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- Hacker News
- I still have a 2019 MacBook Pro with the non-butterfly keyboard and escape key (unfortunately still the Touch Bar).
It’s still a great laptop except the battery lasts maybe 75 mins. I just keep it plugged in but despite the fact it’s 6 years old I don’t notice any problems with it.
I’m tempted to buy an M4 laptop just because it’s “new” and “faster” but then I ask myself Why? It’s the same thing with my iPhone. Until my laptop dies or there is something functional that I can’t do with my old laptop I’m going to keep using it.
by blindriver - depends on use, I had the same laptop but the speed increase when I upgraded to an M3 was easily worth itby willsmith72
- I have an M1 air that still lasts 7-8 hours on one charge. It's very different than the Intel battery life which I had 5 or 7 machines over the years.
- It's always interesting to see users have somewhat strong opinions over fan vs fanless. I could never go Macbook Air again because I've been to hotter climates and do things beyond just using a browser and invariably the keyboard gets too warm for my fingertips. I need the MBPs fans and Mac Fan Control, noise be dammed.by charlie0
- How much of a difference would I see in compute between an M2 and M4 for example? Assuming it’s the same RAM. Did they also make the gpu and neural engine that much better between the two?by yalogin
- Incredible hardware. Love that I can also run local llms on mine. https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/issues/4526
- Can't you run small LLMs on like... a Macbook air M1? Some models are under 1B weights, they will be almost useless but I imagine you could run them on anything from the last 10 years.
But yeah if you wanna run 600B+ weights models your gonna need an insane setup to run it locally.
by ericmcer - If you bought a fully-featured computer that supports compute shaders and didn't run local LLMs, you should be protesting in the street.by bigyabai
- But are these llms worth their salt?by amelius
- 20 years ago I bought a G3 iBook because the hardware was lovely and the system was supported perfectly by stock Debian woody. (Hands up if you remember having to bless your laptop with “holy penguin pee”, part of the output of the yaboot bootloader used in PowerPC systems!)
Times changed and the best hardware for me right now is a Dell XPS from the model lines a few years back that looked like an aluminum sandwich with a black plastic filling. These machines are fantastic but (1) no OLED, (2) now high speed refresh rate, and (3) the keyboard isn’t great.
Could this modern Apple hardware bring me back to Free OS on pretty hardware, or is there something else I should try?
by gorgoiler - I bought one of those iBooks for Debian linux, but I found the resolution was a bit small for X. At the time, I had a thing for non-intel architectures. Prior to that, I had done a lot of work packaging up Debian for Sparc machines. I had access to a wide variety of Sun workstations at my job as a sysadmin at a university.by dunham
- Asahi (Linux) lags quite far behind the latest Apple hardware release. If you want the Linux experience on Apple hardware, I think the best move is full-screen VM. Performance of that is more than good enough, but it does mean you are running a full non-free software stack to get to your free software VM.by jitl
- An frequently overlooked point is the display brightness. The pro models offer 1600 nits peak brightness, which makes these good units for looking at HDR content, especially if you like to take photos or edit videos. Meanwhile the Air maxes out at 500 nits, so the effect and contrast is drastically reduced for those models.by quitit
- Normal content is still limited to 500 nits, and these being mini-LED displays, contrast is already infinite.
Unless you’re making Instagram content, very few photographers use HDR. Everything else will look the same on both screens.
by ricardobeat - Not just that but you can use Brightentosh to force it on.
I live in a sunny place with big windows and basically use it all day every day. When it turns off my screen feels broken I so prefer the brightness.
by nwienert - > The nano texture display is great at reducing reflections. I could immediately see the difference when placing two laptops side by side: The bright Apple Store lights showed up very prominently on the normal display, and were almost not visible at all on the nano texture display.
This is a quiet boon for those who enjoy working outdoors but find the sun/brightness a problem.
by nomilk - It's classic Apple to spend over a decade insisting that that glossy screens were the best option, and then to eventually roll out a matte screen as a "premium" feature with a bunch of marketing around it.
- It's certainly on brand for Apple to face widespread criticism in the past for having matte screens as the default (computer magazines of the day found that matte finishes made screens too dim) only to face renewed criticism for dropping the thing they were previously criticized for.by GeekyBear
- i recently worked with a macbook pro and it caused uncomfortable feelings of eyestrain. i had some app that was supposed to disable the temporal dithering but i'm not sure if it helped. i'm curious if there's anyone else on here like me who has experienced eyestrain with macbooks where the nano texture display has helped.by a-dub
- As someone who buys and likes Apple stuff, I agree, it's a signature move from them.
- They are really good at selling a small quantitative improvement that causes them to start using something, as a new type of thing going from impossible to possible. As if the tech didn’t just didn’t exist before Apple started using it.
It is probably a pretty good screen, though.
I don’t really like Apple overall. But, to some extent, it’s like… well, maybe that’s a good way of selling incremental engineering improvements.
by bee_rider - Apple was actually late to the glossy display party. HP and Dell moved to them a few years before Apple. I don't think Apple was "insisting" on them, but rather following an industry trend that they were late to.by mdasen
- I wonder if they will (re)introduce premium keyboards with sculpted keys that self-center your fingers someday. magsafe coming back was nice, maybe more extra ports?by m463
- If anything, Apple was right back then. Glossy has so many benefits for the places where you’d use a computer, it’s not even close. Having the option to pay premium for those few that work in environments where matte helps them makes sense. I’d pay money for my display to not be matte.by tymscar
- Historically, traditional matte screen finishes exhibited poor optical qualities by scattering ambient light, which tended to wash out colors. This scattering process also affected the light from individual pixels, causing it to refract into neighboring pixels.
This reduced overall image quality and caused pixel-fine details, such as small text, to appear smeary on high-density LCDs. In contrast, well-designed glossy displays provide a superior visual experience by minimizing internal refraction and reflecting ambient light at high angles, which reduces display pollution. Consequently, glossy screens often appear much brighter, blacks appear blacker without being washed out, colors show a higher dynamic range, and small details remain crisper. High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight, and reflections are manageable because they are full optical reflections with correct depth, allowing the user to focus on the screen content.
Apple's "nano texture" matte screens were engineered to solve the specific optical problems of traditional matte finishes, the washed-out colors and smeary details. But they cost more to make. The glossy option is still available, and still good.
by LeoPanthera - One thing that wasn't mentioned is the max sustained screen brightness for SDR, which is higher on the M4 Pro (1000 nits) compared to the M4 Air or M1 Pro (500 nits).by carbocation
- There’s an awesome app called Vivid which just opens the HDR max brightness. I use it all the time with my M3 Pro when working outside and I believe it also works on earlier models.by flyinglizard
- > My ideal MacBook would probably be a MacBook Air, but with the nano-texture display! :)
I agree on the nano-texture display having used one in person for a little bit. It's sort of like an ultra fine matte texture that isn't noticable while using it, but is noticable compared to other devices in the same room. I hope it becomes a more standard option on future devices.
That said, I've used Thinkpads with matte displays and while not as fine, they mostly have the same benefit.
by accrual - I’d love an air with a high density display.
My mom has an M1 air, and its resolution is not great. Everything looks a bit blurry compared with my 4K Dell XPS my wife’s MacBook Pro m4 display. I guess the air’s native resolution means it has to do fractional scaling.
- To be it looked very much like the matte coating on Dell monitors, where bunched up same-color pixels have this "feels like there's a rainbow here but if I focus on it I don't see it anymore" effect. Definitely better than ThinkPad matte, though.by smileybarry