Setting aside on-device LLMs, one needs RAM and disk space just for the multiple isolated Claude Cowork etc. VMs that will increasingly become part of people's everyday lives.

And when it's easier than ever to create an Electron app, everything's going to have an Electron app, with all the RAM/disk overhead that entails. And of course, nobody's asking their agents "optimize the resource usage of the app I made last week" - they're moving on to the next feature or project.

I suppose the demoscene will always be there, for those of us who increasingly need a refuge from ram-flation.

I've no idea what the storage is on either of them, I've never looked. The days of needing storage are behind me, personally

To me it's mostly about learning to mange RAM and storage space on your machine. A lot of stuff does not need to be hoarded on the machine. Move infrequently accessed data to an external drive. Be ruthless about purging stuff you no longer really need. Refuse to run apps that consume tens of GBs of RAM on a whim (looking at you Firefox, I've been impressed with how efficient and stable the Helium browser has been for me). If you are a developer, engineer for efficient use of RAM and storage.

Like I said, 16gb RAM and 512GB storage minimum is nice, but if the fundamental issues that contribute to massive and wasteful use of resources on our machines are not addressed, nothing will be enough.

But these devices are meant for home users.

Not a tremendous amount of home users having huge gradle/go/cargo/node packages in my experience.

The backup problem is real, I'm surprised Apple doesn't come out with a new time capsule (edit: for phones/tablets)- but I guess they want that sweet iCloud services dollar.

Today, the MBP is just way too powerful for anything other than specific use cases that need it.

Also its made out of metal.

Each Air generations gets slight upgrade and also now got 100usd price increase.

Which negative tone? 90% the mainline comments I see are positive.

Mobile hotspot is clunky and unreliable still. I don't see that changing in the next 5-10 years.

I can think of things like 4K video editing or 3D rendering but as a software engineer is there anything we really need to spend the extra money on an MBP for?

I'm currently on a M1 Max but am seriously considering switching to an MBA in the next year or two.

13.6 inch 2560x1664 screen, 1.23kg (13" Mac)

14.0 inch 1920x1200 screen, 0.98kg (14" Thinkpad)

I imagine there are still some rough edges (and it seems like distro choices are probably a bit lacking at the moment if you prefer something outside of a few specific mainstream options) but given how niche ARM support was before the first M1 machines, the progress that's happened so far is honestly pretty astounding. Given that the iterations from M[n] to M[n + 1] seem less large than the initial leap from Intel to M1, it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop.

As for Apple "supporting" Linux, my perception is that if they wanted to make it harder than it was for the people working on Asahi to even get this far, they almost certainly could have. It seems like they're probably doing the same thing that most laptop vendors do, which is not explicitly support it but also not go out of their way to block it either. For a company with the reputation and history Apple has, I think that's a pretty huge win for the community, and even as someone who overall has a somewhat negative inclination to purchase from them, I have to admit that they seem way less hostile to Linux on their ARM machines than I would have predicted.

I was on an M2 Macbook Pro with Asahi and it was great. It's really hard to fault Apple's hardware for most use cases.

I'm currently on a Strix Halo laptop (HP Zbook), which is about as expensive, and the hardware is great, but power efficiency and build quality lag leagues behind by Apple. A 4000 euro laptop still feels like a cheap toy.

PS. The biggest speedup I got this past year (10x) was switching to native TypeScript (tsgo) and native linting (biome or oxlint).

When the M1 came out it was quite frankly unbelievable. And, even after all these years, I still don't see who would beat it across those dimensions.

Looks to me like the base model went up by $100, no?

The whining is just whining. It's a fine laptop, but it's not significantly improved from the one they shipped a year ago. Add to that the fact that laptops as a whole are well on the way down their commoditization slope and the general HN desire to cheer about Great New Apple Devices, this is for sure a backwards step.

We can have nice things but nobody is going to hurt themselves to give out things that are the very best possible, theres probably a lesson in this

https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Air

(I'm still surprised Apple isn't bumping their prices more due to RAM pricing, but maybe they're absorbing a little bit of their margins to potentially increase market share.)

And costs ~800 more for 16Gb/512 with a slower CPU and worse battery life.

As someone who spends his life on the road with a laptop, I strongly feel that anything that works for you under 3lbs is the sweet spot. The difference between 2.2 and 2.7lbs is miniscule in the grand scheme of my backpack.

