I've been on my M1 Air, 16GB, since a few weeks after launch, more than six years now. I still use it daily with lots of Docker containers, VS Code, tons of Electron apps, a small macOS arm VM, and lots of browser tabs simultaneously. Recently, Claude's VM environment is getting exercised simultaneously. Usually the memory pressure is into yellow, but responsiveness is still far higher than any Mac from the Intel days, and far more usable than any Windows laptop that I have the misfortune to experience when borrowing somebody else's computer. And despite all that memory pressure, my SSD isn't getting worn out by swapping, I'm at only "3%" of SSD wear, if those stats on the CLI are to be trusted.
I'm not sure I'll need another computer anytime soon. Even though the kids jumped on it once when I left it on the couch for a few minutes, bending the case on one side of the keyboard. It bent back mostly flat. Gives it a bit of personality.
Never before has $1099 (or whatever) of hardware gone so far for me.
a bit of an aside but what's amazing is that Docker's recent beta VM for Mac (I think released a couple of months ago now) has dramatically improved the performance you get out of your CPU.
Using a macbook air, even a recent one, before this Docker was definitely usable but noticably slower. Probably still worth it but a noticable tradeoff using it as a dev machine Vs a pro. Now that tradeoff has basically gone away.
Still baffles the mind that Apple solved this issue some 20+ years ago, and others _still_ haven't. I remember being basically surrounded by jet engines running Word in school.
A few years ago in an old job I got a monster-specced Dell laptop, and it would still roar if I opened anything. I had to pull all the nerf tricks through the BIOS to at least keep it somewhat tolerable in low-load scenarios (i.e. most of the workday).
Even a 2015 MacBook for me ran the fan hard almost constantly. First Apple silicon MacBook was silent. Now using an M1 Max MBP from 2021 and external hard drives are the thing making noise on my desk.
I have a number of passively-cooled silent machines, from metal-chassis rugged subnotebooks popular with the military and field-service techs, to plastic cheapies intended for the student market.
They're all fairly low-spec in absolute terms, but even 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC is adequate to run Win10 and office apps, at least, it was before all the Copilot bloat. And you can buy them as an individual, if you search them out explicitly.
But that's not what the mass market buys when they go shopping. Partly because that's not what Best Buy puts on the shelf, and partly because Microsoft sternly warns that such machines aren't recommended for the AI-encumbered future. Gotta push 40 TOPS and have at least 16GB to get Microsoft's blessing, which I think is the single largest driving force behind the hardware upgrade cycle.
Apple silicon is only been around for 5+ years, but people tend to forget how bad Intel macs overheated, throttled and hand tons of other thermal related issues.
A fanless CPU needs more, lower-clocked cores to have the same multi-thread performance as an actively cooled CPU with fewer cores, and higher core count CPUs cost more. So you only get a fanless CPU if you either a) get a low multi-thread performance CPU or b) pay for a high-performance CPU and then get only medium performance out of it by running it fanless. Notice that even Apple's highest performance laptops have fans; fanless there isn't a thing.
But Apple's fanless machines do b) and then they just charge you the premium. There are a few fanless PC laptops that do the same thing, but most people don't want that, because they'd rather save a significant amount of money by getting the same performance out of a less expensive CPU with a fan.
This is oversimplified. It is sustained multithreaded performance that brings throttling with fanless cpu. Anything for a short enough amount of time is fine, and sustained single threaded stuff is also fine. Bursts are also fine. A lot of work that people do on a computer is fine. Fanless doesn't really hurt unless you process large amounts of data in parallel for some time. Performance in a cpu does not only show in this kind of tasks.
I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
Of course one could say that ~having~ using the fan is always optional anyway (like the older 13" macbook pro was mostly an air with a fan) and in these types of tasks you may barely hear it. But still I prefer the peace of not ever hearing a fan for my to-go laptop.
> I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
Can confirm. I used an Air for a couple of years as a bit of an experiment at work. Ultimately we did go back to Pros, specifically discounted M3 Max ones, just because I did start hitting bottlenecks running Xcode + Android Studio + Firefox + Slack + Telegram + god knows what else, I did FINALLY find the thermal throttling at the end and we ended up going with more expensive machines. That was over a year ago and I purchased the Air I had been using for my wife, who is using it today. It meets and exceeds all her needs and she loves the thing.
Ultimately I did have to cave and get a bigger Mac for work, but that was more out of convenience than necessity. I could've made the Air work if I wanted to, but ultimately I wanted a larger screen and more displays.
> I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
5W Phone CPUs of today are faster than 105W workstation CPUs of ten or fifteen years ago. It's not a matter of whether it can do real work, of course it can. The question is, in the instances when you still have to wait for the machine, would you rather wait noticeably longer or pay significantly more money in order to avoid white noise? That's the trade off, and most people pick saving time and money over silence, so that's what most vendors offer.
It's not that they can't figure out how to do it. They do make them. There are AMD chips with TDP configurable down to ~15W and fanless laptops that have them. They're just not as popular when you give people the choice.
Yeah tbf I would probably consider just using my phone with my mobile usb-c monitor and bluetooth keyboard, if iOS was not so hostile to be used for actual work (and it does not seem simple in android either, though maybe I would be eventually able to make it work there). It would be very useful to have such a light setup on the go, as I do not necessarily need strong multicore performance all the time.
> AMD chips with TDP configurable down to ~15W
I don't trust the TDP values companies publish because there is no standard way to define what TDP is or how it is measured. At best they are consistent in how they measure them within each brand, so you can at least compare different generations.
