This looks like what the Macbook (2015) wanted to be. Keyboard and single port aside, it was a fantastic form factor, albeit crushingly slow. Mine no longer holds a charge, and am eagerly awaiting replacing it with one of these.
Over time I've also noticed I no longer care about having the fastest possible laptop, since my job provides me with an MBP and that's where serious work gets done.
I have a feeling this is going to be backordered for a long, long time though.
I own a 12" Retina MacBook and I am sad that none of the new laptops can really replace it. They're all significantly larger and heavier. The new MacBook Air is a replacement for the old MacBook Air, not the MacBook. It's a shame Apple have given up on the ultra-ultra-lightweight MacBook concept, considering that the M1 would be perfect for it.
I own a MacBook Air 11'', and it's also a pretty unique machine in terms of small form factor and silent operation. I feel current MacBook Airs finally serve as a good replacement. However, the 11'' Late 2012 model was also quite unique in terms of being a perfect PC citizen. So one could run other OSes with zero effort. In fact, it was Linus' daily driver for a few years.
I wish other manufacturers like Lenovo or Dell tried to compete in terms of fanless design so that there were more options. Lenovo in particular seems quite unfocused as they release tons of devices all the time and good ones are much more expensive than Apple's offerings, at least in EU.
Totally agree. It’s just other CPUs don’t come close to the M1/M2. That’s what really makes the new MacBooks unique. It’s going to be like that for quite some time I think.
I think some Intel / AMD options are pretty similar. However, their performance per Watt is inferior which makes it tricky to come up with nice silent machines.
To be honest I don’t think the Mx platform in the 12 inch form factor will be good enough to be in an ultra lightweight class. I also own a 12 inch retina and while I really like that it is slient and very lightweight we probably need another generation to get that far to have good passive cooling and performance given that the form factor will have to put the battery and motherboard on top of each other. A bezel shrink with a notch would still work out though but it would need a high ppi and 500 nits brightness will further tax the battery.
Given that the M1 doesn't throttle in a 10 inch ipad with passive cooling I think Apple absolutely could build a M1/M2 11 inch air or 12 inch macbook. They either haven't gotten to it or are deliberately avoiding going down into ipad size territory with macbooks.
According to their page the Macbook Air is the world's best selling laptop so presumably there's some market. I also went from an 11" air to the M1 and miss the smallness of the 11".
I'd rather buy a similarly light laptop, that has a touchscreen.
You can already get AMD Zen 3+ machines in this size class, that isn't too far behind in perf & efficiency. Doing so gives you much better Linux compatibility, a touchscreen, and (sometimes) better feeling keyboards. Battery life will always come up short though, x86 laptops just can't match these new macbooks.
I'm yet to find a single non-Apple laptop that comes even close to Macbook's touchpad.
There are better keyboards (Thinkpads are great), even comparable screens, fast processors, better dedicated GPUs. But somehow no one can get the touchpad right.
I don’t really see a difference in trackpads anymore. It used to be a huge deal. The old windows laptops were garbage. Now it’s more or less the same. People keep talking about the apple ones but side by side it’s the same same for general use.
For casual web browsing, on some sites I find it more efficient to click links directly on the screen instead of using a cursor. A big one for me, pinch to zoom for images/charts/maps is a lot more natural to me on a touchscreen.
Controlling mobile emulators when developing mobile apps can also benefit from a touchscreen.
> I feel like the screen would get dirty.
It does, but I'd just wipe it down occasionally like I do my phone.
I recently used a friend's touchscreen laptop to reinstall Windows on it. The touchscreen was handy to scroll with while we waited for Windows Update to find his touchpad driver, but once that was installed, I don't think I even felt tempted to touch the screen again.
We got a SIKER battery replacement for a 2012 MacBook Pro, but one cell swelled up and the battery wouldn't hold a charge. One Amazon reviewer for one of the replacement MacBook battery packs says that they might be building replacement battery packs out of old worn damaged, or mismatched cells. I don't know if that's the case.
In any case I bought a second battery pack from TECHOWL and it seems to be working for a few weeks so far. Fingers crossed...
I’ve changed half a dozen MacBook batteries with Anker over the years, and all worked flawlessly. One I thought was swollen and they promptly moved to send a replacement, but turned out it was my case that was warped.
my older macbooks (air and pro) had a swollen battery which ruined the main boards and were no longer replaceable in practical terms. I'd get it replaced sooner than later if you're planning on doing so.
Mine (2017) is still going strong. My only complaints are the lack of a video-out thunderbolt port and the relatively week camera. I find it plenty snappy and not at all 'crushingly slow', but then again I'm not compiling on it—just happily browsing and chatting.
Like you I'll probably replace it, but not for a couple years once the software catches up and when I can get it cheap refurbed.
I swapped out the battery on mine. It now gets a few hours of life per charge but it's still fairly big and the fan fires up when barely anything is happening. Might just have to jump on this MBA too.
I think we're talking about two different machines, I have a fanless MacBook from ~2015, with the ultra low voltage intel CPU that is way, way too slow these days.
It has also survived multiple water spills, and the speakers don't work anymore. It's definitely time for an upgrade :)
Finally, Apple has seen the light! This is going to be an instabuy for many, including me. This feels like 2012 when Apple introduced Retina displays: Everything that's good about Apple in a single package, and unavailable at any price anywhere else. The nitpicky in me will complain about the lack of a glass touchpad, but I feel Apple is justified in leaving it as a Pro feature.
I just checked and you are right, my M1 Air has a glass trackpad too. However, the trackpad on the 14" MBP is much smoother and more responsive; I thought it the difference was glass vs non-glass. It must be something else.
I don’t mean to insinuate anything here, but have you checked the trackpad behaviour using the same trackpad settings?
I once thought the same thing only to realize my settings on the trackpad weren’t quite the same and somehow my brain just glitched and I glossed over that (important) detail.
Almost 10 years ago we purchased a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for approx 2K UK pounds. It's really surprising and disappointing that a decade later these same specs essentially cost the same!
Not to be rude but this is an inaccurate and poor understanding of computers. The entire chip architecture of the Mac changed since 2010. 16 gigs of RAM on an M1-based chip gets you much, much better performance than 16 gigs on an Intel chip from 10 years ago.
Even the RAM and SSD stats you cite are apples and oranges - both have gotten dramatically faster in the last decade.
> Not to be rude but this is an inaccurate and poor understanding of computers
Not to be rude, but a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. Software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years. What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
> a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters.
> What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
If the swapping is fast enough not to be noticeable, then speed is all that matters. In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all!
The whole reason why we have all these layers of memory (disk, RAM, L3, L2 and L1 cache, etc) is exactly speed, nothing else. The closer to the CPU, the faster, but also more expensive.
Apple must've spent a fortune on marketing bamboozlement ("you don't need as much RAM with apple silicone") that even people on HN now seem to parrot it.
NVME is around two orders of magnitude slower than DDR3 RAM, so as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall.
As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
> as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall.
Yes, probably. Two points though:
1. My comment was that _if_ SSD performance was comparable to RAM, there would be no need for the latter.
2. I have very rarely swapped on my 16Gb M1 Air, and when I did I only noticed later when looking back at graphs. I'm sure there was a performance hit but I never felt it.
> Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
I do plenty of actual, professional use on my 16Gb M1 Air. Right now I have 3 VS Code windows open compiling Go code, running acceptance tests and whatnot. I also have Mail, Safari (with tens of tabs) and Firefox (with >100 tabs) open. A few minutes ago I also had Slack open on it. I regularly start iTerm to do terminal tasks.
You must have an Intel machine. I had a powerful fully specced 32Gb i9 16" MBP. This cheap and humble 16Gb passively cooled M1 blows it right out of the water in every single aspect. It's even better at running Intel Docker images!
I run an 8GB M1 and rarely hit the wall, and I use mine much like you describe using yours. I haven’t yet cared that I have 8GB, and I was expecting to have a rough time with it (this is sort of a stand-in until I decide what I want longer term - these are incredible machines).
>Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
Well, I use my M1 (16 GB) for heavy video editing and music sessions, plus professional programming, with IDEA, VMs, and so on. And I don't seem to ever need even close to 16GB, much less "way north", or even saw it be slow.
>As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
This is the very type of bamboozlement I was alluding to - instruction set and/or silicon architecture doesn't actually change the amount of data you use.
Citrix will still need to buffer the same (compressed?) 4K worth of pixels and Edge will still to load up the full DOM, cache all the sources, stand up a sandbox with javascript virtual machine etc.
There's nothing magical there... a single frame of 16 bit 8K RAW will allocate the exactly same amount of heap on M1, M2, Intel or anything else for that matter.
I'm now playing a 4K movie on Plex. It's using a little over 1Gb RAM for that. After I started it, my computer swapped ~250Mb to the SSD. Firefox is still snappy. Safari is still running normally. VS Code is still doing its thing. I even started a `brew update` on iTerm, and I have the App Store installing a couple apps. Mail still runs fine, sends and receives, and I can switch between mail accounts and messages.
So, you may be technically right about the memory usage and the need for swapping. What you're missing is the fact that it doesn't hurt the user experience.
This is not marketing or bamboozlement. This is me on the same laptop I'm typing this answer.
You should probably do a deep inspection of your beliefs and stop denying the actual, practical experience of many people who are responding to you with real world experience.
> This is the very type of bamboozlement I was alluding to - instruction set and/or silicon architecture doesn't actually change the amount of data you use.
