Introducing the next generation of Mac

Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by kbar13 on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @01:55PM (#25049758)

as a software dev who went for air before the current gen of pro macbooks with hardware esc, dont do it

the air is really sluggish for anything but the lightest of tasks. there was even extremely noticeable latency using gmail.com

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by breck on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @02:58PM (#25050988)

I've been using Airs as my primary machine since 2010. I don't use bulky software (XCode, Adobe suite, Office, etc), so if you use any of that I wouldn't recommend it, but for software dev it's been plenty fast and a real joy to use.

The only time I'm speed constrained is deep learning, but generally I just run tiny test sets locally and then run full jobs on a cluster or the cloud.

In the mid 2010's I had a desktop with like 64GB of Ram and four million processors, and I found programming on the Air I was still more productive. Productivity wise I think it's a very high dimensional space to consider.

(P.S. Can't wait to get this new Air!!!)

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by hyperdimension on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @03:13PM (#25051218)

Honestly, I'm not even sure if that's an indictment of the hardware or gmail itself.

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by Aperocky on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @03:21PM (#25051333)

I place my faith in ARM and 5nm TSMC processing.

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by Zarel on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @04:06PM (#25051918)

There's a noticeable latency using gmail.com on my iMac Pro, too.

I've always used powerful desktops (Mac Pro, iMac Pro) and MacBook Airs while traveling, and while the Airs aren't very good for video games like StarCraft II, I've never had a problem with performance while doing anything else (I work in VS Code on TypeScript). My unit tests run in ~20 seconds on the MacBook Air as well as the iMac Pro.

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by minimaxir on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @01:58PM (#25049819)

The OP is likely referring to the newly-announced Air with the same M1 chip.

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by marc11111 on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @01:59PM (#25049869)

Agree for the current Macs. The new Air seems to have the same specs as the new 13" Pro though or is there a difference?

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by AnonHP on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @02:09PM (#25050079)

Since the new MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan while the MacBook Pro does, I’m sure there are some differences that Apple isn’t admitting right now. The battery life claimed by Apple is also higher on the Air compared to the Pro. Maybe the Air is throttled or runs at lower clock speeds.

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by wilsonnb3 on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @03:14PM (#25051241)

The base model air has 7 GPU cores instead of the 8 that the higher end Air, Pro, and Mini have.

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by ogjunkyard on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @02:33PM (#25050561)

If you configured them the same (chose the more expensive Air), the Air and the 13" Pro have the exact same specs from what I can tell other than a slightly brighter screen (500 nits vs. 400 nits) and slightly bigger battery (58.2 whr vs. 49.9 whr) on the 13" Pro.

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by mekster on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @05:13AM (#25057120)

Which air?

I've used the last 2 Air for developing including Photoshop and VMware fusion but I could work just fine.

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Re:Introducing the next generation of Mac by skrtskrt on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @03:41PM (#25051631)

I only notice any issues when driving a big 4k monitor - seems like the graphics is the limitation to me.

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