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Comment by vmilner | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know why they stopped making 11inch MacBook Airs - the 1kg size makes them easy to carry around. I’ve recently picked up an old final 2015 8GB 256GB edition and it works fine with Linux on it.

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They had a really big bezel, so the current 13" MacBook Air is barely any bigger than the 11" MacBook Air:

- It's 0.5cm thinner

- It's 0.41cm wider

- It's 2.3cm deeper

- It's 200g heavier

The aspect ratio on the 11" model was kind of weird too, a lot of apps would barely fit. But a retina screen would help there - just make everything smaller.

Apple at its grandest would have made a huge deal about how something was 200g lighter. They loved shaving grams off widgets in the good old days of the 2010s.

Whatever the difference is, it's super noticeable. I gave mine away last year and I regret it daily—it was the perfect travel laptop.

I consider the air line dead, tbh—they just lost the magic when they made them bigger and they're just "macbooks" to me now... yea yea it's fanless, but that was never part of the appeal per se. Fewer ports, smaller screen, lighter. Please.

I agree. It is very noticeable. I commute on foot to work several times a week and having a laptop that I barely noticed was a delight. When I am at my desk, my laptop is docked, so the screen size is not an issue. And I’m willing to accept the trade off for the times when I do need to use it as a laptop like when sitting in an airplane; unlike my coworkers, I was never worried about the person in front of me leaning back and crunching the display. I would gladly buy an 11” Air again.

Importantly, if laptop makers stuck to screen size rather than overall dimensions, a 11" with the same bezel today would be smaller than an 11" of the past, and that could be too small for a good keyboard for some.

Have a look at the 12" Retina Macbook [0]. It's just called the 'Retina Macbook' (not air or pro). It was produced between 2016 and 2019. It is absolutely tiny, it ways just 920gr.

It took me a while to find a decent one second-hand, but it has been my ultimate travel companion since. It's small enough to just drop into any bag (handbag even) and can charge of any USB-C charger. No other brand of laptop in that form factor comes even close to build quality. I don't think any other unibody laptop of that size even exists.

If you get a later model (2017-2019, 3rd gen) then you get MacOS 13 (Ventura), which still receives updates. If you can find a later-model with upgraded CPU (i5) then performance is actually quite decent, lower-spec models are also still just fine for browsing, email and terminal work.

Supposedly it runs Windows just fine using bootcamp (I haven't tried). I have mine setup for dual-booting Linux. Linux support is decent, though out of the box no support for speakers (headphone jack works), it has a broadcom wifi/bt chip and the wifi works just fine, but bluetooth is currently broken. There are some out-of-tree patches that add limited BT support. I'm working on writing Linux drivers for audio and BT in my (admittedly limited) free time, if someone is interested in helping with that: find my email in bio.

Upsides:

- Very small and light

- Robust unibody

- Does 10 hours on a battery

- Spare parts still available

- Later models still get updates, including Windows

Downsides:

- Probably won't be long before MacOS 13 goes EOL

- First gen (2015-2016) supports up to MacOS 11 (EOL) and second gen (2016-2017) up to MacOS 12 (still receives security updates).

- Only one USB-C 3.1 port for everything, so if you want to charge and use USB peripherals at the same time you need to carry a dongle

- Very low travel keyboard (obviously)

- It's rare, so limited documentation for Linux support

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-inch_MacBook

The current 13 inch MacBook Air weighs 1.24kg. Is the extra 240g a dealbreaker?

Less the weight than the increased size for me. Admittedly I don’t use it for very long periods so the smaller screen is less of an issue. I think for my needs it just lets me stick it in a small backpack and forget it, and I prefer the keyboard to a tablet (though no doubt someone will tell me there are fancy tablets with keyboards now!)

It's only like 2cm wider due to the bazel difference

Ah worth knowing thanks.

I have an M1 13” Air and my wife still sometimes uses my old 2016 12” Macbook (920g). Whenever I pick hers up by accident I’m reminded how noticeably thin and light it is. It seems like a small difference but it changes the feel quite a bit.

They probably dropped it because the Intel chips were hard to tame in such a small space, but with how efficient the M chips are it should be much easier to pull off now.

I still have mine and thanks to OpenCore-Patcher have the latest macOS running (slowly) on it.

Installed it just to see if it was usable. I expect Linux will be snappier.

Because iPad's

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