MacBook Air with M5
apple.com
apple.com
- it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent
- a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use
- best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU
- no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff all the time
- much better real world performance on battery than x64 processors (!). you can get reasonable perf by setting Intel/AMD CPUs to high perf, but then goodbye battery life and get ready for very loud fans. this is simply a point not emphasized enough, the real world battery perf of Intel/AMD laptops is very sluggish on default power modes and despite that, they consume more battery than the M5
- amazing battery life
- good workmanship, no creaking, good hardware overall (mics, webcam, keyboard, touchpad!)
- very good speakers
For instance, the inability to write to NTFS filesystems without addons is annoying.
But I believe that for most users, the default MacOS experience is now much better than what Windows is with default settings.
The feeling is exactly like the way it was with Windows circa 2005 when you expected your machine to go bad like cheese in a few months.
Also airpods move instantly here. No issues.
Backup, reset to factory. Try using it, if it’s fixed, try restoring. If it’s not fixed it’s defective in some way.
If it’s broken only after you restore, manually import your data and install apps one at a time making sure nothing breaks before installing the next.
I had a long string of Windows laptops that were basically OK from maybe 2013 to 2023 except for problems with USB that got progressively worse over time (for each machine.) I think some of them were were real hardware problems but I think also the USB 3 spec doesn't guarantee that you can plug in very many devices and have it work, it depends on the PCIe architecture inside the machine. That "ding" sound when a USB device disconnects from windows has traumatized me and I've turned it off anywhere where I can because it is like a gunshot to a Vietnam vet.
I found very little literature about other Windows laptops users facing these problems but endless posts by AppleCare frequent fliers who seem to spend their lives at the Genius Bar and getting their old defective laptops replaced with new defective laptops, I think Windows users just expect it to be all screwed up.
For a long time Windows has struggled with processes that suck down a lot of resources at boot time. At home it is things that do software updates and saturate my 2x20Mbps internet connection. At work it is the backup program that saturates my Ethernet.
That cycle repeated itself either two or three more times, up to today, and my current laptop is I think going to be the one that finally last long enough that I'll have to actually pay for my next upgrade.
In roughly the last decade, I've had motherboards fail on me, drives fail on me, PSU fans have issues with the bearings (rattle even when it works), front USB headers not working, SATA SSDs overheat and fry themselves, HDDs fail, separate USB ports get fried, overheating issues, multi-GPU issues (that one's on me, OSes struggle with supporting those), sometimes systems even having bad performance like back when I had a Ryzen 5 4500 and Intel Arc A580 where games would run with low 1% lows BUT nothing would show up as the bottleneck in any monitoring program ever, I've had Windows bootloader freak out across updates, sometimes updates in the OS render themselves not installable for months, sometimes graphics drivers (AMD and Intel) having issues, especially with VR and so much more stuff.
I like to think that I have particularly bad luck and not high enough quality parts and sometimes just pretty jank setups due to the state of my wallet. I've also had laptops fall apart and phone batteries turn into pillows, so go figure. Also regular Debian/Ubuntu updates sometimes bringing down my homelab servers that also run on consumer hardware, so maybe it's definitely got something to do with a lack of luck.
Less so with higher quality parts and machines, like most of the ThinkPads I've owned have been pretty good and my current M1 MacBook Air is still okay (really good note taking machine for being on the move) and same for my iPhone SE, despite the OSes feeling kinda odd. Doesn't really condemn any individual setup in my eyes - as far as I'm concerned, they all suck to some degree and everything that can go wrong sooner or later will, that's just the way it is.
That said, I welcome more (relatively) affordable hardware with decent build quality - ofc running Linux distros or whatever else one desires on them would be nice too, as would more repairability.
My wife browses the web a lot on that Mac, she hasn't complained since I installed Firefox + uBlock Origin but maybe she expects it to be slow.
kextstat | grep -v com.apple
would show anything _maybe_ troublesome, but not guaranteed related.
I had a Mac Studio that would kernel panic on a semi-weekly basis. Apple Care put me through the reinstall OS / remove all external devices tap-dance for weeks, insisting that hardware was the last thing to suspect - before Apple Silicon, kernel panics were almost always hardware, particularly RAM.
Ultimately I bought another Studio and swapped it in - kernel panics went away. With that evidence, Apple acknowledged the problem and exchanged my Studio for another one from the factory. I returned the swap unit within the 30 day window, so it didn't cost me anything but annoyance.
* My MacMini was constantly beachballing and, unfortunately, it took me a long time to realize that there was a problem with the device.
* I now have a 2023 MBP that screams like a "Formula Un" racing car.
I suspect you have a faulty device.
edit: Just saw that you live far away from an Apple store. I imagine you could mail it in for some type of service, but obviously, that's not optimal if you have no immediate replacement.
I think you might have a bad one. See if support will do anything for you this is not normal.
Ads and nags in the Windows World are drawn using the same HTML-based technology that has replaced Windows native apps since Windows 8, the ads and nags in MacOS are the 2025 anti-antialiased retreads of the 1999 MacOS X imitations of the modal dialogs from 1984 MacOS classic. It’s sad. When I set up a new Mac for my wife she was furious at how ad infested it was, especially to browse the web with Safari and if you want to add an ad blocked you need an Apple Account which is something she’s done without using macs for 20+ years.
But I do agree with you. Thankfully it is minimal relative to windows.
- no Linux support
Otherwise I agree, it is a wonderful machine. I'd replace my crappy thinkpad if I could.
My 2014 Air is still going strong for light web browsing and terminal use.
This gets mentioned a lot, but I do quite a bit of dev work on my M4 MBA and have never even felt it get warm. Sustained heavy loads are extremely rare with how quick this thing is.
With the way most consumer laptops have their fan curves set, you open a new web page and get an annoying ramp up. It is not just a hardware thing, but mostly a self inflicted wound of having a fan curve that is way too aggressive.
I use clang to compile on both machines. The M1 mac has noticeably faster compile times.
linux does not apply here. General consumer doesn’t even know what linux is.
Plus you get x86_64 and vendor support for Linux.
X13 is probably the best equivalent in Lenovo's line.
… if it’s not the power layer, it’s the network, video, Bluetooth that won’t power up anymore after a nap
So what’s your opinion on the beefiest laptop money can buy (NVIDIA based for CUDA) that supports Linux the best?
On a current ThinkPad? Essentially perfect. Zero problems suspending and resuming, no matter what's going on, including weird cases like suspending while docked and resuming while undocked or vice versa.
But it doesn't support S3 (suspend to ram), only s0ix:
$ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
[s2idle]The HP Intel is the one I use Windows most often on (since sleep is basically borked on Windows on the AMD one), and on that machine, I actually hear the fans running while in standby (it wasn't actually fully on, judging by the LED pulsating instead of being continuously on). Which is absurd, since the fans are hardly ever audible under Linux in normal office use.
I think the X1 Carbon line is the best direct competitor.
I was pretty pissed off when warranty accidentally replaced it with US layout (battery went under 80% which means top case replacement which basically feels like brand new laptop).
I do dishes with an MBP next to the sink. I wouldn't put it under the faucet, but it's ~fine so far.
At last check my 2008 unibody still boots. It can vote in the fall.
I remember the old keyboard because I got so sick of it I snapped the laptop in half in a rare fit of disgust (I was under a lot of stress at the time).
Overall, Apple blew it out of the park, and I happily forgive the earlier problems. Now I hope that Tahoe is just some kind of planned demolition phase before they introduce a totally new unsurpassable stable OS.
