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A PC Game posted:$400 is 30% of the cost of an MBA. Why spend that now when you could use the 8 gb machine for a couple years, trade it in, and use the trade in + $400 to be 90% of the way to a brand new M5 with 16 gb ram standard Apple's going to ship an 8GB M6 MacBook Air, which will be less RAM than the iPhone at that point.
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Mar 13, 2024 02:41
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Twerk from Home posted:Apple's going to ship an 8GB M6 MacBook Air, which will be less RAM than the iPhone at that point. only the iphone pros tho lol
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Mar 13, 2024 02:53
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A PC Game posted:$400 is 30% of the cost of an MBA. Why spend that now when you could use the 8 gb machine for a couple years, trade it in, and use the trade in + $400 to be 90% of the way to a brand new M5 with 16 gb ram standard Lmao if you think 16gb minimum is arriving any sooner than 2028
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Mar 13, 2024 03:05
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Best Buy has M2 15” Airs with 16GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD for $1500. Seems like a great deal.
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Mar 13, 2024 03:27
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Corb3t posted:Best Buy has M2 15” Airs with 16GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD for $1500. Seems like a great deal. It’s not tho? A 13 inch m3 same specs is barely more than that
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Mar 13, 2024 03:43
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Maudib Arakkis posted:It’s not tho? A 13 inch m3 same specs is barely more than that A 13 inch m3 same specs is $200 more and has a smaller screen. It’s not a terrible deal.
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Mar 13, 2024 03:53
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the next macbook ram tiers will be 8gb 36gb 72gb and then the one after that will be 8gb 48gb 96gb
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Mar 13, 2024 04:14
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Maudib Arakkis posted:It’s not tho? A 13 inch m3 same specs is barely more than that Base M2 to base M3 is like a 10-15% bump. Meanwhile a 15" screen is a huge upgrade over 13".
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Mar 13, 2024 04:23
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A guy at work is considering upgrading his 2017 Macbook Air to a M-series Macbook Air to carry him through grad school for the next several years and beyond. His usage has been content consumption and web browsing, historically, but he'll also be learning coding and programming, so im assuming thats where the need for a faster processor (vs the old Intel i5) comes from, as well as the quality of life that comes with a new apple laptop. The former accountant in him doesn't like money being spent loosely, so a point of discussion so far has centered around the abysmal 8GB of ram the base model has, what a surprise. Hes fine with the "modest" base storage, which I also agree with since he isn't doing things like storing music or video or games. Back to the 8GB: I told him its a trap option, and it will bite him before anything else does. I even went as far as to say that a M1 Macbook Air with 16GB will suit him better than a M3 with 8GB. We checked the apple refurb store (I told him to avoid anything refurbished if its not from apple directly), and it looks like there are options for us if he wants to get a M1 (or even M2) with 16GB. The M1 is over 3 years old at this point, hitting 4 in November (he'll be starting college in August), so there is some uneasiness I have by telling him to focus on M1/16. What do you guys think? He's open to what I suggest, I'd just rather not steer him wrong.
