[HN Gopher] MacBook Air M1: the best laptop?
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MacBook Air M1: the best laptop?
Author : secure
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-11-28 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (michael.stapelberg.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (michael.stapelberg.ch)
| tn890 wrote:
| I own an M1 MBA with 16GB of RAM and it's a lovely little
| machine. I generally do SRE work and it works out ok for that for
| the most part. Intellij Idea, VS Code, a terminal and a browser.
|
| Coming from an i9 16" mbp the difference in usability is massive,
| I hated those fans so much. I do miss the larger screen size
| though; that, coupled with the lack of ports (just 2 Type-C,
| would like more) made me consider getting one of the new 14". The
| battery life is so insanely overkill in this laptop that I'd be
| willing to compromise on it for a bigger display, perhaps for the
| first time ever.
|
| Would highly, highly recommend it for traveling though.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Would highly, highly recommend it for traveling though.
|
| I travel with a thinkpad nano: smaller, lighter, and it has
| cellular wireless.
|
| Yet it can be stuffed- I put a 2Tb NVMe (Sabrent) in mine, and
| I'm now waiting for larger NVMe to hit the market
| tn890 wrote:
| I suppose it all falls down to OS preference more than
| anything. I've been using macOS for a long time and wouldn't
| feel comfortable with something else.
|
| Owning an iPhone and iPad don't help escaping the walled
| garden for sure.
| synergy20 wrote:
| 90% of the time is spent on browser and editor these days,
| the OS is not a major factor for me to choose computers
| anymore.
| joconde wrote:
| UI slowdowns, awkward multiple desktops, and general
| slowness is definitely a factor that made me leave
| Windows though.
| csdvrx wrote:
| We must live in a different world then. I love how
| windows works with different DPI screens, or remember the
| screen layouts. Add to that WSL and AHK, and I have no
| shame to say Windows is the OS I'm the most productive
| with (even if I'm trying Linux again during this long
| weekend! I want to give it a chance!)
|
| The deal breaker: I love Wireless projection (Shortcut:
| Win-K) that works all the time, unlike filmsy HDMI /
| micro HDMI / DP cables that require switching the input
| on the screen.
|
| Believe me or not, but at a recent meeting we had to use
| Zoom locally because none of the 3 laptops (2 macs, and
| my windows thinkpad) could reliably project to the big
| screen next to the drawboard.
| joconde wrote:
| A few specific issues I had all the time:
|
| - Alt-Tab takes between 0.1 and 2 seconds to work,
| apparently at random. Windows are skipped, also at
| random, so I can't predict which window I'll get. I can't
| even switch to another window and back; most of the time,
| the order will get messed up.
|
| - Bringing up the notification pane and the overview with
| all desktops sometimes works instantly, sometimes
| stutters and takes 3 seconds. The animations are always
| half-baked and awful to follow.
|
| - Switching desktops with Ctrl+Win+Arrows sometimes seems
| to re-organize all windows at random, for no reason at
| all.
|
| These issues usually happen a few weeks of heavy use
| after install. I don't have any third-party software that
| messes with Explorer. Re-installing fixes them for a few
| days or weeks. That was on a Dell XPS 15 with a Core i7
| and 16GB of RAM, and it also happens with my larger,
| well-cooled workstation at the office.
|
| macOS has its own multiple-desktop weirdnesses, but in
| general it's polished and works predictably on my M1 MBA.
| Windows was just painful to use, mostly because of the
| above issues. It seems like UI features have a _lot_ of
| inefficiencies that Microsoft can 't or won't factor out.
|
| Also, Windows 10 desktops can't be re-organized, which I
| imagine would be trivial to implement, and makes the
| macOS desktops much more practical.
| thrashh wrote:
| Maybe your time...
| synergy20 wrote:
| Had a mac pro 32GB for job(use it like a desktop basically).
|
| And a few Lenovo carbon x1 that can be carried
| around(including travel).
|
| Carbon X1 is 14", which is large enough for real coding on
| the road, Nano is 13" seems a bit too small for coding to me
| though. I feel 14" is the perfect size for both daily work
| and travel.
