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0 pointsModernMech3y ago0 comments

I think the downvotes are coming from calling it a “game changer”. How has the game actually has changed? What does the new AS MacBook enable that the other ones don’t, or other laptops don’t for that matter?

We live in an age of fast performance and great battery life on most any laptop. Having faster performance and better battery life isn’t changing the game —- that’s how the game has been played as long as laptops have been a consumer product category. If Apple’s support is the same, then the OP’s problem isn’t fixed. Their problem wasn’t performance and battery life.

P.S. I’m speaking as someone who owns both a MacBook Pro and a surface laptop, so I’m not exactly biased against MacBooks.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

jmyeet3y ago· 1 in thread

> How has the game actually has changed?

Battery life for one [1]. Many compare the Dell XPS 13/15 to the MBA/MBP and the XPS has realistically less than half the battery life [2] (the 5.5-7 hours being listed as "feasible" there also requires turning down the display brightness a lot).

The 2011 Macbook Air was heads and shoulders above anything else at the time for that combination of size, cost, power and battery life. Literally nothing else could compete on all of these factors. I mean Linus Torvalds used one [3] (and still does [4]).

On a pure hardware front, the M1/M2 Macbooks are at a similar point where nothing else can compete with that combination of price, power, battery life and form factor, to the point where people will run Linux or Windows on them. You can say it's not for you. You can also say you don't like OSX. That's all fine.

But anti-tribalism is just another form of tribalism. Being irrationally anti-Mac is no better than being irrationally pro-Mac. I'd argue it's worse because the anti-Mac tribalists think they're better than the pro-Mac tribalists.

[1]: https://www.laptopmag.com/news/macbook-air-m2-battery-life-s...

[2]: https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/dell-xps-13-...

[3]: https://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvald...

[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/linus-torvalds-uses-...

ModernMechOP3y ago

> On a pure hardware front, the M1/M2 Macbooks are at a similar point where nothing else can compete with that combination of price, power, battery life and form factor

Like I said, the performance and battery improvements are marginal; it's the same game played a little better, not a changed game. The AS processor doesn’t enable completely new or novel ways of using the device, and in fact the form factor is still limited compared to competing options. The reason I use my Surface Laptop over my Macbook are old reasons -- touch screen support, pen support, and windows software compatibility. If my Macbook supported all of that, then that would be a game changer. But that's not what they did; they improved on some performance and some battery life, which as I said is a story as old as computing. It's not enough for me to consider my new Macbook as a "game changer" if the added benefits won't even cause me to pick it up over an alternative.

cruano3y ago

I think most tech people went from considering intel-based macbooks as a splurge, to the single best value proposition for consumer laptops.

Before there were many tradeoffs for choosing a macbook, most of them around performance/cost, but all of those are gone when the base $999 macbook air beats way more expensive computers.

I'd recommend this machines to literally everyone that needs a laptop, which is something I can't say for the rest of Apple products or any other piece of tech for that matter

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