4 ms·

> It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's a dumb feature, though. The only benefit is fashion. There is absolutely a market for people wanting a reasonably-pric

by ajross 3y ago

> It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's a dumb feature, though. The only benefit is fashion. There is absolutely a market for people wanting a reasonably-priced machine with reasonable (16G+) memory and reasonable performance (which requires a fan) for typical workaday jobs. That's right in the middle of the "boring windows enterprise" segment, and it sells a ton of hardware. But Apple won't serve that market for segmentation reasons, leading to this weirdly crippled Air[1] that for a lot of geeks is sort of the worst of all worlds. Really you might as well just buy a Chromebook for half the price [1] Whose only real selling point vs. the putative 16G+fan device we all actually want is that it's so thin you can mount it on a pole as a halberd blade for 1d10 damage.

whynotmaybe 3y ago
The way I see it now, if price is part of your decision process, Apple is not for you.
- lwkl 3y ago
  > That's right in the middle of the "boring windows enterprise" segment, and it sells a ton of hardware. The devices that are sold in this market are as expensive as MacBooks or sometimes even more expensive. So I don't think this is an issue. Also if the MacBook Air ran Windows it would be the perfect device for most workloads in this market. Because the workload common there is running a Browser, Outlook, Word, Excel and SAP (or any other ERP and CRM of your choice).
giantrobot 3y ago
In what world is the Air's performance not reasonable? I have an M1 Air with 16GB of RAM and I've never felt like it was lagging behind me. It's my main computer which means it's used for work and every nerdy experiment I might run. The best part is I can do all of that shit all day long on the battery and the laptop is super easy to move/carry around. With no modifications or extra effort any thermal throttling I've ever encountered hasn't been noticeable. When the M1 Air first came out there were the breathless articles about thermal throttling. It's only something that will come up with extended periods of high CPU usage. I've tried to get my Air to thermally throttle and have only been able to do so doing 3D renders or running local LLMs for long periods (over an hour in my testing). Even long compiles don't really stress the CPU so much it throttles noticeably. The simple solution in that case was a $20 laptop stand with a fan off Amazon. If your use case is 100% CPU usage all the time either don't get an Air or get a cheap laptop stand with a built-in fan. If your Air isn't your CI/CD build machine or part of a render farm it'll be just fine.

by ajross 3y ago

whynotmaybe 3y ago

The way I see it now, if price is part of your decision process, Apple is not for you.

lwkl 3y ago
> That's right in the middle of the "boring windows enterprise" segment, and it sells a ton of hardware. The devices that are sold in this market are as expensive as MacBooks or sometimes even more expensive. So I don't think this is an issue. Also if the MacBook Air ran Windows it would be the perfect device for most workloads in this market. Because the workload common there is running a Browser, Outlook, Word, Excel and SAP (or any other ERP and CRM of your choice).

giantrobot 3y ago

In what world is the Air's performance not reasonable? I have an M1 Air with 16GB of RAM and I've never felt like it was lagging behind me. It's my main computer which means it's used for work and every nerdy experiment I might run. The best part is I can do all of that shit all day long on the battery and the laptop is super easy to move/carry around. With no modifications or extra effort any thermal throttling I've ever encountered hasn't been noticeable. When the M1 Air first came out there were the breathless articles about thermal throttling. It's only something that will come up with extended periods of high CPU usage. I've tried to get my Air to thermally throttle and have only been able to do so doing 3D renders or running local LLMs for long periods (over an hour in my testing). Even long compiles don't really stress the CPU so much it throttles noticeably. The simple solution in that case was a $20 laptop stand with a fan off Amazon. If your use case is 100% CPU usage all the time either don't get an Air or get a cheap laptop stand with a built-in fan. If your Air isn't your CI/CD build machine or part of a render farm it'll be just fine.