| csdvrx wrote:
| I have a P1 Gen3 (because it's OLED and 4k) and while I
| love it at home or in the office, I don't like travelling
| with it. 14 is just too big.
|
| I may be smaller than you but to me, 12" is the ideal for
| travelling as the laptop fits in my purse!
|
| I'm thinking about getting the X12 detachable as my next
| travel computer, but I'm waiting for next year revision in
| the hope it'll get Xeon or AMD cpu options.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I too have an X1 Nano and it's a nice machine in a lot of
| ways -- feels well built, light as a feather, looks nice,
| great matte 16:10 (!!) screen, great keyboard, and the
| trackpoint is excellent for mousing in space constricted
| settings (like planes). I too like that its storage can be
| expanded (though I wish the WWAN slot could be used for a
| second NVMe SSD, as it can on other machines).
|
| The only complaint I have with it is battery life and its
| propensity for getting warm when doing anything even remotely
| demanding. I even went with the slower, lower power CPU and
| its battery life is still middling, and plugging it into an
| external display is enough to make it fire up its fans.
|
| I wish I could swap its CPU out for something more efficient.
| Tiger Lake is supremely mediocre relative to current Ryzen
| and M-series offerings.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > though I wish the WWAN slot could be used for a second
| NVMe SSD, as it can on other machines
|
| I'm working on that. 2 options: removing the whitelist from
| the BIOS, or hacking a NVMe firmware to impersonate a
| whitelisted WWAN (a small boottime delay to answer requests
| could also be sufficient)
|
| The latter might be easier, as the firmware update seems to
| have more vulnerabilities. Also NVMe are cheaper in case I
| mess up and can't reflash with flashrom for a reason or
| another.
|
| If anyone here works for a storage company and could make a
| firmware with a given PCI id or a 10 seconds delay before
| showing up on the bus, please get in touch!
|
| > I wish I could swap its CPU out for something more
| efficient. Tiger Lake is supremely mediocre relative to
| current Ryzen and M-series offerings
|
| Same, I want a X12 with an AMD, or a Xeon because even if
| the latter is a power hog, at least I'll have ECC!
| Liron wrote:
| I got one and it's so effortlessly fast, I can just open it and
| do stuff in one smooth motion
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _the biggest pain point for software developers is the small
| amount of RAM_
|
| Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM
| is why all of our software is fat barges of bloat now. Y'all,
| this prophecy is entirely self-fulfilling. Please stop.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'm not in the business of not using RAM. I'm in the business
| of making money. If you don't want to use RAM, apply market
| pressure in that direction. The truth is, you have very little
| market power, so I genuinely don't give a fuck.
|
| I'm not interested in selling a $1.99 product to a guy with a
| $199 device. I'm interested in selling a $199 product to a guy
| with a $3999 device.
|
| That's the guy I'm going to listen to.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > I'm not interested in selling a $1.99 product to a guy with
| a $199 device. I'm interested in selling a $199 product to a
| guy with a $3999 device.
|
| I love the way you're thinking (and presenting it)
|
| > That's the guy I'm going to listen to.
|
| You and me both!
|
| Saving a few dollars on RAM is penny wise, pound foolish.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| I understand why you're saying that but when you try do develop
| on Xcode running an emulator and at the same try to use your
| machine normally (keeping some tabs open, listening to some
| music etc.), suddenly 8 GB seems like very little.
|
| Moreover, when you develop for a platform like iOS, you have
| very limited control on how fat your application will be.
| javchz wrote:
| A tradition for desktop software (mostly 3rd party) was to
| develop for "future hardware" from the moment you're
| developing, as Moore's law was a good rule of thumb to predict
| the future.
|
| But for reasons RAM and CPU performance have kept stagnated
| without a lot of changes for around 10 years (until recently
| with Ryzen 5000, Intel 12th, and Apple M1).
|
| Still I find funny you could buy a 16GB RAM Macbook 13" in 2012
| as the top model... and today 16GB is still it's the max
| capacity of the line. To give a point of reference the 2002
| Powerbook the Max RAM capacity was 1GB.
| watersb wrote:
| Apple: "16GB is enough for reasonable people"
|
| Every professor at uni: "Ten days is plenty of time to complete
| this project."
