Apple M4 MacBook Air review: I have no notes
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I can't tell if it's the picture, my screen, my eyes, or if I'm just being gaslit by Apple, but I was very confused why you/Apple are calling the laptop in the pictures "Sky Blue". The final picture is the only one where I can see a hint of blue, the rest all look like the standard Apple grey/silver?
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macosandlinux
Ars Tribunus Militum
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I am looking at the base model 15" version. The price drops to $559 after the education discount and trade in value of my current 15" M2 Air ($520). That's... a really good price.
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I'm not even in the market for a laptop at this moment, but I skimmed the review, reread this
twice and made a 'next time...' purchasing decision I usually only make after reading 5 or 6 reviews and getting lots of hands on time.
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Those tabs don't have to be in one window. I'll often be flipping between different tasks, and have multiple tabs for each, all in separate browser windows.
Maybe I'll have a Jira window with a dozen tabs open representing tasks I want to discuss with the team later, ready to step through them at the meeting. Then I might have a different window with half-dozen tabs open with documents I'm constantly referring to for a report. Then another window with a half-dozen different suggested solutions to a coding problem that I'll get back to trying out once my other tasks are out of the way. Then a half-dozen news articles open that I'll finish reading in my down-time.
These are all different tasks, in different windows, but the tabs add up. And with modern computers, you don't need to shut one task down to context-switch to the next. Just leave that browser window and its tabs there, ready to come back to later.
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Beneath the menu bar, which contains the notch, is a full 16*10 display. Full screen applications use that 16*10 display area. The notch takes away nothing.
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A good way to bring your laptop to its knees, especially if the browser is Google Chrome.
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I applaud Apple for staying true to their fanless ethos in the Air laptop lineup.
Lesser companies frequently treat fanless high-performance laptops as short-lived experiments or a one-off marketing gimmick (cough Lakefield).
For normal consumers, fanless laptops should be the norm. Less heat, less weight, longer battery life, zero maintenance, zero noise, more flexible, and just at the cost of 5% to 10% 1T perf.
4+6 cores is more than enough for casual and moderate usage.
//
To be blunt, I’m greatly disappointed almost every Lunar Lake and Qualcomm Oryon laptop chose actively-cooled designs.
Just make one SKU fanless-only. Windows OEMs have an obsession to eke out a 2% perf win for 15% more power.
Lesser companies frequently treat fanless high-performance laptops as short-lived experiments or a one-off marketing gimmick (cough Lakefield).
For normal consumers, fanless laptops should be the norm. Less heat, less weight, longer battery life, zero maintenance, zero noise, more flexible, and just at the cost of 5% to 10% 1T perf.
4+6 cores is more than enough for casual and moderate usage.
//
To be blunt, I’m greatly disappointed almost every Lunar Lake and Qualcomm Oryon laptop chose actively-cooled designs.
Just make one SKU fanless-only. Windows OEMs have an obsession to eke out a 2% perf win for 15% more power.
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Apple laptops are not part of any 'luxury market.' And the wealthy who by luxury items (home furnishings, cars, clothing and clothing-adjacent accessories) don't consider laptops to be part of that market.
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I am dangerously close to buying one of these.
I’ve still got my old Thinkpad T420. Even 12-13 years later, on paper it does what I need but in practice Optimus still sucks. So I’ve been looking around for replacements and have been thinking about trying an Apple laptop.
Oh man, things escalate quickly. Starting with $100 for ancient and/or broken, I think to myself “well, for another $100, I can move up in $ATTRIBUTE.” Next thing I know, it’s at “well screw it, I’ll just buy a new one from Walmart for $700.” And now this one seems well worth the extra $300 on top of that.
I’ll have to do some thinking about how much I actually need a laptop these days, because this is approaching “no brainer” territory.
I’ve still got my old Thinkpad T420. Even 12-13 years later, on paper it does what I need but in practice Optimus still sucks. So I’ve been looking around for replacements and have been thinking about trying an Apple laptop.
Oh man, things escalate quickly. Starting with $100 for ancient and/or broken, I think to myself “well, for another $100, I can move up in $ATTRIBUTE.” Next thing I know, it’s at “well screw it, I’ll just buy a new one from Walmart for $700.” And now this one seems well worth the extra $300 on top of that.
I’ll have to do some thinking about how much I actually need a laptop these days, because this is approaching “no brainer” territory.
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What is it with people who want to choose violence when they see something different?
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So I was just checking the Apple Refurb online store, and what's crazy is, they are trying to sell refurb older generation Mac Airs for MORE than this new generation will retail at? Maybe they will cut prices once this actually goes on sale? Why would anyone buy a refurb M1 or M2 at a higher cost than a brand new M4?
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They were once upon a time, and I would argue the very top of the line models still are. But perhaps, a better term than 'luxury' market would be 'pro' market - there are a lot of creative pro's who use top of the line, expensive Mac laptops for their work - many people in the music industry, graphic design/digital art/etc,, I think a lot of architects maybe use Macs.
Virtually every Youtube video I see anymore about programming, a LOT of programmers are switching to Macs too. They will use it a lot like Linux in terms of actual dev workflows (for example, I've seen videos of people using vim/neovim on Mac, doing tons of command line work - which honestly, puzzles me - if you are mostly working in the command line and vim anyhow, why not just use Linux?
