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Apple Announces New MacBook Air With 15.3-inch Display and M2 Chip Starting at $1,299
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Follow up. This goes along with my consumer behavior in other aspects. I don't want to get a new computer without AV1 hardware encoding.
Because that is the most likely upgrade path. Anyone who already has an M1/M2 Mac is not likely to be ready to upgrade yet.
That is what Air buyers were asking for. Another Air but a little bigger, please. This is exactly what they needed to deliver. The price is good. If they were to start adding miniLED and other ’pro’ features, it would have driven the price up.
If you look back at the last 10-12 WWDC there have been hardware announcements at nearly every one. Usually it is just one or two products, but this year was a bonanza !
The platform state of the union presentation afterward is where they focus more on the software details and you start seeing actual code.
There are 3rd party options, but they make various compromises to allow connection of the second monitor. If you want to connect two 4K displays using their best resolution, refresh rates, etc., you need to go to a MacBook Pro.
Should they stop trying to sell to all of those people with older machines that are about due to be replaced? That is the market for this device. If you already got an M2 laptop, you probably are not ready to buy another so soon.
There are lots of benchmarks out there for the M2 on the 13” MBA so if that is what you are looking for, you should find it. This was marketing to their prospective new customers.
Probably because the price matters to them and they don’t need to do significant throughput of read/writes. Most casual users who are buying base models are not pushing the hardware and don’t need top performance.
I'd reconsider. If 3.3 is “barely lower” than 4 pounds, then 2.5 is *barely lower* than 3.3. The differences are virtually identical (.7 vs. .8). If “not even close” applies to 3.3 vs. 2.5, then it applies almost as well to 4 vs. 3.3!
Going with the new 15” Air, you'd save weight, get fantastic battery life (much better than your 15” MPB), no noise, no fan, more power, faster processing, likely far less heat, new OS, longer life, etc. You would give up some ports and adjust to a different keyboard — but those could be adapted to pretty easily!
What's ridiculous is there are so many flavors of PC laptops, some with much better specs than this 15" MBA yet Apple makes it sound like this MBA is so much better than any PC laptop. Not true at all. Apart from the M2 chip, what other component in this MBA 15 is so much better?
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I strongly disagree. I would expect the M2 to be better than the M1 in every way. Personally, I think the bad decisions Apple made with crippling the SSDs on the M2 MBPs and 13" M2 MBAs was one of the reasons their sales were so badly hurt. Also, not including a copper heatsink? This aggressive cost cutting is just silly and cheap. I'm waiting for a teardown of the 15" M2 MBA. Hopefully they put the same cooling solution as the M1. If not, it's a skip for me.
Credit: https://9to5mac.com/2022/08/04/macbook-air-m2-vs-m1/
They did include an aluminum + graphene heat spreader. There isn't really a place for a traditional heatsink that is a large mass of heat absorbing material. The M1 had a similar heat spreader but the one on the M2 is wider with more surface area. At least one of the sites that did the teardown and performance test of the M2 Air wiped off the graphene layer and the thermal paste before they put it back together and did the performance test!I strongly disagree. I would expect the M2 to be better than the M1 in every way. Personally, I think the bad decisions Apple made with crippling the SSDs on the M2 MBPs and 13" M2 MBAs was one of the reasons their sales were so badly hurt. Also, not including a copper heatsink? This aggressive cost cutting is just silly and cheap. I'm waiting for a teardown of the 15" M2 MBA. Hopefully they put the same cooling solution as the M1. If not, it's a skip for me.
Credit: https://9to5mac.com/2022/08/04/macbook-air-m2-vs-m1/
Since the Air line is mostly bought by general consumers, they are unlikely to know about or care about the SSD speed. For non-performance needs, that SSD speed will mostly get lost in the noise and be hard to discern.
Right. I'm a snob. Or is that Tim Cook and the Apple execs are greedy? How much money do you think they saved per unit for excluding that extra SSD chip? $2 at 2022 prices? But when you sell millions of units, it matters. It was a really ****** move.
I was at Costco and I saw 2 families stop by and check out the M2 Air while I was trying out the M2 MBP keyboard. They were discouraged by the high cost of the 14" MBP so they thought he M2 Air was a better buy. I feel sorry for these people since they're not tech literate. They don't understand the M1 is a better machine in almost every criteria that would actually matter for their daily lives. To them, it's newer so it's better. They don't even have the knowledge to know they should get the 512GB model or consider the M1.
Dumb question #2, the speakers in the 2023 15" Macbook Air must be better than the mid-2015 Macbook Pro speakers, correct?
Well, this is disappointing. Anyone who read my thread knows my custom build Mac Mini M2 (with 16GB of rams) had major flickering issue. You have to custom order a 16GB version just like the Mac Mini, and that is so disappointing. No way to get 16GB memory without custom order. Also, battery is disappointing.
How long do you think they should keep doing this then? The last Intel MBA was from 2019, the M5 will be 50 times faster than that unit. They didn't do this during the PowerPC transition, they compared each Intel to the previous generation.
This is quite simply false. I just linked the file transfer speed above. I doubt you even watched the video given how quickly you replied. And look at Apple own marketing:
1. "Supercharged", "Blazing-fast performance"
2. "Silent event under intense workloads."
3. "More speed to everything you do - whether you're editing a video..."
Don't forget to read the fine print on that speed claim (why use 2TB???):
Testing conducted by Apple in May 2022 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M2, 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and 24GB of RAM, as well as production MacBook Air systems with Apple M1, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, and 16GB of RAM, all configured with 2TB SSD, as well as production 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-based MacBook Air systems with Intel UHD Graphics 617, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. Final Cut Pro 10.6.2 tested using a complex 2-minute project with 4K ProRes 422 media. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Air."
From the marketing above, I think a reasonable person would conclude that this is more than just a "normal" computer. If this is meant for entry level consumers, as you claim, why not use 256GB and 8GB for those stats?
Well said -- Apple is trying to have it both ways on the marketing angle and it's a fair bit disingenuous
I agree. Crazy deals on the M1 14" MBP.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1668246-REG/apple_mbp_14_sg_46_14_2_macbook_pro_with.html
https://www.microcenter.com/search/...432+4294820039+4294822454+90+593&myStore=true
And if you don't believe me, perhaps a famous YouTuber will do:
Absolutely shameful. This went from a day 1 purchase of 24gb/1TB to waiting for m3 in a year.
Absolutely miffed after I just upgraded all my APs to U6 Enterprises last week in anticipation.