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of
| RAM_ [...]
|
| It is... for development. Which is what software developers do
| and what they often buy hardware for.
|
| Whether it's too little for the apps that they develop to run
| on users' machines is a separate question.
| secondcoming wrote:
| 16GB isn't a lot when developing, but that doesn't mean your
| final code should need 16GB to run. My old desktop has 32GB and
| my laptop has 128GB, both at their motherboard limits.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| I dunno man, are you sure about this kind of supply side
| thinking? I'm much more inclined to assume demand side
| causality here. Which is to say: software has become "fat
| barges of bloat" because the /consumers/ (not producers) of
| said software are okay with it.
| znpy wrote:
| > Software developers thinking
|
| Please restrict this to web developers. My decade old ThinkPad
| x200s with two Core2 Duo cores and 8gb of ram and an SSD can do
| most things very well, except browsing websites.
|
| Loading a large book in PDF format? no problem.
|
| Opening ten years of email in Claws Mail? sure thing.
|
| Opening the same amount of e-mail in thunderbird? A little
| sweaty, but why not?
|
| Playing mp3 files over bluetooth? Yeah!
|
| Wanna write a document in libreoffice writer? As long as you're
| a bit patient.
|
| Chat with other people using Telegram or Hexchat? No problem.
|
| ... What? You want to browse the web? F--k you.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The problem with bloat today is not that developers have
| powerful computers. It is mostly that the latest trend is to
| ship software with their entire run time environment.
|
| Electron is the most glaring example, it essentially ships an
| entire browser with your app, which we may as well call an OS
| nowadays. So in the end, if you have 10 electron apps, you have
| 10 copies of Chrome in memory, in addition to your OS main
| browser. They are all the same except for a few minor
| differences. Sure, it solves "DLL hell" but at an extreme cost
| in efficiency.
| simonh wrote:
| The memory needed to efficiently compile an application isn't
| the same as the memory needed to run it.
| kaliszad wrote:
| For comparison, the whole OrgPad.com server currently uses 8 GB
| of RAM and 2 vCPUs. Everybody of the developers has 24 GB+ of
| RAM with all the main ones having 32 GB of RAM. This is because
| production uses "just" nginx, JVM with the application server,
| PostgreSQL, MinIO and a deduplicating backup using borg. The
| screenshot server is an extra VM, it runs headless Google
| Chrome with puppeteer on a 1 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM node.
|
| We developers use a desktop operating system and programs with
| a GUI. That by itself uses at least 1 GB of RAM extra. We have
| an IDE, like IntelliJ that uses about 3 GB of RAM on my
| machine, there are web browsers, known memory hogs. There are
| e-mail clients, video-chat apps and all of the production stuff
| besides backup too. Some of it is recompiling stuff live e.g.
| shadow-cljs. There is also Spotify or occasionally a video call
| or screen recording e.g. using OBS Studio. That uses even more
| memory temporarily. There is a healthy reserve with 32 GB of
| RAM to make the experience smooth but 16 GB doesn't cut it
| anymore. So we use about half of the amount of RAM eBay used on
| their Sun E10ks in 1999 just for development and that is ok.
| The RAM costs perhaps 100 EUR now. The 50 EUR difference really
| doesn't cut it, if I am having hangs because of swap and the
| GCs doing their best everywhere.
| nicce wrote:
| But do you really need them all at the same time? Spotify and
| video call with screen recording at the same time? Screen
| recording and IDE at the same time? You can present your code
| without heavy IDEs if you are using screen recording for
| that. You can also replace Spotify with spotifyd for example,
| which takes 1/100 of the ram or less. I can also open all my
| apps at the same time and complain that there is no memory.
| It might be convenient to keep apps open on background, but
| you rarely need them at the same time. SSD:s are pretty fast
| in these days. Just open app when needed.
| kaliszad wrote:
| Yes, we need all of that at the same time. Having Spotify
| running or not doesn't really change the equation much. Not
| having an IDE when you want to show something in
| development or want to do a quick Hangout over some code is
| a bummer.
|
| Every new tool changes your workflow and is a distraction
| that doesn't benefit the customer or our work-life balance
| anything. Some people on our team run Windows, because they
| feel at home there. I am not sure you can do a quick 'choco
| install spotifyd' and be done with it.
