I'm a cynical bastard, but the M1 MacBook Air is the real deal. I don't recall being so pleased with a laptop in a long, long time. I'm yet to find something I could possibly gripe about.
At first I was skeptical, but I've seen nothing but good things about the M1. I'm now desperately waiting for the 16" M1. My 2015 Pro is starting to show it's age.
Same here, really hoping the removal of the touch-bar is not a myth. MacBook with M1, good keyboard and no touch-bar would definitely be the best laptop on the market for a looong time..
I'm never buying another MacBook with a Touch Bar. Ever. I've learned that lesson the hard way. I refuse to pay 3,500$ and have to put up with something actively hindering my work.
Getting rid of the Touch Bar might be realistic. If only it were realistic that they would add a USB-A and HDMI port back to it too...
Out of curiosity, if they kept the touch bar but as an addition to a row of function keys, rather than a replacement, would you still have an issue with the TB?
Personally I would rather it was gone. My fingers are big enough that they brush the edge of the touchbar while I type and volume/brightness/whatever just flaps endlessly while I'm trying to get work done. I have to use an external keyboard with that thing.
I doubt that would happen if there were a row of physical half-height function keys between the numbers and the touchbar. But I also doubt they would make that laptop, it would require a smaller touchpad and most people wouldn't want that, myself included.
Or 4:3 screen, but we can keep dreaming there...
My hope is that they offer the touchbar as a configurable option on all MacBooks going forward, at least until they realize no one is buying the ones with the touchbar included. Maybe some video editors like it? It's a failed experiment from where I'm sitting.
For me, I think it's a novel concept, but it's rarely used in practice. I like having it as a scrub bar for video/audio apps or for fine-tuned volume control and it's nice for emojis. But other than that, I rarely interact with it.
Every now and then I overcome decades of muscle memory and push the buttons on a modal from the touch bar.
The ironic thing is that I would use it a lot, if, and only if, there were any browser which displays tabs as favicons on the touch bar.
But there just... isn't. It's completely baffling, the Safari preview is useless and Firefox has a 'touch to select address bar' button which I always forget is there.
I've found it occasionally helpful when using a fullscreen app, such as having access to Camera/Mute controls while on a video conference without having to remember the hotkey.
But I also wouldn't be particularly sad if it disappeared.
It all seems too good to be true, memory and ssd upgrades aside, the M1 devices seem to be fantastic value for money. Also waiting for a 16" M1, decided to order a mini in the meantime.
It definitely is. I'm daily driving a Macbook Air, something which I never thought I'd say. Even beyond the CPU crunching performance, I'm not sure what part of it is causing this, but it's just so much smoother for a variety of misc things. I suspect either better coupling with the integrated GPU or the unified memory.
But many little things, like the smoothness of the OS, or the way that the screen wakes from sleep instantly are just superior to my much more expensive, and power hungry desktop. Of course, my desktop can still cream it in a GPU workload but for programming, it's amazing.
I would have said the same a couple years ago, but nowadays I can get an external 5TB solid state drive for a few hundred $$ that easily fits in my laptop case. As long as my OS runs from the internal disk, I don't really need much more. Everything in the cloud anyway. :)
My concern is more with the longevity of the drive. SSD failures are only a matter of time, and these new Macbooks are going to be bricked once they hit their TBW limits.
There’s a very good chance that the MacBook is outdated or otherwise broken by the time the SSD fails. I’ve been using SSDs for about 10 years, and I’m not the heaviest user, but so far I’ve never had an SSD fail from wear. Thumb drives, sure, but not SSDs yet.
There are just going to be more and more pushes to turn your laptop into a subscription service. Pay apple $100/mo and always have the latest hardware sent to you on release, always have the latest version of the OS, always have a store you can drop off a broken laptop and walk back home with a perfectly working one that day no questions asked, etc.
I think it will be this for electronics, and hopefully telsa will be able to provide this for cars. If I cant own it fully, atleast make the subscription service completely hassle free and worth it.
In fact this is an answer to the OP about they will hide features. Business is business and they have to survive in some form. One-off purchase is well one-off. If there is a business on-going concerns, they can sort of give out the shaver and recover from the blade sale etc. And as software need update any case whilst hardware we have been good enough for quite a while, it is better a software subscription model.