The only time Apple supported first class Linux on their consumer hardware was with MkLinux, and that was when everything was going down in flames and they needed to survive somehow.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Buy the mac, try Linux in an hour, take it back if you don't like it.

Regarding lightweight laptops, the Fujitsu FMV Note U series (14-inch) weighs only 634g-917g with Arrow Lake 255H and a replaceable battery.

I don't like Apple as a company and I don't particularly like MacOS, but no one except Apple makes a laptop worth a damn.

Kinda is, kinda isn't.

I tried a ThinkPad X1 Carbon as well, it felt like a toy.

This year is a lot more competitive than any of the past ~4 years for premium laptops.

The asus expertbook ultra even has a much better screen, a much better keyboard, and a very similar haptic trackpad. Weighs less than a 13 inch macbook air too. There's cheaper options too that are close to as good (minus the screen).

I beg to differ ;)

Amen to that, my keyboard on my m1 air recently failed. I was horrified to find out it is literally riveted to the frame. I got this close to buying a new one. Something annoyed me about this perfectly good laptop being rendered compltely useless and I ended up buying a replacement keyboard, ripping out the old one and shimming this one with paper. Its not perfect but here I am typing from it.

But you are 100% right, there is just nothing better on the market. The gap is so big.

It will be worse at almost everything, except running my preferred OS (Linux). Being able to upgrade/repair RAM, storage and battery at home is quite a perk too.

Plus you get x86_64 and vendor support for Linux.

X13 is probably the best equivalent in Lenovo's line.

- no Linux support

Otherwise I agree, it is a wonderful machine. I'd replace my crappy thinkpad if I could.

My 2014 Air is still going strong for light web browsing and terminal use.

All of the above is true but this, actually, is not entirely: they use a lot of DSP. If you try the same speakers with regular Fedora Asahi with no DSP profile (i.e. vanilla sound), they're very mediocre and do not handle bass well. So, like with many aspects of Apple hardware, this is an example of their software/firmware complimenting the hardware.

Sure, there's no single device that has Apple's blend of attributes, but who need that in this age of VMs and broadband Internet? My 32-core HEDT workstation outperforms anything Apple branded. I have a Chromebook when I need to be unplugged (<10% or the time)

And I do work as a software developer, so anyone doing lighter usage not in this camp will feel the same.

M5 Air should be pretty much the same.

Time "Machine" on MacOS continues to work (though it's clearly not as important to Apple as it once was).

The issue is: if you want to back up a phone: it will take space from your laptop and it must be tethered to do the backup. This means that if you have a 1TiB phone, like I do, you need at least 1TiB of local disk on your laptop to be able to do a single backup if the phone is anywhere near full.

This is in contrast to how Time Capsule works right now for MacOS, whereby you have an SMB share (like, a 100+TiB NAS) and your laptop will just back itself up when it can.

Such a feature would be pretty killer on iPhones/iPads, or having a "photo server" to offload your photos... idk, but Apple won't do it.

Local software development (node/TS). When opus-4.6-fast launched, it felt like some of the limiting factor in turnaround time moved from inference to the validation steps, i.e. execute tests, run linter, etc. Granted, that's with endpoint management slowing down I/O, and hopefully tsgo and some eslint replacement will speed things up significantly over there.

The Apple ARM processors are still in a league of their own but personally I'm not willing to give up my OS freedom of choice for that advantage.

The last time I was excited about the performance of local computers was in the 90s I think.

Modern laptops are so insanely fast. Not sure if they are 2x, 10x or 100x faster than I need them to be. But I never hear fans. I never have to wait for the machine these days.

> in literally every benchmark you can come up

Nope, Panther Lake will win most gaming benchmarks. The M5 will win most others but not by "running laps around" levels.

That benchmark is really important to me due to RSI. Track points save me a buttload of hand pain.

So the minority that goes further than that doesn't matter? Also "rare occasion there is no wifi" is a very city-centric view, and a bit out of touch. We're talking about a trillion dollar hardware company here, asked to add a tiny modem to a laptop. It's a dead simple change.

If I was in the position to buy a premium laptop, work on the go a lot, and enjoy being in nature, I'd 100% want cellular in my laptop. There's zero downsides for someone like that.

I’ve always felt they weren’t really worth it for performance per dollar spent. For C++ work I just use a non-Mac workstation. For lighter workloads the Mac Mini is very capable already.

