MacBook Air M4

I can easily take my M3 MBA on trips, using in on the plane both ways and a couple hours there for a few days, and not charge it once.

I honestly looked for alternatives when I bought it last summer but there weren’t any competitive options.

My $2000 linux desktop is still faster and snappier than the $4000 macbook, but it’s the only thing laptop sized that feels even close.

Yes. No other laptop can sustain peak performance as long as the M-series Macs. The only thing that competes is a dedicated desktop with a big cooler and fan.

Mac laptops feel faster, even if the synthetic benchmarks say otherwise.

Yes. You need to go to server class chips (eg. threadripper) before beating the raw multi-core performance of a top-spec M4 Max in a Macbook pro, and the battery life is still crazy good!

It's a laptop, same performance with higher power efficiency means same performance with a much longer mobile uptime, which makes the Macbooks tiers above their competition.

And for data centers, same performance at better power efficiency means hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in power.

Yes it is. My M2 Max MBP runs multithreaded workloads in the same ballpark as my water cooled 12900k.

Solid, but still I can't find it in a laptop with passive cooling like the macbook air line here, which is a huge plus in a laptop imo

They have superior technology because they control the full stack and have taken more and more ownership of it over the years (most recently building their own modem in the iPhone 16e). They could design chips for an exact set of constraints (originally iPhones) and then expand that to the mac. Intel with x86 had to support legacy and tons of different devices (and bad leadership caused them to ignore efficiency and later ignore gpus). Other laptop manufacturers have to run other people's software and few really make their own underlying hardware to the extent apple does.

Apple is better because they’re not competing on price which is why they can afford to bring so many things in house. That’s how they can afford the talent and other R&D resources.

We get what we pay for.

It's not a Veblen good.

Yeah, I love Framework (disclosure, I invested in their community funding round) and I pre-ordered the desktop and have strongly considered upgrading my Intel laptop of theirs to an AMD mainboard (or just getting a whole new unit since I'll have to get new RAM and would like the higher DPI screen) and compared to other Windows or Linux options right now, I think they are pretty strong for thin and light HOWEVER I would be a liar if I said I think it can compare to a MacBook Air right now.

Which to be honest, is fine -- plenty of people want something different from a MacBook Air, whether it is the ability to run Windows or Linux without compromises (tho VMs on Apple silicon are pretty good, it's not going to be ideal for everyone), the ability to upgrade storage, or just wanting repairability.

But the battery life on a MBA is not something Framework or any of the Windows laptops can compete with right now. I thought we might get there with Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips last year -- and maybe the next iteration will (and ARM64 chips have their own trade-offs for Windows and Linux (whereas if you're committed to Mac, those trade-offs don't exist anymore)) -- but right now, unfortunately, Mac is where it is at for the true all-day performance and battery place.

Even there, however, I would specify that it is the MacBook Airs that have the best battery life. My 16" M4 Pro with 48GB of RAM has great battery too -- don't get me wrong. But my original 14" M1 Max and the 14" M3 Max I replaced it with both have exceptional battery life for what they can do, but I can definitely drain that battery in under 5 hours if I'm working on it hard enough. Whereas the Air just lasts and lasts and lasts.

I upgraded to the AMD board and the larger batteries and this improved significantly - 7/8 hours of real usage now, which for me is fine. On linux with minor tweaking. Depends what you need, but surely for most people a full workday without power is manageable!

It’s annoying that Asus is shipping 14” laptops with 75Wh batteries while the Framework 13 maxes out at 61Wh and doesn’t use LPDDR. On the other hand, it’s annoying ASUS doesn’t ship models with more ram.

I honestly don't understand battery complaints. Cafes have plugs. Airplanes have plugs. Were are people working for hours without power?

Depending on where you live, the main problem is they don't ship to a lot of places.

Were they delayed?

True, but the vast, vast majority of people can't tell and don't care about color accuracy. I am not even talking about 100% sRGB vs P3. I am talking about 45% NTSC vs 72% NTSC. Most people can't tell the difference unless you show two screens side by side and point out the difference to them.