Amen to that, my keyboard on my m1 air recently failed. I was horrified to find out it is literally riveted to the frame. I got this close to buying a new one. Something annoyed me about this perfectly good laptop being rendered compltely useless and I ended up buying a replacement keyboard, ripping out the old one and shimming this one with paper. Its not perfect but here I am typing from it.
But you are 100% right, there is just nothing better on the market. The gap is so big.
It’s still remarkable to me that it’s even possible to do it at all. The amount of tech and miniaturization crammed into that thing — it would be easier for them to rivet, weld, and glue every part, and cheaper. And if the build quality weren’t so high to begin with, it wouldn’t have withstood the repair at all.
A good friend has a Framework, and it’s cool as hell, but incredibly primitive compared with your M1.
All of the above is true but this, actually, is not entirely: they use a lot of DSP. If you try the same speakers with regular Fedora Asahi with no DSP profile (i.e. vanilla sound), they're very mediocre and do not handle bass well. So, like with many aspects of Apple hardware, this is an example of their software/firmware complimenting the hardware.
I beg to differ ;)
Recent Pros have miniLED with high freq PWM.
It can be disabled but it doesn’t seem to help.
Something something windows something something shitty power management.
Try it for yourself and see if that makes a difference. It worked for me!
I remember at some point dell had a warning to not sleep your laptop and put it in a bag, as it can actually cook the lcd panel!
I have occasionally used MacBooks and the trackpad is the same as windows laptops. Or rather it becomes as good when I enable tap to click
It will be worse at almost everything, except running my preferred OS (Linux). Being able to upgrade/repair RAM, storage and battery at home is quite a perk too.
Yes, the MacBook Air is unique-ish for having no fan at all, but a slow running fan that you can barely hear is going to get you more performance with basically zero added cost or compromise.
And for those users who don’t need top performance and just need an affordable office app machine, I’d argue that Snapdragon laptops have the same primary benefits as the MacBook Air.
In terms of competition against x86, Apple is only ahead of competition in their latest two or so generations and only in specific ways.
Want to play games sometimes like 936 million other PC gamers in the world? (The fastest growing segment of people who buy computers) You’ll pay a lot less for an Omen Transcend 14 than a MacBook Pro at the same specs and you’ll get a system with a very similar noise and battery life profile, along with far Better graphics performance.
I don’t personally think Windows is so bad compared to Mac in terms of annoyances. Mac nags you about all of Apple’s subscription services and you can’t even uninstall their apps like News and Stocks. Microsoft lets you uninstall everything including Notepad. It’s really not that annoying after about 5 minutes changing settings and uninstalling some things.
If we are talking about buying a used Mac we are also talking about buying a computer that will lose software support before the Windows equivalent historically. E.g., you buy an M2 MacBook Air and you’ve got about 7 years left or less before you lose major OS versions. Almost guarantee you that won’t be the case with any reasonably recent Windows PC that supports 11 today. My
Windows is offensive, insufferable trash. From its CONTINUAL hounding about "your Microsoft account" to its bug-riddled, regressive, and shambolic UI. Things Windows users took for granted 40 years ago are simply gone.
Example: Select three PNGs in Explorer and right-click on them, and look for "Open with..."
When I bought my iPhone 17 the sales associate even tried to pitch signing up for the trial in person as he guided me through the purchase process.
When you cancel the trial it ends it immediately instead of ending it at the end of your trial period, a dark pattern designed to encourage you to forget to end your trial.
Apple devices also nag you about buying AppleCare in the system preferences.
I’ve never been hounded about my Microsoft account. Be specific. When does this happen? Yes, you need one to set up Windows 11 (just like a Mac and especially iOS are basically useless without an Apple account anyway), but after that I’ve never been hounded around anything related to it.
Never had problems figuring out how to open stuff in Windows. No idea what you’re saying.
Most of these extreme claims about Windows seem to come from people who don’t even use the OS regularly and have forgotten about the ways in which macOS does many of the same commercial OS practices.
I cannot install Windows without a Microsoft account unless I apply work-arounds.
It constantly offers Office 365, even adding dummy icons to the start menu.
There are adverts on the login screen.
To be fair I installed Bazzite there, but for a laptop I cannot find an equivalent device at the same price point even ignoring the need for linux drivers.
Edit: I even specifically bought the Pro version hoping to be able to shut some of this off.
Sure, you can't install Windows without a Microsoft account, but realistically a Mac is far less useful if you don't do the same thing. If you don't sign in with an Apple ID you've got zero iPhone integration, for example. I would imagine that 95% of Mac users are signed in to their Apple ID.
Signing in to an account to use commercial software doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I'd rather sign in to my account than deal with entering a product license key and needing to keep track of it.
I have not been offered Office 365 since after the first install.
There are not adverts on my login screen, it's completely blank. Change your settings.
These sales tactics are not unique to Windows, Mac subscriptions are upsold in the system settings and via notifications. They do go away and stay away but they are there when you buy the system.
- When you open the respective apps they ask if you want to try the free trial.
- Apple once abused the Wallet app to send notifications about a theatrical release.
Other than that I'm not sure what the fuss is about.
And you're right, I can't uninstall Stocks or News, but I if I never open them, does it matter?
Something like Framework is more expensive thanks to RAM abd SSD shortage, but Linux support is so much better.
Dont get me wrong - Asahi is great undertaking and impressive work. Its just idea of buying hardware specifically to drive it is not rational.
There is a lot of hardware with more compkete and stable Linux support.
Massive increase in bandwidth, which is useful for e.g. running local LLMs.
However, at launch, a year and a half ago, it had a bandwidth about 15% higher than competing CPUs.
For a really "massive increase in bandwidth", it would have needed a wider memory interface, like AMD Ryzen Max, which has a 256-bit memory interface, instead of the 128-bit memory interface of most Intel/AMD laptop CPUs.
My linux laptop (32GB ram / beefy gpu) barely withstand 40 min on battery, but can handle very daunting tasks, and obviously gaming.
These are 2 different use cases, but right now, for the ultra portable laptop, Air is the king, until x64 brings back the efficiency per watt. Even qcom can't compete. That being said, I am a big fan of the apple hardware and not the apple software, so whenever Asahi linux is ready enough (with good battery life), I am definitely jumping ship.
Sure, it's got integrated graphics so it won't win any gaming awards, but that's what the laptop with the beefy GPU sitting in the corner is for :) That thing pumps out enough heat to not be too pleasant sitting on a lap anyway.
Power management is not done well with the GPU drivers in Linux. If they are not used, they still draw a lot of power, while that’s not really the case on Windows, from what I heard.
I think the best is to get a good Linux laptop, but with an integrated GPU. If you really want to do anything beefy, you can always use an eGPU :)!
Obviously this will never come close in terms of convenience as having an actual M series MacBook…
Wishing you best of luck for the .net migration!
Most upcoming laptops now have soldered RAM and soldered wifi becomes common too.
However I consider soldered SSDs and/or soldered batteries as completely unacceptable, as they limit the lifetime of a computer to low values.
(Don't tell my Linux isn't buggy. I use it, but I regularly run into nonsense like this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512297 that doesn't happen on Windows or Mac. I still haven't figured out why VSCode freezes for half a second every few minutes on Linux.)
Sure, there's no single device that has Apple's blend of attributes, but who need that in this age of VMs and broadband Internet? My 32-core HEDT workstation outperforms anything Apple branded. I have a Chromebook when I need to be unplugged (<10% or the time)
Your high end hardware is not their target market / competition until you get into very purposeful tasks.