Airs are good for the general use case but some development (rust, C++) really eat cores and memory like nothing else.

I’m not sure why this happens or who formulates these recommendations, but I’ve seen it before with students in fields that just don’t do much heavy duty computation or video editing being told to buy laptops with top-of-the-line specs.

It is disappointing they didn't up it to at least 256GB on the laptops, but we'll have to wait for the next iteration of the studio to see if they'll give us 1TB unified memory.

Also, have you ever used an iPad with a cellular modem? It's a far better experience than tethering. One (larger) battery to run down instead of two, lower latency (the extra hop from iPad to phone over Wi-Fi is gonna add at least a few dozen ms to every single web request), and best of all, I don't have to think about it. I don't have to wait, or fumble around with my phone. I take my iPad out on the train, turn cellular data on in the control center, and in half a second I'm connected to 5G. It's a vastly better way to connect on the go. Tethering is a last resort for me.

I don't follow this one. You can buy Apple hardware from other retailers. You can download software, out of the box, from places other than the Mac App Store.

However there is no comparable laptop hardware in the non-Apple world. Even if I wanted to pay double, there is no usable fanless high-quality quick laptop. Very sadly. The Air is just too good for the money and the competition too bloody incompetent and bad.

I like the UI. What do you think they making worse?

Or you really, really need to drive eight displays from a single machine.

For "home user" stuff a Mac mini or MacBook is going to do everything you ever need (in fact, they have the problem where the M1 systems are still perfectly capable, six years later).

The entry-level option however does constitute a forced bump in minimum-spend on the part of the customer of $100, even if in a spec-vs-spec comparison there is no bump. And you can argue this isn't great for an entry-level apple laptop mostly for casual users that don't need or are willing to pay for 512gb.

But the cheaper macbook is set to be announced tomorrow, probably filling some of the gap the M4->M5 left behind. So I think that probably neatly resolves it. Looks like it all makes sense.

It could also be possible that compsci kids have a powerful desktop at home, or are more savvy with university cloud computing, for any edge cases or computationally expensive tasks.

It’s still remarkable to me that it’s even possible to do it at all. The amount of tech and miniaturization crammed into that thing — it would be easier for them to rivet, weld, and glue every part, and cheaper. And if the build quality weren’t so high to begin with, it wouldn’t have withstood the repair at all.

A good friend has a Framework, and it’s cool as hell, but incredibly primitive compared with your M1.

Also if you'd just spent that extra 120 bucks for the 3 year onsite warranty, you'd have a lenovo technician replacing your motherboard at a location of your choice the next working day.

The MacBook Air has ~16 GiB RAM. The Desktop has 128 GiB, and a lot more processing power and disk space.

The ranking is MacOS >> Linux >> Windows. The Apple ecosystem is expensive but worth it if you can afford it (iPhone + Watch + iPad + AirPods + Mac.)

Here's holding out hope that we'll still be able to see an M5 Ultra then! :)

Because iPads are fundamentally different than laptops. Workers use tablets in the field all the time, often for shorter, quick, one-off checks and such. If you're in a fleet truck or on a job site, having a tablet on the passenger seat to check on work orders is easy. Pulling out a laptop is a much bigger pull, and more awkward.

I was about to write a post mourning how much I wish Panther Lake really could compete, but lacked the memory bandwidth to offer a real challenge. But supposedly it can go up to 9600MT/s which would bring Panther Lake to ~150GB/s.

I am curious what the NPU on M5 has. The 50 TOp/s on Panther Lake is... fine. Apple is really seeing huge success with MLX, with an adoptable software stack that the PC world is super struggling to deliver.

My linux laptop (32GB ram / beefy gpu) barely withstand 40 min on battery, but can handle very daunting tasks, and obviously gaming.

These are 2 different use cases, but right now, for the ultra portable laptop, Air is the king, until x64 brings back the efficiency per watt. Even qcom can't compete. That being said, I am a big fan of the apple hardware and not the apple software, so whenever Asahi linux is ready enough (with good battery life), I am definitely jumping ship.

linux does not apply here. General consumer doesn’t even know what linux is.

It has just gotten a single dent for something less than 0.5 cm and its on the side (although this damage was done when the laptop was closed so some damage is just above the laptop's display aluminium shell.

To be honest, its barely visible and everything is working and there was no damage on display or anything else for what its worth.