Oh, but it does when it has a hardware memory compression engine. The very different GPU design also means it can use less (or more) memory in different situations.
Yes, "a single frame of 16 bit 8K RAW" will be the same size expanded. But on M1 it can be shared more easily with different parts of the CPU, GPU and co-processors without copying.
Even more so for other pipelines, involving CPU+GPU.
MacOS also has memory compression, assisted by the CPU.
And there are other ways an OS can use to keep memory usage lower given a different CPU architecture...
> NVME is around two orders of magnitude slower than DDR3 RAM,
No. Dual channel DDR3 went up to about 18 GB/s read and 14 GB/s write. [1]
The latest NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD are about 13 GB/s read and 12 GB/s write. [2]
Apple SSD are about half that now, but most DDR3 users didn't have highest clocked dual channel RAM either. So roughly a factor of 2 or so at best, about a 50x difference compared to two orders of magnitude :-)
Ooooh good point - haven't actually heard of newest NVME stuff before.
The M1/M2 apple hardware specifically seems to be around an order of magnitude from what I've seen (ddr4x 60-70gb/sec vs 7gb/sec for the NVME or thereabouts).
The obvious observation here is that the fab yields for high memory apple silicone must not be all that great, which is why they're mostly shipping 8 and 16gb versions.
Never mind comparing bleeding edge NVMe with (by now) decade-old DDR3, while the current bleeding edge DDR5 is now trickling out at 100GB/s+ pretty easily.
Never mind DDR memory latencies of ~50ns, vs NVMe at 50uS+.
Just because the user doesn't notice GUI problems doesn't mean it's not going to be a catastrophic bottleneck in any memory-intensive application.
I'm sitting here on an M1 MacBook Pro with 64GB of memory. I'm running Chrome with a few dozen tabs open, Slack, VS Code, and Terminal. Apparently 32GB of memory is being "used".
Do you believe I would experience noticeable performance loss if I was running 16GB of memory?
Well yeah - getting that extra 16gb to the CPU from your SSD would take you around 4.5 seconds, versus 250 milli from RAM. Not to mention random access latency, nanos vs mics.
Over 22GB of that is cache. I’m sure some of that is useful but the overwhelming majority of it is just being used because the memory is freely available so why not? If it improves performance it’s not in anything I’ve ever managed to notice between my 16GB work machine and 64GB personal one (which are used for largely similar tasks, though I’d say the work one is a bit more heavily stressed).
Sure some cleanroom laboratory benchmark will say the 64GB version is faster. And for some workloads I’m sure it’s a bigger deal. But a human just isn’t going to perceive much practical benefit from a full Chrome restart being 5% faster or whatever.
> Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
Plenty of people will be more than happy with 8GB of RAM on an M1. I had a base model M1 Mac Mini and it worked great even for gaming.
Obviously if you're running VMs or editing video or doing any other memory intense workload you're going to need more memory. But for anyone who doesn't need an absurd (>16gb) amount of memory (college students, many programmers, those who use computers just for web browsing and Netflix), 8GB or 16GB will feel snappy.
In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all!
Just in case anyone was curious, I looked into this recently, assuming 7-8GB/s was pretty darn fast, but dual channel DDR2 RAM was doing such speeds in 2002. So a high end SSD is about as fast as 20 year old memory, if you ignore latency.
I don't know what people are reading into my comment. I said _if_ SSD speeds were comparable to RAM, RAM wouldn't be needed. The reason we need it is precisely because disk is slower and cheaper.
Destroying the resale value of your laptop because trashing through a non-replacable SSD is not something I would really appreciate. We don't have(?) official numbers, but consumer SSDs go as low as 150TBW
You’re describing your results on an Intel Mac. They aren’t relevant to this particular bit of the discussion. And, owning two different M1 laptops, I concur that the relationship between the RAM and SSD and M1 SoC yields fundamentally different results from prior hardware. The result is stunning.
What relationship would that be?
The DDR4x ram in the M1 can hit 70gb/sec, compared to 7gb/sec and ~3.5gb/sec average for the NVME. There's no amount of magic to get around those facts.
I'm a professional systems programmer. I agree with everything you're saying, in principle.
Except I have two M1 MacBook Pros (one 16GB, one 64GB). I frankly don't notice the difference between the two on any workload. This involves compiling multiple projects, running multiple docker containers locally in virtual machines, running VS Code, Slack, Chrome, and other productivity tools.
These machines frankly feel like alien fucking technology and I don't say that lightly. I'm used to year-over-year improvements being almost unnoticeable. These machines feel like I've jumped ten or more years forward in performance and responsiveness. And they do so while barely generating heat. My previous Intel MBP would make my home office hot just by being in a Zoom call. When I first got my M1 MBP, I left it running all night performing a SIMD-heavy pure math workload pegging every core at 100%. Not only was it faster, but the room wasn't even perceptibly warmer than ambient.
I have a gaming PC next to my work area. Zen 9 3950X, GeForce 3080, 64GB of DDR-4000 RAM, and Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. The fans go blazing and I start sweating just booting Windows. And unless I'm doing something in VR, it performs comparably to the MacBook Pro. I barely turn the damn thing on these days.
The RTX 3080 is a massive power hog. All that energy has to be dissipated somehow.
It's really impressive what Apple has managed to do with the M1 and M2 chips. If an Apple M chip ever offers comparable performance on AAA games, I'll get rid of my desktop computer.
What does the OS do if the application demands more than 8gb of memory? I have use cases in the 14gb memory range for a single threaded application. Would the application crash since its not built to anticipate swapping?
If I go to their store website it shows me only two options:
- 8 core, 8 core gpu, 8gb, 256
- 8 core, 10 core gpu, 8gb, 512
No indication whatsoever that this 8gb is not fixed. Nor is the storage fixed. But the only way to find out is to try and buy it, at which point I can just turn the first model into the second or something else entirely. Also, none of the presented options is anywhere close in price to the top spec model.
True, in the German store it says "Wähle deine Konfiguration beim nächsten Schritt."
> how would you know that ram is confugurable?
2 options:
- Scroll down a little, and under "Gemeinsamer Arbeitsspeicher" it says:
"Der M2 hat einen schnelleren Arbeitsspeicher als der M1, mit 50 Prozent mehr Speicherbandbreite. Er kann mit bis zu 24 GB konfiguriert werden – 8 GB mehr als beim M1 – für flüssigeres Multitasking und einfaches Arbeiten mit großen Dateien."
- Click on the "Wählen" button under the chosen model. It's very obvious in the next screen that you can configure RAM.
> It's very obvious in the NEXT screen that you can configure RAM.
That is the whole point and I said that already...
If you look through this thread you see quite a few peopke thinking you can only get 8gb of ram because the only two models shown feature 8gb and no text next to that indicating otherwise. Only if you think that apple might be lying, you go to the next page and see that they offer more than 8.
> Scroll down a little, and...
No, scroll down a lot and then it is hidden in the fluff text. Great, doesn't change that it is missing in the central place people actually look at.
All the "well technically you can find out by jumping through these hoops" does not change that this is bad UX.
I don't understand the point you are trying to make here. I wish you luck getting a 2022 Apple machine with 8GB of RAM to handle 2 VMs, IntelliJ, a logic project with 100 tracks or 4K video editing. These tasks are all limited by available RAM and the available RAM has not significantly increased since 2012 (my point).
I've handled all of these. With no issue. If you mean "simultaneously" thankfully I don't edit 8K video simultaneously with programming and recoding music. I don't know anyone who does either.
My point is rather, "16GB in 2012, 16GB in 2022, no difference". And I say: try doing any of those things on your 2012 machine and a 16GB M1, and you'll immediately see the difference.
I didn't say there is "no difference" between these machines, that's ridiculous. My point is that Apples system-on-a-chip architecture, while giving big performance and efficiency gains, comes with a trade-off. That trade off is availability and pricing of RAM configurations. That 8GB or 16 works for you is great, but it doesn't work for every use case.
Editing 4K video on an 8 GB M1 iMac works a lot better than you probably would expect. See "I replaced my $10,000 iMac Pro with a base model 24" M1 iMac for video editing!" [1].
I am aware that macOS is better than Linux with low memory conditions but I can’t imagine this, granted I have an older (2020) MacBook Pro, but I have ran out of ram and I specifically opted for the 32G one.
As in: I got the infamous “your system is low on memory” dialog.
All it took was teams, slack, chrome, MS word, docker (vm with default config) and 2 1G VMs invirtualbox
The MacBook Airs have 8GB unless you build to order. My point is that Apples system-on-a-chip architecture, while giving big performance and efficiency gains, comes with a trade-off. That trade off is availability and pricing of RAM configurations.
I have an M1 macbook air and it's flipping fast with insane battery life. It's giving my employers 6K US Dollars Intel Macbook Pro a run for its money at a fraction of the cost.
Generally won't be swapping that often I would think, but besides the point because swap with SSDs (that are as good as the ones in MBs) isn't a big performance hit like it used to be. Swap also doesn't degrade SSD lifetimes like it used to.
The problem I have is that a 16GB machine from 10 years ago will still work better for certain tasks than an 8GB machine today. Memory capacity is still a fundamental bottleneck for certain workloads even with faster storage, processing, etc. And desktop software is generally getting more memory intensive rather than less.
8GB gets you better performance, but it gets a lot less software running at the same time. The fact that just running a web browser and vscode already almost fills the entire memory is a disgrace. I love the device, but how little effort they put into optimizing their memory use and swap, makes it less than perfect.