The market segment that exists for Macbook Pro is one where competitors battery life sucks, windows isnt the preferred OS, and high performance on a portable device on battery is beneficial. Its one where they have acceptable performance vs a dedicated desktop but remain portable and a good expected lifespan, as a portable.
Here's the kicker: it cost about the same as the highest end Macbook pro before the RAM madness.
> The market segment that exists one where battery life sucks, windows isnt the preferred OS, and some high performance on a portable device on battery is beneficial.
I agree the market exists, but think it's much smaller than it appears: most people do not work under these constraints most of the time; a cheap laptop + beefy desktop could do a better job in aggregate, wirh greater flexibility, especially for people who spend most of their time at the desk with their computer plugged in - which is most people.
I suspect the portability requirement is sometimes aspirational, similar to the people who buy trucks overestimating the number of times they'll need to cary stuff on the truck bed.
>> I don't get why prosumers would marry themselves 24/7 to a single portable device...
I quite clearly was talking about personal devices; are you in the habit of buying computers for your employers? Or perhaps you carry your personal laptop to work. I do neither, excuse my projection if you do either of those things.
Edit: are you kad that I have a remote job? Your tone is really salty for some reason.
I’m really happy with bringing my local workstation with me to a cafe, a coworking space, or on a trip. I love conveniently having one device for nearly everything, from AI fine-tuning to general development to gaming. And I love having a 12-hour battery life under normal use and USB-C charging. The screen is beautiful and great for watching movies on, too.
If you want one computing device, in total, a MacBook is a great choice. It’s overkill in most areas for most people, but it’s not deficient for anyone, and that matters a lot.
You can, with Tailscale! I had edited my original comment to remove how I occasionally[1] remote to the workstation, but I found out empirically that I typically don't do anything that needs more than 2 cores at a cafe - a $300 Chromebook or $100 second-hand laptop will do.
By all means, if the Macbook hits your sweet-spot of trade-offs, more power to you. Car brand A may have the quickest, most-fuel-efficient, all-wheel drive, convertible coupé, but there are other vehicle types. Perhaps a bicycle and an SUV is a better combination for some other people.
1. I'd say abuut once per year.
The last company that was willing to give me a non-laptop desktop... I left in 2005. (with one exception where I simply did not ask)
Not even if "1k EUR desktop + 200 EUR netbook" would have cost less than a beefy laptop.
No, I don't know why.
And I do work as a software developer, so anyone doing lighter usage not in this camp will feel the same.
M5 Air should be pretty much the same.
It seems the M5 air still has non non-reflective screen option, which is very unfortunate.
MacOS absolutely has annoyances, ads, and broken stuff all the time.
When macOS shows an ad, it is sometimes harder to get rid of or disable than the ads built into Windows. For example, the ads to upgrade iCloud to a paid account.
I regularly run into bugs in macOS, both visual/cosmetic and functional, some of which have existed for multiple major versions with no fix.
No thanks.
If money is no object to you, you can pay a >$1k premium for a 13" 60hz display if you care about fan noise under load or battery life. I personally don't mind either of those things, and will gladly enjoy my laptop with vastly superior specs in all other regards for half the price.
Windows has its problems, but they are fixable. You can hack and modify Windows all you want to get rid of the BS. I'll take that over an OS that believes the manufacturer owns the machine rather than the user, any day.
There are reasons the MacBook pro exists. The air is a nice machine but there are definitely trade-off.
"MacBook Air with M5 now comes standard with 512GB of storage — double that of the previous generation — and can be configured up to 4TB for the first time"
for me sounds terrible in a very bad sense for a computer around $1k, so I would have never bought something like this even many years ago.
To be fair, due to the huge increase in the price of SSDs and DRAM, a 512 GB SSD @ $1100 no longer sounds so bad as one year ago, but it is still bad.
It's not that the M1 with 8/256GB was slow at all, but even browsing the web gets into 12GB of usage and exhausting the 256GB is fairly easy if you backup your 256GB phone, try to edit a few videos, download enough Gradle/Go/Cargo/Node packages, or install enough 20GB office apps.
Any apple silicon with 16GB / 512GB of stage (even the M1 series) should have a much longer useful life and avoid disk/storage aging as rapidly from the constant swapping.
Today, the MBP is just way too powerful for anything other than specific use cases that need it.
It could also be possible that compsci kids have a powerful desktop at home, or are more savvy with university cloud computing, for any edge cases or computationally expensive tasks.
The MacBook Air has ~16 GiB RAM. The Desktop has 128 GiB, and a lot more processing power and disk space.
I’m not sure why this happens or who formulates these recommendations, but I’ve seen it before with students in fields that just don’t do much heavy duty computation or video editing being told to buy laptops with top-of-the-line specs.
It's the same at work, to some degree. Our in-house ERP software performs like kicking a sack of rocks down a hill. I don't know how often I had to show devs that the hardware is actually idle and they're mostly derailing themselves with DB table locks, GC issues and whatnot. If I weren't pushing back, we probably would have bought the biggest VMs just to let them sit idle.
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...
A) Embeddings.
B) Things like classification, structured outputs, image labelling etc.
C) Image generation.
D) LLM chatbot for answering questions, improving email drafts etc.
E) Agentic coding.
?
I have a MBP with M1 Max and 32GB RAM. I can run a 20GB mlx_vlm model like mlx-community/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-4bit. But:
- it's not very fast
- the context window is small
- it's not useful for agentic coding
I asked "What was mary j blige's first album?" and it output 332 tokens (mostly reasoning) and the correct answer.
mlx_vlm reported:
Prompt: 20 tokens @ 28.5 t/s | Generation: 332 tokens @ 56.0 t/s | Peak memory: 21.67 GBI’d like to do agentic coding first, but then chatbot and classification as lower priorities. I don’t really care about image gen.
Also, if you’re only able to run 35B models in 32GB, seems like I’d definitely want at least 64GB for the newer, larger models (qwen has a 122B model, right). My theory there is that models are only getting larger, though perhaps also more efficient.
https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine/blob/master/docs/a...
I can think of things like 4K video editing or 3D rendering but as a software engineer is there anything we really need to spend the extra money on an MBP for?
I'm currently on a M1 Max but am seriously considering switching to an MBA in the next year or two.
Airs are good for the general use case but some development (rust, C++) really eat cores and memory like nothing else.
That does seem to fit the bill though of being more of a niche use case for which MBPs will be best suited for going forward.
Seems like most devs who are not on rust/c++ projects will be just fine with an Air equipped with enough memory.
Local software development (node/TS). When opus-4.6-fast launched, it felt like some of the limiting factor in turnaround time moved from inference to the validation steps, i.e. execute tests, run linter, etc. Granted, that's with endpoint management slowing down I/O, and hopefully tsgo and some eslint replacement will speed things up significantly over there.
I also like NanoTexture way more than I thought I would, so there’s that.
A lot of software dev workflows often require running some number of VMs and containers, if this is you the chances of hitting that thermal throttle are not insignificant. When throttling under load occurs it’s like the machine suddenly halves in performance. I was working with a mess of micro services in 10-12 containers and eventually it just got too frustrating.
I still think these MBAs are superb for most people. As much as I love a solid state fanless design, I will for now continue to buy Macs with active cooling for development work. It’s my default recommendation anytime friends or relatives ask me which computer to buy and I still have one for light personal use.
More seriously though I agree it depends on workload. If you've got a dev flow that hits the resources in spikes (like initial builds that then flatten off to incremental) it works pretty well with said occasional breaks but if your setup is just continuously hammering resources it would be less than ideal.