Of course the problem is whether they can cut the line ...
A lot of people will still prefer/need two monitors I’m sure, but if you haven’t tried an ultrawide yet I would encourage you to. I would always pick an ultrawide over two monitors.
Any recommendations on software to tile the display? One reason I like 2 screens is because things like maximizing or full-screening still leaves me with the other display for other windows.
A single ultrawide would be way better, if I could count on having 2 virtual displays within.
I use BetterTouchTool for this, it lets you set up snapping so dragging the window e.g. to one side will snap it to half the width, as well as setting up keyboard shortcuts. It can also do a million other shortcut type things which I barely scratch the surface of, cool app!
https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai is awesome, way more extreme than the other stuff. But it's super configurable and I love how it auto fills windows (but you may not, which can be configured)
I've been using "Magnet" for tiling. It's in the Apple App store.
My use case, 15" laptop display and a 32" 4k display. I find it sufficient enough screen real estate. I sometimes think about getting an additional display but can't quite justify it.
I love https://manytricks.com/moom/. Being available in the app store is a major plus from my point of view. And it has the usual tricks like keyboard shortcuts, etc.
For a 21:9 screen, the max grid size of 25 isn't good enough for me, I specifically wanted 36 so that I could make three 'panels' at 11-13-11 resolution.
Found out with a bit of emailing back and forth that you can by pasting this into a terminal:
defaults write com.manytricks.Moom "Grid: Maximum Dimension Size" -int 36
The grid display ends up being a bit small but I only tinkered with it for long enough to make 1,2,3 assign to the grids, 4 and 5 assign to the left-and-middle and right-and-middle, and q w e, a s d, z x c to top-middle-bottom of each of the three panels.
I've been using Amethyst [0]. It works, is simple enough to configure and get started and has most things I need.
I found the default shortcuts to be the wrong way around for my cognition so I swapped them but otherwise it's been good. I mostly use the fullscreen (usually for the laptop's screen) and "3-column with main in the middle" layouts.
While not a tiling WM, check if Divvy could suit your needs. You can set up hotkeys to resize windows to parts of the screen. The screen is divided into a grid.
Bingo. I do this. It's a little buggy every now and then, you lose unlock with Apple Watch and there is a small performance cost on one core of the system, but they just shipped a native driver too.
Compared to my coworker's 10 core i9 build with over 64GB of ram, my base model Macbook Air builds our node app in half the time.
I kind a like that I can run my primary display at 164Hz via dedicated Type-C to DisplayPort adapter. Too bad DisplayLink can't go beyond 60Hz on 2K screen.
There are also some frustrating bugs with USB-C / thunderbolt connections like the LG UltraFine 4K monitor that have been improved but not yet fully resolved. This isn't unique to M1, but does seem to be new to the more recent MacBook models (possibly related to the T2 chips).
It's like that on the server side too with ARM64. Using AWS graviton 2 instances has been incredible--faster, cheaper, and just better in every way for most of my workloads. I think ARM caught nearly the entire industry flat-footed and asleep. It's going to be wild to see all the big PC and server manufacturers, the cloud providers, etc. scramble to have similar ARM offerings. I can't believe Amazon is a year into a solid v2 of ARM instances, while Azure and Google don't even have a beta or v1 on the horizon.
We're busy moving stuff AWS stuff to Graviton, too. I'm not directly involved, but my understanding is it's been all good (except that not every instance type is available with Graviton). We're going to save a whole lot of money (we spend several million per year on AWS) and as far as I know there's been no performance penalty or any kind of issue.
One day hopefully soon you'll wake up with an email from Amazon that your lambdas are on ARM, there's nothing for you to do, and by the way your bill is 20% cheaper. They've publically mentioned an intention to move all of AWS internals to ARM, starting with elastic loadbalancers. I'm sure lambda will be a high priority for them.
I wish they would ship a Surface Pro like form factor with touch and tablet functionality. iPad Pro with MacOS basically.