Ya but neither have really mattered in terms of speed for years for most people. I'm still stick at 256gb over here and I have to be pretty picky about what stays on.
While your second statement is probably true, do you actually disagree that 16 gigs of RAM on an M1 gets you much better performance than 16 gigs on an Intel Mac?
It's a lot faster and of higher quality now. Those numbers do not reflect the speed of the ram, the speed of the memory, the quality of the screen, or the performance of the CPU
Currently using a 2012 macbook pro, with a 512gb ssd, and 16gb sticks. It's more than enough power for I'd say 99% of what people use computers for (ms office, adobe suite, some cad, light dev work, etc.) These days its not hard to call upon compute from the heavens priced by the second should you need more horsepower.
My spinning-rust 24” iMac from 2011 mostly manages to trundle along with Linux Mint on it for my partner to use. LibreOffice and Firefox for web browsing, mostly.
Anything more than that and it chokes. Too many tabs, it chokes. Too many software updates, woo boy does she choke. That poor machine!
I replaced the HD on my 2009 24" iMac with an SSD some years ago and upped it from 4GB to 8GB. A great performance boost. Old OS but it still works well for me.
Ya but it's the same amount. Wew my files load marginally faster, but I can only have 5 of them for the same money that I used to be able to have 10. That's like telling someone who can't get a new van with similar features for the same price to instead get a one wheel
It really doesn't matter what the underlying hardware is. If it responds to your input quicker, then it's a better product (remember how slow it was to fill that memory in the first place and then save your changes to disk?).
That's not to forget the improvements in network speeds, the screen, the speakers, the battery life, the webcam, etc.
I actually disagree, but I take your point. A better product needs to make a real difference for the price. Right now, 16gb of ram costs $250 (cad) more than base model. 512gb ssd costs $250 more than base model. The likelihood I'd ever see those gains, compared to the likelihood I'd be able to use more storage, is wildly different. The product as a whole is better, but the individual upgrades you'd be absolutely limited by cost much more than they should. For example, a 1TB ~5GB/s read/write capable NVMe SSD off-the-shelf can be had for under $200. That's just a bit ridiculous. I'm not going to get the same utility between those two examples for the ~$4-500 price difference.
If I did have endless money, or my regular work was heavily IO bound, then it wouldn't change anything, except I'd be much more willing to ignore how much it costs.
I never complained about the speed or battery life of the machine, so your mocking tone is unjustified. Apple's system-on-a-chip M1 architecture has essentially got a lot of its speed/efficiency gains at the expense of limiting RAM options. Today even web browsers running typical web pages consume gigabytes of RAM. So yes, 8GB of RAM for such expensive machines is disappointing for me personally. My work issued laptop has 32GB of RAM.
Almost 10 years ago we purchased a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for approx 2K UK pounds.
With inflation, £2000 in 2012 is equal to about £2516 today. I configured an M2 MacBook Air with these specs for £1750 today, so it actually costs less in real terms.
Edit: A 13" MacBook Pro with the same specs is also £1750
I see your point. Essentially, you get a fast computer for contemporary, real world use, for the same price as 10 years ago.
Though if you ignore the specs, the M2 air (for 1500 so you get the same storage space), is probably equivalent – 8GB unified RAM and fast SSD seems equivalent to 16GB ram from decade ago.
Together with the improved software capabilities, I think the overall "experience" is "better" and you get more bang for buck.
How is 8gb of ram equivocal to 16gb of ram? You can hold fewer things in memory. Certain programs respond to that by crashing to desktop. Frankly the speed of memory is a lot less relevant to most users compared to how much crap you can shovel into memory and not start to see programs crash to desktop.
And for the first time, MacBook Air supports fast charge for charging up to 50 percent in just 30 minutes with an optional 67W USB-C power adapter.
Anybody know if the 67W USB-C power adapter is finally stock? Edit: Nope, still gotta wait a month: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MKU63AM/A/67w-usb-c-power... Other (bigger) chargers are a 2 month wait. Looks like Apple is still suffering from supply chain issues.
Anker sells a lovely 65W USB-C power adapter ("USB C Charger, Anker 65W PIQ 3.0") for 34$ on Amazon, which I regularly use to charge my 16" M1 pro macbook without issue. Would recommend over buying the Apple option for 2x the price.
Is this about the new MacBook Air? I'm in favor of them bringing magsafe back, but if and only if it also charges via USB-C cables as well. If this is true, and it charges 60W+, that'd be great.
I have the 16" M1 Pro MacBook Pro and regularly run it from a small 30W USB-C PD charger. That keeps up with the demand even running Photoshop, Minecraft, Xcode, etc.
I had one of the last intel mbas and whatever charger they shipped with that computer was downright anemic. 29W maybe then if that's what yours was? I put the computer under load with a game and the charge actually was trickling down with the thing plugged in and the cpu throttling.
Pretty sure my Dell charger puts out nearly 100W, not sure how compatible it is actually though
Edit:
It is a power supply that came with an XPS 15
The text on the brick claims 5V 1A and 20 V 6.5 A, missing 9V and 15V levels and the current on 20V seems not to be standard. It does charge everything I have plugged it into, but they might all be falling back to 5V1A. The back text could also just not be telling the truth.
RavPower sells some dual-port models that will do 90W PD if you use one port or 45/45W or 60/30W using both ports. I ran my i9 MBP on the single port and it regularly drew 90W.
The biggest question I have is whether it has WiFi 6E or just WiFi 6 (2x2 80 MHz like the original M1 MacBook Air).
That's the one thing that's kind of gimped it for me—if I could get more WiFi bandwidth, especially with the ProRes decoding built into the M2, I might be able to edit 4K video over my network wirelessly for the first time. Would be amazing.
To be clear, I still think the M1 Air was the best portable laptop Apple made since the 11" Air before it was discontinued. I just think it being so 'wireless-first', it should have the best wireless speed possible.
>edit 4K video over my network wirelessly for the first time.
Good lord, to think of not that many years ago still needing to be firmly attached to an array of spinning rust to get performance for that. Now, we want to (nearly can) do it wirelessly. Just another set of gear adding to the pile of boat anchors I've been collecting
> the best portable laptop Apple made since the 11" Air before it was discontinued
I used to have an 11" Air as a daily driver. The portability was nice but I'd never go back to a computer that small. Too cramped, too little screen real estate, too small a battery. It doesn't surprise me that 11" laptops are rare these days.
I've gone back and forth over the years. Part of me would like a smaller system for travel but 1.) I always end up wondering if the tradeoff is worth it given how relatively small and light 13" laptops can be and 2.) I probably will never again travel to the degree I was doing it at peak. So I probably wouldn't actually buy an 11" MacBook Air even if I could.
A modern 13" laptop with narrow bezels is pretty much the same size as the old 11" laptops with huge bezels. I have a Dell XPS 13 9310 (2021 model), and I absolutely love how small it is.
This; the 11" had massive bezels, comparatively. That was the only real downside IMO. But the compact footprint was amazing for travel. I plugged it into my dock if I was at the desk.
I used four generations of the MBA, including the 11" 2015. That was definitely the pinnacle of value / performance in Apple's laptop line until the M1.
However, for 2020 & 2021 models is nothing out of ordinary: 2x2 ax, max 80 MHz wide channels. Basically what every other vendor at the market offers.
During 2019, they went a step backwards: from 3x3 MIMO to 2x2 MIMO. Granted, many APs do not support more than 2x2, but there are models on the market that do, and those who care about these things had a choice. Now, it is join the averages.
I've been looking for replacement home networking gear the last few days - I still don't understand Wifi 6 vs 6E, but mostly what I wanted to say was when the Wifi4,5,.. naming came out a few years back my response was "ugh, stupid marketing" and now that I was actually having to look for hardware the difference in actually comparing functionality with linearly increasing numbers is so wonderful :D
That said, what exactly does E imply? I was really trying to distinguish devices using separate 6ghz backplane, and that was annoyingly opaque to me as a person who writes does code but aggressively avoids anything networking :D
E implies the ability to use additional channels at the 6 GHz frequencies. With 5 GHz there are some problems, almost everyone uses the lower ones, leading to congestion and ignoring the upper ones due to DFS (radar detection; people are not fond of their wifi randomly not working).
And contrary to yours opinion, I consider that both 4 (-n) and 5 (-ac) brought very nice things (like support for new frequencies, wider channels or multiple streams). I happened to own 3x3 MIMO ac router at the time and together with 2015 MBP, I saw what it was not necessary to provide ethernet port anymore.
You miss understand - I thought the naming change from 802.11[a-z]+ was marketing BS, but now I actually had to look for hardware, a sane linearly increasing version number scheme makes life so much better :)
If you do a compare against the original M1 MacBook Air, they don't say anything about the network is different. It just says "802.11ax Wi-Fi 6". Same for the MacBook Pro M2.
So I'm guessing it's the same as the M1 MacBook Air.
What do you use for an ethernet adapter? I can hardly tell the difference with a RT8153 adapter, then the increase in CPU usage renders it largely pointless.
I hoped the notch would be just an experiment and Apple would get rid of it the next iteration. It seems I was wrong. It looks so weird to have your top menu bar split in two, I really don’t get why it is necessary.
For people undecided because of the notch, it might not look as clean on photographs but in practice, macOS knows that it's there and they did a good job in order to avoid displaying anything behind it.