Setting aside on-device LLMs, one needs RAM and disk space just for the multiple isolated Claude Cowork etc. VMs that will increasingly become part of people's everyday lives.
And when it's easier than ever to create an Electron app, everything's going to have an Electron app, with all the RAM/disk overhead that entails. And of course, nobody's asking their agents "optimize the resource usage of the app I made last week" - they're moving on to the next feature or project.
I suppose the demoscene will always be there, for those of us who increasingly need a refuge from ram-flation.
But these devices are meant for home users.
Not a tremendous amount of home users having huge gradle/go/cargo/node packages in my experience.
The backup problem is real, I'm surprised Apple doesn't come out with a new time capsule (edit: for phones/tablets)- but I guess they want that sweet iCloud services dollar.
Time "Machine" on MacOS continues to work (though it's clearly not as important to Apple as it once was).
The issue is: if you want to back up a phone: it will take space from your laptop and it must be tethered to do the backup. This means that if you have a 1TiB phone, like I do, you need at least 1TiB of local disk on your laptop to be able to do a single backup if the phone is anywhere near full.
This is in contrast to how Time Capsule works right now for MacOS, whereby you have an SMB share (like, a 100+TiB NAS) and your laptop will just back itself up when it can.
Such a feature would be pretty killer on iPhones/iPads, or having a "photo server" to offload your photos... idk, but Apple won't do it.
That said, we're very much in "power user" territory now, and it does nothing to support the untethered use-case that Time Machine allows.
In fact, the real punch of my comment before was that this would be a way of selling additional hardware (the old time-capsules) to consumers.
I've no idea what the storage is on either of them, I've never looked. The days of needing storage are behind me, personally
To me it's mostly about learning to mange RAM and storage space on your machine. A lot of stuff does not need to be hoarded on the machine. Move infrequently accessed data to an external drive. Be ruthless about purging stuff you no longer really need. Refuse to run apps that consume tens of GBs of RAM on a whim (looking at you Firefox, I've been impressed with how efficient and stable the Helium browser has been for me). If you are a developer, engineer for efficient use of RAM and storage.
Like I said, 16gb RAM and 512GB storage minimum is nice, but if the fundamental issues that contribute to massive and wasteful use of resources on our machines are not addressed, nothing will be enough.
If browsing the web takes 12GB of RAM, at what point do we stop chasing after more RAM and instead start demanding better performance and resource usage out of the web?
I don't know but macOS is making it ever more difficult to manage storage, with lots of random things under "macOS" pushing ~40GB or "System Data" that gets a crapload of unrelated things like podcast [1] downloads, with no easy way to purge.
[1] I spent too much time hunting down ~250GB of missing disk space, and it turns out it was the Podcasts app's cache, while the app itself reported no downloads. I fully expected this to be managed automatically, but was getting out of disk space warnings. It's a mess.
16GB of RAM (currently) works for 90% of professions daily needs.
You're right, learning to manage storage space is important, but you need to have some storage space to manage first. 256GB is the bottom of the barrel.
I know how we got to these large numbers. Shit, I helped build the road. It still blows my brains out.
But ...
The 13 inch version is heavier than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Which has a 14 inch screen and can run Linux.
It's not a heatsink by default.
The Intel MacBook Pro I had before that one got far, far hotter - almost scalding hot if you really pushed it - without any modifications.
I really do hope that Linux becomes an option in more workplaces without being too locked down for developers.
People have been modding theirs to make this contact, though. And been getting a significant performance boost out of it.
However, the fact that the aluminum gets hot during prolonged use means that it is acting as a heat sink and cooling the CPU compared to a body made of plastic. Thermodynamics, it's the law!
Not really. It's picking up "stray heat" that is radiated from the copper heatsink inside and conduction from the air in the fan system. It does not improve cooling the processor in any kind of manner. If it were plastic, the plastic would get warm too. Maybe it'll be a 2 degree difference.
Direct contact or bust.
It might be marginal, though.
When I used to be assigned a plastic Dell work laptop, I dropped one onto the carpeted floor of my office because I thought it was going into my padded sleeve of backpack and that cracked the case, and broke the screen. I've accidentally yoinked my MBA (last intel one they made) off my desk, and while it dented the body of it, nothing broke. That is now my drum computer, and it gets regularly pelted with drumsticks when my grip tires.
That being said, I am pretty clumsy but I have never dropped any hardware except a dumb phone which I threw out a lot and it was so small and tiny but it never had any problem.
And then one day I dropped it from top just a little bit and let it drop/slide inside my bag (like a cushion) and that day it died. I recently asked someone about it and turns out that its battery got inflated.
I'll take the extra weight of aluminum (0.3lb, 130g). Yes, someone might say the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is 14", but the 13" MacBook Air actually has a 13.6" screen.
If I were in the market for a PC laptop, I'd definitely take a look at the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but I'm also not worried about the weight of my MacBook Air. The X1 Carbon Intel ones are on sale right now since Panther Lake will be a huge upgrade coming soon, but even on clearance they aren't cheap. An X1 Carbon with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage (Ultra 7 268V, the cheapest one due to the sale) will cost $1,679 while a similar MacBook Air will cost $1,699 - and the M5 has 48% better single-core performance and 56% better multi-core performance (Geekbench). A 16GB/512GB (Ultra 5 225U) X1 Carbon is $1,538 compared to $1,099 for a MacBook Air - and the M5 has a 74% single and multi core advantage there.
Panther Lake might narrow the performance gap, but early indicators don't seem like that's the case. Even the top of the line Ultra X9 388H sees the M5 with a 36% single-core advantage while the Ultra X9 388H gets 3% faster multi-core. And I'm not sure the higher wattage "H" processors work for something like an X1 Carbon.
The highest non-H Panther Lake processor (Ultra 7 365) sees the M5 get 51% better single-core and 58% better multi-core. Maybe we'll see better, but it looks like Intel isn't closing the gap in 2026.
It has just gotten a single dent for something less than 0.5 cm and its on the side (although this damage was done when the laptop was closed so some damage is just above the laptop's display aluminium shell.
To be honest, its barely visible and everything is working and there was no damage on display or anything else for what its worth.
I usually don't like apple but damn the macbook air is tiny and can take some damage.
Although I am still just a little sad about the damage because the laptop was perfect condition beforehand now that we talked about it but its incredibly better than any other laptop atleast with that thing in mind. Gonna use this laptop for a long time (M1 Air)
I don’t understand why other laptop manufacturers don’t copy the Apple trackpad.
The new designs are overtly boringly utilitarian. I would say they intentionally look ugly. I guess this must have been intended as a marketing signal.
And it seems like it’s working since you think the new design delivers better battery life. It doesn’t! The 13-inch M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5 MacBook Airs are all specced for 18 hours of battery life.
Of course the zeitgeist keeps changing and what made sense yesterday might look like madness for those that aren't following things closely. As for myself, I very much prefer "slightly chonkier, but better heat dissipation" (coming from owning an intel mb pro and using it on my lap often).
So I guess I'll wait for the next cycle and hope they return to the "Air" idea again.
13.6 inch 2560x1664 screen, 1.23kg (13" Mac)
14.0 inch 1920x1200 screen, 0.98kg (14" Thinkpad)
(EDIT: ninja’d, I see.)
For an RRP of £3,259.99?
Compare that to the base 512GB, 16GB memory macbook air @ £1099.
The next comparable X1 Carbon I can find is: https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...
RRP: £1,900.00 with this crappy display: 14" WUXGA (1920 x 1200), IPS, Anti-Glare, Non-Touch, 100%sRGB, 400 nits, 60 Hz
Also its made out of metal.
