[Xeoncross]

I'm glad the air now comes standard with 16GB of RAM and 512GB disk space.

It's not that the M1 with 8/256GB was slow at all, but even browsing the web gets into 12GB of usage and exhausting the 256GB is fairly easy if you backup your 256GB phone, try to edit a few videos, download enough Gradle/Go/Cargo/Node packages, or install enough 20GB office apps.

Any apple silicon with 16GB / 512GB of stage (even the M1 series) should have a much longer useful life and avoid disk/storage aging as rapidly from the constant swapping.

[sonofhans]

Can I just lean on my cane for a second, and say that the first machine I connected to a network had 256KB RAM, and I considered myself lucky to have so much. My 150 baud modem downloaded text slower than I could read it.

I know how we got to these large numbers. Shit, I helped build the road. It still blows my brains out.

[Doctor_Fegg]

Luxury. I dialled into FidoNet with my 64k Amstrad CPC (contd. p94. Mein gott I’m old)

[sonofhans]

A whole 64k, huh? IIRC those things presented the most costly spilled drink opportunity of any computer at the time.

[themadturk]

Yup. I ran UUCP on a 64K Kaypro with a 1200 baud modem.

[sonofhans]

1200 baud? It was like science fiction come to life the first time I saw text downloading faster than I could read :D

[themadturk]

I was fortunate to have friends who worked for AT&T back then and they were able to get the 1200 baud modem for nothing. It was soooo speedy!

[dijit]

Lets be real, the fact that the Air is good for developers is.. honestly, great.

But these devices are meant for home users.

Not a tremendous amount of home users having huge gradle/go/cargo/node packages in my experience.

The backup problem is real, I'm surprised Apple doesn't come out with a new time capsule (edit: for phones/tablets)- but I guess they want that sweet iCloud services dollar.

[Forgeties79]

maybe I’m forgetting all the benefits of time capsule but you can plug any old storage device into a Mac now and turn it into a “Time Machine.“ It’s pretty turnkey at this point. What would a modern time capsule offer besides maybe remote back ups?

[dijit]

oh no, absolutely- apologies for the confusion.

Time "Machine" on MacOS continues to work (though it's clearly not as important to Apple as it once was).

The issue is: if you want to back up a phone: it will take space from your laptop and it must be tethered to do the backup. This means that if you have a 1TiB phone, like I do, you need at least 1TiB of local disk on your laptop to be able to do a single backup if the phone is anywhere near full.

This is in contrast to how Time Capsule works right now for MacOS, whereby you have an SMB share (like, a 100+TiB NAS) and your laptop will just back itself up when it can.

Such a feature would be pretty killer on iPhones/iPads, or having a "photo server" to offload your photos... idk, but Apple won't do it.

[freeone3000]

I’ve been using Immich to offload photos, and it’s been working well so far.

[throwaway290]

Can you symlink iphone backup location to an external drive?

[dijit]

might be smarter to try mounting the drive on the path that backups use, instead of hoping that the software follows symlinks.

That said, we're very much in "power user" territory now, and it does nothing to support the untethered use-case that Time Machine allows.

In fact, the real punch of my comment before was that this would be a way of selling additional hardware (the old time-capsules) to consumers.

[Forgeties79]

That’s a really good point.

[cj]

I'm excited about this. The previous generation base model 15" Air was good enough for our company to make it the default computer for everyone. Previously we were giving out base model MBP's. And they're $1000 cheaper.

Today, the MBP is just way too powerful for anything other than specific use cases that need it.

[giwook]

Out of curiosity, what are some good use cases for a MBP now with the MBAs being so powerful?

I can think of things like 4K video editing or 3D rendering but as a software engineer is there anything we really need to spend the extra money on an MBP for?

I'm currently on a M1 Max but am seriously considering switching to an MBA in the next year or two.

[giobox]

The Apple Silicon fanless MBAs are great until you end up in a workload that causes the machine to thermal throttle. I tried to use an M4 MBA as primary development machine for a few months.

A lot of software dev workflows often require running some number of VMs and containers, if this is you the chances of hitting that thermal throttle are not insignificant. When throttling under load occurs it’s like the machine suddenly halves in performance. I was working with a mess of micro services in 10-12 containers and eventually it just got too frustrating.

I still think these MBAs are superb for most people. As much as I love a solid state fanless design, I will for now continue to buy Macs with active cooling for development work. It’s my default recommendation anytime friends or relatives ask me which computer to buy and I still have one for light personal use.

[davnicwil]

While I agree that the slowdown is very noticeable once the MBA gets hot to the touch, I joke that it's a feature, encouraging you to take a cooldown break every once in a while :-)

More seriously though I agree it depends on workload. If you've got a dev flow that hits the resources in spikes (like initial builds that then flatten off to incremental) it works pretty well with said occasional breaks but if your setup is just continuously hammering resources it would be less than ideal.

[dev_l1x_be]

It is just Apple’s way trying to tell you not to use microservices.