I usually don't like apple but damn the macbook air is tiny and can take some damage.

Although I am still just a little sad about the damage because the laptop was perfect condition beforehand now that we talked about it but its incredibly better than any other laptop atleast with that thing in mind. Gonna use this laptop for a long time (M1 Air)

So I guess I'll wait for the next cycle and hope they return to the "Air" idea again.

I don’t understand why other laptop manufacturers don’t copy the Apple trackpad.

For an RRP of £3,259.99?

Compare that to the base 512GB, 16GB memory macbook air @ £1099.

The next comparable X1 Carbon I can find is: https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...

RRP: £1,900.00 with this crappy display: 14" WUXGA (1920 x 1200), IPS, Anti-Glare, Non-Touch, 100%sRGB, 400 nits, 60 Hz

(EDIT: ninja’d, I see.)

> it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop

It's not a heatsink by default.

People have been modding theirs to make this contact, though. And been getting a significant performance boost out of it.

Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?

Apple traditionally keeps a simple line-up of 3 or 4 models per product category. And each product has limited simple upgrade options consisting of normal vs expanded ram/storage/cpu.

Could they technically create 300 models with every permutation? From cellular, to touch-screen laptop, oled/led screen, different ports, battery sizes etc.

Sure, but they'd be confusing their customers with a complicated product offering and adding complexity in their supply chain hurting their margins, to pursue ever smaller niches that don't improve their bottom line, while competing with small niche brands that already cater to this demand.

And what's the point? You have cellular on your phone and a $3 usb cable plugs it into electricity, meaning you already have cellular for your laptop. You can buy dedicated cellular hotspots the size of a Airpods case that you can throw into any bag, jean or or jacket pocket.

Now if a cellular modem was a $1 part, sure, throw it in there. But it's not, again if you look at industry prices it adds between $100 and $300 to the retail price.

A $200 price bump makes sense for a common need, not for a niche use for an entry-level laptop model, in fact raising the price of an entry-level laptop by $200 is absolutely nuts for a minority use. Niche users can plug in their phone or buy a dedicated hotspot. You say I have a city-centric view, sorry but I don't know if you're not familiar with the typical macbook air buyer. Southpark did a satirical episode about them and it's not far from the truth.

Macbook Pro would be a different story, but this thread is about the air. I do think they'll introduce it in the next 2 years because Apple started to build its own modems. Previously they'd basically increase their entry-level product by a lot just to offload the majority of that price increase as revenue for Qualcomm, it was an entirely bad business decision and no surprise they didn't take it.

Can't replace the nob anymore either, as the convex knob was arguably the best

PTL’s highest SKU is comparable to the base M5 for only multicore perf at double the power use in every benchmark I’ve seen. It lags significantly behind in single core.

But I’d love to see a benchmark showing otherwise.

Just the latest I’ve seen https://youtu.be/7OxE7FwJPJM?si=b5T0PbmhUD1TXhX4

But I can find none that have PTL actually anywhere near M5 without strapping a much larger battery to the device

The 128gb limitation feels like it's portrayed as a limitation of the M5 chip itself -- not just of the Macbook Air product line.

Ads and nags in the Windows World are drawn using the same HTML-based technology that has replaced Windows native apps since Windows 8, the ads and nags in MacOS are the 2025 anti-antialiased retreads of the 1999 MacOS X imitations of the modal dialogs from 1984 MacOS classic. It’s sad. When I set up a new Mac for my wife she was furious at how ad infested it was, especially to browse the web with Safari and if you want to add an ad blocked you need an Apple Account which is something she’s done without using macs for 20+ years.

For instance, the inability to write to NTFS filesystems without addons is annoying.

But I believe that for most users, the default MacOS experience is now much better than what Windows is with default settings.

I think the X1 Carbon line is the best direct competitor.

… if it’s not the power layer, it’s the network, video, Bluetooth that won’t power up anymore after a nap

This gets mentioned a lot, but I do quite a bit of dev work on my M4 MBA and have never even felt it get warm. Sustained heavy loads are extremely rare with how quick this thing is.

I’m really happy with bringing my local workstation with me to a cafe, a coworking space, or on a trip. I love conveniently having one device for nearly everything, from AI fine-tuning to general development to gaming. And I love having a 12-hour battery life under normal use and USB-C charging. The screen is beautiful and great for watching movies on, too.

