Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware. They do have a moat here. macOS is so bloated, I hate it, but the hardware is just so much better than anything else.
They are the only laptop company who makes a fanless laptop that never gets hot to touch with long batery life. I'm still on my m1 air with the smallest configuration you could get at the time. Yet it's somehow capable of matching my T14 i7 with 32gb og ram for most of the work I do, and it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. To be fair my t14 is a corporate windows machine, so it's not like it's a fair fight.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
> it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off.
I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
There is no doubt that it throttles. For the most part I don't notice. I've build a rust SDK around apache arrow which produces Typescript, Python and Go interactions with our datalake. Compiling that is rather slow. It'll take 5-10 minutes on myh corporate pc vs the 15–30 minutes on the air. Whenever I absolutely have to work on it on myh mac I'll usually end up letting Azure DevOps spend it's 30-60 minutes while I do something else.
sscaryterry · · focus · HN ↗
palata · · focus · HN ↗
I mean, the "so much better" in my experience is really the battery life.
Quothling · · focus · HN ↗
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
II2II · · focus · HN ↗
I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
Quothling · · focus · HN ↗