kiwimachead

timmillea said:

I have an M1 MBA 16gb/2TB and wonder how long I will have to wait before Apple produces something that will actually excite me enough to upgrade? 

Regarding fans, once you have been fan-less, there is no going back. Like children, computers should be "seen and not heard". For studio sound recording, it means you no longer need a 'booth' and do you really want to be distracted by a change of fan speed, up or down, while writing? Silence is bliss and its value cannot be underestimated. 

My next Mac will be a fan-less, small laptop with either 8 or 16 TB internal storage. A mini would be tempting except that an MBA can do everything a mini can do plus it is also a laptop. Otherwise, I could just buy an NVMe thunderbolt-connected 8TB and make my current M1 MBA last another 10 years. 

Hear you. M series MBA’s are brilliant and anticipate keeping my new M3 for a long time. Apart from the silent operation, battery life is for me the most impressive thing in newer MacBooks. In my experience as a Mac user since the ‘90’s, the biggest increase in product lifespans came with the introduction of the SSD. A while ago now I had an MBP for work and an MBA at home (both 2011 models). The same Ram and storage but the little 11” MBA had an SSD and it massively outperformed the Pro, actually lasting until earlier this year when the NVRAM finally died, but otherwise it was still snappy chugging along with Photoshop, Office and Safari/Chrome windows open. Prior to the introduction of SSD’s, my Mac’s would become too bogged down to enjoy using after a few years.

That crease and the inevitable (not to mention complex and expensive) faults on every folding phone I’ve seen are like a really bad joke. Seriously I would never buy one. Here’s the billion dollar question: If Apple could make a phone that unfolds into an iPad form factor … without a screen crease … would it weigh less than an 80’s Motorola brick and cost less than an AVP? 🤣

Just shows how lackadaisical and arrogant business IT departments are with software update processes. Hopefully it’s not a big blow to the global economic recovery from inflation post Covid and Ukraine (i.e. income lost, insurance headaches, ensuing boost to business IT budgets.)

Apple really jumped the gun on this announcement. Their AI features look great but are still probably a year away from being delivered and ironed out so can only guess they are masking embarrassment at how outdated the performance of Siri and predictive text, etc, are looking in 2024. My 256GB 14 Pro is only two years old and as poor as the basic functionality is for some stuff, it’s still a fast phone so will just wait for new features to be ironed out with the iPhone 17 or 18 pro.

Apple silicon is a game changer but people forget how much of a difference SSD hard drives made when they were introduced. Our 2011 MBA (SSD) died this year. It kept going well beyond software support ending and the only repair was a battery replacement. Without SSD the Intel processor would have been practically unusable a long time ago. I had a MacBook Pro with HDD (also 2011 model year) for work around 2014-2016 and it was so slow as to be almost unusable compared with the humble MBA.