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Mar 13, 2024 04:47
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buglord posted:A guy at work is considering upgrading his 2017 Macbook Air to a M-series Macbook Air to carry him through grad school for the next several years and beyond. His usage has been content consumption and web browsing, historically, but he'll also be learning coding and programming, so im assuming thats where the need for a faster processor (vs the old Intel i5) comes from, as well as the quality of life that comes with a new apple laptop. The M2 model is better. It has a much nicer display and the updated chassis design will make it feel much newer for much longer as Apple will probably continue to use it for the better part of the next decade. The M1 has the previous-generation chassis that was debuted with the final iteration of the Intel MBA in 2018. If it were me I’d push for M2/16/512 and count on that lasting me at least another seven years if not longer. If he balks at $200 tell him to consider it spread out over 7-10 years and ask him whether an additional $20-30 a year is worth it to him to never have to worry about hitting a wall and immediately needing either a replacement or to start mass-deleting poo poo. I recently hit the storage limit on my 2013 rMBP after a decade of use and it caused the usability and experience to immediately nosedive more sharply than any age-related issue. Sure the computer struggled with tasks and became increasingly incompatible with poo poo as time went on but it was still a totally formidable daily driver in its old age with a Retina display and NVME storage keeping it feeling fairly spry, but hitting my storage limit made it completely unusable virtually overnight. As a grad student he’s going to accumulate a ton of course materials, lots of assignments and literature, and as a programming student he’ll have to download and run tons of project files and assignments and whatnot. Xcode is gonna take up a fuckton of space just on its own and will need a fuckton of additional space every time it downloads an update, and the same can be said for every other piece of school-related software he needs. If he’s making posters or working with images for his graduate work in any way they’ll probably want him to have access to a few Adobe apps as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up needing to run a VM at some point. 256gb is not a lot of space at all for a grad student.
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Mar 13, 2024 05:53
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The existance of an 18GB MBP tells us, that the next base MBA with increased ram will have generous 10GB (in 2028).
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Mar 13, 2024 09:54
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buglord posted:A guy at work is considering upgrading his 2017 Macbook Air to a M-series Macbook Air to carry him through grad school for the next several years and beyond. His usage has been content consumption and web browsing, historically, but he'll also be learning coding and programming, so im assuming thats where the need for a faster processor (vs the old Intel i5) comes from, as well as the quality of life that comes with a new apple laptop. Depending on what languages he's coding in and what focus area he's got for the programming course (web dev? data processing? native apps? games?) will change the requirements a bit, but it's safe to say 16GB of ram and 512GB storage should be considered the minimum. I bought an m1 air 16/256 instead of springing for the M2 because for my use case the slightly longer battery life on the m1 was worth more to me than the slightly better performance of the m2 (I also liked the wedge design  ). I do end up hitting the thermal limit a bit and probably should've gone for the pro for active cooling but it's usually enough to focus on some less intensive task for a few hours or just accept that background processing will take longer than normal.Definitely agree with trilobites recommendation to get more storage. I really should've swung for more storage myself as I do data processing work in java and end up with some chunky databases and container setups. I actually filled up the SSD (and used all the ram at the same time) last week and spent a few hours recovering from that. The system effectively locked up at that point rendering about a frame a second...
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Mar 13, 2024 10:42
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Maudib Arakkis posted:M3 air not coming till the 26. Ask customer service to hurry up and they said it’s a “ custom order. Bro, I copped the dang thing by pressing button on your website. It’s not exactly bespoke You opened a support ticket for one of the larger consumer electronic companies in the world, with extensive supply chain ownership, to “hurry up”? I mean you do you but what was your expected outcome? They are already factory shipping you custom builds and the standard SKUs are going to be spoken for.
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Mar 13, 2024 14:10
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Maudib Arakkis posted:M3 air not coming till the 26. Ask customer service to hurry up and they said it’s a “ custom order. Bro, I copped the dang thing by pressing button on your website. It’s not exactly bespoke Anything that is modified results in being "built to order," and not just off the shelf available, and before you place the order it gives a delivery timeframe. And even if you ordered the 15" M3 Air 16GB/512GB the website clearly states that delivery of those is scheduled for March 21-28th, likely due to a shortage of units. Customer service can't just "hurry up" and go get one from a pile they keep sitting in the office to send out to you or something. There are supply lines and shipping times that have to be accounted for. Do you actually not know this or do you just have your head up your rear end and enjoy giving customer service reps a hard time because it's inconvenient for you to wait?
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Mar 13, 2024 14:41
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The guy is a troll. He gets probated every other day.
