Comment by tiffanyh
10 hours ago
I'm not sure why the negative tone in this thread.
The MBA is an amazing value, and appears to have only gotten slightly cheaper.
This is a solid product, that continually receives incremental improvements and delivered at a lower price point (when spec'd out).
The MBA is an absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs. I use it (MBA 15" M3) with a large complex TypeScript code base, and it is fast and amazing at 24GB of ram or more.
PS. The biggest speedup I got this past year (10x) was switching to native TypeScript (tsgo) and native linting (biome or oxlint).
> absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs
Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box. The news here isn't "The M5 Air is a disappointment", it's "Laptops are commoditized and boring".
As a developer my quality of work life improved radically when they let me have a Mac instead of the Windows laptop I was using.
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As a Windows-based developer from 1996 to 2015 and then Linux from 2015 to 2020, I can say that my dev experience is immeasurably better using a Mac.
The ranking is MacOS >> Linux >> Windows. The Apple ecosystem is expensive but worth it if you can afford it (iPhone + Watch + iPad + AirPods + Mac.)
$350 windows box probably isn't silent like the MBA
> Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box
Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?
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It's a bit slow, but still workable for Rust too. I prefer doing my daily work on a much more powerful 9955HX though.
Makes sense; according to Geekbench, 9955XX has about a 25% lead in multi-core over the base M4, and about a 5% lead in multi-core over the base M5. And more cores, so better for parallel Rust compilation.
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This laptop should be good enough for 90%+ of all users out there for 5-10 years
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Mine shipped with one. It's not perfect, but it's always been more than capable for me. Did yours not boot into anything on startup?
Why is the finder the way it is? Is it actually easier to use than (whatever the normal file browser windows and linux uses is called) if all you ever use is macs?
Most of the other quirks I can work around (though the default alt tab behavior not picking up windows of the same app is an insane default) but the finder is just unusable.
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Snarky but I agree. I dislike how much MacOS changes with each version. My kids have a Linux box (NUC). I wish we could have Linux on a late model Mac Mini
I wonder how many more sales Apple would get if they published enough specs to make Asahi et.al. first-class.
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Until they release an update that slows it down
Which one is that? My M1 MBA absolutely rips still.
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I don't get it either. I've rolled out well over a hundred of these in a higher education setting and I have never had one have a hardware issue or needed to retire it other than wanton damage. I still have a ton of M1s in circulation and they are great still. I had to just replace a Dell with only 2.5 years of service, they tend to fall apart.
I retired my M1 MacBook Air last year, really out of power greed. I wanted to play with local LLMs (lol).
I seriously never had issues with my m1 in my workloads. Dev stuff, docker, etc. editing 30min 4k GoPro videos. I probably would these days with rust dev stacked in there but yeah. Can’t agree more, they’re an amazing value.
The MB Air M line is a personal contender for best product of all time: Fantastic performance without fans, amazing battery life, high res display and build quality at that price point.
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.
My M1 Air is going strong as my travel & about-town laptop. It can do everything I do on my vastly more powerful M4 mbp, aside from compile multiple mobile apps simultaneously in less than a minute. Absolutely insane value and anyone who says otherwise has no idea what they are talking about.
> The MBA is an amazing value, and appears to have only gotten slightly cheaper.
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.
Base price went up, as did storage and the new price is cheaper than the previous price + equivalent storage I think
>I'm not sure why the negative tone in this thread.
Which negative tone? 90% the mainline comments I see are positive.