If you want one computing device, in total, a MacBook is a great choice. It’s overkill in most areas for most people, but it’s not deficient for anyone, and that matters a lot.

Your high end hardware is not their target market / competition until you get into very purposeful tasks.

The market segment that exists for Macbook Pro is one where competitors battery life sucks, windows isnt the preferred OS, and high performance on a portable device on battery is beneficial. Its one where they have acceptable performance vs a dedicated desktop but remain portable and a good expected lifespan, as a portable.

I imagine once a lot of the cleanup and maintenance is done on what they have, they'll be in a better spot to accelerate support for other SoCs, and it probably won't be half a decade before the M6 or whatever is supported.

All said, Apple could just spend a tiny tiny amount of their warchest and just ship some goddamn drivers for Linux a la Boot Camp and save the Asahi team the time divining it from the tea leaves.

I don't even use windows (beyond gaming). The Jedi and I are just off on the ends of the bell curve pointing and the stupid numbers on the stupid price tag.

There are only a couple of relatively niche spaces where things like cpu performance are really the bottleneck right now.

Hell - RPi 5 is perfectly fine for a huge range of development tasks. The 8gb version is very reasonable $125.

Can you find things that these boxes can't do? Absolutely. Do most developers do those things? ehhhh probably not. Especially not in the webdev space.

Would I still pick a nice machine if given the chance? Sure, I have cash to burn and I like having nice laptops (although not Apple...).

But part of the "AI craze" is that hardware genuinely is commoditized, and manufacturers really, REALLY wanted a new differentiating factor to sell people more laptops. There's not much reason to upgrade, especially if the old machine was a decent machine at time of purchase.

I have 8 year old dell XPS laptops that do just fine for modern dev.

You can run docker in WSL better than you can on a Mac. You can run Linux natively on that box, too. "Stacks" is sort of ambiguous (my world is embedded junk, and the answer for using a mac with these oddball USB flashers and whatnot is pretty much "Just No, LOL"), but to claim that the mac is more broadly capable in these spaces when it is clearly less is.... odd.

Macs are popular among the SV set, so macs are strong in whatever the SV set thinks is important (thus "I bought a Mac Mini for OpenClaw!"). And everything else runs on $350 windows garbage.

However, the fact that the aluminum gets hot during prolonged use means that it is acting as a heat sink and cooling the CPU compared to a body made of plastic. Thermodynamics, it's the law!

The Intel MacBook Pro I had before that one got far, far hotter - almost scalding hot if you really pushed it - without any modifications.

Nice slippery slope.

All they need is 2-3 higher-end configs to start with (aka people who are already spending more on RAM/storage) with an additonal checkbox for 5G/cellular. It may not be optimal for business, but there's a market for it, I guarantee you.

They literally make $200 ipad keyboards that are extremely unremarkable yet they still sell well.

They make a vision pro, that can't even do a quarter the things a $1000 macbook can do; and still build them to this day, despite the massive complexity of that hardware combined with the tiny target market.

But a cell modem in a computer is too niche? You know the ipad has had modems right? Is a macbook any less deserving of a modem (or any less difficult to add a modem too) than an ipad?

It comes off on my T14s Gen 1 and the T14s Gen 5 that replaced it.

Battery life in sleep (and in general) could be better, but on the whole I've been quite happy with it.

Only Apple has been laser-focused to give us this experience.

I do hope that it’s fixed though. I haven’t followed Windows laptops that closely, but my work laptop from a few years ago does lose battery surprisingly quickly when “sleeping”.

It's been five years since M1 and Intel has never been competitive in single-core perf per watt with Apple. It would be surprising if it changed.

Something like Framework is more expensive thanks to RAM abd SSD shortage, but Linux support is so much better.

I was pretty pissed off when warranty accidentally replaced it with US layout (battery went under 80% which means top case replacement which basically feels like brand new laptop).

On a current ThinkPad? Essentially perfect. Zero problems suspending and resuming, no matter what's going on, including weird cases like suspending while docked and resuming while undocked or vice versa.

You can, with Tailscale! I had edited my original comment to remove how I occasionally[1] remote to the workstation, but I found out empirically that I typically don't do anything that needs more than 2 cores at a cafe - a $300 Chromebook or $100 second-hand laptop will do.

By all means, if the Macbook hits your sweet-spot of trade-offs, more power to you. Car brand A may have the quickest, most-fuel-efficient, all-wheel drive, convertible coupé, but there are other vehicle types. Perhaps a bicycle and an SUV is a better combination for some other people.

