Sean Hollister
That AirJet-equipped MacBook I told you about.
In case you read my story this morning before we added its accompanying vid, here’s how three Frore AirJets affected the sustained performance of a 15-inch MacBook Air.
Laptops Archive
Archives for November 2023
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Sean Hollister
Dan Seifert
The Sony Vaio P series was the sickest laptop of the late 2000s.
Too bad it was “damn near useless,” as Colin from the This Does Not Compute YouTube channel put it in his look back on the P series and some other Weird Sony laptops from the early 2000s.
Chromebooks are good now. And such low prices!
Monica Chin and Nathan Edwards
Umar Shakir
Apple’s Space Black aluminum took ‘a lot of R&D for the sake of aesthetics.’
iFixit did some digging on the new MacBook Pro and found that Apple’s anodization and dying process must have taken “a huge amount of effort, and trial and error,” according to metallurgist David Niebuhr.
Under a microscope, Space Black had higher peaks and lower valleys from an etching process than Space Gray. It still shows light fingerprints, but iFixit gives Apple an “A-for-effort.”
Dan Seifert
Actually, yes, a brand-new $1,600 computer should come with more than 8GB of RAM.
Apple’s stinginess with the amount of RAM in the new base model MacBook Pro 14 continues to be a story, with news today that vice president of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers defended it by saying “8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems” with no actual evidence to back that up. This is the same amount of RAM found in a $600 Mac Mini or a sub-$1000 MacBook Air, but here applied to a $1600 MacBook Pro.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Apple silicon and unified memory is impressive but it’s not magic and working memory is still working memory. If you are doing any sort of multitasking, like one might expect to do with a $1600 laptop that has Pro in the name, you will quickly run into limits with 8GB of RAM. Don’t buy the hype.
Apple insists 8GB unified memory equals 16GB regular RAM
[AppleInsider]
Victoria Song
Got questions about the M3 MacBook Pros?
Here’s my review of the M3 MacBook Pro 14. I’ve also been testing the 16-inch with the M3 Max — and while I’m still working on that review, comment on this quick post any burning questions you might have. (Like, does space black really fend of fingerprints?)
I’ll be going live at 2PM ET to answer’em!
Dan Seifert
Actually, yes, a brand-new $1,600 computer should come with more than 8GB of RAM.
I’ve been critical of Apple’s new base-model 14-inch MacBook Pro, which comes with just 8GB of RAM for a starting price of $1,599. Despite Apple Silicon’s excellent performance and the fact that Apple’s unified memory is faster than traditional RAM, working memory is still working memory and more is better, especially if you use a lot of apps or browser tabs.
Jason Koebler at 404 Media agrees and points out that relying on swap, which shifts data to the SSD when RAM is full, also shortens the life span of your computer, making it an environmental issue on top of a bad user experience. We should expect more from our expensive laptops.
In Defense of RAM
[404 Media]
Dan Seifert
Why are Apple’s M3 Pro and Max configuration options so weird?
If you’ve been speccing out a new MacBook Pro this week and have poked around Apple’s configuration tool, you might have noticed that the options for the M3 Pro and M3 Max chips are... kinda weird. Memory is limited to certain configs, you can’t get the best CPU without also springing for the best GPU, and so on.
Quinn Nelson at Snazzy Labs has a compelling theory why: it’s due to the process node Apple is required to use for the 3nm chips TSMC is building and the necessary binning that results. It’s a good watch.