Perhaps more to the point, you're right -- Apple doesn't deserve to be lauded for removing something that was a dumb restriction in the first place. But it is interesting considering this is the most popular laptop in the world.
Restriction implies they made the deliberate decision to withhold or break functionally. Limitation is probably more accurate, because they didn't put the extra work to make it work properly.
Limitation is probably more accurate
I don't think there is anything interesting
From a consumer standpoint? Apple sells about six million Macs per year and the Air is their best-selling computer and anecdotally it is popular with the HN crowd. So it is objectively impactful. I would call that therefore "interesting" but at that point we're splitting semantic hairs so whatever.
Comparing the port count/capabilities of the two isn't a fully fair comparison though. The Apple Silicon Macbook Air models are likely 1) much faster than that corporate-issued laptop (even if it's workstation class), and 2) much smaller and quieter (no fan noise even under load).
Though I'm not sure why all the griping about how many monitors an Air can support; users can buy a Macbook Pro if they want more monitors? I don't understand the logic behind buying a tiny, thin laptop only to dock it as a workstation.
as if $500 isn't money to you. Maybe it indeed isn't, but that is a lot of money to many people.
FYI Intel Macbook Air has supported dual external monitors 2018-2020, and same for base Macbook Pro 2012 (Retina) - 2020.
The restriction I am most annoyed with these days is the lack of external GPU passthrough. I’m not even sure the asahi Linux folks have gotten that working yet.
So folks are probably just happy they’re not having to deal with as many compromises and tradeoffs (they get to have their PC that works almost just like a smartphone but does more things their intel machine could now). That’s totally understandable.
Ah, yes, "poor Apple couldn't find a way".
Except it did for the more pricey models.
The M3 MacBook Air relaxes this restriction by allowing two external displays.
The addition is the ability to have two external when closed; likely this could have mainly been done in software if they cared.
(You can get more than one external on a laptop with the screen open if you go up to the Max or Pro or whatever.)
It's easy to deduce that it's a big deal for macbook air users because it wasn't possible before.
It's easy to deduce both from the article and from other comments here, which presumably you read if you're going through the trouble of responding to someone else's comment.
I typically despise this type of question, where you're obviously trying to make a point but playing dumb and playing it off as if you have no clue what you're talking about.
This type of question is used all over the place and super obnoxious.
I'm not American, genuine question, why is it a big deal that you're getting free healthcare? I've had free healthcare my whole life, shrug.
As a European, genuine question. Why is it a big deal that Biden wants to forgive student loan? I've gotten free education my whole life, shrug.
As an apple user, why is it a big deal that Dell is extending it's warranty to 2 years? My apple device gets updates 4 years later, shrug.
Just for clarity, it's so far from novel in the world of windows laptops that it's genuinely confusing why that would be an advertised feature.
I must have struck a nerve with you after my objection to the format of the question.
My only mistake here was not saying those were oversimplified made up examples, thought it was obvious but apparently not.