It's empty space, and the whole row goes completely black in most fullscreen cases too as the screen is 16:10 BELOW the menu bar.
You forget it as easily as you forget that you have a nose right in the middle of your vision.
I have a quest 2 that I burned sunspots into that resulted in blotches of pixels stuck on yellow. I use my headset for hours at a time and never notice them unless brought to an all black loading screen, and even then it's not a guarantee. The brain is crazy good at filling in blindspots.
I'm currently sitting at my notchless-MBP noting how there is not a single thing in the middle of my menu bar and there never has been. I can't think of a single reason I wouldn't want a notch in exchange for smaller bezels. Especially given the aspect ratio of a Mac is taller such that it doesn't interrupt typical video or photo content
My XPS (not a brand new one, not sure if this has changed) has a really weird webcam location to get the thin bezel, it's right next to they keyboard
There are always tradeoffs, and I find the notch to be a trade-off with no real loss. Especially on a Mac where the hardware/software integration is tight enough that the notch never poses an issue. I could see a notch on a windows/linux laptop being a more significant problem given that the OS may not be designed to work around the notch so seamlessly
I had a 9360 which had a “nose cam”, but two iterations later they did it right. 16:10 display, camera in the right place, ultra thin bezels and no notch.
I also need to mention that this thing is light. Lighter than an iPad pro, lighter than any MBAir.
(But I’m still getting the MBAir, because it’s fanless. Fanless still beats no notch.)
I have a launch day MBP16" and I haven't noticed the notch a single day so far. I just have more screen space now. Does it really bother you in your day to day?
The notch doesn't get in the way in daily use as much as it would seem. Look at it this way: without the notch, that area would've been useless black glass. But with the notch, the menu bar doesn't eat into the continuous part of the screen yet remains fully functional, effectively giving you more usable screen area.
I've read all the arguments pro-notch, that you won't notice, and that it doesn't take up screen real estate, and so on. But still, the design compromise bothers me; hiding a camera such that the aesthetic geometry isn't distorted feels wrong and fake, and something not here to stay for long, just as you say. Why not implement a mechanical flip-out camera holder? Helps with perceived big brother effect, too.
Btw, is the mandatory touch bar thingy back? That would be a step back in my book.
This pushes menu and status bars up into the bezel area at the top of your laptop's lid, leaving more room in the primary 16x10 display area for apps and things.
It's free real estate, why not have menus go up there?
Oh my god, that midnight colour. I just bought an M1 and knew this would be coming soon. I didn’t expect a new colour that looks so amazing though, haha.
I have a friend who as of 2019 was still running her black plastic MacBook for music production. (Probably still is.)
Every time I saw it I felt a little pain -- why did I buy the white one? (Which turned half yellow with time.) I guess it made it easier to give away when it got too slow for coding.
I have the M1 Air and my two complaints are: no MagSafe, no SD Card. Otherwise, I love it, even though it crashes every time it goes to sleep on an external monitor and Apple's in-house software makes me root for Asahi every day. But it does look a little bland.
This new black one fixes 1/2 of my hardware complaints: it'll be hard not to upgrade out of cycle.
man that's amazing. i revived my black macbook a few years ago but it's slow even for browsing (and outdated os).
on the new m2: i have no complaints with my current m1 (i don't miss magsafe that much?), and the increased price makes the new gen meh for me. good if you're upgrading from intel, but i'll still recommend the m1 air for the foreseeable future.
i'll say this once again: i want a 15"/16" macbook air.
You can't do stereo with fewer than 2 speakers but even if you have 64, you're probably still doing stereo. (Or you are a movie theater.)
Generally speaking, you can probably achieve better stereo sound with the 4 speakers than with the 2, but this is not always the case. Coming from Apple, I would normally expect the Pro to have higher-end speakers and thus probably sound better.
But I could be wrong, since Actual Audio Professionals don't use the onboard speakers for anything serious.
Also: I'm really surprised there are enough TouchBar lovers to justify its continued existence.
The whole existence of the 13” MBP is kinda pointless and anachronistic?! It sticks out like a sore thumb with the old-school display and touch bar next to the 14” MBP.
I really don't understand it. I want HN to explain it to me. Is there a whole team and supply chain for the 13" MBP that was too far along in the M2 upgrade design process to stop or something?
By the time you spec up the memory and base ram to something from this decade for the 13", you are only another couple hundred away from the 14" pro which you might as well get at that point
Here in the UK, you're waiting about 2 months right now for an M1 MBP, even a base spec one. I can't imagine Apple wanted to kill off all the backorders for machines built from existing components, so they need to stretch out the launch.
The 24GB unified memory is a really nice upgrade (the M1 MBA has 8GB upgradeable to 16GB). The CPU/GPU upgrades are predictable and wlecome but the memory is huge.
A lot of development isn't CPU bound but is memory bound or at least can really benefit from more memory. This upgrade makes the MBA an entirely viable dev machine for many workloads.
I have a MBP (Intel) but it's expensive. Getting a viable machine for $1200 would be great. You feel less bad about losing it or breaking it or upgrading it more often.
Really happy to see this.
As an aside, having 8GB of unified memory even as an option in 2022 is a joke. It should just be 16Gb minimum.
For web dev the base model (8GB RAM) MacBook Air M1 is a viable dev machine - makes the maxed out i7 MacBook Pro I had from work feel sluggish in comparison.
I have a MBA 16GB and everything is fine until I use Docker. It's under constant memory pressure and I was looking into getting a 32/64GB Macbook Pro 14 M1 Pro max. But really dreaded the additional weight/size of the laptop + 96W power brick which is an additional of ~2 lb
In my experience this is just not true. Unless you are doing multiple vms and some wierd stuff. Base Macbook Air is wonderful. It is faster than my 32gig desktop xeon workstation desktop from 5 years ago.
I also think there is big argument for devs to be developing webaps on consumer gear. How else you can spot the issues with your apps. And tbh if your macbook air has problems running your webapp... well. Good luck.
Made a point not to install Docker on this machine. Honestly loved it when I first tried it.
Usually have like 20-25 tabs open in safari, a VS Code instance (sometimes two), a Nextjs app + express backend running against a local Postgres. This is always in the yellow memory pressure range for me.
If I close the browser or just stick with a few tabs it’s all good, but when each tab can suck 100s of MB it quickly adds up. It’s a workflow my 2014 MBP with 16GB still handles though so I don’t feel like my expectations are too high.
Because ppl use Docker, even when it's not really that necessary...
I'm using Nix for the past few years and it has obviated the need for Docker.
I have simple shell.nix files, which are activated via direnv and that's it; 0 runtime overhead, no need to install various java/node/python/ruby version managers.
What actually feasts on memory is the various chat apps and project management and knowledge-base management software, in-browser email clients, github pages, JetBrains IDEs.
You should keep these closed, whenever u can and then 8GB is enough comfortably.
You will still receive Slack notifications on your phone, then u can fire up Slack to reply or have a discussion. Same with Notion or Logseq. You don't need to have a gmail tab open all the time either. The built-in Mail.app might just be enough for you too, which might eat slightly less memory. You can use Sublime Text or Emacs for editing, instead of VS Code or WebStorm. Install a browser-tab suspender extension. Download technical docs and read them via Dash (or whatever open-source equivalent it has). Have you looked into how much memory does a github.com page eats?
Tell me you haven’t used an M1 device without telling me.
People getting their hands on 8GB M1 MacBook Airs in the early days were saying the memory management and performance were making it snappier than the 16GB Intel MacBooks.
I made a mistake of purchasing a 8GB M1 MacBook Pro. It was painful to work with. For casual stuff it worked just fine, but as soon as I ran a Docker image (with 2GB memory limit), had Slack and few other light apps open, some tabs in Safari it started to become slow. Painfully slow. The spinning beach ball was a very frequent sight to me. My RAM usage was often in the red zone and I had to kill applications constantly. When I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to a M1 Pro with 32 GB of RAM all of these issues went away.
Docker on Mac (and Windows) is a full-blown VM. The containers assume Linux, so they are getting it -- inside that VM.
That also brings issue with networking. Sure, if you are using the bridged (in Docker's parlance) networks, you won't notice. If you need to use host/ipvlan/macvlan, you will.
VMs are much more memory intensive than other workloads because they wire a lot of memory and/or just access it constantly, which defeats pretty much every optimization you could conceivably do to hide it.
I have M1 with 8GB, it can't handle basic node.js/react app. I have to force kill node and start again every few hours. This with just browsers and apple music playing.
Not Docker, webpack. Your run-of-the-mill webpack dev server will happily gulp gigabytes of RAM, and pray that your frontend dev stack only runs one of them. Your IDE will probably use a few more gigabytes on top of that for static analysis and autocompletion, and that's how you need at least 8-10GB to run develop your average mid-size web app without swapping.
My webpack config for a fairly large app run under a single GB, and performance on my m1 pro machine is so good that I have it permanently running the background. Maybe you need to optimise your config?
not docker, but the linux virtual machine that docker on mac has to use because mac os has no other way to run containers (which would mean running linux binaries anyway).
on linux you would have pretty much no overhead from running software in containers.
It’s viable but you’ll spend a lot of time with memory compression/swap working hard. Not a great experience IMO.
It's more complicated than that; if you look at the reviews and tests 8GB M1 machines, you'll see there were no issues like the ones you're mentioning.
The pipeline between the unified RAM and the SSD is so fast, it's essentially a L3 cache as apposed to swap as in the way we traditionally think about it.
