Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

It will probably have no fan and throttle under real work like the m series air.

I'm a backend dev, I've been using a base model m1 air since it was released, I've never felt it slow down, I still have no reason to update. 99% of people who will buy these entry level machines will not hit thermal throttling or if they do they won't care

I’m a backend dev with an m1max and 64gb ram. I run golang, various docker containers and an occasional ollama llm plus a few games. This machine still feels like it has infinite resources.

Man, it's wild how we have such different experiences. I have a base level M1 air, and I feel like it chugs along anytime I ask it to do anything even vaguely computationally expensive. Obviously that's not rigorous, but that's my subjective impression.

I also have the cheapest M1 air and the only bottleneck is memory. Once you have too many things open it's not happy. But doing webdev this thing compiles 40% faster than my (older) xeon 8 core desktop machine. It even plays Baldurs Gate 3 (but it takes too much space on the drive lol)

This is similar to me, without ollama. I sometimes fantasize about a new MacBook but even my docker containers offload their hard work to apis, so outside of memory, I do not want for much.

My m1max is getting along quite nicely, I love this thing.

"backend dev" does not say much. What language are you using?

Golang, but does it matter ? What do people do with these entry models anyways ? Users who have high expectations will know better than to buy these, but for the average joe they will be more than sufficient

Fair enough

I disagree. I’ve used a M1 air as my daily driver at work for the last four years. It only ever truly throttles during periods where I’m running one build after another for ~half an hour plus. If anything, the limit on memory to 16GB is the real killer

Imagine 8gig version i have :D. Still works just fine but it requires some discipline. Which might actually not be that bad.

Sure, under a heavy sustained multithreaded load it’ll throttle.

But the average user will never encounter this. Typical web browsing and office tasks are bursty and mostly single threaded.

Gaming is the only area where it may be more of a problem. But it’s fine for this to simply not be a great gaming laptop. Most laptops aren’t.

Still, detracts from the glory of "the fastest single-core CPU in the world on PassMark"

Not really. The fact that it came out on top in an iPhone when all the others use large heat sinks and fans makes this result even more impressive.

More interesting, these results are from the base iPhone with the base A19, not the iPhone Pro with a vapor chamber to act as a heat spreader and the A19 Pro.

I've been using an M1 since release date and I never have my fans kick in unless I'm doing something that pegs CPU for minutes on end. The last time I noticed fans spinning was the last time I ran a benchmark.

The A series has been passively cooled for 15 years inside of systems with much less thermal mass.

It will probably have no fan and throttle under real work like the m series air.

Ah but a Chromebook or low end budget PC laptop will? From experience these things fire up like jet engines just to open a text editor.

I use my M4 MBA as my personal laptop. Never once felt I was overloading it an it was being throttled.

Claude Code, some light video and photo editing, YouTube, and Netflix.

Not sure what others using an entry level laptop would expect it to do.

I'm using M3 Air for a zoo of development (from native code compilation, to high level orchestration) and it barely loads the CPU.

Not really a problem with how those usually only throttle with sustained load. Very few people do anything that keeps the CPU tied up for longer than a minute or two.

And even then, my M1 air is still fast under sustained load. As fast as it would be with a fan? Surely not. But fast enough that unless I'm racing compilers or something I really don't care.

It helps that for heavier work I tend to use my desktop I guess.

Yeah these things have margin for days, so they’re still reasonably snappy even when throttled. It’s not like you’re cut back to Intel Atom performance levels or something.

Ehh. A lot of people play games. I can make the fans spin heavy on my m3 pro. Especially when most games on mac today mean running through a translation layer and weren't multithreaded to begin with. Throttling is a nonstarter for games. Might be ok for compiling but for gaming the lag induced by throttling makes it entirely unplayable.

Were you anticipating people playing (probably AAA) games on a budget Macbook?

These aren’t modern AAA games that spool fans. Well they were 10 years ago when they came out I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com