And in any case, the question is how competitive such a configuration is vs an ARM-based laptop, with much longer tradition in the low-power space. Could be my searching skills, but looking to get a laptop recently I did not find anything in a better spot in the efficiency/performance/price axes than an air. In particular I was unable to find AMD fanless laptops anyway.
Just as an example, during light work with my m5 mac (eg editting a text file, or writing this comment while a youtube video plays in the background and a bunch of light stuff run in the background too, screen low lit) I see 3-4W total system consumption reported by the OS, while a wattmeter shows 7-9W consumed. Part of it may be hardware, part of it software, but figuring out idle consumption is actually very important for making fanless work. A lot of work a cpu does in a normal day of mine is in bursts. Much of the time it is not necessarily doing much, and you need the thermal headroom for when it is actually needed. Last time I tried tinkering with a thinkpad and linux I did not get remotely as far. I would be happy if there get to be more options.
> The question is, in the instances when you still have to wait for the machine, would you rather wait noticeably longer or pay significantly more money in order to avoid white noise
If I encountered these instances often enough, then definitely a fanless laptop would not be appropriate for my use-cases. But I don't encounter them for what I want to use it for, and the next option with a fan is a larger, heavier and more expensive laptop, which I don't need. When I needed one for my work, I got one. I also have a 16" one that stays mostly at home because I cannot carry this weight around daily and I do stuff I cannot do with an air there.
I did forget, because a silent laptop is now table stakes for me. I can't imagine buying anything with an audible fan again. I'd rather stay on the hardware I have.
I wouldn’t want a fan on a Windows laptop, for sure. On Linux they are fine as long as the lowest speed is “off,” since they’ll only kick on if you explicitly ask the computer to do something crunchy.
When the M5 Mac Mini Pro 64GB RAM and more release, I'd like to seamlessly mesh the Neo to the Mini the way Plan 9 imagined. And, a payment would be all that you need to expand on the cloud.
Happy to see Gerbil Scheme occupies 4GB RAM use on the Neo while building.
So what? The right amount of performance is what allows you to do what you have to do quickly enough. Anything beyond that is useless. It’s not like you have to use 100% of the theoretical performance of a computer all the time.
I can't stand Apple, but it's the truth. I used one sporadically to build my stuff for Mac. Going back to my Windows workstation after that always felt like travelling 15 years back in time. I recommended M1 Air to everyone whose workflow was compatible with a Mac. Most of the people who acted on that recommendation still use it and don't really think about upgrading.
I absolutely loved that m1 air, but one time there was a MacOS update, and it bricked. I discovered that another mac is required to recover my M1. As if I had another working mac laying around somewhere. I would love to go back to mac, but those things really scare me.
If a {Dell, HP, Lenovo} firmware update fails leaving the computer bricked, can you use another {Dell, HP, Lenovo} to restore the firmware?
(Honest question: I'm a longtime Mac user, I use Macs at work and I can tell you the correct DFU port for each model. But my home computer for the last 6 years has been an HP EliteBook with Ubuntu.)
Same with the iPad Air m1, handles everything you throw at it, does video editing, office, etc. Connected to an external display and keyboard feels like a full laptop, on the couch is the best consumption device. And with Claude it can handle your coding sessions.
There are terminal/ssh apps (a-shell, blink [shonky business model, sadly] etc) for remote coding, at least one git client (Working Copy), plenty of text editors.
Remote makes it way more useful, but bashing out well-formatted code on the road is trivial in Textastic, for instance.
For years my favorite hackathon kit has been a tablet + cheap bluetooth mouse + cheap bluetooth keyboard. It could be an iPad or an Amazon Fire tablet so long as it can run an RDP client and I can log into my home computer or a big cloud machine.
My concern with the Neo is that it may have the same "feels impossible for the price" quality early on, but the 8GB ceiling gives it much less room to become the kind of absurd long-lived machine your Air turned into
I had a ton of issues with my Macbook pro M1 16GB, memory pressure would be in the yellow always and into red frequently which caused sound stutter and all sorts of issues.
My M1 air (I think 8GB?) had similar issues
My M2 24gb was amazing - especially since it allowed dual monitors.
I recently upgraded to the M4 32GB and it is my "do everything" computer and is absolutely awesome.
My personal experience with the m-series is that get as memory as possible. I do feel the M1 had issues based on the couple I owned.
EDIT: Even on 32GB my memory pressure is constantly in the yellow, but have not seen it go to red
Memory pressure sort-of means something sort-of doesn't. It's certainly possible that critical pressure could cause audio issues, but it could also be impossible to ever notice.
More importantly you shouldn't be experiencing audio stalls, so complain in the feedback app if you do.
That sound bug being there for so long would be pretty embarrassing for Apple if they haven't lost the ability to get embarrassed about the shitshow that OS X... i mean, macOS has become a long time ago..
Low memory handling is better that what Linux does, we can all at least agree on that :)
I got the 8 GB version of the M1 Mac Book air for a freelance stuff where I had to ship stuff for iOS as well. Really wish I had gone for the 16 GB version, since I had no idea just how bad the memory situation would eventually get. That said, it’s at least a good little computer for me being on the move!
I'm not sure I'll need another computer anytime soon. Even though the kids jumped on it once when I left it on the couch for a few minutes, bending the case on one side of the keyboard. It bent back mostly flat. Gives it a bit of personality.
Never before has $1099 (or whatever) of hardware gone so far for me.