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Mar 13, 2024 14:45
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ended up getting a m3 pro 14" mbp 18gb/1tb to replace my 13" mba. the only thing that's been a surprise is that the thicker body means typing is less comfortable than on the mba. i also looked at the 15" mba but the size of it is just a bit too big for travel even if it's thinner
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Mar 13, 2024 15:15
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Maudib Arakkis posted:M3 air not coming till the 26. Ask customer service to hurry up and they said it’s a “ custom order. Bro, I copped the dang thing by pressing button on your website. It’s not exactly bespoke 
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Mar 13, 2024 15:44
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jabro posted:The guy is a troll. He gets probated every other day. He’s also the source of one of the funniest SA Mart threads of all time.
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Mar 13, 2024 16:50
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Canned Sunshine posted:He’s also the source of one of the funniest SA Mart threads of all time. You can't just blue ball us like that. Link that poo poo.
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Mar 13, 2024 16:53
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Branch Nvidian posted:You can't just blue ball us like that. Link that poo poo. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=1&threadid=4038223&pagenumber=1&perpage=40#post533566532 A few name changes later and all that.
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Mar 13, 2024 16:57
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Noticing a strange trend regarding posters with Dune-themed usernames. Probably just a coincidence.
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Mar 13, 2024 17:08
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Canned Sunshine posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=1&threadid=4038223&pagenumber=1&perpage=40#post533566532 Oooh, it’s Nom Epique, the ‘crapple’ troll guy. This makes sense now.
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Mar 13, 2024 17:17
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The Lord Bude posted:Oooh, it’s Nom Epique, the ‘crapple’ troll guy. This makes sense now. Dammit, the overuse of copping should have alerted me.
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Mar 13, 2024 19:09
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jabro posted:Dammit, the overuse of copping should have alerted me. I was about to make a post quoting all the times he said copping recently, lol Not a very clever troll.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:09
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BobHoward posted:I was about to make a post quoting all the times he said copping recently, lol I felt like Chazz Palminteri at the end of The Usual Suspects.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:28
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This is pretty interesting. Wal-Mart is selling a brand new M1 MBA for relatively cheap. Probably going after those Pavilion and Inspiron consumers. https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/03/15/walmart-brings-the-popular-macbook-air-with-the-m1-chip-to-its-shelves
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Mar 15, 2024 15:58
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Considering that Apple just discontinued those models, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple and Walmart worked out a deal for Walmart to offload them for fairly cheap.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:15
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I wonder what proportion of new macOS users lured in by the $699 price point will end up hating the fact that they have 8GB of RAM that can't be upgraded. Not that it's a Mac-exclusive problem, just kinda feels like it's gonna start people off on the wrong foot.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:17
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Probably not many people will be bothered by it ultimately. They are still really nice machines regardless of nerd numbers like ram
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Mar 15, 2024 16:22
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Anticipating the deluge of low-subscriber youtube tech channels uploading "I BOUGHT A MACBOOK.... FOR GAMING?!?!?!!?!?!" videos featuring these units, only to result in the usual "it didn't go as planned!" conclusions.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:22
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yeah for somebody like an incoming college freshman or a high school student, or like my mom/etc, the $699 makes it really compelling for a machine with all of the creature comforts of a MBA. Honestly I think the 256gb of storage is a way bigger sticking point for me. It bothers me from an e-waste standpoint in that I’m pretty sure many/most people will run out of storage way before the computer ages out of usefulness. I went into undergrad in 2007 with a C2D Polycarb MacBook that had like 1GB of RAM and 120gb of spinny disk storage stock and that thing was still like $1300. By the time I replaced it with a 2011 Sandy Bridge Air I still hadn’t used up all of the storage (that would change radically as soon as I started doing photography and other creative work and I ended up hitting the Air’s 128gb wall by 2013). Everything takes up more space now and videos especially are much much bigger, but also I doubt that your average college student in 2024 is trucking around 80gb of music these days.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:45
