Walmart Selling MacBook Air with M1 Chip for $649 Starting Today | Hacker News Reader

Walmart Selling MacBook Air with M1 Chip for $649 Starting Today

macrumors.com

35 pointshaunter45 comments

This is a great deal. I use a 2017 intel MacBook Air as a daily driver for browsing and light coding (takes about 15 minutes to generate a stable diffusion image).

It only has 8GB of ram, but is still chugging along.

I can’t believe these are cheaper than iPhones.

> I can’t believe these are cheaper than iPhones.

The iPhone SE is $429.

Is that the only iPhone made? Are there iPhones that cost more than the MBA? Did I comment that it’s cheaper than all iPhones?

Same here. It's a great machine and very rarely (like with several hundred tabs open) I get notified about a lack of memory.

Has anyone used OpenBSD or Asahi Linux on the M1? I have no interest in running MacOS on one but if the battery life is good it might make an excellent laptop for Emacs and light web browsing purposes.

> Has anyone used OpenBSD or Asahi Linux on the M1?

Has anyone tried searching this question on the internet?

HN has a higher quality community than many other places... which is why I asked here.

OK, but what did you find after a few cursory searches? Many of the results would lead you to HN threads... where you would find that quality you are looking for.

For OpenBSD, the last threads on hn.algolia.com are from 2 years ago for v7.1; v7.5 is now out, which is a newer version by 4 releases.

For Linux there are newer threads which are still 10 months old, such as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37538482

I think the consensus is if you’re ok with Fedora’s arm64 package selection, don’t need external monitor or TB, shut down your computer every time instead of closing the lid to sleep, you’ll get really good performance on Asahi Linux but not as good battery life as on macOS

This seems to have a slightly shorter support lifetime than you'd normally get with a Mac. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772 is all phrased in terms of "when Apple stopped distributing them for sale", which happened in March.

It's still years longer than what you'd get from most other companies, though.

8gb of ram seems like a poor decision

I regret it. My M1 air is already showing its age and is a bit slow at times. Not sure if the extra RAM would have helped.

I've only had a couple instances during intense hackathons where I get the low memory popup though. but when it happens its annoying af

For 649 this machine will run circles around anything in the same price bracket.

.. until running out of RAM.

You need to start thinking outside the box with ram. These new chips have a unified bus and so swapping to disk is not nearly as costly as it is on normal machines.

Yes, it will suffer compared to an M1/2/3 with 16+ GB of ram but again for 649 you will be running circles around a comparative x86 PC even if it has more memory. Asahi Linux is a huge perk, too. Battery life and chassis strength are also things that should not be discounted. This is a chromebook on steroids.

So the solution to running out of RAM is more wear on the disk? Doesn't this thing have soldered-on storage that you can't replace when you wear it out?

649. It’s a wear item. You replace it when it dies.

Isn’t that’s even worse? It would cost almost 0 to add more RAM and make it a durable machine. What Apple does here is basically the definition of planned obsolescence.

I'm sorry, but for $649 it's not "running circles" around this:

https://www.amazon.com/GEEKOM-IT12-Mini-i9-12900H-Computers/...

I will admit it's pretty decent for a laptop, though... especially if you like living in the gated Apple ecosystem.

You’re missing the (slightly better than) 2K OLED monitor. Seems like you can get something like that for $200, which will downgrade your hardware significantly. The linked computer probably uses more power than a Macbook for the same task even if the Macbook is running its display.

I don’t love Apple’s gated ecosystem (which isn’t as bad on Mac as on iPhones) but this thing is an absolute steal for what it is, especially considering 90% of what people on these days is in a browser or electron app.

That’s a mini PC. Not even remotely comparable. Why are you even posting this? No display. No battery. It’s a raspberry pi lmao.

desktop / mini PC. not really comparable, and comes with Win11, which is a more miserable choice than Win10 or Apple's gated nonsense.

you could probably put Debian on it, though. one of the reviews mentions how loud it is, lol.

A little while ago I got a $250 Ryzen 5 laptop with 16GB of ram and a HD display. The keyboard is awful and its not great at gaming but it has a lot for the price.

I was suspicious of this, and they should really include more. But I have 30 tabs open on my 2017 intel version and this m1 is ever better.

Is it enough for a teenager to edit video? That's probably one of the most demanding tasks an average teen might need.

Probably not. Only 256GB of storage. Video, even with a bit of compression, will chew that up pretty quick.

Yes. It'd be limited more by the disk space taken by 4K footage than anything else, but a decent external drive with USB 3 or Thunderbolt 3+ would cover that.

B-but Mac RAM is different than PC ram.

Isn’t it now though? Soldered in to the SOC and therefore super fast

We still have a ton of these in use for general office work and they are still more than fine. For light use these should be good plenty longer, but I would not pay full price for them anymore.

It's funny, lots of people complain about it, and I tend to be sensitive to performance issues, but honestly I have zero complaints. I've been using a min spec M1 Air for years and it works great for me. I mostly browse the web and use VSCode remote tunnels and for those purposes it's by far the best laptop I've ever used.

Well, yes, if you mostly do things which don't require much memory, then the device's low memory won't be an issue.

8GB is not a lot in this day and age, though. I paid for the upgrade to 16GB in my current (2016 13" MBP, now seriously showing its age) and am very glad I did.

Everyone's complaint about Chrome and Electron apps like VSCode is that they are (supposedly) enormous memory hogs...

They are good machines if anyone is thinking of one. Used mine three years with few issues. The speakers have gone a bit buzzy, otherwise good.

Apple Silicon M1 will be supported for many years by Asahi Linux, since it was the original platform for reverse engineering.

Would it be enough to run Xcode to develop a minimal iPhone app for learning purposes?

Yes, easily. It's the perfect machine for this and you'll love the experience.

Still doesn't justify going back to usb-hub land for me

I've used one for three years and no usb hub. Depends what you want to plug in I guess.

Definitely not fan of bluetooth peripherals

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

I think it's unlikely Walmart is advertising on HN.

walmart is the largest company in the world and will have tentacles in bloody everything, likely through 3rd party marketers and a whole lot of automation.

entirely possible that other ad companies flagged HN as a juicy target for selling Apple products, and that ended up on a large, weighted list of marketing targets. awful lot of tech-bro programmers on HN.

lower priority means just a couple of posters / AI bots, instead of a full-court press with dozens of well crafted accounts posting long responses.

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