New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip (opens in new tab)

It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them.

Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.

Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway.

Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.

The weird part of that argument to me: to arrive to that point you've already made a ton of choices that need to be educated.

You decided on the form factor: you don't want a convertible (neither a Surface like tablet + keyboard, nor something like a Yoga).

You decided to forgo touch.

You decided you don't really want to game. You also evaluated you don't need anything Windows or x86 only.

Then sure there's about 10 models. But at that point is it much complicated than say, choose from the DELL XPS line ?

And the crazy thing is, despite Dell having 170+ laptop SKUs they don't use that fact to actually have a wide range of products.

You'd think with 170 different SKUs they could produce an ultrabook with ports, wouldn't you? A modernised version of the E7270? Apparently not, though.

The problem with this tactic is that there's a lot of SKUs that give people a terrible experience and they jump to another brand.

Apple's solution to this is to instead have 50 SKUs, organize them by a few very easily understandable categories, and then price every SKU exactly within $50-$75 of one another so that there's always a meaningful upgrade for slightly more money. This is also why Apple is very stingy with storage and RAM. They use the cost of upgrades to pull you to higher priced SKUs, which then need their own upgrades, and OH LOOK there's an even nicer base model for just a little more!

[0] The amount of money you save when the thing you want to buy turns out to be cheaper than what you were willing to pay.

With such bloated webapps now a days, those 8G of RAM are going to cook too fast...

Newegg's feature selector is pretty good at sorting through this. Just uncheck all the bad screen resolutions and CPU models and see what's left. Bonus: Require at least 32GB of memory in an exact power of two, excluding all the junk that solders 8GB to the system board.

Dell has XPS 13, XPS 15, and XPS 17 and now the plus designation. It's pretty easy.

If you remember back in the day, Nokia also had a crazy number of SKUs for their phones. Nokia is no longer the power it used to be. Could it mean many SKUS means a lack of focus ? Thinking you can out market / out segment your competition rather than try to concentrate more on the product ?

I find AMD also has less SKUs than Intel. Here, as a challenger you can't really afford to segment the market as much as the leader. You need to concentrate your offerings in a few potent products.

Having suffered through many Dell laptops (flagships) I'd rather flush the money down the pan than buy one machine from them.

What Dell is selling in comparison to Apple is legacy technology with shoddy workmanship.

I don't get it. What's so great about Apple's lack of choice?

All those numbers try to hide that they basically sell all the same.

They are marginally more expensive, but they also very easy to sell second-hand. I'm speculating that the monthly cost is on par with a PC.

(And with more and more Electron apps, might struggle even with that once you hop onto a video call.)

When the original iMac came out, it was by far the #1 computer SKU. It was way better than competing products at the price range because of those economies of scale.

> All other details can be configured in the buying flow but there's not much to think about if you just want a simple laptop.

You would think so, but unfortunately not. Apple is quite good at upselling and their price gating for screens, ram etc. is very opaque. In other words: whether you want the air with non-sabotaged specs or the pro or the pro pro or the pro max is not simple.

I have a great M2 pro machine, but officially it can only support 2 external monitors. I should be able to close my screen and power 3. I can do this with a dock so it's not a resources problem.

I am curious what is different between the Air and the Pro that the Air can power 2 external monitors (it does say when the lid is closed) and the Pro can only power 1 regardless. Or is this a software update and the Pro page just has not been updated.

I keep hoping that this is a problem that is only temporary and eventually it will be removed or as time goes on each series can run 1 more monitor or something.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/04/14-inch-m3-macbook-pro-multi-...

I use Asahi Linux on M2 now, and the USBC display support isn’t done yet, but I am hoping it would be better than MacOS.

More-than-one-display is pretty much the standard on regular (non-apple) computers: you can drive as much as your system can sustain.

If it can identify something people will pay more for, while not quite putting off most people, it'll do it, no matter how mad.

So if most people think 8GB is fine for a laptop, they'll buy it, and everyone else pays through the nose for more.

Most people only want one extra screen? That's what you get on the base machine and you must pay (alot) for more. If one day most people need two, then you'll get two.