I jut don't care that much much about color accuracy.

Software availability is worse for me, as ARM still causes problems. The AMD CPU are pretty nice.

The ThinkPad still have some advantages to me. There are some design choices I much prefer. Granted, when recommending to other people, they likely wouldn't value those same things.

I bought a ThinkPad recently, just as I have done for 15+ years now. At the same price point I would say its at least competitive.

But yeah, if Linux on M-Series continues to make progress, maybe I would would consider it. I'm not using MacOS as I daily driver.

Latest X1 Carbons have 14" 16:10 OLED screens: https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...

Or pick up a Framework 13 which has a 13.5" 2880x1800 16:10 screen: https://frame.work/products/laptop-diy-13-gen-amd/configurat...

A lot of new windows laptops (finally) have a 16:10 ratio or even 3:2 on microsoft surface.

If you use the product filter it only shows laptops that come pre-configured with 2TB of storage. If you choose a custom build you can configure the latest X1 Carbon with 32 GB RAM, 2 TB storage, and a 2.8k display.

If you choose the custom build route some even can ship with Fedora or Ubuntu, so presumably Linux support is reasonable.

There should be no questioning on matters of personal taste, but I will offer my experience with the 13 FW, which is that build quality is pretty great already, but also you get the option to maintain it longer term, such as changing hinges etc. which gives confidence on longevity. I also have a Macbook M1, and I have found myself reaching for the framework almost exclusively now. It feels great to work on a machine that you feel like you own a bit more than any other. Macbook is also great, I think one of the best machines I ever owned, but it gradually loses first place to Framework.

I haven’t used or seen one, but based on this I have a very strong impression about what the built-in speakers sound like.

Plastic case?

Yes, human visual perception exists along a spectrum of temporal, spatial, and chromatic resolution that varies from person to person — I’ve even met some people who can’t perceive the difference between 30hz and 120hz, while to me and most people I know, the difference between 60hz and 120hz is enormous.

So you could make the same argument against high DPI displays, superior peak screen brightness, enormously better contrast ratio, color gamut, etc. Also speaker quality, keyboard quality, trackpad quality, etc.

Where does this argument end? Do you propose we regress to 60hz 1080p displays with brightness, contrast, and viewing angles that are abysmal by modern standards? Or is the claim that the MacBook Air’s current screen is the perfect “sweet spot” beyond which >99% of people can’t tell the difference?

I think the market data alone disproves this pretty conclusively. Clearly a significant enough percentage of the population cares enough about image quality to vote with their wallets so much so that enormous hardware industries continue to invest billions towards make any incremental progress in advancing the technology here.

To be fair, I think there’s strong data to support that modern “retina”-grade DPI is good enough for >99% of people. And you can argue that XDR/HDR is not applicable/useful for coding or other tasks outside of photo/video viewing/editing (though for the latter it is enormously noticeable and not even remotely approaching human visual limits yet). But there’s plenty of people who find refresh rate differences extremely noticeable (usually up to at least 120hz), and I think almost anyone can easily notice moderate differences in contrast ratio and max brightness in a brightly lit room.

In seriously surprised you can't tell, it feels significantly smoother for me to see a high refresh rate display. 60hz just looks sluggish/slow and wrong to me now. I had a side by side of the same monitor (was at a lan) and was watching my friend play and couldn't understand why his game looked so laggy untill I realise he had high refresh rate off. Turned on 144hz and it was so much better

If you try using a 60hz screen after a 120hz one, it will feel very sluggish and choppy. As long as you don't get used to 120hz, you'll be fine with 60hz.

Yeah I think when they say non-tech people they mean a subset of people who know a bit about refresh rates (example being avid PC gamers for instance), but I'd still say the vast majority of people cannot tell 60 to 120. That or its not something they think about.

Certainly if they had both side by side they may be able to notice a difference, but in everyday use it makes no real difference to the vast majority of people. Anecdotally even though I do use Android myself, everyone around me still think iPhones look the smoothest (albeit most of them have never even touched a quality phone running android)

I switch between refresh rates ranging from 60hz and 240hz every day and while I certainly notice the difference, unless I’m running games I adjust and forget about it in seconds. While VRR 120hz+ on all Apple device screens would be nice it’s not exactly a dealbreaker… it’s not like rendering my IDE with 2x+ extra frames changes much of anything.