But, I think they use Macs because 1) it's better hardware than comparable PC laptops, and 2) gives them very good video tools for making those YT/TikTok/Twitch videos, which is really what that particular market's core business is, not so much programming as making social media content ABOUT programming.
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I mean, I have an M1 Pro MBP, and it has a notch. I haven't had a reason to upgrade, but once Apple ditches the notch entirely, I probably will. I'd love for them to add a touchscreen too, but I've basically given up that dream...
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I've been a Windows loyalist most of my life. Only Android and Windows phones but I'm just ready to leave Windows. Win 11 is just gratuitous spyware, leaving Win 10 to rot. Literally just bought an iPhone last night and ready to work on moving my gaming PC to Linux. Apple makes great hardware and limited spyware and I guess that's what matters to me more vs. having Xbox and Candy crush shoehorned in at every turn.
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What a stupid reply. One can be doing things and literally need dozens of pages open. If I have Exchange update get borked you can bet your butt I have many tabs open to help me troubleshoot the issue.
Also - modern browsers will deactivate tabs after they haven't been the active tab for a while and reload the page when called upon again, so it's a non-issue these days anyway.
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macosandlinux
Ars Tribunus Militum
There's nothing wrong with getting the M1 Air for $600 if you can live with 8GB RAM as a first Mac. Otherwise welcome M4 Air!
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Not really commenting on the review, but my prayers go out to you for having to manage/maintain an exchange environment. Hats off to ya homie! While I’m not currently working, that’s def something I’m glad I don’t have to do anymore.
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I have an M1 Air with 16G RAM and it is overwhelmed when editing RAW photos in Lightroom. I've been considering upgrading to a 14" MBP but wonder if this Air + 24G RAM will do the trick? Any opinions?
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Sky blue color is a pale blue with undertones of green. The hint of green might surprise some — after all, one of the first things we learn about color is that the sky is blue. The color sky blue, however, brings a hint of green into the mix to create a tone that’s uniquely soothing and natural. Sky blue color evokes a sense of hope, dreams, and goodwill.
https://www.adobe.com/express/colors/sky-blue#:~:text=Sky%20blue%20color%20is%20a,that's%20uniquely%20soothing%20and%20natural.
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It’s the creature comforts, compatibility and reliability (JustWorks™) of the Mac ecosystem with the flexibility and customization of *nix. (Peanut butter and chocolate)
I can run all my zsh workflows and Microsoft productivity apps during the day, reply to texts via iMessage, and then shut all that shit down and load up SeratoDJ pro at night. (Or Lightroom)
I’ve been tempted by System76’s offerings but there’s just some apps I use that simply won’t run or run well on Linux.
Windows? Maybe if they integrate Powershell with Linux more but from what I’ve seen these days, they’re going the opposite direction. Everything I read indicates Windows is becoming increasingly annoying to use.
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The Air is really reaching the limits of what it can be in its current incarnation. The best laptop for most people.
On the other hand, those performance charts are a reminder of what a beast the M4 Pro Mini is.
On the other hand, those performance charts are a reminder of what a beast the M4 Pro Mini is.
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Sorry but that's just not true, for this laptop. Consider its capability. Consider the sheer amount of R&D and existing tech that goes into it, the precision manufacturing, the environmental footprint of its entire supply chain of resource extraction, processing and manufacturing, and the many hours of highly skilled labour. If anything, $1,000 is cheap.
Yes, fine, $1,000 is a lot of money for much of the world. But you're buying an item that can last 10 years of use - I myself have used two Mac laptops for 10 years each. $100/yr is not a lot considering the capability you're getting with this product. I spend more than that on coffee, and I know which one is more essential to my life! ... It's not the coffee.
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I’ve used Linux at work for lots of years for lots of different purposes, including shipping on many products. Vim is always my first choice for a text editor, everywhere. But at home I don’t want to be bothered with that world. Fiddling with Linux is what I get paid to do. macOS lets me do command line things where I’m comfortable, but I don’t have to be the OS support guy. The hardware is great and to me it’s worth it.
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I suspect Face ID is just too THICK to fit in the super slim top. Apple is trying to avoid have the camera stick out which would be very ugly. In iPhones and iPads they have the full Z height of the chassis to work with, in laptops not so much. Don't forget it's not just a camera, I suspect it's probably the dot matrix projector that is tricky to flatten/miniaturize.
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I'm a bit disappointed by Apple not making the nanotexture display finish an option on the Air. I'd have happily paid $200 for the nanotexture upgrade, but I'm not willing to buy a 14" MBP with the attendant weight and power I don't really need.
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Macs are very popular in my field of science (astronomy) in that underneath they are close enough to UNIX/LINUX that most relevant applications can be ported almost trivially.
They can also run Microsoft Office which, despite the efforts and "social energy" of developers and proponents of eg. LibreOffice is just easier and more compatible with the day-to-day documents we will be receiving from everyone in admin in the University who are on the default Windows boxes supplied by IT.
Purely personally I also prefer the UI to any Linux offering, but that's a personal preference.
I manage a cluster of servers that run Linux, so I'm not totally Linux-averse and on those it makes total sense. For me personally I prefer Mac for desktop.
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I have one note - I miss the old 11" MacBook Air model that was just about 1kg. They could bring that back with a 12" edge-to-edge display and trim down those bezels on either side of the keyboard.
Otherwise this thing is a great laptop. I'd happily trade in my 13" M1 Pro for it.
Otherwise this thing is a great laptop. I'd happily trade in my 13" M1 Pro for it.
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