Remote development is the name of the game for the backend, for frontend the M1 chips seem capable enough and can fit the form factor easily.
When I'm doing focused work I use an external screen/keyboard/mouse, the only times I use laptop ones are when I'm trying to get work done in a coffee shop or something like that - I even travel with BT keyboard/mouse because the laptop ones make me unproductive.
And for media consumption and casual browsing, couch surfing, travel, bed shopping - the laptop form factor is clunky, a tablet is a much better device.
Maybe I should just give up and buy both, but I wish I could have one device for everything (even if it costs as much as both of those combined)
Exactly this! An iPad with bluetooth keyboard (I cannot bring myself to drop £349 on the magic variety) is frustratingly close but it’s just not quite a ‘proper’ computer and I end up carrying the keyboard everywhere it’s so useful.
FYI the magic keyboard for the 11” iPad Pro is currently on sale for $199 (normally $299). [1] I got one recently and it’s great. So much better to type on than the butterfly keyboard on my 2017 MBP.
I do hope Apple will release a v2 where the iPad can be put in portrait orientation with the Magic Keyboard (and enable vertical stack for multitasking). So close yet so far.
For me it would be my only device (I never make calls anyway) if it had a full OS or, maybe, if iOS could run full dev environments without shooting/freezing background processes. Not seeing that happen though...
I am overall happy with mine. It is very quick, and the battery life is quite exceptional.
> I'm yet to find something I could possibly gripe about.
I can. It does not much like my Philips 328E1 monitor. When it wakes up the display, sometimes it renders all the colors as sorta-inverted. Like, not actually inverted, but maybe just one color channel is inverted. Repeatedly sleeping & waking the display sometimes fixes after a few tries. Rebooting always fixes it.
Also, on a fresh login, after I reach the desktop it will sleep the display maybe 5 seconds later for unknown reasons. Usually it wakes up okay after a few more seconds, and then things are fine from then on.
I tried all sorts of things, then gave up. Now I don't let the display sleep, so I manually turn it off when I walk away from my desk. It makes switching to my other MacBook a little more hassle because I have to do it manually, but I can live with it.
And before you ask if there's something wrong with my display... it works great, 100% of the time, never a single glitch on my work computer, which is a 16 inch MacBook Pro.
Sometimes I regret getting the M1 and not waiting for them to work out the bugs.
Have you tried changing the cable/adapter out? USB4/Thunderbolt is an incredibly complex protocol now and cables are now active with built in microprocessors sometimes even running full OSes inside the cable. It's possible that could be the cause. You didn't mention what type of monitor connection you're using.
I think that's mostly FUD. It's just one tool that's reporting those reads, and the reality is that with modern storage hardware, the numbers they report can be very misleading because of additional layers between the OS and physical drive.
In practice, I can't imagine the SSD load to be particularly worse than what the iPhones endure, and I have yet to hear anyone complain about their iPhone dying from their flash storage being overused.
No it's not FUD and I can absolutely prove this to you. Just open Activity Monitor -> Disk and then watch disk writes. Then check how SMART report changes and you'll see it's exactly match what MacOS itself reports.
MacOS is heavily rely on swap at least on M1 hardware for absolutely no reason.
It's definitely not FUD, but it's probably a bug. I'm surprised at how many people are in complete denial that this could be happening and are assuming that people aren't understanding the tooling or something, instead of the obvious explanation, that it's actually an issue.
I was just looking at Disk tab of Activity Monitor, and the numbers just don't make any sense, unless Mac apps are all throwing gobs of bits at the disk for no particular reason.
For example, in two days of uptime it says the SafariBookmarksSyncAgent has written 1.94 GB to disk. I haven't added any bookmarks to my machine in those two days and I haven't used Reading List, so how is that even possible?
As other's have stated, it's possible that SafariBookmarksSyncAgent has a process that regularly writes to memory (object creation and garbage collection) and that memory is being paged to disk.
Me too, I ultimately ended up quite frustrated with the laptop. My suspicion is that it ultimately comes down to your comfort with MacOS and your workflow. I spent a long time trying to get my M1 Macbook Air to simulate my workflow on Linux, but it was never _quite_ there. Sure the thing is zippy, but it doesn't mean much to me without a proper package manager or open operating system.