[philistine]

It's all related to things outside the CPU and GPU that made me choose a base model M5 Macbook Pro. I prefer the larger 14-inch screen for its 120hz capability and much better brightness and colour capability. I adore that there are USB-C ports on both sides for charging. The battery's bigger. That's about it.

[sgarland]

If nothing else, I’ve learned that for me personally, 14” is the sweet spot for a laptop. It’s just enough over the 13” to be good, without being obnoxiously large.

I also like NanoTexture way more than I thought I would, so there’s that.

[studmuffin650]

I’ve hit limitations of M1 Max pros all the time (generally memory and cpu speeds while compiling large c++ projects)

Airs are good for the general use case but some development (rust, C++) really eat cores and memory like nothing else.

[giwook]

What are your specs?

That does seem to fit the bill though of being more of a niche use case for which MBPs will be best suited for going forward.

Seems like most devs who are not on rust/c++ projects will be just fine with an Air equipped with enough memory.

[criemen]

> Out of curiosity, what are some good use cases for a MBP now with the MBAs being so powerful?

Local software development (node/TS). When opus-4.6-fast launched, it felt like some of the limiting factor in turnaround time moved from inference to the validation steps, i.e. execute tests, run linter, etc. Granted, that's with endpoint management slowing down I/O, and hopefully tsgo and some eslint replacement will speed things up significantly over there.

[schrijver]

The Macbook Pro has a HDMI port and a Micro SD slot, it’s great to not have to look for a dongle. Steep price difference though.

[aembleton]

Running a LLM locally on LM Studio. I find that that can tax my M4 Pro pretty well.

[robotresearcher]

It's a personal thing how much you care, but the speakers on the MBPs are pretty amazing. The Air sounds fine, even good for a notebook, but the MBPs are the best laptop speakers I have ever heard.

[jug]

Yes, back 10-15 years ago MBP felt more prosumer to me but they have monstrous performance and price points nowadays, like true luxury items or enterprise devices, that I'm happy to see good base specs on the MBA. The base spec on that device matters a lot. Also, Apple will probably release a cheaper MacBook this week and if the rumor holds, it'll be good enough for most consumers.

[windowsrookie]

The base 15" MacBook Pro was $2,399 10 years ago ($3,251.07 adjusted for Inflation) today it is $2,699.

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...

[boutell]

Because you can buy it with 32GB of unified RAM, the MBP is now actually the cheapest device for something... useful local AI models!

[drob518]

Have you used local AI models on a 32 GB MBP? I ask because I'm looking to finally upgrade my M1 Air, which I love, but which only has 16 GB RAM. I'm trying to figure out if I just want to bump to 32 GB with the M5 MBAir or make the jump all the way to 64 GB with the low-end M5 MBP. I love my M1 Air and I don't typically tax the CPU much, but I'm starting to look at running local models and for that I'd like faster and bigger. But that said, I don't want to overpay. Memory is my main issue right now. Anyway, if you have experience, I'd love to hear it. Which MBP, stats of the system, which AI model, how fast did it go, etc?

[rahimnathwani]

For local models are you wanting to do:

A) Embeddings.

B) Things like classification, structured outputs, image labelling etc.

C) Image generation.

D) LLM chatbot for answering questions, improving email drafts etc.

E) Agentic coding.

?

I have a MBP with M1 Max and 32GB RAM. I can run a 20GB mlx_vlm model like mlx-community/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-4bit. But:

- it's not very fast

- the context window is small

- it's not useful for agentic coding

I asked "What was mary j blige's first album?" and it output 332 tokens (mostly reasoning) and the correct answer.

mlx_vlm reported:

  Prompt: 20 tokens @ 28.5 t/s | Generation: 332 tokens @ 56.0 t/s | Peak memory: 21.67 GB

[drob518]

Thanks for the info.

I’d like to do agentic coding first, but then chatbot and classification as lower priorities. I don’t really care about image gen.

Also, if you’re only able to run 35B models in 32GB, seems like I’d definitely want at least 64GB for the newer, larger models (qwen has a 122B model, right). My theory there is that models are only getting larger, though perhaps also more efficient.

[dev_l1x_be]

MPS is okish, is this is what you mean. ANE and CoreML is kind of meh for most use cases, great for some very specific tasks.

https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine/blob/master/docs/a...

[dillydogg]

I have noticed something similar. With the computer science undergrads and grad students I work with, Air is much more common than with the premeds and med students, many of whom have MBPs (who I am presuming do not need that much power).

[rocketvole]

I think its because compsci people know what they need to a greater degree than other majors. It's easier to upsell a computer to someone who doesn't really know about computers.

It could also be possible that compsci kids have a powerful desktop at home, or are more savvy with university cloud computing, for any edge cases or computationally expensive tasks.

[eru]

I use vscode's tunnel from my MacBook Air to my Archlinux desktop a lot.

The MacBook Air has ~16 GiB RAM. The Desktop has 128 GiB, and a lot more processing power and disk space.

