Hacker News Reader

Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

Apple was really losing me with the last generation of intel macbooks but these m class processors are so good they've got me locked in all over again

View on HN

The M1 Max that I have is easily the greatest laptop I've ever owned.

It is fast and handles everything I've ever thrown at it (I got 32 GB RAM), it never, ever gets hot, I've never heard a fan in 2+ years (maybe a very soft fan if you put your ear next to it). And the battery life is so incredible that I often use it unplugged.

It's just been a no-compromise machine. And I was thinking of upgrading to an M3 but will probably upgrade to an M4 instead at the end of this year when the M4 maxes come out.

Unlike the PC industry, Apple is/was able to move their entire ecosystem to a completely different architecture, essentially one developed exactly for low power use. Windows on ARM efforts will for the foreseeable future be plagued by application support and driver support. It's a great shame, as Intel hardware is no longer competitive for mobile devices.

Now that there's the 13 inch iPad I am praying they remove the display notch on the Macbooks. It's a little wacky when you've intentionally cut a hole out of your laptop screen just to make it look like your phones did 2 generations ago and now you sell a tablet with the same screen size without that hole.

I really hate the notch[0], but I do like that the screen stretches into the top that would otherwise be entry. It's unsightly, but we did gain from it.

[0] Many people report that they stop noticing the notch pretty quickly, but that's never been the case for me. It's a constant eyesore.

A big issue with the thin bezels I am now noticing is you lose what used to be a buffer for fingerprints from opening the lid.

What I've done is use a wallpaper that is black at the top. On the MBP's OLED screen that means the black bezel perfectly blends into the now black menu bar. It's pretty much a perfect solution but the problem it's solving is ridiculous IMO.

I do the same, I can’t see the notch and got a surprise the other day when my mouse cursor disappeared for a moment.

I don’t get the hate for the notch tho. The way I see it, they pushed the menus out of the screen and up into their own dedicated little area. We get more room for content.

It’s like the touchbar for menus. Oh, ok, now I know why people hate it. /jk

> The way I see it, they pushed the menus out of the screen and up into their own dedicated little area. We get more room for content.

Exactly - laughed at first but it quickly made sense if they are prioritizing decent webcam quality. Before my M1 Pro 14 I had a Dell XPS 13 that also had tiny bezels but squeezed the camera into the very thin top bezel. The result was a terrible webcam that I gladly traded for a notch and a better camera quality.

However, that Dell did still fit Windows Hello (face unlock) capability into that small bezel, so the absence of FaceID despite having the notch is a bit shit.

Here’s a handy free utility to automate this for you: https://topnotch.app

Personally I never see the desktop background so I just set desktop to Black, it’s perfect for me.

Thanks!

Thats surprising you haven’t heard the fans. Must be the use case. There’s a few games that will get it quite hot and spool up the fans. I have also noticed its got somewhat poor sleep management and remains hot while asleep. Sometimes I pick up the computer for the first time that day and its already very hot from whatever kept it out of sleep with a shut lid all night.

Not sure what app you’ve installed to make it do that, but I’ve only experienced the opposite. Every Windows 10 laptop I’ve owned (4 of them) would never go to sleep and turn my bag into an oven if I forgot to manually shut down instead of closing the lid. Whereas my M1 MBP has successfully gone to sleep every lid close.

The Windows 10 image my employer uses for our Dell shitboxes has sleep completely disabled for some reason I cannot possibly comprehend. The only options in the power menu are Shut Down, Restart, and Hibernate.

If I forget to hibernate before I put it in my bag it either burns through its battery before the next day, or overheats until it shuts itself down. If I'm working from home and get up to pee in the night, I often walk past my office and hear the fans screaming into an empty room, burning god knows how much electricity. Even though the only thing running on it was Slack and an editor window.

It's an absolute joke of a machine and, while it's a few years old now, its original list price was equivalent to a very well specced MacBook Pro. I hope they were getting a substantial discount on them.

M1 Max here too. I don't see the point of if/when M4 Max comes out as an upgrade because these updates are too frequent and too small in performance bumps to be justified. Not speed, RAM, storage, or features are a limiting factor. They're going to have to create more "only works on X" iDevice upgrade lock-in killer features to get people to upgrade artificially and unnecessarily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com