With that being said, I'm an old-school curmudgeon when it comes to computers. I'm hard to please, and I don't necessarily hold it against Apple that they didn't make "the perfect computer".
As an aside, is anyone interested in an $850 8gb Macbook Air? Lightly used with only 70tb written to the drive.
I'm asking because I'm assuming your real issues are with your stated reasons, since MacPorts is a "proper package manager" (being ported from one of the BSDs) and if you don't like that one, Brew is certainly popular. And I've never directly benefited from Linux being an "open operating system", since I don't write code that interacts with anything lower-level than the C API, but macOS' Darwin kernel and many of the binaries are open source.
I'm kind of old-school (my intro to Unix was a DECStation), and I find macOS to be plenty Unixy. If I'm not using Xcode I'm using Emacs (in VI mode). I've never said "I wish I had <Linux feature>"; actually, it's been rather nice that my Wifi doesn't break, I don't have to deal with PulseAudio, it goes to sleep--and wakes up!--when I open and close the lid, the UI is unified, networking is easy to use, etc. However, if you run the Linux GUI applications on macOS it's a klunky experience, so you benefit from finding native applications. Also, Docker wasn't very pleasant, but that might have just been Docker; fortunately I've only had to use it for one project.
As someone who loves the macOS + Unix experience, I'm just curious what workflow it doesn't work well with.
Well, I write quite a bit of GTK, and as you mentioned that's not necessarily a first-class experience on MacOS, which I expected and was fine with. It was quite a bit more frustrating to get the Rust toolchain working though, and from what I understand it will be a while before they iron out the issues on the M1. Another papercut. Then I had issues with binaries disappearing out of nowhere, similar to the aforementioned git disappearance. My Rust programs automatically were removed from PATH, and I still don't know what causes the issue. As for the package managers, I think Brew and Macports are both fine pieces of software, but they don't even come close to how robust and compatible something like pacman is. Working with the App Store is a frustrating experience, and I'd prefer to have all my software managed in one place.
Maybe it's just different strokes for different folks, but I'd much rather just clone my dotfiles and have a Linux workspace up and running in ~10 minutes tops. Moving my workflow over to MacOS feels like trying to board a plane while it's taking off, and it doesn't bode well for my productivity when I can't rely on my tools even showing up in the first place.
My experience (as a user) is that GTK on macOS is functional at best, and I find it an unpleasant experience, so macOS is definitely not ideal for that. No experience with Rust, but it isn't the path the tools expect, for sure. I've never had a problem with PATH not working, maybe the new shell in Big Sur is mostly-but-not-quite like bash? You could try changing your shell to bash, if you haven't already.
If you really want an apt-get (never used pacman) kind of everything-repository experience, though, you're going to be disappointed on any system that doesn't prioritize a centralized repository of software. In practice, this eliminates a commercial OS, and probably commercial software, since there's no effective way to get a central repository. The App Store is the closest, but then you get people complaining you're the gatekeeper, or you get a free-for-all like Google Play. I think Linux manages only because the number of people that use it are small enough that bad actors go elsewhere.
That doesn't seem to have anything to do with the M1, though? It just seems you're uncomfortable with macos. A new processor isn't going to change that macs run macos, and if you don't like macos, then you're not going to like the Mac.
Sure, it is an amazing chip. But the delta is only large compared to the rehashed 14nm Intel chips that Macs shipped with in the last few years. Recent Ryzen-based APUs are in a similar ballpark as M1's performance-wise.
I think that a lot of Mac users overestimate the M1, since their only experience with x86_64 is low-point Intel and not peak AMD.
I mean, I mostly agree with you. It is an issue with MacOS, and the M1 is a pretty nice package for what it offers. If I could reliably run Linux on it, I'd be a lot more excited. Hell, if I could even drive my monitors with it I'd be mostly satisfied. I guess I'm just one of those "niche users" at the end of the day.
Me too, I ultimately ended up quite frustrated with the laptop.
