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Daniel Bryan posted:People have been this crazy about stuff, but I feel like people are misunderstanding what the MBA is. In their (extremely light) defense, we had to sell people on the 2011 model by being like “no, actually it’s way more powerful and capable than you think. No, it’s really better than the Pro. Really. It really is. I promise you, thats the one you want to get. It will be faster and better. For real. No you aren’t going to burn any DVDs....”
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May 16, 2020 13:56
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The MBA is cursed by the 2012-2013 model being the basic “I need a laptop” recommendation. Now the 2020 sits where the old 12” MacBook used to sit. If you just want some computer to do things, the 2 port MBP is a much better buy I think.
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May 16, 2020 17:46
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The thermals on my i9-9980HK MBP are really great, haven't noticed any throttling. It's a speedy motherfucker.
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May 16, 2020 17:58
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Imagine getting a 20-30% performance boost from just 1mm of extra thicc. Or XPS style vapor chamber. But nah, apple target demographic would notice the thickness more than the performance. Bring back 2008 thickness. Call it a Pro S Max. Change $5999 for it.
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May 16, 2020 18:53
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Part of the issue is that “can it edit 4K” has quickly gone from being something that no laptop could really do to a pro/prosumer feature to a mainstream “new grandpa editing clips from his phone” feature kind of all at once.
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May 16, 2020 18:55
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Shaocaholica posted:Imagine getting a 20-30% performance boost from just 1mm of extra thicc. Or XPS style vapor chamber. But nah, apple target demographic would notice the thickness more than the performance. Adding more cooling doesn’t change the processor being a 10W part. Don’t buy a MacBook Air if you want performance in more than 10-30 second chunks. Buy a MacBook Pro.
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May 16, 2020 19:10
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Penisaurus Sex posted:Adding more cooling doesn’t change the processor being a 10W part. I was speaking in general. The MBPs could use some extra cooling too. Shaocaholica fucked around with this message at 21:06 on May 16, 2020 |
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May 16, 2020 20:37
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Ok Comboomer posted:Part of the issue is that “can it edit 4K” has quickly gone from being something that no laptop could really do to a pro/prosumer feature to a mainstream “new grandpa editing clips from his phone” feature kind of all at once. "Well, my Apple phone can record 4k60... are you saying my much bigger COMPUTER, which costs twice as much- can't edit it in a timely fashion???"
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May 16, 2020 20:50
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I agree re: TDPs on the Air, it doesn't make any sense except as a web browsing device, and then, why wouldn't you just buy an iPad? I remain convinced they A) expected greater perf/watt improvements out of Intel by now, but they should have already learned that lesson on the 2019 Pro  and B ) macOS maintaining compatability with both ARM and x86 [in any sort of reasonably unified fashion] is proving harder than they thought, else, why not throw an A13 in the MBA and call it a day?
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May 16, 2020 21:42
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Crunchy Black posted:I agree re: TDPs on the Air, it doesn't make any sense except as a web browsing device, and then, why wouldn't you just buy an iPad? I remain convinced they A) expected greater perf/watt improvements out of Intel by now, but they should have already learned that lesson on the 2019 Pro It fills the same hole left by the outgoing 12” MacBook and fits the needs of the same target market from that. The “good for drat near everyone” laptop is the 2 port MBP.
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May 16, 2020 21:59
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Penisaurus Sex posted:It fills the same hole left by the outgoing 12” MacBook and fits the needs of the same target market from that. That’s not how these laptops are being marketed though.
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May 16, 2020 22:07
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There's nothing wrong with the Air, it fits the $999 Macbook price point just fine and will be perfect for the millions and millions of college students who will buy them by the truckload.
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May 16, 2020 22:20
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I'm not saying there isn't a niche there, I'm saying, Apple is being absoute rear end at filling it right now and people in this thread need to buy Pros if they're going to do anything more than install Chrome. That is a substantive difference in the model lineup compared to how its been leveraged in the past.
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May 16, 2020 22:29
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Shaocaholica posted:Imagine getting a 20-30% performance boost from just 1mm of extra thicc. Or XPS style vapor chamber. But nah, apple target demographic would notice the thickness more than the performance. 
