13 ms·
I don't understand the pricing of the MacBook Air vs the 13" Pro. The Air ($1249) vs 13" Pro ($1299), you get: - same CPU - same GPU - same Neural chip - s
by tiffanyh 6y ago
I don't understand the pricing of the MacBook Air vs the 13" Pro.
The Air ($1249) vs 13" Pro ($1299), you get:
- same CPU
- same GPU
- same Neural chip
- same RAM (8gb)
- More storage for the Air (512gb vs 256gb with 13" Pro)
- You get Touch Bar with 13" Pro
So if you don't care about the Touch Bar, you actually get with the Air:
- better specs
- smaller device footprint
- and $50 cheaper.
Am I missing something?
- keyle 6y agoAs a previous macbook pro top model owner, with the huge amount of dysfunctional features it had, I'd be totally in for a mac book air.
- css 6y agoAir only has passive cooling; Pro has a fan.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adwi 6y agoDepending on benchmarks sounds like another win for the MBA...
- Osiris 6y agoSo the Pro should be able to maintain higher clock speeds for longer, is the assumption?
- kjsthree 6y agoYes, that is almost certainly the case. They didn’t mention clock speed at all though so we’ll have to wait for real-world tests.
- ralph87 6y agoThe emphasis here being on the word "should". I wouldn't buy just yet until some third party has published a sustained load/heat test. Apple have sucked at this for quite some years now, it's folly to touch a MacBook for anything remotely compute-intensive
- andromeduck 6y agoOnly when you compare apples to oranges, but this is an apples to apples comparison. Same underlying silicon, almost identical configuration, different chassis. It's impossible for the Pro not to outperform the Air when the only substantial difference for performance is TDP and we have zero reason to believe that heat-pipe + fan would be outperform by passive cooling of all things.
- marcolussetti 6y agoAgreed, the Pro's cooling should be better. However, I think it's worth waiting and seeing. There might not be that big of a difference in the end (e.g. both are uncharacteristically well designed and run fine; or conversely both are so badly thermally throttled that no serious intensive tasks can be performed) in which case other factors could end up being more significant.
- colejohnson66 6y agoApple has always sucked when it came to cooling. The Apple /// and Lisa were plagued by “IC creep” where, due to heat expansion from inadequate cooling, the ICs would wiggle out of their sockets ever so slowly.
- minxomat 6y agoThey have said exactly that multiple times in the presentation. Mini & MBP will maintain higher clock speeds indefinitely.
- marta_morena_28 6y agoOh I am sure judging by how excellent MacBook Pros cool things, having passive cooling will make no difference at all. I mean, during summer I put my MacBook on a large ice block that I freeze over night, this way I can maintain acceptable build & development speeds during the day. Should work the same for the MacBook Air. No?
- laksdjfkasljdf 6y agoIt will be equally as hot, but quieter.
- beamatronic 6y agoThat's some serious doublespeak right there
- justin66 6y agoPerhaps this pricing was brought about by the same head injury that caused someone in management to believe 8GB is an adequate base spec for RAM in 2020.
- shakow 6y agoIt is definitely an adequate base spec. What would the random MacBook user fill 16GB of RAM with?
- robotmay 6y agoChrome?
- snazz 6y agoI don’t do any tab-hoarding in Chrome (that’s the job of Safari on my machine), but I’m pretty sure that it will suspend tabs long before you run out of RAM. 8 GB is still plenty for web browsing.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoI started surfing the net in the 90s with 8MB. :D
- o-__-o 6y agoBRB gonna fire up Netscape on my brand new MacBook Air
- mixmastamyk 6y agoNetscape?! That's for the kids, we used NCSA Mosaic and liked it. I suspect lynx is still around in some form.
- marcolussetti 6y ago
- baggy_trough 6y agoNot having the Touch Bar is worth at least several hundred dollars.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoYeah, so i don't accidentally trigger Siri all. the. time.
- bzbarsky 6y agoYou can solve that problem by going into keyboard settings and changing the "Touch Bar shows" setting to "Expanded Control Strip". Or "F1, F2, etc. keys" if you prefer. Whichever one you set, holding down the "fn" key will temporarily toggle to the other one. You still don't get the same feel as physical keys, but no Siri, no sliders to adjust volume or brightness, no stuff shifting around as you switch apps.
- baggy_trough 6y agoYou can do that, but keys on glass are still in every way inferior to physical keys.
- bzbarsky 6y agoI didn't claim that this solves all issues someone might have with the touchbar. Just the specific "I keep triggering Siri" issue.
- baggy_trough 6y agoYes, it's just annoying that the best workaround involves replacing the touch bar functionality with an inferior replica of the physical keys it replaced.
- aj_icracked 6y agoYou can disable the siri in Touch Bar and configure it to have the buttons you want. We do that to every new laptop we give our team, it's great.
- komali2 6y agoPresumably a bigger battery on the Pro?
- danielfoster 6y agoAre there any differences in screens? I have no idea but would guess that the Pro has a better screen with more accurate colors.
- bcherry 6y agotech specs say 500nits on the pro and 400nits on the air, so its possible they are different screens but also possible they just have different backlights
- obilgic 6y agoI literally had to cancel orders after noticing this as well, was very confusing even for a developer. Also, what's the difference between the left and the right versions? just the storage? can't you configure the storage? why do they make it look like there are 2 different options.
- russianbandit 6y agoFor Air, the one on the right has one more GPU core too.
- reaperducer 6y agowhat's the difference between the left and the right versions Just the storage. They're suggested configurations, presented to make it easy for the masses, not the HN tinkerers.
