8 ms·
- Quad core processor - Scissor keys - No touch bar MacBook Air, the new MacBook for Pros.
by highace 7y ago
- Quad core processor
- Scissor keys
- No touch bar
MacBook Air, the new MacBook for Pros.
- wyclif 7y agoExactly what I was thinking when I read the spec sheet: 'I wonder how many developers will go for the maxed out version.'
- gcoguiec 7y agoI am.
- tvararu 7y agoSeriously considering trading my maxed out 2018 13" for this, but in the end probably not going to do it.
- flanbiscuit 7y agoMy personal laptop is an 11" Air mid-2013 and I still use and love it. I especially love the keyboard on it because the keys have height, feel closer to a mechanical keyboard, and don't capture as much dust and dirt as the flat keys on my newer touchbar 2016 pro work laptop This is good news from Apple as I was not into any of their more recent laptops but I'll probably upgrade to this one I only wish they had a 11" version but not a deal breaker
- robin_reala 7y agoSame for me, although it’s a 2012 11". The 13" model here is actually somewhere in between the old 11" and 13" for size.
- lonelappde 7y agoI don't love coding on a tiny screen when I'm not using my laptop keyboard to awkwardly type with an external monitor.
- fastball 7y agoI probably would except for the lack of ports and weak CPU. Still just waiting on a new 14" MBP.
- asdff 7y agoyou actually make use of 4 usbc connections? I'm genuinely curious on the use case. These days you can get 12 in 1 dongles from china that cover the last 25 years of input device standards into one usbc connection, and it will charge the thing.
- fastball 7y agoNot a big fan of dongles.
- asdff 6y agoWhy though? I find buying one $30 dongle that has 10 inputs for cables I already own is a better deal than buying 10 $20 usbc cables. As a mac user I've been used to dongles for a while, mac laptops never seemed to have the standard AV out aside from that fluke generation with HDMI. Always some weird connector for the sake of being weird, it seemed.
- skrtskrt 7y agoDefinitely going from 2015 MacBook Air to this new one for my personal at-home coding laptop, as long as I like the keyboard when trying it out. I had really been wanting to upgrade for Retina & better processor but I knew they would upgrade the processor and fix the keyboard if I waited for 2020... no reason to wait now. I don't run any crazy fat Docker stacks for my own stuff at home, so this is perfect.
- M5x7wI3CmbEem10 7y agowhy not the pro for a few more hundred dollars? or wait for the upgraded version in the summer? you get a noticeable performance boost, dedicated graphics card, touch bar, and so on?
- skrtskrt 7y agoI really don't need that much extra memory or performance, I thoroughly dislike the touch bar, and I want a slimmer/lighter form factor. My at-home hobby work is in Golang and Python, and not particularly compute-intensive stuff. Neither of those have huge heavy toolchains. Really the main thing driving an upgrade from my minimum-spec 2015 Air is the Retina display.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoActually: - 2 cores - 1.1 GHz In 2020...
- selectodude 7y agoIntel’s 10nm chips have very low base clocks. They’re almost always in some sort of boost mode.
- samcat116 7y agoYou can get a quad core i7
- stagger87 7y agoWhich is still a 1.2 GHz base clock.
- read_if_gay_ 7y agoBecause wasting energy on a 4 GHz base clock is completely pointless (and so is your criticism) if you can adjust frequency as needed. 99% of the time 1GHz is sufficient. It’s only when you launch the browser that a faster CPU is useful, not when you’re reading through a website
- enraged_camel 7y agoThe problem is that it ramps up by 250 Mhz increments, over a period of several seconds, and that can be extremely noticeable in some workflows. I went from an 6700HQ (2.6 Ghz base) to a 10710U (1.1 Ghz base) and the difference is definitely there, and it's jarring enough to the point where I kind of regret it. It feels like a huge step backwards, despite the latter CPU being four generations ahead.
- exhaze 7y agoDid you make sure that your turbo button was pressed? Honestly, this is why I just stick to naturally aspirated CPUs.
- lonelappde 7y ago"quad core" @ 1.4GHz
- tomp 7y agoExcept - 16GB RAM Can you even run Eclipse with just 16GB?!
- augusto-moura 7y agoJava people problems
- MrBuddyCasino 7y agoExactly. I'm deciding between 32GB or even 64Gb, just to be on the safe side. Because nowadays you're running Slack, Spotify, several messengers, Firefox, Chrome, IntelliJ, Docker and Kubernetes on your local machine.
- Silhouette 7y agoWhich is kind of horrifying, if you stop and think about it. You're wondering whether you need another 32G of RAM to run a basic working environment, a glorified text editor, and some communications software. I used a BBC that could do that in 32K of RAM in the 1980s! Obviously I'm not really suggesting the functionality today is equivalent, but the idea that ultimately you're meeting the same basic needs yet it now takes a million times as much space is... unsettling.
- MrBuddyCasino 7y agoIts certainly amazing how much memory consumption has grown. I like to think of it in terms of economics, we could never write today's software using 80s methods. Slack in assembler? Impossible. Kubernetes in C++? Maybe, but there will be security holes, and Go is just more productive. Developers are expensive, very expensive.
- henrikeh 7y agoI’m not well-versed at all in Go and Kubernetes? Isn’t the large RAM usage from the usage of containers? Is Go a memory-hog?
- mFixman 7y agoI honestly never understood the hate for the touchbar. It allows me to be much more granular with volume and brightness, and I never really used F-keys anyway.
- loudmax 7y agoMuch of the hate is that the touchbar wasn't optional, at least not unless you wanted to opt out of an Apple laptop. If the touchbar had been something users could choose, Apple users wouldn't have minded so much. Supporting more options is expensive, so it's understandable that Apple didn't want to give their customers a choice. Still, it seems like a gimick. And it appeared at the same time as the butterfly keyboard, cementing the notion that Apple had lost its way.
- r00fus 7y agoI appreciate the touchbar every day (esp. with bettertouchtool) but the soft escape is horrendous as it's used in so many of my workflows and isn't 100% responsive and doesn't give any tactile feedback.
- Plyphon_ 7y agoVolume adjustment is actually a great example of why I hate the touchbar. - I can't adjust the volume without looking at it. Because the touchbar is flat with no haptic feedback when I land on a button, it's hard to remember the exact position of the volume 'button' without looking. Sounds trivial - but combined with point 2.... - The way the volume control expands - it actually moves the 'volume down' button AWAY from your finger, which again requires me to keep looking at the control. This means that when a loud song comes on, it can take 2-3 seconds to quickly turn the volume down in total. I could do that with one single keypress in half a second or less on a keyboard, without needing to look at the keyboard. That can also be the difference between missing a key detail from a quiet speaker on a Hangout. Flashy, but it's a terrible user experience by every metric other than looks, I guess.
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoYou can actually just tap the volume icon on the Touch Bar and slide your finger back and forth immediately and it works; you don't have to tap, then move your finger to the volume slider and move back and forth. (This is clever, but basically undiscoverable unless someone tells you in, for example, a comment on Hacker News, which is how I found out.)