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15-Inch MacBook Air Reviews: The Sweet Spot for Performance, Size, and Value
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This is a pretty sweet air and I'm glad to see there is such variety. If this existed a couple of years ago, I'd jump on it. Alas nothing can take my 14inch MBP lol ride till it dies ...
Great product at a great value that fills a gap in Apple’s laptop lineup. The question is why keep the 13” MBP around anymore?
So glad this day has finally arrived. The 15 inch MBA is a great product, if I had one small complaint is that 16GB of RAM should have been the default configuration in this current age.
Give me the screen and promotion on the MBP all day everyday and twice on Sunday.
No, the 120hz screen is worth keeping. You can't go back after that.
Although I’m happy to see the 15” MBA come to fruition, I just can’t go back to a normal laptop after making a iPad Pro 12.9” my daily driver 4 years ago. The one thing that is enticing with the 15” MBA is the battery life. It’s the biggest negative I have with the M1 iPad Pro. I would love it if Apple made a Magic Keyboard case that was thicker and incorporated a battery under the keyboard. Yes, it would be even heavier than its already porky weight, but getting ~12-15 hours of use out of it would be helpful, especially when traveling.
Sure, but I'm not the one making out that one is more portable than the other am I?
I'm interested to see how it compares. I have a 16" 2019 Intel-based MBP that I'm looking to replace.
Right, most authoritarian regimes also manage to tolerate a certain amount of dissent, too. A contemporaneous example meant to only make a point in the spirit of "reductio ad absurudum": Prigozhin has also vocally criticized Putin...do we really think that he's not doing so largely for the optics of allowing dissent and that, ultimately, Prigozhin knows his boundaries and his role in this menagerie? Again, I'm hardly saying Apple is an "authoritarian regime" or making parallels to Putin's actual regime, I am simply pointing out the logically fallacy that "well MKBHD and a few others point out things" doesn't mean that the messaging isn't very tightly controlled through tools like fear, intimidation, and the like.
Apple does not at all directly tell people what to say or how to say it, but you need only read or listen to any review, the talking points, etc from those who are "in the pre-release hardware club" to see that there is actually very little variation in the content.
Cupertino regularly reviews the mix of journalists covering them and curates the list of who is "in and out" on a regular basis. This is no secret. And it's not necessarily a bad idea...but as a consumer, do you really find the coverage diverse & meaningful? I don't. It is incredibly homogenized, shallow, and almost cultish if you ask me.
Honestly, it has become so transparent that 90% of it is literal copy and pasting from materials that it basically is as bad as if an AI/LLM just produced this stuff. I don't even bother with the pre-release-seeded/launch day "reviews", it's that bad.
A token negative point or somewhat lukewarm review doesn't do anything to restore my confidence that journalists with access to Apple (or other large manufacturers with similar PR depts) have anything of value to say in their "reviews". They're smart people with great things to say by and large, but not when it comes to opinions on Apple's products, because the reality distortion field is a thing, and only works when the choir sings in tune and together.
I love Apple products, don't get me wrong, but the amount of Kool-Aid that Apple serves up is insane, and to suggest otherwise, well, in my view, basically just confirms that one has drunk waaaaaay too much.
Take them for what they're worth, but this discussion point and practice goes back over a decade....
ð apple pr blacklist negative reviews - Google Search
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MBP 16 is around 5 pounds and MBA 15 is around 3.
And it would be. Buying RAM upgrades from the OEM vendor is always a terrible deal, and you see the same with Dell/Lenovo/HP/etc. For reference, checked some random ThinkPads and Lenovo wants $90 for 8->16GB DDR5 upgrade or $150 for 8->16GB LPDDR5 upgrade.
At the moment, both DRAM and NAND prices are incredibly low (not even thinking about the wholesale & bulk contracts that an OEM like Apple gets into) so the high price of OEM upgrades is particularly notable on un-upgradable computers.
They likely would not have gotten the 15" MBA in advance for review testing, and so you will have to wait a few more weeks for their video (assuming they got one on launch day; getting a unit with more ram will likely extend the delivery date).
I am also curious as to what sort of "upset" you are hoping to hear from the unbiased reviews. I personally don't expect the "unbiased" reviews to be too off the mark, in the sense that the MBA is pretty much a known quantity. We are already keenly of its strengths and weaknesses since the 13" M2 MBA release from last year, and this will be everything it was, just with a larger screen.
It's a larger version of the 13" M2 Air. of course the specs are the same.
16" is a larger version of the 14" and yet has twice the amount of nands
The M1/2 has two display controllers integrated into the SOC; one for the internal display and one for an external display. This is separate from the GPU that does the rendering. Each display controller is surprisingly large taking about the space of 4 performance cores. Apple had a silicon budget for these chips and adding another display controller would make the chips too large. Apple likely had pretty good information on what Air customers do and multiple external displays are likely a rounding error. I've heard before that most people don't use external monitor with their laptop. I'd feel totally cramped to work like that but I realize that I'm not a typical customer.
Can someone explain Mini LED like I’m 5 years old? Or 10/15 at least? And is it different than Pro Motion? Sorry for dumb Q if it is, but w/o more info when these terms are tossed around it seems like “Retina”, Pro, Max… etc.
Hi! I was / am in a similar boat except for after a while I realized my “old” 2019 Macbook 16” is still fine if not best/better at least for my 99% at-home needs… the less weight and better battery life is very appealing for this new model, but, no I wouldn’t worry about 1 inch more of screen in your case, just enjoy what you got for a while.
Same as the 13" M2 Air. It really depends on what you are doing with it. If you are running the M2 CPU and GPU together for extended periods of time, then it will throttle back to about the same speed as the M1 when it is not throttled, i.e. not very much slower. Not having a fan is totally worth the small performance hit for very rare scenarios.
The fact that they were able to achieve this with Intel chips in the exact same class of devices makes it pretty hard for me to care about why they weren't able to do it. To me it's a bit of a fail, and a step backwards when Apple silicon was supposed to be a step forwards. I'm sure they could figure it out if they really wanted to.
apple is shifting focus to gaming, gonna be hilarious when ppl to start complaining about the overheating