1. I'd say abuut once per year.

Here's the kicker: it cost about the same as the highest end Macbook pro before the RAM madness.

> The market segment that exists one where battery life sucks, windows isnt the preferred OS, and some high performance on a portable device on battery is beneficial.

I agree the market exists, but think it's much smaller than it appears: most people do not work under these constraints most of the time; a cheap laptop + beefy desktop could do a better job in aggregate, wirh greater flexibility, especially for people who spend most of their time at the desk with their computer plugged in - which is most people.

I suspect the portability requirement is sometimes aspirational, similar to the people who buy trucks overestimating the number of times they'll need to cary stuff on the truck bed.

That being said, I am pretty clumsy but I have never dropped any hardware except a dumb phone which I threw out a lot and it was so small and tiny but it never had any problem.

And then one day I dropped it from top just a little bit and let it drop/slide inside my bag (like a cushion) and that day it died. I recently asked someone about it and turns out that its battery got inflated.

I'll take the extra weight of aluminum (0.3lb, 130g). Yes, someone might say the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is 14", but the 13" MacBook Air actually has a 13.6" screen.

If I were in the market for a PC laptop, I'd definitely take a look at the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but I'm also not worried about the weight of my MacBook Air. The X1 Carbon Intel ones are on sale right now since Panther Lake will be a huge upgrade coming soon, but even on clearance they aren't cheap. An X1 Carbon with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage (Ultra 7 268V, the cheapest one due to the sale) will cost $1,679 while a similar MacBook Air will cost $1,699 - and the M5 has 48% better single-core performance and 56% better multi-core performance (Geekbench). A 16GB/512GB (Ultra 5 225U) X1 Carbon is $1,538 compared to $1,099 for a MacBook Air - and the M5 has a 74% single and multi core advantage there.

Panther Lake might narrow the performance gap, but early indicators don't seem like that's the case. Even the top of the line Ultra X9 388H sees the M5 with a 36% single-core advantage while the Ultra X9 388H gets 3% faster multi-core. And I'm not sure the higher wattage "H" processors work for something like an X1 Carbon.

The highest non-H Panther Lake processor (Ultra 7 365) sees the M5 get 51% better single-core and 58% better multi-core. Maybe we'll see better, but it looks like Intel isn't closing the gap in 2026.

But I do agree with you. Thankfully it is minimal relative to windows.

With the way most consumer laptops have their fan curves set, you open a new web page and get an annoying ramp up. It is not just a hardware thing, but mostly a self inflicted wound of having a fan curve that is way too aggressive.

Them's the breaks.

The difference in displays (Pro much brighter) and size/weight (Air much lighter) are much more significant considerations, IMO.

I really do hope that Linux becomes an option in more workplaces without being too locked down for developers.

That said, I just don't think I can keep buying Apple hardware, just not a fan of the company... I only begrudgingly use Android as there isn't a reasonable, more open option.

I'll probably stick with my M1 air for personal use a couple more years then pass it on. My daughter is still using my now 13yo rMBP with 16gb/512gb. I wish the ram and storage upgrades on mac weren't so overpriced.

Not really. It's picking up "stray heat" that is radiated from the copper heatsink inside and conduction from the air in the fan system. It does not improve cooling the processor in any kind of manner. If it were plastic, the plastic would get warm too. Maybe it'll be a 2 degree difference.

Direct contact or bust.

Until Windows leaves it in S0 state while its in your backpack :)

My Lenovo does this every week, such a joy.

* My MacMini was constantly beachballing and, unfortunately, it took me a long time to realize that there was a problem with the device.

* I now have a 2023 MBP that screams like a "Formula Un" racing car.

I suspect you have a faulty device.

edit: Just saw that you live far away from an Apple store. I imagine you could mail it in for some type of service, but obviously, that's not optimal if you have no immediate replacement.

Yes, the MacBook Air is unique-ish for having no fan at all, but a slow running fan that you can barely hear is going to get you more performance with basically zero added cost or compromise.

And for those users who don’t need top performance and just need an affordable office app machine, I’d argue that Snapdragon laptops have the same primary benefits as the MacBook Air.

In terms of competition against x86, Apple is only ahead of competition in their latest two or so generations and only in specific ways.