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May 16, 2020 22:45
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Crunchy Black posted:I'm not saying there isn't a niche there, I'm saying, Apple is being absoute rear end at filling it right now and people in this thread need to buy Pros if they're going to do anything more than install Chrome. That is a substantive difference in the model lineup compared to how its been leveraged in the past. The Air is just fine for all kinds of things. MS Office is less demanding than web browsing, outside of edge cases like huge Excel-based financial models. Lots of popular applications are either run through the browser, or their desktop versions literally are Chrome (well, technically, Chromium) thanks to Electron. Lots and lots of people don't need anything more out of a computer than, "runs a web browser, runs Word, plays Netflix, plays Spotify, and can do my taxes once a year." If you want to do any video editing, batch processing (like raw photo import off an SD card, or compiling largeish chunks of software), or for some reason you want to game on a Mac, then a Pro is a better choice. For everybody else, the Air does a perfectly reasonable job.
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May 16, 2020 22:49
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Crunchy Black posted:I'm not saying there isn't a niche there, I'm saying, Apple is being absoute rear end at filling it right now and people in this thread need to buy Pros if they're going to do anything more than install Chrome. That is a substantive difference in the model lineup compared to how its been leveraged in the past.
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May 16, 2020 22:58
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Did electron apps suddenly get better? They’ve been resource hogs as long as I’ve used them. I could see a low spec Air choking if you have a heavy Chrome instance, Discord, Atom/VSCode/Whatever.
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May 16, 2020 23:09
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Ironic the people who need more performance are relatively poor compared to those who just need a web laptop.
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May 16, 2020 23:17
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Mister Facetious posted:"Well, my Apple phone can record 4k60... are you saying my much bigger COMPUTER, which costs twice as much- can't edit it in a timely fashion???" pretty reasonable to be surprised by this if you're not a tech nerd though
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May 16, 2020 23:34
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Penisaurus Sex posted:Did electron apps suddenly get better? They’ve been resource hogs as long as I’ve used them. Electron eats a lot of RAM, but it's not as bad as you'd think looking at activity monitor/task manager/top. There's a lot of caching, as well as uncollected garbage and straight-up free space, that can be pushed out if Chromium sees memory pressure. Chromium will actually allocate memory in big chunks, and not bother to give it up if it sees that there's a decent chunk of free system memory. It does a lot of its own memory management, and OS-level malloc and free calls are relatively expensive operations. There's an interesting dive into how things look for Electron memory consumption from the development side, rather than just "I see a big number of megabytes next to that process name!" here: http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/ quote:Electron will truly eat free memory (documentation defines as “The total amount of memory not being used by applications or disk cache.”) until it gets pressure from the OS. Maybe this is a combination of disk cache from loading the images because working set size and previous measures of RSS don’t match up with how much of free gets used Microsoft has some documentation about Teams memory usage, as well, complete with a graph that shows scaling across different amounts of installed RAM: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-memory-usage-perf Basically, if you give Electron/Chromium more RAM, it'll take it. And, to take this back to Apple hardware - the very lowest-end, cheapest Macbook has eight gigs of RAM. Eight gigs isn't enough for everybody, but it's acceptable for most lower-demand users. Lots of people complain about how Electron apps are eating all their precious RAM, but there aren't a lot of people saying "this brand new MBA is too slow!" for usage that doesn't produce sustained CPU work/heat output. Space Gopher fucked around with this message at 00:20 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 00:01
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Weedle posted:pretty reasonable to be surprised by this if you're not a tech nerd though That's the joke. People don't necessarily know you need a gpu for fast video editing. They see the price and assume more = better than.
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May 17, 2020 01:48
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The dirt that is unseen cannot be unseen.
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May 17, 2020 02:33
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Shaocaholica posted:Imagine getting a 20-30% performance boost from just 1mm of extra thicc. Or XPS style vapor chamber. But nah, apple target demographic would notice the thickness more than the performance. You have a point, but XPS has been bad for a while and it remains to be seen whether the vapour chamber (which is only on the 17 as well) will help it.