|
| SSDs are fast, but switching windows is faster. People just
| forget, what a hassle it is to wait 5 seconds here, and 5
| seconds there. We are used to hot-code reloading and
| basically instantaneous response like more than 95% of the
| time when developing. That is the power of Clojure/
| ClojureScript. It eats a bit more RAM in development. We
| can live with that as long as the RAM fits in a normal
| laptop and doesn't cost a fortune. We save much, much more
| by not running on Heroku/ AWS. :-)
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > Screen recording and IDE at the same time?
|
| If I'm presenting some code, I'd prefer to do it in a
| familiar environment (i.e. my IDE of choice) -- so that I
| don't get lost, so that I know the keyboard shortcuts, and
| don't add more stress and fumbling to the presentation.
| Also, everyone on my team uses IntelliJ IDEA, so presenting
| with Code might add more confusion or might make it
| impossible to show IDEA-specific stuff (eg. run
| configurations or the debugger).
| nikita2206 wrote:
| It's just not enough when it's a multi-service backend that you
| want to run on your local machine, plus IDE, a browser, and a
| few well known electron/react native apps that play music and
| let you chat with your colleagues.
| qeternity wrote:
| > and a few well known electron/react native apps that play
| music and let you chat with your colleagues.
|
| This is the whole point: devs with 32gb/64gb machines looking
| at their own app taking 1gb aren't going to realize that for
| many people this is 25% of the available non-os ram (8g
| system with 4g free non kernel / other.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| This is ridiculous nonsense written by, presumably, someone who
| isn't a professional software developer.
|
| Software developers often have to run several emulators (e.g.
| Docker Desktop, Android, and iOS emulators), hundreds of Chrome
| tabs, compilers, _heavy_ 'ol IDEs, _Microsoft freakin ' Teams_,
| and a bunch of other stuff concurrently. 16 GB is _just_ enough
| for many workloads, but it 's easy to see use cases in which
| would exceed that.
| totalZero wrote:
| There's a miscommunication between your comment and GP. You
| may use 16GB RAM as a developer but that doesn't mean the
| average user of your product is equipped equivalently.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Mac has really good memory management though (and you can
| improve linux's by a great margin if you don't have too much
| RAM by enabling zram).
| darthrupert wrote:
| People should be literally at software houses' headquarters
| with pitchforks and torches, revolting against such wastes of
| resources.
| inopinatus wrote:
| None of that is necessary to develop software, and when you
| do want it, most of it doesn't even have to run on your
| laptop.
|
| When did people become so helpless? I was offloading
| interactive workloads via X11 back in the 90s, and these days
| it's to a near-instantly provisioned public cloud instance.
| If someone can't get by in a pinch with vim and a command
| prompt, then I don't particularly want them in my crew.
|
| There"s a corollary to that old dictum, "a bad worker blames
| their tools", and it's "a good worker chooses good tools".
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| If you don't want to give me a decent machine, I don't
| think I want to be on your crew.
|
| Anyway, I generally work for big corporates that don't give
| the developers the ability to spin up arbitrary cloud
| workloads from their laptops.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Oh, you'll get a decent machine, but as the top comment
| conveys, developers that think this is a license to bloat
| need some firm correction, or simply weeding out.
|
| Not merely because their undisciplined code will be
| substantially more expensive to run, especially at scale,
| but also in particular because it's correlated to being a
| useless towel in a crisis.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I agree. But isn't part of the design conceit that the
| storage is fast enough that swapping isn't as painful as it
| would otherwise be?
| rak1507 wrote:
| This just proves the parent commenter right. 'Software
| developers often have to run...' - yes! That is the problem!
| People _shouldn 't_ have to run all of that, but they do. If
| people thought about what they really needed rather than just
| buying more hardware, the world would be a better place.
|
| (Also, I doubt you _need_ hundreds of chrome tabs + heavy
| IDEs, a couple of tabs + <insert lightweight editor of
| choice> works just fine)
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Okay from a data analysis / data scientist perspective how
| do I load into memory my ~60GB dataset into memory for
| analysis. Also, swapping to disk will waste my time.
| areoform wrote:
| The storage read speed for the M1 is ~3.4 GB/s. The write
| speed is 2.8GB/s. Unless you are looking at all of your
| 60GB dataset in one go, clearly the speed at which
| storage can be accessed is fast enough to do batch
| processing on the data fairly seamlessly. Even at 2GB/s
| that's your entire dataset in 30s.
|
| https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/12/how-fast-is-the-ssd-
| insi...
