-display without a software-driven dongle, that's all you need to know, it's otherwise a full-capability tb3 port, basically usb4 but without the baggage of being unable to connect to certain tb3 devices like usb4 sometimes does.
there is absolutely a justification for laptops like air to not have multi-display support. not everybody needs it, and those processors cross-over between the tablet and laptop spaces. it's a fancy tablet apu, regardless of how good it performs. the sin is not offering a M3 Pro variant on the 15" MBA, and I'd say offering the M3 on the MBPs at all. But it totally makes sense for ultramobility laptops to cut power and cost, and you'll almost definitely see ultrabooks start doing that as the wintel monopoly crumbles over the next year or two. That will be branded as USB4 and won't necessarily support all the capabilities of TB3... or be compatible with all legacy TB3 devices. USB standard sucks, or rather: USB Implementers Forum is responsive to their customers, who aren't you (at least not directly).
Perhaps “less energy” is only one input to cost, which is why the rest of the industry doesn’t have near the level of recycled components.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling
> 42% of crude steel produced is recycled material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_by_material#Iron_and...
The only reason it's not industry standard to use 100% recycled metals is that it's pointless greenwashing. Everyone already uses as much recycled metal as they can get their hands on because it's cheaper.
Definitely an interesting emergent bandwagon phenomenon, i find myself thinking. Years ago i didn’t notice such bandwagon attention seeking sorts of derisive nonsense nearly as much if basically ever.
Like you said, it’s sort of just a reality nowadays.
“there is absolutely nothing sustainable or green about apple, it's products, or its business practices.”
My first fews months of my time on HN can be best described by the famous XKCD strip per link below. Foolhardy attempts as I soon realised.
That doesn't mean they can't give more, but it's not an 'apples' to apples comparison.
However, they aren’t using good-old SODIMMs - or anything like them. There is no way they’d ever be able to give you laptops with 400GB/s of memory bandwidth in that slim package while making it user-serviceable. I would love to see them try but it’s not an easy request.
I remember when I bought my first alu-Macbook in 2009 and I could remove the battery and add additional memory by just flicking a latch
The bigger crime is that the 15" can't be configured with the M3 Pro... particularly given the less-ambitious spec compared to M1/M2 Pro. Things like not supporting a second external display make the 15" MBA a non-starter as an 'ultrabook' even with 24GB configurations.
With the M3 Pro, since you get a 192b memory bus, you'd have options up to 36GB as well as dual external display, which is at least adequate for the class of product.
But you wouldn't have the same performance with discrete memory, so shrug.
I'm one of those people. Putting Command on Control means that's one less thing I have to think about. Keyboard shortcuts become mostly the same between the different systems.
There's similar options on iOS if you use an external keyboard there.
hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":[{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000039,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x70000002A}]}'
I don't think there is any magic bullet, short of remapping all shortcuts on either of the system, it's just tricky.
The price is insane, but I needed a solid dev machine, so that I could run multiple IDEs (GoLand, IntelliJ) + Figma. Additionally, I wanted to dive deeper into AI/ML. Apple's MLX easily competes with Nvidia RTX 4090 [1]. Everything is just instant, and I'm extremely happy with the purchase.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/12/13/apple-silicon-m3-...
With a mobile class 4070 my benchmarks were above the Mr max's and as it's nvidia, tool and framework compatibility are no issue. And price was less than 3K, extended support included.
everything i've seen is that once you seriously cross the threshold of VRAM usage/gpu offload, the performance collapses. and sure, if you stay within that the 4090 (or even 4070 mobile) is a lot faster, but the most popular current families of models don't generally fit on a 4070 or even 4090.
on a 41.5gb model, would a 4070 mobile/4060 ti 16GB really beat a 64gb m1 max? it seems doubtful but idk.
if there's viable ways to split models across multi-gpus i'm all ears, but afaik there's not (outside NVLink). Other than buying or renting A100s, the only serious option would be bergamo with avx-512 and a bunch of memory, much slower but avx-512 does have inference instructions now, and that gets you into the class of memory you (currently) need for things like snowflake-arctic-instruct:128x3B.
(and of course training is a whole different kettle of fish, but everyone knows that at this point.)
I don't, my setup won't compare in term of memory affected to the GPU part. I actually don't know what the best workaround would be.
My priorities were portability, versatility and VR capacities above all, so yes it wont hold 40G in GPU RAM.
… especially when your mouse hides behind it and it takes a few milliseconds to remember the notch
On my old MBP, the menubar starts below where the camera module is.
That area rarely gets used, so why not put the camera there? It is weird how large the area is, however. The camera is a fraction of the tab's size and there aren't any sensors on either side, I don't think.
You pretty much forget about it after a week or so. The only people who make a giant fuss about it are people who haven't used a system with it for very long, if at all.
Of course if you were in the kind of environment where it might be a problem if your computer unlocked as you walked by, you probably wouldn't enable the feature anyway. As it is I am annoyed by iphone and ipad apps that require faceid or other login each time as I'm the only one who uses those devices anyway.
Nevertheless I think faceid on the laptop or imac is an insecure idea.
I wish I had it on my Mac.
Once you’ve used it for a few days, it tends to fade out of awareness. If you really don’t want to see it, there are utilities that make the menubar black so it blends in.
Indeed, keyboard shortcut design as well as physical keyboard design is such a forgotten moulded corner of personal computing (especially bad with Apple given they own both the OS and the device)...
But there are apps for that! (at least the former) You can have Alt-F open your File menu on your Mac as well, the press E with Karabiner+KeyboardMaestro combination
> But I found it problematic to go back and forth between the MacBook Air and my PCs, as I would constantly reach for the wrong keyboard shortcuts. The biggest issue is the Ctrl + C (Windows)/Cmd + C (Mac) divide: Those modifier keys are in very different places.
Well, put then in the same place! (and Mac's place is better since it's a more ergonomic thumb key) This is one of the few benefits of different designs - they might force you to reevaluate your common routines
I'm currently using Ukelele, but it's not ideal. And I would really really like to remap Right Alt different to Left Alt, to get a proper ISO layout!
(the only missing low-level part in KE is stuff like home row mods where you'll need another utility like kanata/kmonad, but not sure how well they integrate with KE)
Downside is how many apps surprisingly lack iPadOS versions
Every time I look up what Apple's trade-in will be, I have to compare it to eBay to make sure I've not gone crazy.
In years past, the common recommendation was save as much as you can and buy the top-of-the-line you can. But now the Air seems reasonable.
I bet you don't have to use old windows 10 which is not capable to restore windows on proper displays after I reconnect monitors... perhaps it's something disabled by my organization, but in macOS, at least I don't have to do this once twice a day.