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May 17, 2020 04:17
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Crunchy Black posted:I'm not saying there isn't a niche there, I'm saying, Apple is being absoute rear end at filling it right now and people in this thread need to buy Pros if they're going to do anything more than install Chrome. That is a substantive difference in the model lineup compared to how its been leveraged in the past. 
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May 17, 2020 04:20
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American McGay posted:This is absurd lmao. Uh well yall have fun buying underpowered Intel machines that Apple is overcharging you for lol And I say this as a huge Intel Mac apologist. what niche is it filling, pray tell? edit just to make sure I'm absolutely clear: the Air should have more *effective* power than it does. The A-whatever ARM and or macOS version to support it in situ weren't ready so we have the current situation. Crunchy Black fucked around with this message at 05:16 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 05:11
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Does anyone with a new MacBook Air have any recommendations for either an HDMI or (full size) Displayport adapter that will 100% definitely work at driving a 4k 60Hz monitor? The USB-C to Displayport cable that works with my Windows laptop worked for about a minute before prompting a 'not enough power' warning on my MacBook Air and then stopped working altogether. I have a USB-C hub with an HDMI port that only works for 4K 30Hz. It's really hard to find info on whether any particular product will do 4K 60Hz on the Air as opposed to the Pro, so first hand experience would be pretty great.
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May 17, 2020 06:59
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American McGay posted:This is absurd lmao. I think a better way of putting it is that Apple (and lots of other companies, of course) set the tone in the early/mid 2000s for differentiating between “consumer” and “professional” laptop, and for what criteria shoppers could use to tell them apart. Apple in particular really hitched their brand identity to creative work—filmmaking, photo editing, digital art, and so forth. And for a while it was really easy to be like “gonna edit serious stuff? get a MacBook Pro. Not really gonna edit stuff? Regular MacBook is fine for you.” In the last ten years those metrics have dramatically changed. If the videos that you post on Facebook or send to your friends are shot in 4K, because every camera that you own is somehow now a 4K camera, then “can it do 4K” stops being a useful means to differentiate “consumer” vs “prosumer”. A decade ago, we were still in the 5D Mk2 era, where professional-quality 1080p video capture had juuuuust become accessible to the average prosumer at $2500 minus lenses. The DSLR revolution was happening in the digital video space. Phones shot images that were 0.1 megapixel, 1.0 mp, 3.0 mp and took VGA-scale video. There was zero danger in 2010 that the video you shot on your iPhone 3GS would be too much for your polycarb MacBook. Apple needs to reframe how they tier out their computers, or make hardware changes (ARM chip, video coprocessor, etc) that allow users to, say—easily transition from recording 4K video of their child or pet on their iPhone or iPad to quickly editing it on a MacBook Air. That’s the vision that Apple’s been selling since iMovie. And now that the A13 has proven itself capable of handling basic 4K work the deficiencies in the low-power intel hardware become more clear. trilobite terror fucked around with this message at 09:27 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 09:24
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YouTube is what I’d be worried about on the MacBook Air, given what it randomly does to my MacBook Pro. Also a very common use case.
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May 17, 2020 09:45
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Sri.Theo posted:YouTube is what I’d be worried about on the MacBook Air, given what it randomly does to my MacBook Pro. Also a very common use case. I haven't had an issue with YouTube running at 1440p in Chrome on my 2020 i5 16GB Air. In general I haven't had any real performance issues with it outside of using IntelliJ IDEA with a bunch of other poo poo open (Chrome, Slack, Steam, etc.) causing the fan to spin up a lot (and it still manages to feel fairly snappy). I don't do any video/photo editing though, mostly general usage and light dev work.
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May 17, 2020 10:10
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Crunchy Black posted:Uh well yall have fun buying underpowered Intel machines that Apple is overcharging you for lol I'm saying the premise that the Macbook Air can't do anything more than "run Chrome" is absurd. It does 95% of what it's intended target needs it to do.