I needed more RAM to run SQL in a VM that I didn't expect I would need.
If you can guarantee you won't need more, sure it's plenty viable. If you can't make that guarantee, you need to remember there is no upgrade path. You will be selling the machine and buying a new one.
It absolutely isn't. I initially bought an M1 with 8GB, and it would constantly crawl to a halt. Unfortunately I was past my return window so had to sell it at a loss to buy another 16GB.
Because you are most likely running the Intel version, not the Apple Silicon one!
Check it in the Activity Monitor. There should be a "Kind" column on the CPU or Memory tabs. If not, you can turn on that column via a right click on the headers.
I'm using IntelliJ IDEA 2022.2 EAP (Ultimate Edition)
Build #IU-222.2680.4, built on May 25, 2022
Runtime version: 17.0.3+7-b463.3 aarch64
VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM by JetBrains s.r.o.
and it's freaking buttery smooth.
notice the "aarch64" part!
I really do not understand this. The 14" Macbook Pro (M1 Max) does support up to three external displays. What was the problem with these new Macbooks to not support at least two displays..
I'm pretty sure Apple has the technical expertise to "turn off" internal display on clamshell mode and allow two external displays (that's my usual setup) but somehow they don't want to do that.
Nope, just as the sibling wrote: with that chip, they have two outputs total to play with, and on laptops one of them is wired to the internal display.
The Touchbar in the 13" MBP counts as a display. So the Pro already runs 2 displays and can add a third. The same GPU+CPU is in the MBA which only runs 1 + 1 external display. It't not a limitation of GPU or whatever they want you to believe. This is pure market segmentation.
Does it? The touch bar is something like 2170x60px. That's a tiny fraction of the processing power and data bandwidth compared to an actual screen. In terms of raw pixel count, it's only about 2x as many pixels as my old Commodore 64 would push every frame. Each of those pixels is a lot deeper but it's still probably pretty much a rounding error compared to how much is being dealt with for the internal screen, never mind an external one.
(Hell, is the central GPU even running the touchbar, or is there a specialized display circuit just for it?)
That said, my reaction to this whole thread is pretty much "I guess multiple external monitors is a reason to upsell you to a Pro machine" so we agree on that point :)
Framerate's hard to determine from a youtube video of someone pointing a camera at it, single-stepping has some things seeming to move at the same framerate as the camera but redrawing the whole screen as the player moves around looks more like 1/3 of the camera's framerate to me.
It looks to be at worst 10fps to my eyes. Which is also where animation really starts to shift from “moving drawings” to “fast slideshow” in my experience. So right on the border.
Isn't it just based on amount of pixels needing to be pushed through? So if it can support a 6K external, it should be able to support multiple monitors as long as combined resolution doesn't exceed 6k?
>So this, like the M1 supports only ONE external display.. so as long as you live the lopsided big-small life, sure.
Oh no, you're breaking my heart. Is there no adapter you can buy that splits that 6k thunderbolt bandwidth into two smaller external displays? Okay I just googled, and it looks like there are third party DisplayLink which sort of maybe work, but are not officially supported? But people SEEM to have dual 4k monitors working?
I’m using a Dell D6000 hub with two 4K screens using display link and one iMac 5K with a luna dongle. So 4 screens in total with the MacBook Pro M1 with 8gb and all screens at 60hz.
Everything is fluid with a web stack (node, angular and tools like Vscode, DB, slack etc).
The only thing that puts it on its knees is when I share a screen with some apps. The buffers might not be done the right way. Otherwise it works surprisingly well !
Running Macbook Air M1 with 16 GB of RAM and never had performance issues running multiple Electron instances, simulators, compilers, browsers and what not. Changed to Macbook Air after my 3 times as expensive Macbook Pro 16" (8 core Intel) was stolen and never missed it for a second. Doesn't seem like there is a compelling reason to upgrade to Macbook Air M2.
On the contrary, I was planning to get an almost maxed out M1 Pro, and now I'll buy an almost maxed out M2 Pro (when 16" comes out), because the things I do need extensive processing power and every bit of performance counts.
If I can not have a big desktop system and just use my daily laptop for developing these hard, CPU bound simulation tasks; I'll be a happy camper.
I'm using 256GB machines for Clojure development in IntelliJ since 2017 and I never run out of disk space. I have 36GB of photos and 10GB of iPhone backups on iCloud Drive though.
The trick is not to mix your personal stuff, like movies, photos and music with your work stuff. Also make sure you regularly clean up the older versions of the software you use, including Docker layer caches, brew / nix packages, JetBrains IDEs, browser caches, etc. If you are not doing audio/video work, then removing iMovie and GarageBand frees up 4.5GB. Similarly Keynote/Numbers/Pages 2GB.
for the person who's looking for a machine to handle emails, facebook, netflix, and maybe a bit of document editing, 8GB is totally fine. and even if that extra ram was free, it still has a cost in battery life. 8GB of ram is the right choice for a lot of people buying a macbook air.
I have a mini with 8gb and its great. I run logic, intellij, node and it doesn't flinch. For work I would want more but for personal stuff, 8gb has been fine.
Actually, when you consider how many banks of memory it would take to obtain 100GB/s, it's a bargain. Desktop DDR5-4800 tops out at 38.4 GB/s, so you would need three, desktop DDR5 memory sticks to get that - but it would not even matter because a 12th Gen desktop Intel Core i9 can't handle more than 75GB/s at once. Now, DDR5 is falling in price, but low-power laptop grade DDR5 is still quite a specialized part, let alone with such bandwidth potential.
Apple charges $400 for 32 GB when you upgrade the memory in computers with M1 Max. That used to be a decent price, at least before DDR5 prices started falling. The M2 memory upgrade is twice as expensive.
Edit: 16 -> 32 GB with M1 Pro is $400. 32 -> 64 GB with M1 Max is also $400. 64 -> 128 GB with M1 Ultra is $800. Memory upgrades for the high-end Macs are surprisingly cost-effective.
This is not true. The M1 Max machines start with 16GB of RAM, upgradable to 32GB, so you are adding 16GB more for $400. The new M2 machine starts with 8GB of RAM, upgradable to 24GB for $400. They are both adding 16GB for $400 or 8GB for $200 if you check, so the cost of upgrades is exactly the same.
Kind of ridiculous when you can get 64GB of laptop RAM for less than $400 easily. I still don't get why the M-series chips have such ridiculously low memory ceilings.
I doubt Apple will allow you to configure up to 24GB on a MBA though - they’d likely want to reserve that to the MBP which has active cooling and can sustain peak performance.
Edit: as comments pointed out, I’m wrong - thanks for the corrections.
I think the only excuse for that huge notch has to be they are planning to put Face ID in there at some point in the near future and don't want the design language to change again when that happens. i.e they are pre-reserving that space in the menu bar.
The latest iPads and iPhones have a LIDAR on the back camera. They can be used to scan the environment. And the FaceID setup for the front-facing camera is used to create those animated memojis that match your face.
If you add it to a laptop, it could actually map the background environment and do some really fancy processing for video calls. Or even improve audio based on the room shape it sees.
Feels like it exists for some sort of Enterprise customer that wants to use the old chassis for whatever reason, be it some sort of docking solutions, accessories, cases, whatever. It really doesn't make sense for almost any consumers.
Yeah but the people who come up with that marketing garbage are lizardmen wearing human skin. Real people don't talk like that. Presumably parent is human, though this is the internet so they could be a dog, and I'm just wondering why a real person and not a marketing drone would use that artificial, cringe-inducing marketing NewSpeak.
Pro is a dockable workstation with a small form factor. Pros have insane amount of internal bandwidth. M1 was able to edit 30 4K streams or 7 8K streams simultaneously IIRC.
That small cooling difference affects how these CPUs are clocked and how they behave under sustained workloads.
A long video render is easily 2-3h at 100% CPU load. A scientific simulation is >24h at 100% load, with instruction trains optimized to get every ooze of performance, hence hitting the TDP almost instantly.
A MacBook Air M1's body is not an unlimited heatsink attached to M1 SoC. I've succeeded to heat my M1 air to unusual levels when the platform was new and some programs were prone to entering infinite loops.
Inclusion of that small fan affects the frequency range and how they handle sustained workloads.
A pro won't blink while an Air will throttle to keep itself from melting. For long video and photo jobs, that really matters (or for long (>24h) running simulation/scientific code or plethora of other examples).
No, it absolutely doesn't matter for video or photo jobs, and no one is running multi-day simulations on one of these devices. If you're running such intense simulations, a theoretical 5% to 15% difference in performance makes no difference at all when you can pay a little bit more to get either a 14"/16" MBP or a Mac Studio and easily get a much more substantial 50%+ performance uplift.
The 13" MBP is a relic that should have been discontinued. It makes no sense for Apple to have kept it around.
I am torn... One one hand I think I want this as an upgrade to my 2016 MBP, on the other hand the 14" Pro has a 120hz display. And although I mostly code on it on the go I got so used to 144hz on my desktop monitor that I kinda feel like an upgrade should include that too. I get that this would totally canibalize their more expensive models but one can dream.
> The new MacBook Air features MagSafe for dedicated charging and peace of mind when users are plugged in.
MagSafe was one of Apple's best hardware ideas, and I'm really surprised they dropped it for a few generations. I'm glad they realized their mistake and brought it back, though.