Want to play games sometimes like 936 million other PC gamers in the world? (The fastest growing segment of people who buy computers) You’ll pay a lot less for an Omen Transcend 14 than a MacBook Pro at the same specs and you’ll get a system with a very similar noise and battery life profile, along with far Better graphics performance.

I don’t personally think Windows is so bad compared to Mac in terms of annoyances. Mac nags you about all of Apple’s subscription services and you can’t even uninstall their apps like News and Stocks. Microsoft lets you uninstall everything including Notepad. It’s really not that annoying after about 5 minutes changing settings and uninstalling some things.

If we are talking about buying a used Mac we are also talking about buying a computer that will lose software support before the Windows equivalent historically. E.g., you buy an M2 MacBook Air and you’ve got about 7 years left or less before you lose major OS versions. Almost guarantee you that won’t be the case with any reasonably recent Windows PC that supports 11 today. My

I use clang to compile on both machines. The M1 mac has noticeably faster compile times.

It might be marginal, though.

And you're right, I can't uninstall Stocks or News, but I if I never open them, does it matter?

Windows is offensive, insufferable trash. From its CONTINUAL hounding about "your Microsoft account" to its bug-riddled, regressive, and shambolic UI. Things Windows users took for granted 40 years ago are simply gone.

Example: Select three PNGs in Explorer and right-click on them, and look for "Open with..."

I had a Mac Studio that would kernel panic on a semi-weekly basis. Apple Care put me through the reinstall OS / remove all external devices tap-dance for weeks, insisting that hardware was the last thing to suspect - before Apple Silicon, kernel panics were almost always hardware, particularly RAM.

Ultimately I bought another Studio and swapped it in - kernel panics went away. With that evidence, Apple acknowledged the problem and exchanged my Studio for another one from the factory. I returned the swap unit within the 30 day window, so it didn't cost me anything but annoyance.

The feeling is exactly like the way it was with Windows circa 2005 when you expected your machine to go bad like cheese in a few months.

When I bought my iPhone 17 the sales associate even tried to pitch signing up for the trial in person as he guided me through the purchase process.

When you cancel the trial it ends it immediately instead of ending it at the end of your trial period, a dark pattern designed to encourage you to forget to end your trial.

Apple devices also nag you about buying AppleCare in the system preferences.

I’ve never been hounded about my Microsoft account. Be specific. When does this happen? Yes, you need one to set up Windows 11 (just like a Mac and especially iOS are basically useless without an Apple account anyway), but after that I’ve never been hounded around anything related to it.

Never had problems figuring out how to open stuff in Windows. No idea what you’re saying.

Most of these extreme claims about Windows seem to come from people who don’t even use the OS regularly and have forgotten about the ways in which macOS does many of the same commercial OS practices.

Backup, reset to factory. Try using it, if it’s fixed, try restoring. If it’s not fixed it’s defective in some way.

If it’s broken only after you restore, manually import your data and install apps one at a time making sure nothing breaks before installing the next.

Also airpods move instantly here. No issues.

kextstat | grep -v com.apple

would show anything _maybe_ troublesome, but not guaranteed related.

I cannot install Windows without a Microsoft account unless I apply work-arounds.

It constantly offers Office 365, even adding dummy icons to the start menu.

There are adverts on the login screen.

To be fair I installed Bazzite there, but for a laptop I cannot find an equivalent device at the same price point even ignoring the need for linux drivers.

I had a long string of Windows laptops that were basically OK from maybe 2013 to 2023 except for problems with USB that got progressively worse over time (for each machine.) I think some of them were were real hardware problems but I think also the USB 3 spec doesn't guarantee that you can plug in very many devices and have it work, it depends on the PCIe architecture inside the machine. That "ding" sound when a USB device disconnects from windows has traumatized me and I've turned it off anywhere where I can because it is like a gunshot to a Vietnam vet.

I found very little literature about other Windows laptops users facing these problems but endless posts by AppleCare frequent fliers who seem to spend their lives at the Genius Bar and getting their old defective laptops replaced with new defective laptops, I think Windows users just expect it to be all screwed up.

For a long time Windows has struggled with processes that suck down a lot of resources at boot time. At home it is things that do software updates and saturate my 2x20Mbps internet connection. At work it is the backup program that saturates my Ethernet.

My wife browses the web a lot on that Mac, she hasn't complained since I installed Firefox + uBlock Origin but maybe she expects it to be slow.