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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I see the disconnect.

At our company we used to buy everyone MacBook Pros by default.

After the M-series chip, the MBPs are just too powerful and no longer necessary for the average white collar worker (they seem like “actual” pro machines, now) to the point where we now order MacBook Airs for new employees.

I feel like until recently, you really needed a MBP to get a decent UX (even just using chrome). But now there doesn’t seem to be a major compromise when buying an Air for half the price, at least compared to 3-5 years ago.

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What's crazy about that to me is the Macbook Air doesn't even have a fan. The power efficiency of the ARM chips is really something.

Well, the power efficiency about Apple Silicon combined with their firmware and drivers is really something. ARM doesn't have much to do with it.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Apple Silicon CPUs are entirely based on ARM architecture, and they elected to use ARM architecture, among other reasons, because it has lower power consumption and lower heat generation compared to CISC architectures.

This is just fokelore.

“ARM architecture” in the sense it’s used by Apple is just an ISA. The ISA obviously has some effect on power consumption (e.g. avoiding complex CISC decode). But in reality, by far the most significant driver of CPU efficiency and power consumption is process node.

Anecdotal, but I switched to an M3 MBA from an M1 MBP for my iOS and other dev related work

I’ve had zero problems with lag or compile time (prior to macOS 26 anyway)

The only thing it can’t do is run Ableton in a low latency way without strongly changing the defaults

You press a key on the keyboard to play a note and half a second later you hear it

Other than that, zero regrets

That’s weird, my m1 air handles ableton absolutely fine.

something’s off with your setup.

> After the M-series chip, the MBPs are just too powerful and no longer necessary for the average white collar worker (they seem like “actual” pro machines, now) to the point where we now order regular MacBooks (not Pro’s) for new employees

Regular MBs are not really a thing anymore. You mean Airs?

Yes, fixed!

In 2021, we bought everyone M1 Pros with 32 gigs of ram. Historically, keeping a developer in a 4 year old laptop would have been crazy, but nobody is really calling for upgrades, like we did back when we got rid of the Intels.

Absolutely true. I now know that I only need an MBA, not an MBP.

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