On smartphones you interact with the UI in a more direct way, which probably makes the input latency even more obvious.

For me 120Hz is noticeable immediately when scrolling, though I also don’t find it important enough to warrant a higher price aside from gaming.

What I find more important is a high pixel density, though on phones that’s less of an issue as with PC screens - I have yet to find one comparable to the ones in current iMacs.

It just feels more "fluid" and real, and then you get used to it and 60Hz feels jittery. I have an iPad pro, and its honestly made me consider going with an iPhone Pro (I still have just the non-pro model), although not quite yet. However, I notice a huge difference between scrolling on my phone and scrolling on my ipad.

Its the same thing about retina vs. the previous resolutions we had put up with. Yes, you don't need them for text, but once you get used to it for text you don't want to go back.

You have to understand that your own perceptual experience is not identical to that of all other humans. Without recognizing that, we will inevitably end up talking past each other endlessly and writing each other off as { hallucinating, lying, exaggerating, etc } for one of us claiming to perceive something important that the other does not.

It would be no different than arguing about whether we need all three primary colors (red, green, blue) with someone who is colorblind (and unaware of this). Or like arguing whether speakers benefit from being able to reproduce a certain frequency, with someone who is partially or fully deaf at that frequency. And I truly mean no disrespect to anyone with different perception abilities in these or any other domains.

Recognizing that large differences exist here is essential to make sense of the reality - that something that seems completely unimportant or barely noticeable to you, could actually be a hugely obvious and important difference to many others (whether it’s a certain screen refresh rate, the presence of a primary color you cannot perceive but others can, an audio frequency you cannot hear but others can, or otherwise).

120Hz on Snapdragon/Mediatek Android phones works great with little impact to battery life. Pixels are hobbled by the poor power efficiency of their Tensor chips.

genuine question; why would you do that lol? phones easily get full day battery nowadays, and flagships get 2 day battery if your usage is anything but insane

* People who have been left behind by Apple's push towards phablets

* People who like to think differently and customize their phones without relying on jailbreaking.

You don't buy a PC and try to run MacOS on it do you? Then why do people keep buying random laptops and then complaining when Linux doesn't run on it? You buy a laptop from a vendor who designs them to run Linux out of the box.

Also, Apple's power management isn't flawless either. It used to be fantastic, but I've never, ever seen a laptop that has to charge for 15 minutes before you can even boot it from a flat battery. This seems to happen if I leave my laptop powered off for more than a few days. Like, turned completely off, not sleeping with the lid shut.

> they only need sufficient RAM to run a browser and browser-based apps.

browser-bases apps are notoriously memory hogs, your point doesn't make much sense.

the truth is that apple get away with cheating a lot on their OS as they swap aggressively and do very aggressive swap compression.

the part about swapping aggressively is essentially overlooked by the entire industry: swapping to flash storage will wear it out faster, which is a huge issue when the flash chip is soldered and not replaceable. this will essentially create more e-waste (but they get to (happily) sell you a new laptop). so long for being green.

Abusive is a stretch. If you don't like it.. you're free to not buy from them?

It sounds like you've changed your screen resolution to a 16:10 aspect ratio: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/17j5zo5/i_think_ive_fo...

The notch is definitely still there by default.

I have exactly that setup, and I see a notch. Are we talking about something different?

Yep, it's not a notch cut into your available space. It's "wings" of extra pixels taking up what would otherwise be unused space.

don't even need third party apps -- just pick a 16:10 resolution and the menu bar will shift down.

Hackintosh

As someone who’s been laptop shopping recently, the problem with most non-Apple options is that in exchange for RAM and storage been cheap and/or upgradable, they make significant sacrifices in various areas compared to MacBooks. This is insanely frustrating to me, I don’t know why generic PC manufacturers can’t seem to manage to build a small laptop that is as good of an all-rounder as the Air is and not also come with aspects that suck for no good reason.