The last time I was excited about the performance of local computers was in the 90s I think.
Modern laptops are so insanely fast. Not sure if they are 2x, 10x or 100x faster than I need them to be. But I never hear fans. I never have to wait for the machine these days.
The difference in displays (Pro much brighter) and size/weight (Air much lighter) are much more significant considerations, IMO.
That said, I just don't think I can keep buying Apple hardware, just not a fan of the company... I only begrudgingly use Android as there isn't a reasonable, more open option.
I'll probably stick with my M1 air for personal use a couple more years then pass it on. My daughter is still using my now 13yo rMBP with 16gb/512gb. I wish the ram and storage upgrades on mac weren't so overpriced.
That benchmark is really important to me due to RSI. Track points save me a buttload of hand pain.
Can't replace the nob anymore either, as the convex knob was arguably the best
It comes off on my T14s Gen 1 and the T14s Gen 5 that replaced it.
> in literally every benchmark you can come up
Nope, Panther Lake will win most gaming benchmarks. The M5 will win most others but not by "running laps around" levels.
Until Windows leaves it in S0 state while its in your backpack :)
My Lenovo does this every week, such a joy.
For people saying this machine is so much faster, I don't care. My situation isn't the norm, but we're on HN. I have a powerful desktop that's my main compute machine and my laptop is a terminal. I need a web browser, whatever corporate shovelware I need, and a ssh connection (and tailscale). If I wanted to do real work locally I wouldn't be getting an Air.
While realizing I'm not the typical user, it's not like the typical Air user needs much compute anyways. The general public just uses web browsers.
Though one thing I'd love is if they could add just a little distance between the keyboard and screen so my screen doesn't get so dirty constantly... doesn't anyone use lotion at Apple?
Regarding lightweight laptops, the Fujitsu FMV Note U series (14-inch) weighs only 634g-917g with Arrow Lake 255H and a replaceable battery.
I don't like Apple as a company and I don't particularly like MacOS, but no one except Apple makes a laptop worth a damn.
The Apple ARM processors are still in a league of their own but personally I'm not willing to give up my OS freedom of choice for that advantage.
Also if you'd just spent that extra 120 bucks for the 3 year onsite warranty, you'd have a lenovo technician replacing your motherboard at a location of your choice the next working day.
That's pure nonsense. I'm a fan of the Asus ExpertBooks myself which seem to be largely ignored in these discussions. They weigh about 2 pounds, 15mm thick, they don't overheat, about 15 hours of battery, and pretty damn durable.
I tried a ThinkPad X1 Carbon as well, it felt like a toy.
And costs ~800 more for 16Gb/512 with a slower CPU and worse battery life.
As someone who spends his life on the road with a laptop, I strongly feel that anything that works for you under 3lbs is the sweet spot. The difference between 2.2 and 2.7lbs is miniscule in the grand scheme of my backpack.
I imagine there are still some rough edges (and it seems like distro choices are probably a bit lacking at the moment if you prefer something outside of a few specific mainstream options) but given how niche ARM support was before the first M1 machines, the progress that's happened so far is honestly pretty astounding. Given that the iterations from M[n] to M[n + 1] seem less large than the initial leap from Intel to M1, it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop.
As for Apple "supporting" Linux, my perception is that if they wanted to make it harder than it was for the people working on Asahi to even get this far, they almost certainly could have. It seems like they're probably doing the same thing that most laptop vendors do, which is not explicitly support it but also not go out of their way to block it either. For a company with the reputation and history Apple has, I think that's a pretty huge win for the community, and even as someone who overall has a somewhat negative inclination to purchase from them, I have to admit that they seem way less hostile to Linux on their ARM machines than I would have predicted.
I imagine once a lot of the cleanup and maintenance is done on what they have, they'll be in a better spot to accelerate support for other SoCs, and it probably won't be half a decade before the M6 or whatever is supported.
All said, Apple could just spend a tiny tiny amount of their warchest and just ship some goddamn drivers for Linux a la Boot Camp and save the Asahi team the time divining it from the tea leaves.
Them's the breaks.
> it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
The jist is that Apple don't want to prevent you from running your own bootable code on a Mac (which isn't true for iPhone and iPad, sadly), as long as you don't compromise the security of Apple's bootloader, code, etc.
I was on an M2 Macbook Pro with Asahi and it was great. It's really hard to fault Apple's hardware for most use cases.
I'm currently on a Strix Halo laptop (HP Zbook), which is about as expensive, and the hardware is great, but power efficiency and build quality lag leagues behind by Apple. A 4000 euro laptop still feels like a cheap toy.
Currently in a brief macos phase before I can be issued my Linux laptop at work. It's so clunky. A major annoyance for me right now is the lack of MST multi-screen over USB which means my nice daisy-chained home setup is fine on my near-decade-old Dell but doesn't work at all on the fancy Macbook. They have the hardware to support it, they just don't.
Generally the hardware with Apple is amazing but I'll take the hit on that and things like battery life just to get an OS that feels like it's on my side.
I'd maybe consider Asahi for home use but I'd be wary of it for work. Perhaps in a few years.
This year is a lot more competitive than any of the past ~4 years for premium laptops.
The asus expertbook ultra even has a much better screen, a much better keyboard, and a very similar haptic trackpad. Weighs less than a 13 inch macbook air too. There's cheaper options too that are close to as good (minus the screen).
I do hope that it’s fixed though. I haven’t followed Windows laptops that closely, but my work laptop from a few years ago does lose battery surprisingly quickly when “sleeping”.
Linux on the other hand has always been able to sleep as expected. I'm definitely advocating for panther lake + linux. Not panther lake + windows, which I hoped was clear given the context of the parent comment.
I haven’t used a Linux laptop in over a decade personally, so can’t really speak to that much though.
What I do know is that Windows sucks and macOS has absurdly good battery life, both in active use and in sleep.
Ever since lunar lake (intel's prev-gen ultrabook chip), this isn't even true anymore.
And now with panther lake, competing windows and macOS laptops do have comparable active use battery life, especially when comparing against macbook airs which do sometimes lose because of their smaller batteries.
This guy: https://www.youtube.com/@JustJoshTech does really good battery tests (brightness at 300 nits, looped office tasks, wifi on, BT on), and a number of windows laptops match even the 14in macbooks pros. That macbook pro already gets noticably more battery life than both the 13 and 15in macbook air.
For a specific example ,the current XPS14 without the OLED (meaning the base 1200p screen) will have hours more battery life than any macbook. If you're looking for "absurdly good battery life", both macOS and windows laptops can give you this today. Your last comment hasn't been true (at least for active use) for at least since lunar lake came out (end of 2024).
Only Apple has been laser-focused to give us this experience.
Battery life in sleep (and in general) could be better, but on the whole I've been quite happy with it.
I was about to write a post mourning how much I wish Panther Lake really could compete, but lacked the memory bandwidth to offer a real challenge. But supposedly it can go up to 9600MT/s which would bring Panther Lake to ~150GB/s.
I am curious what the NPU on M5 has. The 50 TOp/s on Panther Lake is... fine. Apple is really seeing huge success with MLX, with an adoptable software stack that the PC world is super struggling to deliver.
PTL’s highest SKU is comparable to the base M5 for only multicore perf at double the power use in every benchmark I’ve seen. It lags significantly behind in single core.
But I’d love to see a benchmark showing otherwise.