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Disk speed on the MacBook Pro 2021's are ~7-8GB/s on the
| M1 Pro / Max so those are still faster which improves my
| ability to swap out even large amounts of data above
| 64GB.
| jsight wrote:
| Why should an Android developer not "have to" run an
| Android emulator?
| Salgat wrote:
| Or I can just do whatever is most productive for my
| workflow and not have to worry about RAM, not worry about
| managing tabs, not worry about what windows I left open
| that I might or might not need later, worry about the ram
| consumption of different apps I want to use, etc, that's
| also an option. Dunno why you're making it such a huge
| deal, convenience and productivity are after all the goal.
| Msw242 wrote:
| How do you test builds that work across multiple services
| locally without using a ton of ram?
|
| What do you do for a living?
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| I'm so glad there are people like you to tell me the best
| way to do my job without even knowing what I do - it must
| be a real skill.
|
| Yes, it would be possible to curate my tabs better, but I
| often have quite a few things on the boil at any one time
| and taking time out to carefully prune my tabs holds up
| delivery.
|
| I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I
| managed to survive, but context switching became painfully
| slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain
| and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious
| productivity drain.
|
| It turns out that the heavy IDE is heavy for a reason, it
| provides useful capabilities! The kind of capabilities one
| needs as a professional software developer. When one is
| working on a foreign code base spanning thousands of files,
| it's genuinely handy to have some tooling to help you find
| your way around. VS Code tries, but it's generally pretty
| useless in my experience.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few
| months, I managed to survive, but context switching
| became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large
| parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser
| tabs. It was a serious productivity drain.
|
| A friend recommended I try such a RAM diet, so I went
| from 64Gb to a 4Gb laptop. Unlike you, I've found it
| helped me focus.
|
| So I've kept this laptop as a "productivity" laptop -
| when I work on a tight deadline, I use it, because there
| will be 0 risk of context switching :)
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It's not for everybody, but for helping manage tab
| overload the tab groups added to Safari in Monterey have
| been a massive boon for me. At least in my case most tabs
| fit fairly well into one of ten or so groups, and so
| management is as simple as switching my main Safari
| window to the group relevant at that point in time. The
| unused groups are slept after a certain period of
| inactivity, which means that most of the time Safari is
| only consuming the resources required by a single set of
| tabs. It's pretty nice.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| I had an auto-discarder plugin for Chrome to a similar
| effect. I also tried switching to Firefox, which also
| improved matters somewhat. I don't think I'd have
| survived at all with a 8GB device at all otherwise!
|
| However, doing something as basic as loading up a large
| Java project (like Kafka) in Intellij would cause the the
| laptop to die a horrible death when it tried to resolve
| the Maven dependencies.
| nicce wrote:
| Or they just prefer easy and fast ways for developing apps
| (looking Electron et al.) Which bloats the memory. Goes
| unnoticed since they have high memory themselves.
|
| Literally Teams is one of them. Well, it is dropping Electron
| in the future.
| belter wrote:
| While reading this and really doing nothing compared to a
| work day have:
|
| - 24 Chrome tabs open with news
|
| - 17 of Firefox
|
| - Waiting for VMWare Workstation to finish an install of the
| new Fedora 35
|
| - Intellij is compiling a Rust program
|
| - Have Ableton live running in the background listening to a
| mix of last week
|
| - A presentation on PowerPoint for next week that looks like
| it would use half the resources of AWS us-west-1
|
| - CLion while trying to see why a C++ example does not
| compile and Visual Studio Code to cleanup a Cloudformation
| template....
| mamcx wrote:
| Also: You can't avoid a lot of it: Is PART OF THJE JOB.