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What comparison are you trying to make? You are not painting a full picture, leaving the weight, CPU and battery life out of the equation. If you personally care about neither, yes the Air will not be the machine for you.

I've yet to find a non-apple laptop that's as ergonomically comfortable _as a laptop_ as the recent Airs. That's a premium unto itself, I don't know if it's $500 worth, but that's a less tangible part of the equation over raw horsepower.

This mimics my experience. I bought the absolute bottom barrel M1 when they launched to replace my 2014 MBP, 8gb RAM and 128gb of space. The HD space is annoying, but otherwise this machine is untouchable. I do game dev work bouncing between the MBA and my gaming rig, which is Ryzen 7 2700, 64gb RAM and a 3070, and with certain benchmarks, the MBA still wins, silently, on battery for hours. Still blows my mind.

I had someone tell me "an Air? You're a developer, you need a Pro" and I thought to myself, well this Air is frankly amazing.

I'm at exactly the same point with mine, it still feels like new even though it is nearly 5 years old.

I have yet to update beyond Monterey though (even though I really should) in case it slows down a bit or the battery life isn't as good.

One benefit is that computer stays connected even if you go somewhere else with your phone.

It's one of those small things that makes like a bit easier. On Lenovo/HP these have been around for years and they don't cost that much.

Battery consumption and antenna efficiency are two major pain points. iPhones suck battery like a horse drinks water when in hotspot mode, and the large surface area of even a small MacBook Air would allow for some pretty interesting antenna design.

And it isn't really ironed out to behave in Germany where on a train you have frequent losses of phone connectivity. Every time it loses signal, the hotspot drops out and disconnects.

Different battery, different bills

The integration is fine, but it's not perfect. It kicks my wife off her iPhone Hotspot every time she closes the lid on her laptop. It also burns the battery on her iPhone, which is a concern in the exact situation you'd want cellular connection (places with no wifi often don't have outlets either).

Anecdotally, I've also seen her get issues when going from an area with bad connection to an area with good connection (iPhone will disconnect).

The experience with a non-iphone is also not seamless, though that's to be expected.

Point being that reliable and easy cellular access on a MacBook would be a pretty nice improvement. This is especially true given how much of what people do on computers relies on the internet these days.

My work laptop is a 2019 i7, my personal is a m3. There is a huge - very very noticeable difference. The thing that actually annoys me the worst with the intel though isn't the 'speed' per se but it's the shitty battery life and heat it generates (and the fan noise that causes).

My 2014 got a little screwy around 2022 and eventually wifi stopped working entirely (I suspect battery swelling putting pressure on something) but if not for that I'd still be using it. Hell, I probably could have gotten it fixed, though I'd prefer to put that money toward another machine that'll last me 8+ years.

I'm on a 2020 [edit: I got it as part of comp for a contracting gig, is why the overlap in years with my 2014 MBP ownership, but didn't switch to using it for personal stuff until after that was over and my MPB wifi broke] M1 Air now, so close to or in year 6 for that. No issues yet and battery life still stellar, should get at least 2-3 more years.

(Folks who are like "LOL who even needs 18 hours of battery life?", which is a common sort of post on Apple laptop announcements: well for one thing it's extremely nice to be hunting for outlets even less often, and to maybe go on a whole light-laptop-use 3-day trip and not charge it the whole time and it's still alive at the end of it, or to have that battery as reserve for charging your phone, but also and perhaps most importantly, it means that a 30% degraded battery after several years of ownership still gets you 10+ hours of real-world use)

Bought new since 2014, used all the way to launchday M1.

I was riding the 'service battery' indicator all the way to the bloody end. 1148 cycles, max capacity 3735 mAh.

Not who you replied to but I’m on a Mid-2014 15 inch MBP retina, bought new and used nearly every day since and taken on dozens of trips.

I had the battery replaced, the tab key replaced, and the screen refinished (anti-glare coating removed) for about $240 a couple years ago and aside from the fact it can’t be updated beyond Big Sur 11.7.10 I have no issues.

MacBooks last a ridiculously long time.