Just the latest I’ve seen https://youtu.be/7OxE7FwJPJM?si=b5T0PbmhUD1TXhX4
But I can find none that have PTL actually anywhere near M5 without strapping a much larger battery to the device
It's been five years since M1 and Intel has never been competitive in single-core perf per watt with Apple. It would be surprising if it changed.
Panther lake and the M5 have been out (I know fan makes a difference, but hey it's still a decent reference), and fully tested by a number of reviewers. The "almost every way" comment is with the exception of single-core scores. Outside of that metric, when you look at photoshop/premiere/davinci resolve/compilation/SSD speeds/multicore cinebench; both are about as fast as one another (with some back-and-forth wins on either side). How is it a ridiculous claim when so many publications/reviewers have arrived at the same conclusion?
The point is both achieve nearly the same experience (performance wise) averaged-out, doing real work, and any differences are small enough that it hardly matters. The tests are out there. See: Just Josh (youtube), Notebookcheck (various articles), Zip Tie Tech (youtube), Phoronix (article), Hardware Canucks (youtube), and Max Tech (youtube). Plenty of test results for actual panther lake machines.
The Max Tech review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q77AzvY3FTE) directly doing a head to head of the M5 macbook pro vs the Expertbook ultra is a good enough summary of how close they actually are. Bunch of heavier tasks being run one after the next, all on battery, side-by-side, in a nicely edited video. As a whole, the chips are more similar than they are different. They are 100% in the same performance tier.
In the real-world, stuff like animation timings for switching virtual desktops are 100% more noticable than the single-core performance gap between those two chips. Or having a 120Hz vs 60Hz like these new macbook airs.
IMO, the main tradeoff with choosing these intel chips over the M5 is the price. Only the X7/X9 panther lakes have the strong GPU, and those are priced significantly higher than base M5 macs (which already have a strong GPU). But for someone who really prefers linux (like the parent comment), then I do think it's worth it.
The only time Apple supported first class Linux on their consumer hardware was with MkLinux, and that was when everything was going down in flames and they needed to survive somehow.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
Buy the mac, try Linux in an hour, take it back if you don't like it.
Apple is notoriously a control freak. They want to control the hardware, they way to control the software, they want to control the services, they want to control the entire experience.
What you're saying goes against everything they stand for.
Every time they open up, they do it because they're forced to.
They moved away from PowerPC (more control) to Intel (less control) because PowerPC couldn't keep up (despite them lying for half a decade about its performance, at some point it became too hard to distort reality).
They provided Windows dual-boot because they had to, their PC market share was too low and they couldn't get many applications so they had to accept it. After the iPhone took off and Mac started having a bigger marketshare and things were ported to it, they didn't need it as much so they stopped trying, they ditched dual boot for ARM. They never provided any real support for Linux, just some random hints and kind words, basically. They have more than enough money to sponsor an official port.
If anything, it's amazing that someone presumably technical can be "15 years into the ecosystem" and not understand these larger patterns so that I have to explain them like this :-)
Every time they open up, it's because they're weak. Once they're in a position of power:
* only XCode as an official IDE
* no JIT on iOS
* no first-class support for Ruby, Python, JS, etc to build iOS applications
* AppStore, no sideloading
* must use Mac to build for iOS
* ...
They're basically PC Nintendo. Always have been. The mega genius Jobs didn't want fans in a PC from the 1980s because they weren't cool, leading to said PC melting.
I find it funny that people keep excusing a multi-trillion dollar company for not finding pocket change to fund official porting efforts (such as Linux on Apple hardware, or Swift on Linux and Android) across decades. They're not doing it because they don't want to. They never will.
The purpose of a system is what it does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
I don't talk to people this condescending.
The MBA is an amazing value, and appears to have only gotten slightly cheaper.
This is a solid product, that continually receives incremental improvements and delivered at a lower price point (when spec'd out).
Which negative tone? 90% the mainline comments I see are positive.
PS. The biggest speedup I got this past year (10x) was switching to native TypeScript (tsgo) and native linting (biome or oxlint).
Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box. The news here isn't "The M5 Air is a disappointment", it's "Laptops are commoditized and boring".
Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?
There are only a couple of relatively niche spaces where things like cpu performance are really the bottleneck right now.
Hell - RPi 5 is perfectly fine for a huge range of development tasks. The 8gb version is very reasonable $125.
Can you find things that these boxes can't do? Absolutely. Do most developers do those things? ehhhh probably not. Especially not in the webdev space.
Would I still pick a nice machine if given the chance? Sure, I have cash to burn and I like having nice laptops (although not Apple...).
But part of the "AI craze" is that hardware genuinely is commoditized, and manufacturers really, REALLY wanted a new differentiating factor to sell people more laptops. There's not much reason to upgrade, especially if the old machine was a decent machine at time of purchase.
I have 8 year old dell XPS laptops that do just fine for modern dev.
You can run docker in WSL better than you can on a Mac. You can run Linux natively on that box, too. "Stacks" is sort of ambiguous (my world is embedded junk, and the answer for using a mac with these oddball USB flashers and whatnot is pretty much "Just No, LOL"), but to claim that the mac is more broadly capable in these spaces when it is clearly less is.... odd.
Macs are popular among the SV set, so macs are strong in whatever the SV set thinks is important (thus "I bought a Mac Mini for OpenClaw!"). And everything else runs on $350 windows garbage.
I don't even use windows (beyond gaming). The Jedi and I are just off on the ends of the bell curve pointing and the stupid numbers on the stupid price tag.
3x productive, is that because the Mac is 3x more expensive than the windows?
that is a logic error if so. You should look at the total output of the human / cost + equipment.
If the output of the human is 10% higher but the cost is only a fraction of their monthly salary, then it is worth it.
Me: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.
You: "You should look at the total output of the human / cost + equipment. If the output of the human is 10% higher but the cost is only a fraction of their monthly salary, then it is worth it"
Jedi: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.
I mean, I'm not actually as dumb as the chad in the meme. I know how to do division. I'm just unwilling to accept your framing like "10% higher output" without evidence, and am pointing to the bleedingly obvious and extremely large signal (price) that I can measure.
99.999% of the time, the obvious hypothesis is the right one. And the obvious hypothesis is that macs are outrageously overpriced and you should just by an Asus Whatnot instead.
The ranking is MacOS >> Linux >> Windows. The Apple ecosystem is expensive but worth it if you can afford it (iPhone + Watch + iPad + AirPods + Mac.)
Looks to me like the base model went up by $100, no?
The whining is just whining. It's a fine laptop, but it's not significantly improved from the one they shipped a year ago. Add to that the fact that laptops as a whole are well on the way down their commoditization slope and the general HN desire to cheer about Great New Apple Devices, this is for sure a backwards step.
When the M1 came out it was quite frankly unbelievable. And, even after all these years, I still don't see who would beat it across those dimensions.
I have an MBA15M3 that is lovely. With 1mm thermal heat pads (internal, CPU|case), I was able to increase the run-time before throttling significantly.
Among my favorite evening companions. Much more durable than initially conceivable.
>other than wanton damage
Some fairly clever students read their warranties closely and figured out how to get annual upgrades without violating warranty exclusion clauses. Very clever. Very annoying.
I seriously never had issues with my m1 in my workloads. Dev stuff, docker, etc. editing 30min 4k GoPro videos. I probably would these days with rust dev stacked in there but yeah. Can’t agree more, they’re an amazing value.
Anyhow, because the differences between my M3 and the new M5 are just the CPU/GPU and I am not actually hurt much by the current CPU speed, I won't be upgrading.