|
| Also too: Next time people complain about JS, Java, Electron,
| etc? Remember this.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Is it possible to run Windows on these yet (in virtual)? That's
| the only thing stopping me from getting an M1.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| You can use parallels to run Windows applications, but that's
| not really a "native" Windows environment. I love my M1 MacBook
| Pro that I was given for work but I absolutely _despise_ macOS.
| realusername wrote:
| The hardware maybe yes but I really don't like macOS so it's a
| pass for me.
| glogla wrote:
| I think the price/performance ratio depends on whether your use
| case works with with the 8/256 or 8/512 configurations. The
| moment you need to go 16/512 or more, the price difference to 14"
| is not that large, especially considering the better display -
| with the first improvement in resolution since October 2012, so
| over 9 years.
| cehrlich wrote:
| I recently bought a 16/1TB Air over a similarly specced 14"
| Pro. I can see the advantages of the Pro, but the Air also has
| things going for it - smaller and lighter, better battery life,
| 100% silent in absolutely every use case, no moving parts. I
| love this computer. It's without a doubt the best one I've ever
| owned, even better to me than the 2012 15" Pro was for it's
| time.
|
| However due to the bloat of modern software I might have to
| upgrade to a 32GB machine in the not so distant future.
| Hopefully there Air-class machines wont be limited to 16GB for
| too much longer.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| I've had the 16" M1 MBP for a month and have yet to hear the
| fans. With my 16" i9 MBP the fans were a very regular thing
| for the same workload.
|
| Fast, responsive, silent and incredible battery life make it
| easy to call it the best machine I've owned.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| csdvrx wrote:
| For me, I see:
|
| - No OLED screen
|
| - Limited RAM
|
| - No ECC option
|
| - Fixed NVMe of a small size
|
| - Can't have more than 1 NVMe for raid1
|
| - No amd64 core for legacy software
|
| It has advantages for some people, but not for me.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Why would you waste all that money on an amd64 core when
| Rosetta runs x86-64 code faster?
| beebeepka wrote:
| Faster than what?
| user-the-name wrote:
| Than any previous x86-64 core in a Mac.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Not much of an achievement, tbh
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| You have a very niche set of requirements there; few others
| care about the things you listed.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > You have a very niche set of requirements there; few others
| care about the things you listed.
|
| What can I say, I have a refined palate for exquisite
| computers!
|
| (but I'm surprised that on Hacker News of all places, my
| tastes are considered exotic!)
|
| At the moment I have a thinkpad P1 Gen 3 as my main computer
| (Xeon, 64Gb of ECC, multiple 2Tb NVMe in RAID, OLED...) but
| I'll ditch it in a second if I can get an AMD equivalent (and
| preferably 128G of ECC).
| vehemenz wrote:
| Do you use the eraserhead on the Thinkpad? I ask because
| most users (including here) probably use the touchpad, and
| non-Mac touchpads are 10+ years behind and borderline
| unusable.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Actually, most of the time I don't, but the Lenovo
| trackpad is great.
|
| I've tried a mac (because I like to keep my options
| opened) but I have found the trackpad to be only slightly
| better (mostly bigger), while the lack of trackpoint
| ("eraserhead") was painful
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| You have good taste!
| qvrjuec wrote:
| Is OLED really great for computer use? I would imagine all of
| the static UI would make burn-in an issue
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| An OLED screen is a dealbreaker for me on anything but a
| smartphone. I don't want risk of burnin anywhere near any
| large expensive display. I have laptops that are over a
| decade old and have seen a ton of use and their screens are
| still in great shape, which almost certainly wouldn't be the
| case had they been equipped with OLED panels.
|
| The moment that microLED displays start hitting the market
| however I will be buying them. All of the advantages of OLED
| without the drawbacks. Until then it's IPS/VA for me.
| csdvrx wrote:
| I love working at night.
|
| I'm flexible on every requirement but OLED for my non travel
| laptop.
|
| No OLED = won't buy.
| beebeepka wrote:
| How long have you had it? I want one but I am scared of
| burn in. That's for a TV and a monitor
| csdvrx wrote:
| About 6 months. I use Windows 11 with no "fixed element"
| (ex: hidden taskbar, each app is in fullscreen) which may
| mitigate such issues.