Apple seem to spend a lot of design time on how to extract the most money out of those willing to pay, no matter how annoying it is.

I don't want to waste time migrating to a new system, only to find out I need to return/resell it, or later down the road find out another arbitrary/artificial limitation Apple has set that I either have to find a work around for or suck up until I can switch machines again if none exist.

This is unfortunate since there are some features that have made it very tempting to switch.

But just in general, Intel has always prioritized lots of I/O flexibility on its chips. If you look at the datasheets there have always been dozens and dozens of units on every SKU that are never plumbed out to ports on the device. Three or four display outputs, six or eight USB controllers, stuff like that. Apple is the opposite: they won't include something if they aren't absolutely sure they need it. So after the shift from x86 to Apple silicon, laptop users are feeling a squeeze on I/O that used to seem "free".

The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality control that confuse consumers and leave them unhappy. This is the flip side of choice in prioritizing, say, gaming performance over battery life while optimizing price or vice-versa.

Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution.

Anecdotally, my Framework 13 AMD ran me 1500 and I ended up with 64 GB of ram, 2 TB of storage, and an AMD 7840U. I bought my RAM and storage separately to get that end cost, to be fair.

I wouldn't be surprised if the M3 actually outperforms my processor by a bit, but having way more RAM matters a lot to me. All that on top of being able to repair my own machine is a no brainer to me.

I know most laptop users wouldn't care about this stuff, but I really hope Framework does well and helps bring repairability back to laptops.

Just recently there was a Thinkpad P14S on sale for $999 that blows the Macbooks out of the water in terms of ram and storage, while having a high quality OLED display and a Ryzen CPU that can easily trade blows with Apple silicon. It is hotter and heavier and has very bad battery life, though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/s/7CgJwku18K

In $999 13" M2 Air you get 8GB Unified RAM and 256GB memory. Intel ARC seems to be better than M2 graphics. Weight is exactly the same. Usual downsides remain - fan and smaller battery life, although still pretty good.

No one matches Apple's build and screen quality. But their base models are pretty underpowered, and it's not until you're spending closer to $2k that you get specs that feel appropriate for 2024. On the Windows side, there are lots of cheaper options, many of which have beefier specs, but the build quality pales in comparison.

The right tradeoff depends on your budget and what you really need out of a device.

For $1700 you can get a sub-1kg Asus ExpertBook B9 with 32GB RAM and a 2TB disk and a decent 12th 12 core Gen Intel CPU.

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-ExpertBook-i7-1255U-Military-B94...

Not saying it is better in all respects, but definitely in some, meaning there are definitely alternatives.

That will be a great little machine to use until it starts throttling. You'll need an MBP to keep consistent peformance.

But yeah, there's still a real lack of Windows laptop competition these days, especially if you want a GPU. 'Gaming laptops' tend to come with severe heat/noise/weight/battery problems.

(And why are competitors touchpads still shit-tier compared to Apple? Even on those bulkier gaming laptops where space isn't at a premium and the price is on the premium side)

With the size difference between the MBA and MBP almost eliminated, the M2 MBA was a superfluous SKU at launch, much less now.

It's nuts that the entire rest of the industry basically has own-goaled Apple into a dominant position. Apple's playbook:

1. Model-year build stability over faster go-to-market on new components. 2. Better build quality. 3. Better battery life. 4. Better display, especially in value models.

I'm leaving OS and UI out of the discussion.

e.g. $1,899.00 for 15'' 16GB ram + 1TB SSD

i just bot a similar aluminum HP with Oled , Ryzen 7, 16GB , 1TB SSD for $700

the build quality is good, just a tick below apple. the fan is mild, not as good as apple.

but $1200 premium for apple ? I had to say no

My 5 year old Lenovo Carbon X1 14" is 2560x1440 while I can't buy a current X1 with anything above 1920x1200 for any price. WTF?

With that said, the specs on a Mac air are extremely modest when you really look at them. Apple is simply optimizing to do more with less.

If it wasn't intentional they should incorporate it into their marketing -- "exactly the same weight as air!"