Not really using it for anything demanding, mostly just listing to podcasts at night (the speakers are wonderful). Battery life is incredible. Screen mostly stays off, but is very clear — I can see the brightness being an issue if used outdoors/windowsun.
I just looked up my M1 receipt: in 2020 I bought a Macbook Air M1 with 16G memory and 512G SSD for 1399,- inc tax.
I did not expect the price for a base machine to go down in 2026.
Each Air generations gets slight upgrade and also now got 100usd price increase.
The M5 equivalent is now $1300. 1TB requires the CPU upgrade.
I’ll probably buy this, unless the cheap one they release tomorrow is better. A current MacBook is something like 30x more powerful than my ancient one. It’s going to be insane.
Macbook Neo, probably coming with the iPhone A-series chips https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/03/apple-accidentally-leak...
The language towards the end of the press release implies to me that they're targeting last-gen Intel MacBook Air users thinking about upgrades more than anyone with an M2/3/4 MacBook.
If one wants to serve large-ish LLMs locally, an M3 Mac Studio w/ 512 GB/RAM is still a super compelling option, and I was hoping that the M5's would bump us up to 1TB of unified memory.
Don't get me wrong -- seeing them use LMStudio as the benchmark for measuring local LLM inference is super awesome for the local / open-source LLM community, but seeing this have the same 128GB cap as the M4 is... disappointing?
M3 Studio is still the best option if one wants 512GB.
The 128gb limitation feels like it's portrayed as a limitation of the M5 chip itself -- not just of the Macbook Air product line.
It is disappointing they didn't up it to at least 256GB on the laptops, but we'll have to wait for the next iteration of the studio to see if they'll give us 1TB unified memory.
Here's holding out hope that we'll still be able to see an M5 Ultra then! :)
If they do a 1TB m5 ultra, I too would be configuring one for sure.
I’ve always felt they weren’t really worth it for performance per dollar spent. For C++ work I just use a non-Mac workstation. For lighter workloads the Mac Mini is very capable already.
Or you really, really need to drive eight displays from a single machine.
For "home user" stuff a Mac mini or MacBook is going to do everything you ever need (in fact, they have the problem where the M1 systems are still perfectly capable, six years later).
My worst purchase thus far.
Indeed, why did you? Didn't you read product specs for a device that costs nearly 2-and-a-half grand?
I expect this MacBook Pro (2024) to last a decade and inflation to eat away at value of cost/benefit of future purchases so I got the best one I could possibly afford. Meaning whatever entry level Apple laptop is available in 2034 will be only a small multiple faster than than my top of line 2024 one. I could be wrong as well but that's the dice roll.
I mean its still a decent machine, but man, I can get an M5 now for just over half the price...
(oh dang that was like nearly 5 years ago now)
When my 1TB had about 400GB on it, the extra space "was worthless" - but now it's useful (though I have my suspicions that most of the extra space is being taken up by cloud caches).
I would love it though if they did, but it would probably require a data-only esim.
Anker 747 Power Bank (PowerCore... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089D4176K?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar...
On Thinkpad you can add the module later. It's a simple upgrade, open up the laptop and plug in the wwan module. The Thinkpad already comes with a sim tray. Though today presumably you would use an esim.
But hey you can pick a color for your macbook, so that's something.
Extra rant: the hardware quality of modern MacBook is fantastic. The keyboard sucks. The reflective screen sucks. The number of ports is ridiculously small. Soldered ssd and ram etc etc. Fantastic battery life. My thinkpad is a turd in comparison. But at least it doesn't bend when dropped. MacOS is horrible, Linux is the only thing I want. Sleep on modern PC is broken by design. A MacBook sleeping loses 1% of battery per day. A thinkpad loses 100%. Why can't we have nice things god dammit.
Everyone carries their phone. Power users (i.e. nomads who need connectivity in many different places) have lots of unlimited data plans available that are modestly priced (I've travelled asia the last few months and used e-sims for like $10 a month in each country). And that's a niche group, but even they have their phone as a hotspot. Downside is that it burns battery, but if you're sitting somewhere for any length of time that battery would matter, just plugging-in basically resolves that.
The vast majority of us are either at home, work, friends/family or a rotating set of a few local cafe's, all of which are in our wifi auto-connect list, and have their phone hotspot for the rare occasion there is no wifi.
Then for the powerusers you could just buy a mobile hotspot device as well, basically what your phone does but it's just connectivity + battery.
It's not as cheap a part as you'd think, estimates range between $100 and $300 extra per laptop, even though it seems like a niche thing for which alternatives at lower/similar price points (phone/dedicated device) already exist. So I'm not sure we're going to see it anytime soon. Maybe with Apple making its own modems now it'll happen in a few years. Previously it'd just make for a more expensive device for something few users need (and shipping cheap devices to everyone is a priority with their service business of $100b in 2025, more than Tesla with a market cap of 1 trillion)
So the minority that goes further than that doesn't matter? Also "rare occasion there is no wifi" is a very city-centric view, and a bit out of touch. We're talking about a trillion dollar hardware company here, asked to add a tiny modem to a laptop. It's a dead simple change.
If I was in the position to buy a premium laptop, work on the go a lot, and enjoy being in nature, I'd 100% want cellular in my laptop. There's zero downsides for someone like that.
Apple traditionally keeps a simple line-up of 3 or 4 models per product category. And each product has limited simple upgrade options consisting of normal vs expanded ram/storage/cpu.
Could they technically create 300 models with every permutation? From cellular, to touch-screen laptop, oled/led screen, different ports, battery sizes etc.
Sure, but they'd be confusing their customers with a complicated product offering and adding complexity in their supply chain hurting their margins, to pursue ever smaller niches that don't improve their bottom line, while competing with small niche brands that already cater to this demand.
And what's the point? You have cellular on your phone and a $3 usb cable plugs it into electricity, meaning you already have cellular for your laptop. You can buy dedicated cellular hotspots the size of a Airpods case that you can throw into any bag, jean or or jacket pocket.
Now if a cellular modem was a $1 part, sure, throw it in there. But it's not, again if you look at industry prices it adds between $100 and $300 to the retail price.
A $200 price bump makes sense for a common need, not for a niche use for an entry-level laptop model, in fact raising the price of an entry-level laptop by $200 is absolutely nuts for a minority use. Niche users can plug in their phone or buy a dedicated hotspot. You say I have a city-centric view, sorry but I don't know if you're not familiar with the typical macbook air buyer. Southpark did a satirical episode about them and it's not far from the truth.
Macbook Pro would be a different story, but this thread is about the air. I do think they'll introduce it in the next 2 years because Apple started to build its own modems. Previously they'd basically increase their entry-level product by a lot just to offload the majority of that price increase as revenue for Qualcomm, it was an entirely bad business decision and no surprise they didn't take it.
Nice slippery slope.
All they need is 2-3 higher-end configs to start with (aka people who are already spending more on RAM/storage) with an additonal checkbox for 5G/cellular. It may not be optimal for business, but there's a market for it, I guarantee you.
They literally make $200 ipad keyboards that are extremely unremarkable yet they still sell well.
They make a vision pro, that can't even do a quarter the things a $1000 macbook can do; and still build them to this day, despite the massive complexity of that hardware combined with the tiny target market.
But a cell modem in a computer is too niche? You know the ipad has had modems right? Is a macbook any less deserving of a modem (or any less difficult to add a modem too) than an ipad?