- EgoIncarnate 6y agoOn the Air only 7 GPU cores (vs 8 on Pro). Also no active cooling, so likely lower max CPU performance under thermally limited conditions.
- mrfusion 6y agoSame screen?
- threeseed 6y agoLikely to be 10w TDP on MacBook Air versus 35w on MacBook Pro. So lower clock speeds on the CPU/GPU and more use of the low-power cores.
- wlesieutre 6y agoThey might both be an M1, but only the Pro has a cooling fan. The Air is going a more iPad route; totally silent and more than enough performance for typical tasks, but under sustained load it's going to throttle hard.
- wlesieutre 6y agoOr they may be throttled lower all the time, so that using the four performance cores still stays within its cooling budget. Either way, it's not going to run as fast as the MBP without having a fan. I'm very curious to see benchmarks on these things. Also wondering if processors are performance binned from one SKU to another, or if it's really just the amount of RAM and storage. Apple's been known to have secret hardware differences like that, the 2018 iPad Pro had 4GB of RAM unless you specced it up to 1TB storage, which included a secret upgrade to 6GB RAM. You wouldn't know from the specs, since Apple doesn't talk about how much RAM their iPads have. Now here we are with the M1 and Apple doesn't talk about the clock speed. All MacBook Pros have an M1, but do they all have the same clock speed? Maybe.
- slg 6y agoHere[1] is an article from The Verge that goes into the full differences with confirmation from Apple. For those too lazy to click through, yes the fan is the biggest difference. Beyond that the screen in the Air is slightly darker, the base model has worse chips due to binning, the battery is smaller, and there is obviously the Touchbar. [1] - https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21559228/apple-new-macbook-air-pro-difference-arm-m1-fan-thermal-performance https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21559228/apple-new-macbo...
- davidf18 6y agoThere is no fan in the Air but there is in the Pro which allows the Pro to run the CPU at higher speeds because the fan cools the CPU. Even though the 16" MacBook Pro has the CPU as its 15" predecessor, it runs much faster because the cooling system flow is better and there is a bigger heat sink on the 16" model.
- NegativeLatency 6y agoThe pro has ports on both sides
- tomaskafka 6y agoThermals and sustained performance. I expect 10 W passive CPU in MBA body to throttle quickly - I now have 2017 12" MB, and for about 60(winter)/15(summer) seconds of sustained load it's the most awesome little machine in the world, and then becomes a slog. It has 7W CPU in slightly smaller body than new Air, so I expect Air's performance review to be 'the story about throttling'.
- person_of_color 6y agoIs there a market for aftermarket coolers on MBA?
- lostgame 6y agoThere's a market for aftermarket coolers on laptops universally - I sometimes see laptops on those fan pads?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoA quality laptop fan pad is about $20-$30.
- marcolussetti 6y agoI wonder how useful they are. I used to have a gaming laptop in the early 2010s and the nicest cooling fan I could find, but it only dropped the temperature down by 2-3 degrees
- lostgame 6y agoºF or ºC? - fair difference there.
- marcolussetti 6y agoGoo point. -- Celsius.
- lostgame 6y agoMuch more worthwhile, in that case. A couple degrees Fahrenheit means nothing IMHO but a couple degrees Celsius is at least physically noticeable. :)
- bartvk 6y agoMy suspicion is that they're not useful at all. Once I bought such a cooler pad, and placed a 2011 13" MacBook on it. Then I benchmarked it (i.e. max out the CPU), and measured the sensor "CPU Near". I could not measure a difference between the cooler pad on or off. I can't remember the brand of the cooler pad, but it had two 10 cm fans.
- reader_mode 6y agoBetter screen, better thermals (this is really important, hopefully they do it right), larger battery (almost 15%). At 1500$ for 16GB version 13" Pro seems like a really good value deal for on the go workstation - if M1 benchmarks come out decent.
- throwaway314156 6y agoThey should have had better thermals in the previous 13" Pro, but... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=3m56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=3m56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=5m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=5m30s That's just a headscratcher.
- reader_mode 6y agoI have an 2018 MBP with an i9/Vega20 - I can testify how terrible their thermals are. But given that this thing can be passively cooled - even apple crappy venting will probably do a decent job with this chip. Need to see what happens when the reviews land.
- snowwrestler 6y agoThe M1 chip will for sure sustain higher performance in the Pro because it has active cooling. Apple ramps their chip performance dramatically and frequently in iOS devices; that’s how they hit such high benchmarks but also deliver long battery life and stay cool. Those chips spend most of their time not performing. In such a system, having “the same chip” in two different devices will not tell you much about their relative performance under real world loads.
- novok 6y agoYou get 100 more nits of brightness, active cooling (= more performance), better speakers & more battery with the 13" pro.
- ab_testing 6y agoThe pro comes with fan cooling. With that, the pro can run for much longer without hitting max temperatures . The air is fanless so in an intesive task, you will hit thermal limits very soon and the cpu will be slowed down .
- jjtheblunt 6y agoMaybe the 5nm process just runs much cooler?
- BooneJS 6y agoMBP will have a fan, so presumably it will avoid thermal throttling (or throttle less).
- devxpy 6y agoI'd also be very interested to see if that $250 difference between the 7-core & 8-core GPU is really just a software toggle. It sounds like they've built 1 SOC, not two, so I don't know how they came up with that.
- yoz-y 6y agoBinning, most probably.
- Teknoman117 6y agoThe larger chassis allows for better cooling and more battery. Their comments would make it seem that the same processor in the MacBook Pro performs better because of more thermal headroom due to active cooling. The Air is fanless.