|
| I've checked recently with a pixelcheck tool and I
| couldn't see any alteration, but we'll see in a year or
| two!
| beebeepka wrote:
| Be sure to check back with us in 6 months, year at the
| most
| danlugo92 wrote:
| But the burn in...? You haven't gotten it? Or do you swap
| out device/screen when it happens?
| csdvrx wrote:
| IDGAF about burnin. I care about working at night, and
| the $ benefits of my extra productivity are greater than
| hardware replacement costs.
|
| Also I have worldwide next day onsite warranty (the #1
| reason I like Lenovo!), so if or when somethings becomes
| a problem, it will be solved quickly without even going
| to a repairshop let alone leaving my laptop there!!
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| The RAM is annoying but its a tradeoff for having it integrated
| into and shared by the CPU/GPU. macOS hasn't supported RAID
| boot for some years, but internally buying a larger storage
| configuration does get you more physical flash chips and
| increased bandwidth.
|
| And Apple has Rosetta 2 translation which is extremely good and
| many applications beat Intel performance even when running
| translated. Having an Intel core would have defeated the cost
| and performance benefits of M1 and would make the cooling,
| power supply, etc. more expensive and larger.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Having an Intel core would have defeated the cost and
| performance benefits of M1 and would make the cooling, power
| supply, etc. more expensive and larger
|
| Not as an optional core that could be powered on when
| necessary.
| emrah wrote:
| Long battery life and fanless quiet design are killer features
| imo but the 13" screen is a no-go for my aging eyes.
| oojuliuso wrote:
| The new air's right around the corner, so hopefully some of those
| concerns will be addressed. I'm excited that Apple can now
| release yearly refreshes without hesitation. No more vendor
| roadmaps to rely upon. This should mean faster iteration and
| refinement for what customers want.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| Coming from a 2014 MBP the trackpad is a HUGE downgrade (not
| nearly as responsive), macOS is for sure getting worse on each
| generation too. Other than these are pretty good.
|
| A side note: I've been wanting to move to linux, the only thing
| stopping me is the local music management & mobile syncing
| workflow, if anyone have any recommendation
| kello wrote:
| Okay same situation right here. Seriously, if anyone has
| suggestions especially for the mobile syncing workflow with
| linux I would love to hear them. The seamless message-
| notiifcation experience with Apple is what holds me hostage.
| dm319 wrote:
| Apple do this quite nicely. I don't have mac equipment, but I
| see the integration is good where the grass is greener. In
| linux it is replicated using the websites for
| messages(android)/whatsapp/telegram and signal has an app.
|
| When I used to have an iphone (4s days), I loved the move to
| android (pixel) which gave me so much freedom. Cloud apps
| weren't restricted to Apple PCs (I think this has changed
| now), and I could just plug into my linux laptop and just
| drag and drop files to read on a journey. Also tethering
| always worked nicely on linux.
| dmitshur wrote:
| It's unfortunate it can't drive an 8K display, but good that it
| can do 6K.
| numlock86 wrote:
| I just wish programs would stop randomly crashing all the time. I
| am not sure if it's connected to the dozen memory leaks or a
| consequence of those.
| xbar wrote:
| That must suck. Crashes are not part of my experience on either
| of my 16GB M1s nor on my 32GB M1 Max.
|
| The only software that I found vexing is Docker, so I don't use
| it. This is major and is a good reason to be wary of these
| Macs. I left off Docker 6 months ago on M1. Things may be
| better now.
|
| 16GB was fine for a secondary machine. 32GB is now enough for
| me to be productive as a primary machine.
| Msw242 wrote:
| Uhh no docker sounds huge for a lot of companies
| user-the-name wrote:
| I have two MacBook Airs and I can't remember the last time a
| prgoram crashed unexpectedly. Either you have some kind of
| hardware problem, or some really dodgy software installed.
| Havelock wrote:
| Lots of issues running docker and other strange segfaults in
| VM.
| joconde wrote:
| I see new Safari tabs crash and close immediately after I open
| them. It's been the most annoying issue, along with some pages
| rendering the first screen, and staying blank below for 2
| minutes.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Betteridge's Law strikes again
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
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