Same here. I used Macs since 2007 and the M1 MacBook Air basically ended my Mac tenure. The M1 felt like yet another step towards making the Mac more closed. The M1 is another case of Apple breaking a lot of backward compatibility and using the community to fix it for free (who needs a working Fortran compiler, to compile their BLAS and other numeric libraries?). Even though the M1 Macs feels a lot faster than the Intel Macs, macOS still feels tediously slow compared to Linux. Then there are a lot of low-level tools on Linux which do not have good equivalents on macOS (e.g. perf). And then there is the issue (unrelated to M1) that every good MacOS application is slowly switching to a subscription model, which only extends the feeling that I don't own my machine anymore.
I returned my M1 Air and bought a Ryzen-based ThinkPad, upgraded it to 32GB RAM, and I am very happy with. I am now selling my old Intel MacBook Air, which was my last Mac.
> The M1 felt like yet another step towards making the Mac more closed
There's a certain amount of hubris in this, in that (at least until AMD came along), pretty much every single Intel chip has only made Intel money, while ARM is broadly-licensed and is ripe for a surge. All Apple did was create an ARM-compatible chip, which is how someone already got Linux running on it: https://corellium.com/blog/linux-m1
Now, which one is more "closed", really? Near-absolute Intel hegemony that only benefits Intel, or ARM, which seems to benefit anyone who wants to tackle creating an ARM chip?
Honestly (disclosing my bias here), I hope IA64 dies in a fire in 5-10 years. It's had enough time in the limelight, Intel has rested on its laurels of late (arguably holding back progress), and its technical flaws run quite deep (another reason why the M1 seems impressive; ARM is simply a better-designed architecture from the ground up)
It's actually unreal. The only thing not great about it is only two ports. When i'm trying to build to 3-4 devices it's a pain. But found a good USB-C coming out in May which should hopefully help. Worth it to escape the touch bar and fan.
I agree, but I think it's sad that we have to "escape" the Touch Bar. It drives me insane and I'm considering switching from a Pro to an Air just to get rid of it. But that doesn't say anything good about Apple.
Agreed. It’s crazy that people on HN (you, me, and other commenters) are considering an Air just to get away from the TB. Airs only have one free port (one has to be used for charging).
It really says something that HNers are willing to give up ports and speed (and possibly SD, if rumors are true) just to get away from the TB.
Perhaps if you have a certain kind of monitor, presumably an expensive one? I have a no-TB 2017 MBP that has two ports, and I use one to charge and the other to connect a monitor over HDMI. That means I have zero free ports.
And since I run in clamshell mode, I can't even unplug the power cord temporarily, as the computer will only run in clamshell mode if it is plugged into power.
I do have an Anker mini-dock dongle, but it gets very hot when I use it, so I only use it when necessary. Also, it annoyingly cannot be used to charge any devices, so I can't even plug my iPhone into it to charge. I'm sure there are some other docks out there that are better, but when I was looking in 2017 it wasn't clear which ones those were (aside from the $200+ ones, which I wasn't about to purchase).
What type of monitor do you use? I just did some quick googling, and it looks like they're 2x as expensive as monitors that just have HDMI. It's possible that they're higher-end in other ways (resolution, brightness), but I paid about $120 for a 24" Samsung a couple years ago, and it looks like the cheapest Thunderbolt/USB-C monitor I can get is $190. But that's only 21", which is pretty small.
I was an Air user for 10 years (2010 - 2020). Got the M1 MacBook Pro with TouchBar this time around and love it, and wouldn't go back to Air (but haven't tried the Air M1). Also got an M1 Mini and love that too.
My nearly decade old HP laser printer works just fine with M1 - it talks AirPrint, macOS bundles a PCL driver, and HP have released drivers for M1 too...
Damn you got me. It's true, I created an account 7 years ago, slowly accumulated 6k+ karma commenting on a variety of topics, all so that I could shill the M1 laptop in 2021. I planned it all.
And I would have gotten away with it too! If it hadn't been for you meddling kids...
This kind of post is specifically discouraged in the HN guidelines.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
it's not a new account. The amount of praise is too much to pull off without being suspicious i think. A few fake accounts will probably just get accepted, but the more you use it the faster somebody finds something wrong is my reasoning.