The Apple-supplied MagSafe port sits flush to the laptop case. The magnetic USB-C PD connectors are quite low-profile, but I'm still paranoid about it catching and shredding the port (that's a mainboard swap at Apple unless you know about sending it to Louis' shop). Now if I can find a design that is breakaway when it catches to sacrifice itself when put under undue strain, comes with plastic tweezers, and I can buy cheap replacements, I'd be all over them.
It's still only 224 pixels per inch (ppi), not the 254 ppi of the MBP 16". Back when Apple had subpixel RGB font antialiasing like Cleartype the 224ppi was fine but 224ppi text doesn't look sharp with grayscale antialiasing. It's not without good reason that an iPad Retina display is 264ppi. I switched from Mac after Apple removed Cleartype-like font rendering because my external 4K display no longer had as sharp of text as Windows+Linux.
It's not enabled by default, but can be enabled in 30 seconds by (1.) pressing the Win key, (2.) starting to type "adjust cleartype...", (3.) clicking "Adjust Cleartype Text", (4.) clicking "Turn on Cleartype". One can then fine tune it but the defaults work great.
I presumably still have mine, though it's probably hidden away in storage somewhere. Why I as a poor grad student in 2007 thought it was worth it to pay extra just for the black finish, I'm not sure. I was new to the Mac back then ... funny to think that I went from anti-Apple as a college student to a dedicated Mac user for fifteen years.
I'm a little sad they didn't have an actual dark color available for the M1 MBP (just light silver and medium silver), I assume it'll be offered on the next MBP.
I wish there was a MacBook variant that had a 15" screen but cost under $1500. I feel like this is probably the only missing gap in the laptop line up. Its hard for me to understand the limitation considering the iMac is at 24".
As a parent with 2 kids - giving each a Mac laptop that won't cause eyestrain/reduced productivity is a non starter at $1999 each.
I stopped noticing the notch after using it for, what, maybe half an hour on my MacBook Pro? And the screen estate besides the notch is extra and the idea fits well with the macOS menu bar.
I had completely forgotten my 16" MBP has one. When I read your comment I had to remind myself "oh yeah, this laptop has a notch".
I see it there looking right at it... but I'm sure in a few minutes it won't exist in my mind once again. It is simply that out of the way which seems so strange given that it is right in the middle... but that has always been a dead space in macOS.
The notch itself doesn't bother me but the way they deal with menu bar apps does. Disappearing them into the notch's void when you have enough to push them there is really really bad UX.
The only app that I'm aware of that actually helps address this is Bartender, when they should have figured this shit out before they came out. It's possible that they introduced some fix in MacOS Ventura, but there's no indication that this is the case so far.
This argument went round and round back when Apple first released the notched MacBook Pro. Some people apparently don't care about the tradeoffs involved and would indeed prefer a smaller screen -- they think it would be that distracting to have a notch. I think they're crazy, personally, but maybe I'd hate the notch too if I had a laptop with one.
Is this the 13" model? Might just be they still have a bunch of manufacturing capacity or something comparable left. But my wife owns the 2-core version (w/o touchbar) and so far its my favorite sized macbook -- had me regularly wondering why the air existed. If it weren't for the touchbar on the current model, I would have strongly considered it but couldn't resist a better keyboard + no touchbar on the 14" model. Still, side by side I just love the size and feel of the 13". Curious to checkout the air now at some point.
For those 3 people who genuinely think that the touch bar is useful. And isn't it cheaper and lower-end than the M1 Pro/Max 14"? (gosh is their naming confusing)
I’ve got a 16 MacBook Pro and it’s great and all - but soooo thick. Like as thick as my old, old, MacBook Pro from 2012. I was expecting it to be more like a 2015 MacBook Pro when I bought it.
I’d much prefer some of that sweet apple silicon power, in a nice thin 15 inch size please.
It’s an odd one: Apple Silicon would allow for a significantly more portable laptop with far fewer compromises than something like the 2015 MacBook. Not only that, it’s been a number of years since the MacBook Air could be considered remarkably thin or light. These days it’s just “pretty thin” and “pretty light”.
Logically, I would like to see the Air be renamed to just “MacBook”, with a 15” variant for those that want a larger screen but don’t need the extra horsepower. The Air name would better fit a spiritual successor to the 2015 MacBook IMO (though with a usable keyboard and a non-gimped CPU).
As for the 13” MacBook Pro—I don’t understand why that thing is still on sale and being refreshed. It makes the lineup incredibly confusing, with 3 different computers in a $200 price range (M1 Air, M2 Air, 13” Pro).
Yeah but my guess is soon the M2 Max will be revealed. Its probably already developed, they just need to wait six more months to reveal. Clearly apple is able to jump straight to the M2, but they are releasing M1 to maximize profit.
Didn't the M1 come out in november 2020 and the M1 Pro in October 2021? That would be closer to a year than 6 months. I actually would not be suprised if it took even a little longer and if they went with a more advanced node on TSMC to get both, architecture improvements and miniaturization improvements.
Please either support made-up arguments like this, with sources, or even better, don't post them to begin with. Don't waste our time.
Absolutely nobody wants to hear that you have magical oracular powers that enable you to tell us what the secret evil motives are behind Apple's CPU development iteration schedule and product release schedule.
Its not really so clear though, that the next fab rev would come through on time. They often don’t and these product plans are developed years in advance.
That’s precisely why I skipped M1 altogether. The M2 gains are great and we will have more mature software. The second M2 Pro drops, it’s an instant buy.
Incremental release of breakthrough products. M1 and M2 were both probably ready at the same time. Release M1, then M2 to try and get the upgrade sells. Its tough to beat, but atleast the products are amazing
Looks like these will be "available next month". Usually they say when you can order, but I've not seen that detail. Anyone have more info on how to get my grubby little hands on one?
They're having supply issues like everyone else. A bunch of their computers are on back order right now. Probably your best bet is to order one now and hope a ton of other people aren't doing the same.
I am deciding on a new Laptop. I am still worried that my workflow (heavy on docker) will suffer under Apple Silicon. Has someone some (very) recent experience on Docker + M1/2?
It's really going to depend on how well arm64 is supported in your stack.
If arm64 versions are just available then you really shouldn't see a difference.
That can be a big if, though.
And otherwise you are stuck running everything under qemu, which is going to be very slow.
I used to use Windows+WSL+Docker for personal stuff. I now use Linux+Podman for personal stuff, and MacOS+Colima+Docker for work (not by choice).
It took me 4 months to iron out everything with M1+Docker where I work. There's still a question weekly about some oddity in our Docker channel.
Remember that container concepts (i.e. jails for a BSD) aren't natively supported by MacOS. The entire ecosystem is built on the backs of a very awesome community. In some cases, there are other things missing from MacOS that prevent them from creating the type of experience you get with WSL (especially networking).
Rosetta virtualization would resolve one of the biggest headaches I have had: x86 container emulation speed. No idea if it would do anything about the second: most of the x86 containers I have tried immediately segfault (nodejs containers seem to be an exception to that rule).
If you're working with other people, who remain on x86, you will come to experience the hell that is multi-arch builds.
Wait a few months and then decide based on what people are seeing.
Depends - I've had a world of pain with Python because of incompatibilities. It's not my main language though so if you're as deep down the rabbit hole as I am in my main languages you might be able to get it working.
New hardware is exciting but it’s also a bit scary.
I’ve been burned by Apple hardware faults before. Dodgy keyboard, faulty display, bad battery. It would be cool to see the design velocity slow down a bit for some models so that they can iron out the bugs properly. I’ve no interest in being a Guinea pig for whatever A9999’s problem shakes out to be.
To be fair, Apple will often conclude that the faults are endemic and engage in a replacement program.
I was waiting for today to buy a macMini for my wife whose 2012 iMac died. So I'm unhappy as well and just bought a M1 macMini because I can't wait any longer.
I wonder if a M2 mini would have been perceived as competition for the macStudio.
> And for the first time, MacBook Air supports fast charge for charging up to 50 percent in just 30 minutes with an optional 67W USB-C power adapter.7
Woah. Speaking of batteries I've been impressed with the battery life in the new MBPs. They last forever with these new M chips. One of the best features.
Only thing that is missing that I was hoping for is multi-monitor support. I guess they want to keep this feature locked behind the pro line, but it feel like a limitation for people that don’t need the power, but want to dock it with two large monitor for productivity.
Aside from the potential stability concerns already mentioned in sibling comments, the aluminum case is essential for dispersing heat, as the MacBook Air relies on passive cooling instead of using a fan.
Feels like a downgrade to add the MagSafe charger, maybe if they would have been practical about it and added it to the opposite side and re-assured everyone that charging through USB-C is just as good.
Feels like a cash grab to get people to buy more obsolete MagSafe chargers instead of moving towards a world where chargers are ubiquitous and universal.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that they just didn't have the data capacity to add another USB-C port and wanted to free up one of the USB-C ports, however other manufacturers seem to be coping with this.
If Apple announced a 16" MBA, I'd buy one and ditch my ThinkPad. 13" is just a bit too limiting for my tastes, and I don't need the power or the extra expense of the 16" MBP.
Why do you want to lug around a 16 inch laptop? Just get a monitor when you need more screen real estate. I have to carry both a MBA and a 16 inch MBP and the MBP just has too big of a footprint. It makes almost any bag bulky.
Regular 4k@120hz is totally doable on M1 Max MBP, can confirm that myself.