I don't know why you bought a new one. You can have two ways to look at this, one way is your ultra pessimistic view, my view is I don't need to upgrade my laptop ever 2 years anymore.

Before the M1 Max I was upgrading so often because intel macbooks sucked so much. Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a decade.

As for being "exploited" by ads, just don't be, stop mindless consumption...

These "pro" machines have always been known for work and productivity, and 8GB just sounds like a piss poor product decision

It's also why you should understand your personal use case and do research. I think this is on you, not Apple. Corpos gonna corpo -- you have to do the research to figure out whether the gains from new chips will actually impact your workflow.

If you bought a M3 Max just to fuck around on Facebook and Hacker News then of course you won't notice a difference. If you are running workloads that actually require that level of performance then you will notice a significant difference. M3 Max is twice as fast at rendering 3D scenes in Cinebench.

For most real-world users, the M3 really is about 30% faster in single-core and 100% faster in multicore. That is really significant for a lot of us, especially software engineers. But the really big speedups mentioned in Apple's marketing are more niche and it takes some savvy to recognize that.

(I'm plenty content with my M1 Max for now and I expect I'll continue to happily use it for a few more years)

I wouldn't exactly just avoid them, though most are useless, so it's not a bad idea. You just want to understand what they are... even honest ones will only present information that is a reason to buy.

E.g., when I saw the iPhone 15 ads and the best thing they could say about was that it had some titanium, I knew it was a product I could ignore. (Not that I have an iPhone 14 either, but I already knew that one wasn't worth an upgrade to me).

In the Windows world, I rarely if ever come across a laptop where the speakers weren't clearly last in precedence for engineering and BOM consideration. Just astoundingly bad sound quality accepted as normal in the Windows laptop world, even in supposedly premium machines.

In comparison, even the least impressive MacBook Air speakers are good.

But if you were coming from another MacBook Pro when evaluating the Air I can see why you would have come away wanting better. The Pro machines are indeed a clear step up, and the larger 16" models are even better given the extra space they have to work with.

Sometimes I hear her watching some movie or show a few rooms away, and I can never know if she's watching it on the TV or on the Pro just by the audio alone. Those speakers do fill the room, and them some.

I have never really watched more than short content on that form factor. I like a bigger screen and a remote, watching anything like a movie on a laptop feels klunky.

A 4K monitor I use works perfectly fine on Linux, but with Macbook Pro, even though resolution perfectly matches, it still has blurred font (the filter they apply completely changes the look of the font, even though I use the same one), everything just remains blurry and again, watching video disables it.

yeah, the fact that such basics are still broken is the biggest scandal to me in these premium machines with so much tech progress otherwise

My personal machine is a 16GB M1 Air. I never wish I had more horsepower. It's simply never an issue.

My work machine is a 16GB M1 Pro. Ditto. Really, I'd probably be fine on an M1 Air for that, too.

[EDIT] Yes I run local docker containers, though not with huge production datasets or for load testing or whatever—all that works fine. And, hell, they run faster than the shitty oversubscribed VMs our K8S cluster hands out anyway—I see way worse performance in prod.

[EDIT EDIT] Oh and I used to compile a fairly big C++ program on my Air pretty regularly, and use it to test/develop a big 3D application. Worked fine. Took a damn beefy server to compile that project much faster than my Air did.

Half the reason I'm getting is a Mac is because they're so nice to look at, so I think I really want the better screen. And the extra RAM is always nice. And I know I'll appreciate the decent speakers.

Plus it'll arrive way quicker. I think I'm happy with the MBP...

The MBP arrived. What a machine!

I'm biased that my current laptop is a 2015 MBP (never owned an Air). But I'm still tempted to return it and get a 15" M3 MBA and save £600.

I think I underestimate battery life and over-emphasised performance. I've been running some npm & maven tasks every 1 minute, run a docker container, playing music on the speakers, set battery to power saver, set brightness to 50%. And after 4.5 hours I'm down to 72%, so I think I'm happy with that.