I used my 2011 MBP daily until upgrading to a 2020 M1 air.

I kinda miss the ridiculous heat output on winter mornings.

I have a Late 2013 MBP still going strong. Original battery, original charger, no repairs whatsoever, hours of battery life still. Wife stopped using it just two months ago when I upgraded her to my M1 Air.

Yeah, I have a personal m2max. The only thing that might get me to upgrade to the m4 is just being able to hand this laptop down to my sister or my parents for whom it is severe overkill for but they will use it for like 10 more years.

> I wouldn't be surprised that the average upgrade cycle for a lot of folks is in that 3-5 year range, for both personal and corporate buyers.

My personal laptop is a 2014 MacBook Pro. I'll be buying one of these new M4 Airs, and comparing to an 11-year-old computer.

Since graduating from college in 1993, working in the graphic design industry full-time through 2019, I had two brand-new Macs (a PowerMac G3/800MHz, and a G5), the balance were hand-me-downs from other employees --- the G5 in particular was especially long-lasting, though ultimately it was supplemented by an Intel iMac.

Each year when Apple came out with new machines, we would make a game of putting together a dream machine --- ages ago, that could easily hit 6 figures, these days, well, a fully-configured Mac Studio is $14,099 and a Pro Display w/ stand and nano texture adds $6,998 or so.

TBH, for non-tech folks that upgrade cycle has likely stretched a good bit beyond 3-5 years. 3-5 was the norm 10 years ago, but I’d wager needs-driven upgrades, opposed to marketing driven, are closer to 7-10 years outside of obvious niches.

Sample size one: My spouse is using either a 2013 MBA and wants to upgrade, mostly b/c the enshitification of web sites. Basic productivity was okay-ish for her work (document creation, pdfs, spreadsheets, etc), but even Gmail now suffers with more than a tab.

Edit: thinking more, I don’t know if I agree with myself here.

> What does "23x faster" even mean

The measurements are in the linked footnote, they tested the “Super Resolution” upscaling feature of Pixelmator Pro.

You don’t give it up. USB C charging still works just fine.

I have several hundred open on my M2 MBA and have no problem. Maybe it's because I use Brave? I don't know but have never had to think too much about it. I also don't have much RAM (either the base amount or up a little).

I do restart my browser once a month or so, if things ever feel less snappy than normal.

Really bad habit, when I’m into something I open some tabs and if I switch to something else I keep opening new bunch of tabs.

Once I no longer remember the older tabs I create a tab group from the current tabs in case there’s a tab I care about and start fresh.

What do you feel is a good price for that?

Hey, as for OMSCS.

I did some research and I'm deferring for a semester but tbh my motivation is pretty low. As per perception it seems decent but depending on circumstances it's def a much better idea to do an on campus programme.

It isn't depending on what "web browsing" someone is doing, which can be a pretty wide range now.

1 persons "web browsing" is no browser extensions, a couple of gmail tabs, some light blog reading, and maybe something as heavy as reddit.

While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.

8gb is quickly becoming unworkable for people that fall closer to the latter group.

That's a rough era, new enough to have soldered RAM and old enough that Apple felt ok with 4GB in a base model.

At this time (and historically), I mostly use it as a laptop, but I have also used it as a desktop for long periods with an external monitor. As a laptop, I love that it's so tiny. It’s working very well so far... but I’m afraid that at some point, I’ll have to switch to Linux or OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I’m still on macOS 11 (Big Sur).

MS Office has already stopped updating, along with some other software (though not much, most still updates without issues). As long as Firefox keeps receiving updates for my system, most things will be fine.

.. if you are someone that even ventures into areas that lack proper cell coverage. I don't think most people do.

Warning about the case: MacBooks are not built to handle hard cases and you will destroy the hinge, screen, or both.

The only time I got my M1 Air to actually somewhat heat up was when I was compiling Node.js from scratch, right after I bought it (prebuilt binaries weren't available yet apparently). So my experience matches yours.

I also do a lot of AI + Audio stuff, and it gets somewhat warm but not as much as when compiling heavy stuff.