MacBook Air

[bodhi]

Evening all,

Just ordered myself a new MacBook Air as my laptop from 2013 is dead.

Looking forward to it arriving. Went for the 8 core CPU / 8 core GPU with 512gb SSD and 16gb RAM.

It gets good reviews so I’m excited to try it out. Probably overkill for what I use it for but still, can a machine ever be TOO fast?

 

[Quadophile]

That is a good buy

Look forward to your views after you get it

 

[Ian]

Very nice! The new ones look really good - is this the M1 chip?

 

[EvanDavis]

I never liked the older Macbook Air's. With the thick bezels the screen looked like an after thought to me. The new ones on the other hand are pretty nice. My Mrs has maxed out 16" Macbook Pro and that thing flies.

 

[bodhi]

My old 2013 Macbook Air was the best laptop I've ever owned. There's a few quirks of the OS you have to get used to, but for what I use it for it was perfect. I'm excited to get my hands on the new one. Should be here on Thursday hopefully!

 

[bodhi]

This update is brought to you by the Macbook Air M1.

It arrived yesterday and my initial thoughts are:

1. It's not changed a whole lot in terms of design from the one I bought in 2013, which is a little disappointing, but at the same time, it's such a good build that there's probably not much to change. It is a little smaler footprint wise which is nice.

2. It seems fast, although I've not really thrown anything meaningful at it yet. One thing I didn't really understand when I ordered it is that with the change to the M1 architecture not all programs will run on it. 2/3 of software is now natively configured to run on the M1 processor. If it's not, then there's a tool called Rosetta 2 which converts a program to run on M1. So far I think only MS teams and Dropbox have required that. I had a Teams call last night and it worked fine.

3. The keyboard is ok, I'm making more mistakes that I normally would, but I think that would be the same for most keyboards when you first start using them

4. Even with a 2 hour teams call, the laptop didn't get overly hot on my lap. This is a fanless machine so it's totally silent

5. Getting good speeds on my new ASUS RT-AX86U wifi 6 router, BUT, no faster than I'm getting on the 8 year old laptop or our phones. Around 250mbps. I was expecting the laptop to blow other devices away but that's probably a cap from the ISP.

6. Battery seems good so far, but as I've only had it a day it's hard to tell so far.

7. It looks good in space grey, the dark colour definitely suits it.

 

[Quadophile]

Good to know all worked out well out of the box. Some things like keyboard will need a few days to adjust.

As for the wifi 6 is concerned I suggest you tweak the settings in your router. see if all is optimally set. Check if the mode is correctly set. It should be AX for wifi 6 and not ac. ax with give you the best speed. Also try to change the channel width. If you have 160 that will give you the fastest speed if not 80Mhz should work fine. Anyway I hope you can improve your speed to the best potential.

Enjoy your new toy

 

[bodhi]

Good to know all worked out well out of the box. Some things like keyboard will need a few days to adjust.

As for the wifi 6 is concerned I suggest you tweak the settings in your router. see if all is optimally set. Check if the mode is correctly set. It should be AX for wifi 6 and not ac. ax with give you the best speed. Also try to change the channel width. If you have 160 that will give you the fastest speed if not 80Mhz should work fine. Anyway I hope you can improve your speed to the best potential.

Enjoy your new toy

OMG. I'm too scared to change anything in the router!

It took me 3 hours to get it working, only worked after a lengthy call to my ISP where they got me to change some totally random setting which I would never had thought to change.

I think it does have 160, I could change it to that I guess. I might try it and let you know how I go.

 

[Quadophile]

@bodhi If you have already spent 3 hours with your ISP I would tell you to leave it alone as I do not want your router to get messed up and you making another call to ISP in frustration. Reliability is more important than speed. I just want you to enjoy the new toy.

 

[bodhi]

@bodhi If you have already spent 3 hours with your ISP I would tell you to leave it alone as I do not want your router to get messed up and you making another call to ISP in frustration. Reliability is more important than speed. I just want you to enjoy the new toy.

Haha. I agree, I don’t overclock because i definitely live by the rule that reliable is better than fast

I might have a wee play around though