Well, apart from the lack of LTE connectivity. Please, [email protected], deliver me from the temptation to get another ThinkPad, just because they ship WWAN...

Until Apple finally starts shipping their home-grown modems (which does not seem soon), I wouldn't hold my breath.

iPads are available with WWAN -- not sure if home-grown or not, but still...

What about usb dongle?

They universally suck, and I always forget to take them. Same for LTE-to-WiFi hotspots.

(Edited to add: one of the great things about a MacBook [Air] is supposed to be that you just throw them in your backpack, and you can be productive, like, anywhere, without having to worry about battery life, or anything. Still, 'lack of connectivity' kinda kills that dream, which means I still carry my ThinkPad T14 gen3 (despite its power management flaws) or Surface Go2 (Potato Inside<tm>), where I would rather take my MacBook)

I'm assuming you don't have an iPhone?

iPhone and iPad tethering works extremely well. I've spent many days working via tethering and in practice it's just as good as having a card in the laptop IMO, other than a minor pause in connectivity when you open the laptop. Plus it's much cheaper.

It would be nice if they added a built-in option for people for whom money is truly no object, but it really is not a limitation that every impacts my in any significant way.

Isn't an iPhone (which you always have with you if you're in the Apple ecosystem) hotspot good enough for almost anything? I don't think the indirection slowdown could even be detected.

Also, I noticed a while back that connecting to the iPhone with a USB-C-to-Lightning cable got me a hardwired hotspot.

>Well, apart from the lack of LTE connectivity.

I have two unused SIMs with unlimited data (Thank you, Sprint/T-Mobile free line promotions), and would love to be able to put one to use.

I was burned pretty hard by the “air” product line. There used to be a whole ton of issues related to throttling, cooling, keyboard, and hinge issues. I used this thing as a daily driver during college.

Ended up switching up to a MBP, which is still in use today.

Anybody have any experience with today’s hw? With Apple silicon/arm, were they able to fix the over heating issues; or was the internal chassis redesigned to improve airflow?

Still sounds like it can get hot and throttle if pushed hard for a long period [0].

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m3-macbook-air...

They’re ultra portables. If your workload isn’t suited, MBP is the way to go.

Some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39595707

All of my Air’s have been the best laptops I’ve ever owned. Current M2 air is an excellent rig.

I'm confident that my M1 Air will last me another few years. It's quite great and I have no major criticism - which is rare for me.

What were you doing that prompted so much throttling? I have a sizablr array of microservices and databases I work on day to day, and it's such brief little

Personally I think the tradeoff is awesome for almost everyone. If you are a high powered user, a laptop fan pad is cheap and will prevent the 33% speed loss of throttling.

There's people who mod these laptops by bridging the heatsink to the case. It improves speed significantly. But it also makes the case uncomfortably hot under heavy use. I think this is a fine tradeoff Apple picked, to not optimize for speed. This is an Air. It should be very performant for most, just not under enduring load. I certainly would not call this an overheating issue.

In my experience, yes, the thermal and energy profiles are vastly improved. I went from an Intel MBP that was constantly throttled due to temp to a 2020 MBP with a M1 (13" 16G of RAM). I've done a bunch of development on it, mostly running Pycharm and Docker. I got the fan to come on once while editing/transcoding using iMovie or ffmpeg (I forget, it's been a while), running a few containers in Docker, and editing code in Pycharm.

The hardware also "feels" better to me. I had issues with the keyboard and video connection with the Intel MBP that I have not had with the 2020 M1 MBP which gets carried in a backpack pretty frequently.

I'm on the M2 MacBook Air, and it's pretty incredible. It runs cool, it's as fast as I could possibly want for daily tasks (I'm not doing video encoding or anything), and it's tiny. It's barely bigger than my iPad.

It's far faster than my top-end Intel MBP was. I haven't seen it struggle with anything yet.

I've found that where I used to take my iPad to do things (on the couch, in the car, etc.), now I take the MBA, because I might as well have my full computer setup. I've found I'm using my iPad a lot less overall.

I've been using Mac laptops since 2005, and it's easily the best I've ever had.