Hard to answer the question regarding 4k+ ultrawides @120hz though, primarily because i dont think there is a display like that in existence yet (googling didn't net much success there for me). The only ultrawide 4k+ display i found that is above 60hz is the LG 5k ultrawide with thunderbolt 4 support, and it maxes out at 70hz (and M1 Max MBP supports it at that refresh rate just fine, that's my current setup).
Back when I had my M1 MBP, I never managed to get above 60Hz, and I found some articles suggesting that nobody could. I'm curious why you had more success.
In my case, I had to get a new DisplayPort cable (not all cables will support 120hz). Things were rocky at the start but I believe Apple also released an update to improve compatibility.
Literally my only question. If they don't understand that then this is a massive market-research fail. I went Windows before the M1 Pro Macs just because I could not run two displays well on the Air (Displaylink sucks so so much).
On the contrary, I suspect they have market research to the effect that only a small proportion of users have or want multiple screens, and of those who do, they're likely to buy a more expensive model in the first place. Basically everyone I know has gone the route of a single large display, Mac user or not.
My anecdata seems to confirm this as well. We ordered ~30 Macbook Airs at work over the last 18 months or so (startup, so no actual IT department), and I didn't even know they only supported one monitor until a month ago when a new employee asked why their second screen didn't work.
This was the 27th MBA we deployed, so 26 people only used one external monitor (and I went back and asked if anyone needed an upgrade for dual-monitor use in case they just ignored it). All non engineering roles though.
> Basically everyone I know has gone the route of a single large display, Mac user or not.
I've noticed that, too, which I don't quite understand. Dual displays were touted as a productivity multiplier back in the day. Is that not the case anymore?
Seeing as there are single large monitors with more pixels than those multiple back in the day monitors, it makes sense. People ran multiple screens to get the real estate. There was always a fight on how to arrange them to minimize the gaps from the bezels. Now, it's one screen, no interrupting bezels and more pixels.
I prefer my dual displays--I think. But there are definitely a ton of "power users" of various kinds these days who prefer a single large (often curved) display. I really thought about it a bit back and decided to stick with dual displays but I see the arguments for not having to deal with moving windows between monitors, etc.
It's not just notifications of the phone. Having to switch between the huge amount of apps and windows is bad even on more screens, let alone on a single screen.
Meh. I'm more productive when one thing has focus, so I prefer not having multiple applications open at once vying for my attention. One display works great for me ... I'd even shut my laptop screen if I could, but I use touch ID for authentication.
Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I've never been in a position where I thought that having more screen real estate than a large 4k display would be helpful. When I need to have more than one application visible I can do that; when I want to focus on one thing at a time I can do that too.
I genuinely don't know what "2013-style lunchbox" means here. Lunchbox to me means a small metal box with a handle that has a picture of an 80s cartoon on it.
I'm pretty sure the Air would be enough for me performance-wise but the number of ports is a problem - I have 3 USB-C ports occupied right now. Any tips for a docking station?
I have just been given an M1 Max with 64GB of RAM from work and it has to be the most insane laptop I've used. I have a very big smile on my face when I build stuff.
One note, I used the images of the chips themselves and the M2 chip is physically bigger than the M1 chip by 21.8%, but the article claims a 25% increase in transistors. So there's only an actual 3% increase (1.25 / 1.218) in the transistor density with this new process. Most of the advancement is presumably in the form of better heat transfer and cheaper silicon per unit area.
No it doesn't. It's essentially Air with just a few incremental upgrades, the same chip just with a few updates. It's a money grab. They will keep selling Air for $999 and pressure consumers into a higher price, as they typically do/and is their business mantra.
X1 is a Pro level device more comparable to MBP. Air is like a browsing the web laptop. It's in the class of laptops that should be $500. You are all so bedazzled by the hype machine that you don't even perceive how you are being fooled to pay a massive fee for EXTREMELY limited feature set of a laptop that's a class below. And Apple isn't even lying about that, Air is a hobby/not a pro level hardware. It's clear Air had more sales funnel than MBP and they wanted to tap into that money making funnel. Have fun with your 2 ports and single screen, and a phone like bezel with no FaceID LMAO. This is such a massive rip off lol, sorry to pour cold water on the hype, but that's just what it is.
Hell, they rewrote Google Work, hey, I'm Apple pay me $200 for rewriting software that has existed for 12 years already.
> "Air is like a browsing the web laptop. It's in the class of laptops that should be $500."
I do some volume purchasing of tech product (Lenovo / Dell Laptops and desktops + poweredge on server side + some networking on other gear). I like those products, they are fine.
That said, my wife has an air. I think folks are seriously underestimating the air if they are thinking it just something to browse the web.
The "pro class" X1 screen resolution is 1920 x 1200 / the "web laptop" Air is 2,560 x 1,600.
I mean, you just said it, your wife. X1 maybe went with this screen for whatever reason but there are other laptop options (XPS 13, Surface Laptop). XPS is even better than Air 3.5K 3456x2160. I think for newer consumers, they can more "easily" navigate through all these options to decide, well, I'm not a Pro (or not using it for Pro) and I will get Air. But in the end it's not a PRO level device and it's really sad that these GREAT devices are being overlooked due to this. As far as Air most PRO people wouldn't do with only one screen, or they want to us VM, or if they truly edit video Air won't have the AV1 and H264 extensions making it dog slow for that. In the end Air is REALLY marketed and sold to the web browser crowd, which is a laptop you can find easily for $500 and really great one around $700-$900 range, with the only thing you are losing is maybe that extra couple hours on battery life.
My sibling uses an air - built and sold one company, doing the same again with 8 digit funding. He could buy any computer he wants. He chose an air. This is unique a bit to tech world, my piece of this in IT side is not the SAAS tech directly and old IT they don't work so well so I don't buy them.
The upside, he handed off his huge tricked out machine to me. I think especially for folks who are not in one spot (ie, staying with a partner, vacation home etc etc) it works fine.
Yeah, that's the issue here, Apple positions itself as a luxury device. Personally, I think there's a halo effect from iPhone being good, but it doesn't mean that other Apple products are. It's just hype and undeserved hype at that.
Also, I just don't like Apple as an industry player, they rewrite and replace into CLOSED software (Embrace, extend, and extinguish), to use most of it, you need to be 100% Apple devices. This is terrible. As consumers, we've benefited GREATLY from vendors competing, and that's what has driven a lot of innovations on our table top. Apple goes against all of that, and this is why I don't/won't spend more money there. If you see WWDC at least 40% was about replacing already existing functionality of Google Docs.
What upgrades would folks recommend from the base configuration? I've never had an Apple Silicon machine and assume the base processor/RAM would be fine, but I've heard others say not to go with less than 16 GB of RAM. I think I'd go with the 512 option for the SSD.
Would love to hear from folks with Apple Silicon experience!
16gb 1tb ssd is the min for me. I've only notified things slowing down twice - I had open: a few instances of Tableau Desktop, some jupyter notebooks, several RDPs, a 500k line xml file in VS code, several excel sheets, slack, Skype, teams, discord, a lot of chrome windows and tabs, outlook, and Spotify.
Wanted to upgrade to 32gb ram but max is 24 on the new airs.
I'm confused about the display size. It's smaller than the 14".
Also, the small print is outdated:
> The displays on the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro have rounded corners at the top. When measured as a standard rectangular shape, the screens are 14.2 inches and 16.2 inches diagonally (actual viewable area is less).
Love it, but the lack of ports still seems like a bit of an issue. It looks like the MBA and 13in MBP only have 2 USBC ports, with one used for charging (they don’t have magsafe from what i can see). The 14/16in MBPs have 3 USBC, HDMI, SD card + a separate magsafe charging port.
One of my favorite things about my 2020 13" MBP (Intel) is that it has USB-C ports on both sides, so it's a bit disappointing that Apple decided not to carry that feature on to the smaller M1 Macbooks. The 14" M1 seems like a big hit to portability just to get a few extra ports.
You can combine charging with external display on 1 port. That’s my “desktop” setup with no other ports used. Mouse and keyboard work connected to monitor.
There is magsafe now, so you don't have to loose one for charging. Honestly it's easiest to just dump it into a USB C dock because they don't support more then one external monitor anyway.
The M2 MBA has magsafe, but the M2 13" MBP does not. Sure it's cheaper and quicker not to redesign a new chassis, but it puts the 13" MBP in an odd spot.
Asahi doesn't have native sound support so you'd need an external DAC or audio interface to get audio from it... as well as no GPU acceleration. I'd say that the only people that could daily drive it are using it from a desk right now for programming. Very promising indeed, but I don't think anyone would be wise to run it on their primary device.
Probably still way slower than advertised. The M1's were otherwise awesome but the GPU performance was much over-stated (claims like faster than 3090 when barely on-par with 3050 which is 1/4th as fast).
You have to remember that these are just scaled mobile GPUs. They can't hold a candle to proper dedicated GPU hardware and never will until Apple gets around to designing desktop specific GPU SoCs.
Oh it's no contest. You may as well be comparing chihuahua to a mastiff. Still, it's better than nothing and useful to have around for development and small-scale experimentation.
True... unless you factor in all those blackscreens nvidia has given you on linux(well me at least). Ive wasted days and weeks on stupid nvidia drivers.
They can totally fit Nvidia GPUs, just not particularly high performance ones. It's not that hard to find a thin-and-light laptop with a low powered discrete Nvidia GPU.
Heck, even the Switch technically has an Nvidia GPU.