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May 17, 2020 16:28
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Ok Comboomer posted:I think a better way of putting it is that Apple (and lots of other companies, of course) set the tone in the early/mid 2000s for differentiating between “consumer” and “professional” laptop, and for what criteria shoppers could use to tell them apart. The vast, vast majority of people don't do any video editing more sophisticated than "cut a selection from a single longer shot," and they almost invariably do it straight from their phone. Cutting a larger movie together out of multiple shots, using a camera that's not built into a phone, or editing a video on a computer is already in way-out-of-the-norm territory. Your “gonna edit serious stuff? get a MacBook Pro. Not really gonna edit stuff? Regular MacBook is fine for you” options still hold just fine if you consider the MBA the "regular MacBook." Space Gopher fucked around with this message at 16:43 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 16:41
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I’d wager to say the MBP line has drifted from serious work loads. It’s more like the middle tier and the top tier is just non existent in the Apple lineup.
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May 17, 2020 17:55
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Shaocaholica posted:I’d wager to say the MBP line has drifted from serious work loads. It’s more like the middle tier and the top tier is just non existent in the Apple lineup. I dunno man, I've got the 16" MBP and its pretty much top tier with the exception of I/O and workstation-type GPU offerings. Dongle Life is retarded. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 17, 2020 18:04
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Shaocaholica posted:I’d wager to say the MBP line has drifted from serious work loads. It’s more like the middle tier and the top tier is just non existent in the Apple lineup. Idk that I agree with that considering that the new 16” MBP is a good like 2-3x more capable than my TOTL 2013 model and has 8 cores in it. Describe your ideal “top tier” MacBook.
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May 17, 2020 18:47
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Brain Issues posted:I dunno man, I've got the 16" MBP and its pretty much top tier with the exception of I/O and workstation-type GPU offerings. Dongle Life is retarded. strong disagree. i'm a programmer and while i have a work issued 16" mbp (with 16gb of ram and the i9 8 core) i do 95% of my work on a five year old desktop with a quad core i5. regardless of what geekbench or whatever show, the performance of intellij, xcode and even vscode is so much better on the desktop than on the mbp. i don't know and don't care if it's thermals or tdp or lack of nvenc or what, but the performance of apple's laptops is embarassing
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May 17, 2020 19:02
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Yeah I basically (minus storage and maybe a useless CPU upgrade, don't remember) have the TOTL 2013 15". I'm sort of psyching myself up for spending $3K+ to get the same thing again on the justification of future-proofing and 7-10 years of usage out of it. The 2013 is frankly still fine for me and only halfway through the 2nd battery's cycle-life so I don't need to go out and do this tomorrow. My biggest concern future-proofing wise is if I'm going to buy into the tail end of Intel Macs and while I'm sure the first few years would be tolerable, on year 5 of ARM-life if I'm going to be treated like a bastard child and abandoned and told to upgrade only halfway though the amount of life I want to get out of it. On the other hand the alternative seems like buying into v1.0 of ARM Macs and lol at buying into v1.0 of any Apple product.
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May 17, 2020 19:05
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Pakistani Brad Pitt posted:Yeah I basically (minus storage and maybe a useless CPU upgrade, don't remember) have the TOTL 2013 15". I'm sort of psyching myself up for spending $3K+ to get the same thing again on the justification of future-proofing and 7-10 years of usage out of it. The 2013 is frankly still fine for me and only halfway through the 2nd battery's cycle-life so I don't need to go out and do this tomorrow.
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May 17, 2020 19:19
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Ok Comboomer posted:I think a better way of putting it is that Apple (and lots of other companies, of course) set the tone in the early/mid 2000s for differentiating between “consumer” and “professional” laptop, and for what criteria shoppers could use to tell them apart.
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May 17, 2020 19:29
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the talent deficit posted:strong disagree. i'm a programmer and while i have a work issued 16" mbp (with 16gb of ram and the i9 8 core) i do 95% of my work on a five year old desktop with a quad core i5. regardless of what geekbench or whatever show, the performance of intellij, xcode and even vscode is so much better on the desktop than on the mbp. i don't know and don't care if it's thermals or tdp or lack of nvenc or what, but the performance of apple's laptops is embarassing You can't really compare that because you're running Linux on the desktop, right?
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May 17, 2020 19:46
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Doesn't help that 10nm Intel is what- three years late? Everyone else caught up.
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May 17, 2020 19:46
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