Regarding your last point, it’s because of the video accelerators on the M series chips which is why they mention Final Cut. The latter comparison to Intel laptops also has to take into account that it’s been ~4 years since Apple shipped that.

I am kind of interested in the M3 Air. I generally prefer MacBook Air over MacBook Pro, since it's lighter and more compact than the Pro, but I am currently still using a MacBook Pro with M1 Pro due to the limitations of the earlier Airs. It seems that these limitations are getting lifted slowly, with the M2 supporting up to 24GB RAM and the M3 supporting two external displays in clamshell. If the MacBook Air M3 supported 32GB RAM, it would pretty much be a no-brainer to go from the M1 Pro to Air M3.

Apple's "Pro" branding has become increasingly meaningless but in the MacBook category, which I believe is where it originated, it's meant to suggest "media professional", a demographic which has reason to care about all of these things.

There are even shades of this in the iPhone and iPads Pro, which have a few features which are mainly of interest to professional media types. For AirPods it just means "the expensive ones", and for Vision Pro it means "this is expensive". That's the main signal for phones and tablets as well, realistically.

The Air is also way overkill. I had a 12" MacBook before that. It ran the software that I wrote. I write markdown in Sublime Text and run python scripts.

There just isn't a reason to get something beefier.

I was legally blind for 15 years. Apple has been there for me with their screen zoom since Powerbook G4 12" on OSX 10.3. I've since had surgery on my eyes, and I still find myself relying heavily on the screen zoom. It's probably my all time favourite feature of OSX/MacOS.

Thankfully I haven't had a need for VoiceOver or NVDA, so I wouldn't know how to compare those. But I think it's great that Apple actually puts in internal effort on accessibility unlike Microsoft/Linux.

Go to other local websites and the specs will be in the local units (most likely metric), but even in Europe, display sizes or car wheels are almost always denominated in inches.

It's the total spending dollars that's important. By using US customary units, you get 25% of the world GDP in one easy-to-do-business-with entity.

Its pretty easy to do a compatibility check on forums before purchasing. My IdeaPad Gaming works flawlessly with Manjaro, even supports the charging settings and performance modes.

I still prefer the ~2017 ThinkPad X1 Carbon, despite the much slower CPU, half the memory, worse screen, and the coating peeling off. Not sure why I prefer it, perhaps some combination of it being lighter, quieter, and the screen opening 180°

I wonder if that explains the battery difference.

USB-C Alt-Mode and Thunderbolt always trump DisplayLink. So it's best to figure out first what displays you want to connect and then buy the Mac that supports that configuration. But if you already have a Mac that doesn't support the number of displays that you want to hook up, DisplayLink is a solution.

Luckily, these new MacBook Air models support two external 5K@60Hz displays with the lid closed.

It's awful design... It would had been forgivable if it was just a small circular camera cutout, but I'm guessing they didn't do that purely because they wanted to be different. Plus to go with a circular camera cutout on their Macbooks would suggest that it's not a great design choice on the iPhone either.

It's the only thing I genuinely hate about my M3 Macbook. Almost everything else is great.

These kind of comparisons are still valid for me. There are plenty of others less technical than me that want these too. The youngest intel Airs only just aged out of applecare coverage last year, and for most casual users getting 4 years out of an Apple computer is totally expected.

I wouldn't be surprised if they could double performance.

I know Apple is pushing MLX, and MLC-LLM is fast too, but in practice most Mac users (I think) are using llama.cpp based stacks.

I avoid the MS Office suite wherever I can. Recently went through some lengths to deactive Microsofts intrusive updating background service (nearly as bad in slowing down my system as Adobes).

I have removable disks in my workstation but that has never saved me from data loss. The most common cause of data loss is an errant "rm -rf" or "git checkout" or whatever. The second most common cause is the storage media failing (bad sectors, flash wear, etc.). On portable devices, I imagine one of the most common causes of data loss is losing the device itself.

The only way to prevent these classes of data loss is with backups. "One is none."

At which point you might as well spring for the Pro.

I can't fault the business logic but as someone who'd only use a Mac for occasional iOS development, this nudging upward dissuades me from pursuing that idea altogether.