Also, have you ever used an iPad with a cellular modem? It's a far better experience than tethering. One (larger) battery to run down instead of two, lower latency (the extra hop from iPad to phone over Wi-Fi is gonna add at least a few dozen ms to every single web request), and best of all, I don't have to think about it. I don't have to wait, or fumble around with my phone. I take my iPad out on the train, turn cellular data on in the control center, and in half a second I'm connected to 5G. It's a vastly better way to connect on the go. Tethering is a last resort for me.
Because iPads are fundamentally different than laptops. Workers use tablets in the field all the time, often for shorter, quick, one-off checks and such. If you're in a fleet truck or on a job site, having a tablet on the passenger seat to check on work orders is easy. Pulling out a laptop is a much bigger pull, and more awkward.
Mobile hotspot is clunky and unreliable still. I don't see that changing in the next 5-10 years.
I make it clear it's not about specs, it's not about UI, its about the fact that apple makes the world actively worse so they can sell you a better alternative.
You cant have iMessage anywhere else because they don't want you to, you are locked into apple stores because they refuse competition, you cant repair your own device because they get that money back in repair fees.
Its not about the operating system or the specs, I feel investing in Linux is the best way to create a more sustainable future for me and the ones I love and changing that take will require systemic changes, not these spec bumps and UI overhauls people fixate on.
However there is no comparable laptop hardware in the non-Apple world. Even if I wanted to pay double, there is no usable fanless high-quality quick laptop. Very sadly. The Air is just too good for the money and the competition too bloody incompetent and bad.
I don't follow this one. You can buy Apple hardware from other retailers. You can download software, out of the box, from places other than the Mac App Store.
I like the UI. What do you think they making worse?
- pro motion (120hz screen).
- better display brightness which is important when there is a bright sun outside.
- 1 more USB-C port and HDMI port (no dongle hell).
- 20% more battery life.
- This is more personal, but 13" is too small and 15" is too big, so 14" MBP worked best for me (~25 HFOV with a stand + KBM).
It's hard to justify saving 400 bucks given the gap between the models, but the decision is closer since the air has 16GB memory by default since M4 AFAIK.
Taking into account Tesla chips deliver way more intelligence on smaller hardware maybe we will get there, a glm5 model running locally at 100 tokens/sec would be really dope!
Remember how cool MagSafe was? Tripping over a cable no longer meant smashing your laptop. In the late 2000s, this was amazing. Then they made the laptops thinner so we got MagSafe 2. Annoying if you had chargers but whatever. And then... gone.
Macbook Air? The 2008 version I don't count. It's a weird and bad product. But the 2010/2011 products were rock solid and nobody could compete with Apple's value proposition for the hardware. Nobody. And they continued to be amazing but suffered from a screen that didn't get an upgrade from 2011 (IIRC). Where was the retina display? It was such an obvious upgrade.
But then Apple killed it for the 12" Macbook, which was a horrible product. Too many compromises. A single port. Ugh. That was Johnny Ive's baby.
Oh and let's not forget the whole butterly keyboard debacle, all for an estimated 0.5mm decrease in thickness. It failed because it got dust in it. It was expensive to replace. It was just a terrible design decision.
Oh and the Touch Bar? Please.
It was clear that Apple just wanted to increase the ASP of hheir laptops. So getting a good laptop for $1000 was no longer on the cards. Instead we were forced into the 13" Macbook Pro at the better part of $2000.
And here we are in 2026. MagSafe is back (has been for a few years obviously). The butterfly keyboard got ditched (again, some years ago). And they of course killed in the 12" Macbook and brought back to Macbook Air (again, some years ago).
But my point is that in many ways the 2026 Macbook air looks a lot like the 2010-2015 Macbook Air. Updated specs of course but it sits in that same segment of being "good enough" for most people and being excellent value.
One simply cannot overstate the importance of being able to walk into an Apple Store and just buying one. For me, this alone kills buying almost anything else. Even getting a charger for non-Apple laptops could be nontrivial. It's less of an issue now with USB-C charging but a lot of higher end Windows laptops can't draw enough power so still have their own chargers.
I like 16GB/512GB as the new baseline. Given what AI has done to RAM and SSD pricing, a slight price bump to $1099 seems perfectly acceptable to me.
The difference is in the number of GPU cores. One chip has an 8-core GPU, while the other has a 10-core GPU.
As a developer, I don't need pro, it is more expensive, heavier, bulkier, hotter.
Time flies...
I mean I get it - it's slightly annoying to need an extra 18" of charging cable length but at the end of the day tradeoffs for a smaller, cheaper, lighter machine have to exist.
1) The price for a 14" model with the most powerful Max processor with 128GB of RAM ($5099 with all else left at the default settings) doesn't seem to have jumped hugely considering what's being going on with RAM prices in the world.
2) Interesting/disappointing that they aren't offering a model with even more RAM, further jumping on the local inference train.
We can have nice things but nobody is going to hurt themselves to give out things that are the very best possible, theres probably a lesson in this
1) Not necessarily, as the thermals would presumably be different, the use-case is different (not everyone wants or needs a laptop; expandability of the Pro, etc.) and Max =/= Ultra, especially if you're crunching local inference.
2) Even if there was some cannibalisation, does that matter? Unless we assume Apple is running a higher profit margin on Studio/Pro machines (unlikely, since laptops are more expensive than the equivalent Mini/Studio) they're still making roughly the same money at the end of the day. And for the higher end (i.e. workloads needing the Ultra and/or >256GB RAM) there's still no competition.
3) I'd not be surprised (RAM shortages aside) to see the RAM options on the Ultra increase before long, maintaining the differentiation, just at a higher level.
Basically, Apple stumbled into relevance as (amazingly) the most cost-effective option for local inference. Having found themselves in this position, it would be a huge fail to not lean further into this. They seem to be doing this to an extent by optimising chips for e.g. prompt processing, but increasing the RAM is needed too.
[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-macb...
Hardware is completely boring now. That also applies to Phones
I did get tricked into putting Tahoe (or whatever the iOS version is called) on my iPhone 12 Pro though, and my phone is now sluggish and sad, so I am going to have to upgrade it, which I'm carrying quite a lot of resentment about. Hoping I can hold off until the fold phone.
next year we get the M6 Titanium and then the M7e
Though a bit disappointing that it came with a $100 (almost 10%, above inflation) price bump. There's not much point to a spec bump when it's paired with a price bump, and faster specs for more money is usually an option. This negative price-sensitivity is particularly important for a model (Air) that caters to casual users, who typically aren't at all begging for spec bumps, and certainly not willing to pay much extra for them.
Yes the new cheap macbook will fill the gap below it, but the new MBA's don't seem like great value play. I recently bought a new old M2 model for roughly a 40% discount for my girlfriend and the value is insane. Same ports, screen, battery life, same formfactor/weight/keyboard, same software, storage, memory. Only it doesn't have the latest fast M5 chip, but for almost all Air users I think that's not a necessity. Certainly my gf wouldn't experience a difference in the next 6-8 years of use I think she'll reasonably get out of this thing.
Which is a fantastic position to be in, Apple creates so much value here that older models are amazing and affordable. But new models just don't seem very interesting to buy.
(I'm still surprised Apple isn't bumping their prices more due to RAM pricing, but maybe they're absorbing a little bit of their margins to potentially increase market share.)
Kinda is, kinda isn't.
The entry-level option however does constitute a forced bump in minimum-spend on the part of the customer of $100, even if in a spec-vs-spec comparison there is no bump. And you can argue this isn't great for an entry-level apple laptop mostly for casual users that don't need or are willing to pay for 512gb.
But the cheaper macbook is set to be announced tomorrow, probably filling some of the gap the M4->M5 left behind. So I think that probably neatly resolves it. Looks like it all makes sense.