I don't think you read the full details. The Asus Flow convertible is a tablet/laptop that supports a full desktop external GPU, in addition the discrete mobile GPU that is built into the device.
Yes, an M1 Air. I don't do containers, but everything else I use (mainly Ruby + Rails, Elixir + Phoenix) works nicely. No compatibility issues whatsoever.
No new colours for the MBP? Lame.. I'm holding out for some greens, reds, blues even. Midnight is cool, but it's basically just darker grey and not on the MBP. Pretty sick of silver and grey tbh
The base M2 macbook air is $1499 in the US. Whereas it is £1549 in the UK. Previousely Apple just replaces the currency but uses the same figure. Now Apple has increased the uk price. Thank you Apple.
One difference is taxes, the UK price includes VAT whereas the USA price adds tax at checkout so they aren't really comparable numbers. Further, the pound has fallen so you'd expect they have to increase the GBP price to maintain margin.
Sad to see the bump to $1199 though. That $999 base model Macbook Air is the hottest deal on a laptop today. Seems like it's kind of a magic number that can sway people from a Windows machine.
After I taught myself to keep my wrists unbent/horizontal with the ground while I typed, this sort of thing doesn't bother me at all. Without evidence I attribute to this my lack of RSI or carpal tunnel despite being a heavy emacs user over the decades.
Awesome hardware and I will get one. But interesting that with the slight price increase there has been zero progress in performance per $ since 2 years. Shows how far ahead the M1 was.
8/10 cores, 16GB, 512GB comes out to $1700. That's quite a bit pricey IMO compared to the base 14" MBP ($2k) which has better port selection, and beefier CPU/GPU.
It's unfortunate that the base price is $1200. I don't see myself recommending this to friends when the M1 Air starts at $1000 and is so similarly spec'd.
supercharged
/ˈsuːpətʃɑːdʒd/
Learn to pronounce
adjective
1. (of an internal combustion engine) fitted with a supercharger. "a supercharged 3.8-litre V6"
2. extremely powerful or fast. "it's essentially a cutting-edge smartphone with a supercharged camera"
For every new device Apple markets, I'm curious if they still have that famed "#courage" they so loudly advertised a while back. Let's take a look at the tech specs:
Not on apple's website. There you only see two options, both 8gb. Only after trying to buy it, you see that apple lied and there are much more than two models and 16 and 24 are options.
No different than any other BTO models.. you're offered upgrades at the time of purchase. Maybe that's just my conditioning as an American consumer speaking though.
Every iteration of Apple is "redesigned, reimagined, stronger than the strongest, better than the previous iteration, thinner, lighter, faster".
I am running out of adjectives.
Why do we pay for these marketing stunts?
They are a bit over produced for me. The goofy video of the kid floating up because "light" that was touted as showing it in production. The only thing being shown off in that video is some F/X pr0n that someone concepted, some team produced, and showed nothing of realworld usage. Oh well, that marketing clearly works on lots of people.
18% is pretty decent, IMHO, for their bottom-most spec, especially given the RAM limit is being extended to 24GB, while the power consumption is still brutally good (18hrs video playback) and the screen is also a bit more spacious at 13.6"...
and it's not like they don't have faster CPUs. it's just the cheapest you can get and even that is getting faster!
tbh, im using an M1 Mac Mini since last December and it's sooo freaking fast and smooth, that I'm not even really motivated to upgrade at all, if it wouldn't be for the extra memory. though the 16GB is surprisingly sufficient too, if i have run browser tab suspender extensions and close my unused electron apps (notion, logseq, slack), while coding (in Clojure, using IntelliJ and Emacs).
This was on the same manufacturing process as the M1. There's generally a bigger boost when moving to a smaller process. But yes, there are diminishing returns, especially when you look at single core performance. Power efficiency and transistor counts are still increasing decently.
18% is pretty good for the same process. So all these gains are from microarchitectural smarts only? Or a case of Apple presenting fab gains as their own?
I'm not too surprised to see a price increase of some sort, given inflation in general and increased fab costs in particular. Still, it's a shame they can no longer meet the $1k price point.
It sets a new precedent. Air was supposed to be cheapest, and they trying to stretch people into paying more. From fab perspective, they used the same and it becomes CHEAPER not more expensive to make it. The upgrades were very incremental too; so this is very much a money grab.
> From fab perspective, they used the same and it becomes CHEAPER not more expensive to make it.
They may have used the same five nanometer process, but that doesn't mean Apple's own costs went down. I don't know what their negotiations look like, but TSMC have stated that they'd be raising prices on already-established chip technology. In general, given supply issues for many of the components that go into making a laptop over the past few years, it would be a miracle for Apple's costs not to have risen.
Combine that with general increases in the price level, and 20% is probably not that far off.
Capitalism says there are way much cheaper/better options than a 8 / 256 laptop for $1200. The fact that you are somehow defending a device that's clearly overpriced doesn't help your argument. Capitalism also says that Apple has a monopoly due to locking down all their apps to only work within their ecosystem.
Upgrade-ability and repair-ability are important topics, and do impact how environmentally friendly a device can be considered to be, but this is unrelated to the core of the topic at hand.
The contention was that "They should have said it's less bad instead of saying it's better". That is what I was responding to.
You've introduced a different topic, that is tangentially related, but not directly relevant to a discussion about framing things. It'd be relevant in a discussion about the absolute environmental friendliness of the device, but that's another discussion entirely.
I'm still using a 2017 MacBook Pro, though I have an M1 Mac Mini.
I had 2 second-hand 27" iMacs too, from 2011 and 2013.
I gave the 2011 one away, because I couldn't upgrade it anymore, but it is still used for audio/video editing.
The 2013 one has some issues with its hard-drive and I'm planning to upgrade it to an SSD. It's still a pretty capable machine, though I would probably put Linux on it, since the macOS upgrades for that are discontinued too.
The display panels are "just" 2K in them, but still super sharp, though a bit dusty inside... They are better than most cheaper external monitors I saw ppl using for everyday work...
I think a decade of runtime for Macs is not that uncommon. 2 decades would be even better, but I wouldn't call it a "vicious upgrade cycle"...
I mean, I'm still on an iPhone Xs Max and before that I had an iPhone 7 Pro and I have no intention of upgrading, despite the back-glass being cracked on it. and not because I can't afford it, but because I won't really utilize the extra power of the latest versions.
Yeah, same. Tho my PC, I pretty much upgrade everything, and keep using older components. Now I know it's not 100% green, but with an old PC you can literally grind it to the ground by using it as an old storage device, linux box, or ad blocker. My original PC case I've literally been using it for 20 years now, it's crazy it still works/fits all the hardware in there perfectly, and that's probably the biggest component.
Yes, they should say nothing at all. Instead of saying things like "This means that every Mac Apple creates, from design to manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon neutral."
Carbon Neutrality is branding and does nothing to reverse CO2 or climate change. It is all green washing.
Better for the environment is never buying another computer.
Yes, I am saying that the MacBook Air M1 I am writing on right now should not exist. That what short term gains I am getting from it now will end up causing all your kids to suffer. I am saying you are all sacrificing your children future for novelty and convince. I ams also saying there is no way out of this because we have built this Tower of Babel and what will happen now is out of our hands.
While I appreciate where you're coming from, your conclusion seems to imply there is no world in which technology and a sustainable future can coexist. I realize we are closer to the end now than ever before, but what you are suggesting is that the ending is inevitable. If this is true - we've triggered our downfall and nothing can stop it - then should we not be praising companies that make efforts towards sustainability?
Since we can't just put things back into a box, isn't complaining about marketing like this just barking up entirely the wrong tree? If the premise is that technology ideally shouldn't exist in its current form, then that requires an entirely different discussion built on an entirely different foundation, and Apple's marketing claims are just a small distraction at best.
That was the point of my original comment. We will get no where towards anything sustainable if we keep allowing these lies/PR without calling it out. Unless Apple admits how much of a problem their devices are for the environment then sustainability it is just greenwashing. Unless we realize that capitalism is antithetical to human existence then humanity is over as we know it and all your kids will suffer immeasurably.
Apple and all these companies show no be allowed to use this BS carbon trading. They should be taxed directly for the cost of externalities on the price of the product. It would be so prohibitively expensive very few people could afford it. The profit these companies make is because they are not charging anyone the true cost.
We can put things back into the box. We just do not want to.
You know what my PR would say?
--
This creation and use of our products causes harm to the environment and puts the planet, and your children's future, at risk.
> Better for the environment is never buying another computer.
Really? An older core2 computer uses like 10 times more electricity at idle than a halfway modern one. Also, since it is much less powerful, you might need multiple old computers to manage the sane workload.
I am completely unconvinced that wasting huge amounts of electricity is "better for the environment".
...but you could upgrade components. Yeah, and by now the only component in that computer that is still the same as when bought would be the case. So you threw out and bought 95% of a computer instead of 100%....
Chaning one's perspective on PR vomit would be my suggestion. If it comes from a PR team, then of course it is all shiny, smells great, long lasting, making the world a better place. The true information will never come from those PR departments. Maybe, it'll come from an interested 3rd party, but then you have to know if they are just being informative or if they have an agenda and distorting info as well.
No matter how I squint, those 2 statements are logically equivalent, while "both harm the environment" is also true, but you "harm" the environment too, in that sense, no?
Over time I've also noticed I no longer care about having the fastest possible laptop, since my job provides me with an MBP and that's where serious work gets done.
I have a feeling this is going to be backordered for a long, long time though.