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Last Chance posted:Probably not many people will be bothered by it ultimately. They are still really nice machines regardless of nerd numbers like ram tbh for browsing the web with a handful of tabs, word processing, watching netflix, etc. they'll be fine.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:46
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trilobite terror posted:yeah for somebody like an incoming college freshman or a high school student, or like my mom/etc, the $699 makes it really compelling for a machine with all of the creature comforts of a MBA. what do normies keep that requires a bunch of data? not really being ironic here, the only thing i can think of is photos/videos that get backed up from their phone for the record im not white knighting some cheapass move by apple, i just wonder how many people who aren't like downloading pirated content need lots of storage for a non-work pc
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Mar 15, 2024 16:48
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Bestbuy is selling the M1 air for $650 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m1-chip-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-space-gray-space-gray/5721600.p?skuId=5721600
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Mar 15, 2024 17:01
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Eletriarnation posted:I wonder what proportion of new macOS users lured in by the $699 price point will end up hating the fact that they have 8GB of RAM that can't be upgraded. Not that it's a Mac-exclusive problem, just kinda feels like it's gonna start people off on the wrong foot. The kinds of people who would jump on that deal won’t notice in the slightest. People in this thread have really weird hangups when it comes to how much ram is actually necessary for the average home user, because most of us aren’t average home users. (It’s the same reason we see endless whinging in this thread about the one monitor thing, when the actual statistics show most MacBook users don’t use an external monitor at all, and only a tiny proportion of them use more than 1). It’s a non issue. There’s a reason 8gb of ram has been the entry point for nearly 15 years now; and it’s that the amount of ram you need to do basic poo poo like surf the web and watch Netflix and use MS office really hasn’t changed much. The people base model macs are targeted at - students, normal home users who do stuff like the above are never going to have an issue with 8gb of ram, and they aren’t suddenly going to do so in the next few years. Apple knows this, it’s why they invest resources into stuff that actually makes a noticeable difference to the average person like energy efficiency (battery life) and having super fast SSDs.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:18
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it’s insulting and frustrating because we know how cheap RAM and storage really are, but also yeah my mom is never going to benefit from 16gb of RAM or 512gb of storage or maybe she might and the computer outlives her 🤷🏻♂️
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Mar 15, 2024 17:34
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Yeah, I think most users won't be too bothered. Like you say, 8GB can be fine for just content consumption and I don't think this model will have many buyers who have already had expectations spoiled by a machine with more. I'm actually making this post on an old Dell tablet with 8GB of RAM and it does a great job, but it also lives on a desk and is basically a spare monitor for my desktop that only runs Firefox and chat clients. I mostly thought about it because it feels like in Apple's general pricing strategy, a lot of buyers are supposed to look at the 8GB model and go "ugh, I don't want that" justifying a model that they feel like will have enough RAM (and better margins for Apple). But, in this case, they seem to be positioning it as a premium model - relative to Wal-Mart's other typical offerings, at least. I don't know if the goal is just "we want to try to sell these old M1 MBAs however we can", or if it's more of a long game ploy to attract customers who wouldn't normally consider Apple.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:35
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Poking around on Walmart's site at Windows laptops around the same price point, you can indeed find many laptops with 16gb and 512gb or higher but they all also have 1080p screen or worse, which is IMO a far bigger crime.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:48
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I mean... if you want to talk about features your mom won't notice, a screen sharper than full HD is probably at the top of the list. Unless your mom is substantially younger than mine. I just upgraded both my parents from ten year old 720p screens to new 1080p in the last couple years and I don't think either of them said anything about the screen looking better.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:51
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Eletriarnation posted:I mostly thought about it because it feels like in Apple's general pricing strategy, a lot of buyers are supposed to look at the 8GB model and go "ugh, I don't want that" justifying a model that they feel like will have enough RAM (and better margins for Apple). See I argue that the vast majority of buyers don’t do this at all. You do this, because you’re an engaged, tech savvy buyer; probably with more complex needs than most people. But most people aren’t in this category. There’s a reason apple’s marketing always shies away from technical details and statistics, instead preferring comparative graphs, and aspirational statements, and focusing on things you can do with the computer.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:53
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