[smelendez]

It’s possible that their departments give them computer recommendations that exceed what they actually need.

I’m not sure why this happens or who formulates these recommendations, but I’ve seen it before with students in fields that just don’t do much heavy duty computation or video editing being told to buy laptops with top-of-the-line specs.

[avhception]

I think there is a tendency to simply give in and buy bigger hardware if something doesn't work. With friends and family, I sometimes feel like having to talk them off the roof with regards to pulling the trigger on really expensive (relative to the tasks they're doing) hardware, simply because performance is often abysmal due to the fact that they trashed their OS with malware and bloatware and whatnot and can't understand all of that.

It's the same at work, to some degree. Our in-house ERP software performs like kicking a sack of rocks down a hill. I don't know how often I had to show devs that the hardware is actually idle and they're mostly derailing themselves with DB table locks, GC issues and whatnot. If I weren't pushing back, we probably would have bought the biggest VMs just to let them sit idle.

[btown]

This is also just the direction that AI is taking us, even for people who wouldn't describe themselves as traditional developers.

Setting aside on-device LLMs, one needs RAM and disk space just for the multiple isolated Claude Cowork etc. VMs that will increasingly become part of people's everyday lives.

And when it's easier than ever to create an Electron app, everything's going to have an Electron app, with all the RAM/disk overhead that entails. And of course, nobody's asking their agents "optimize the resource usage of the app I made last week" - they're moving on to the next feature or project.

I suppose the demoscene will always be there, for those of us who increasingly need a refuge from ram-flation.

[prmph]

Where does it stop? Of course having a bit more room does not hurt, but my view is that if 256GB was not enough for you, 512GB wouldn't be either.

To me it's mostly about learning to mange RAM and storage space on your machine. A lot of stuff does not need to be hoarded on the machine. Move infrequently accessed data to an external drive. Be ruthless about purging stuff you no longer really need. Refuse to run apps that consume tens of GBs of RAM on a whim (looking at you Firefox, I've been impressed with how efficient and stable the Helium browser has been for me). If you are a developer, engineer for efficient use of RAM and storage.

Like I said, 16gb RAM and 512GB storage minimum is nice, but if the fundamental issues that contribute to massive and wasteful use of resources on our machines are not addressed, nothing will be enough.

[ProfessorLayton]

>Where does it stop?

I don't know but macOS is making it ever more difficult to manage storage, with lots of random things under "macOS" pushing ~40GB or "System Data" that gets a crapload of unrelated things like podcast [1] downloads, with no easy way to purge.

[1] I spent too much time hunting down ~250GB of missing disk space, and it turns out it was the Podcasts app's cache, while the app itself reported no downloads. I fully expected this to be managed automatically, but was getting out of disk space warnings. It's a mess.

[matthewkayin]

I think 512GB is a fair minimum for a computer these days, but I agree with your "Where does it stop?" sentiment when it comes to RAM.

If browsing the web takes 12GB of RAM, at what point do we stop chasing after more RAM and instead start demanding better performance and resource usage out of the web?

[themadturk]

My first Apple Silicon machine was an 8GB/512GB M1 MacBook Air. I rarely bumped up against the RAM, but I was pretty happy using between 300-400GB on the SSD, so I really think the 512GB was plenty. I have a 1TB machine now, and typically still use less than 512GB...but now and then I've found a good use for nearly all of that terabyte.

You're right, learning to manage storage space is important, but you need to have some storage space to manage first. 256GB is the bottom of the barrel.

[1123581321]

From observing family members, 256GB is usually fine, but small enough that normal computer use can accidentally fill it up. 512GB provides plenty of headroom for them. 512GB is tight for more involved usage that’s not serious media creation, and 1TB is comfortable. 1TB seems like the realistic minimum for heavier media creation.

[drob518]

I agree with the sentiment, but in general it's not worth my time to try to purge. I used to do that back in 2005. Heck, in the 1990s, I'd buy a new hard drive every year. But these days, I find that a hard drive lasts me for 5 years if I plan well.

[Xeoncross]

It doesn't stop, it's just where we are in this rolling window of time.

16GB of RAM (currently) works for 90% of professions daily needs.

[jug]

Even with the $100 price bump, I think this is a win. 16/512 is a very nice base spec on Mac.

[drob518]

That works for a LOT of people. Not me, but the everybody else in my family.

[reactordev]

I have a 16GB/512GB Air M1 (2020) because I knew I would need the extra space but this really makes me happy. A new Air, higher headroom, M5, is awesome. It’s not a MBP but it’s good enough for 95% of the daily stuff. If you aren’t running local agents this would be amazing.

[dubeye]

I have an M3 8gb air and it' mostly fine, unless I have a node server running or similar. Otherwise it's not very different to my M4 16gb iMac

I've no idea what the storage is on either of them, I've never looked. The days of needing storage are behind me, personally

[themadturk]

I never understood the 256GB SSD on the MBA. That's no space at all.