It's actually annoying that the MBPs are so much bigger and heavier for so little of an improvement in real-world usage (for non-gaming, non-video-editing tasks). They seem last-gen in comparison.

I have an M1 Air 16gb and it's the best computer I've ever owned by such a wide margin that it's hard to believe they could improve it. Hard to overstate how dramatic an improvement it is relative to intel machines, especially if you tend to push your computer. It almost never heats up, and the battery lasts forever. Remarkable engineering.

Before Apple Silicon, I'd agree with you - but that was mostly because Intel couldn't produce a low-power chip.

Now with M series, the Airs are quite nice and usable for most people. I'm typing this on a stock M1 Air and it's been perfect for non-professional usage (ie, hobby stuff).

The air line was bad until the m1 imho, now they're basically all you need unless you have very specific requirements

…and the base configuration still has 8 Gb of RAM.

I think the 256gb storage is an even bigger letdown, esp because small SSDs are slower and the swap writes will likely be focussed to a smaller area, increasing the degradation speed even further.

All in all, 16gb/512 should have been the default a long time ago but why do it when you can sell it for an additional $500

I'm a dev and have a base model m1, it never slowed down, if it's enough for my use it's probably enough for the millions of people who buy it to browse reddit and watch netflix. It's the base model of their entry level laptop, back in the days a macbook air would barely be enough to browse the web

I think it'll deserve that title when you can hook up two external displays without turning the laptop's display off

You can, as long as you close the laptop: https://support.apple.com/en-us/117373

I have no way of proving this (gotta love no edit history on HN) but I could swear "without turning the laptop's display off" wasn't there when I posted this comment. I wouldn't have posted this if I had seen it.

You're not crazy! I edited my comment to add that right before you replied

Honestly, that's a pretty niche use case for most people.

If you haven’t tried an ultrawide then give it a go. It’s a game changer.

I wonder what the reviewer normally uses the space in the center of the top task bar for?

Google Chrome on a 13” MacBook Air almost fills the entire menu bar on its own for me — you don’t need that many notification icons before some start disappearing. (I also think Google Chrome has way too many menu entries, but that’s a different discussion.)

Also, the fact that a menu item that doesn’t fit on the left of the notch by 1px has to move to the right as a whole means that the notch effectively takes up a lot more usable pixels than it seems at first glance.

Menu bar icons? Not too hard to get macOS to have a plethora of menu bar icons especially if your "looks like" resolution is low.

Do you mean the menu bar?

Still no touch screen?

Why?

Was expecting better battery life with 5nm->3nm, but it doesn't appear to be the case sadly. Logic board in the lid & more room in bottom case for battery could boost to 24hrs hopefully in the future.

I'll take the 16" MBP, thanks. I can get more memory, in my case 36GB vs. 24GB, I get more cores, and most importantly, I get more ports. Am I paying half as much again? Yes. But I'm getting a machine I can realistically use for at least twice as long, so it's a better value in the long run and delivers more capability over its lifetime. Obviously, YMMV.

I realized recently that my 16" M1 Max MBP is entering its third year of service for me. It still feels fast and I have plenty of disk space. I do wish I had more memory, but I have plenty for what I do now—though I'd want more if I did more with on-device LLMs.

I was tempted by the M3 Max, but I'll wait for M4 Max since my M1 Max is barely breaking a sweat.

For me, The Mx Pro/Max is a must-have since I tend to be a heavier user. For a casual user, though, I think the base Mx Air is a fine machine. In fact, I have a coworker doing SWE work on an M2 Air.

>I'll take the 16" MBP, thanks. I can get more memory, in my case 36GB vs. 24GB

My current and previous MacBooks have had 16GB and I've been fine with it, but given local LLMs I think I'm going to have to go to whatever will be the maximum RAM available for the next model.

Similarly, I am for the first time going to care about how much RAM is in my next iPhone. My iPhone 13's 4GB is suddenly inadequate.

> My current and previous MacBooks have had 16GB and I've been fine with it

I have too, but my MBP is from 2012! It's not unrealistic for me to consider a machine that's going to get me to 2034.

I would still be using my 2012 if the hinge hadn't become so loose as to not let the screen stand up!

They can’t get any better because MacOS has become trash.