The gem Apple discontinued: the 11-inch MacBook Air (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The gem Apple discontinued: the 11-inch MacBook Air (2019)

morrick.me

26 pointstosh50 comments

Still waiting for apple to re-embrace the 11 or 12inch laptop market again. The 12in Macbook was so let down by its Intel SoC, it could really shine with what they have now. Personally I think they should just shove the A18 / A17 Pro into the smallest laptop possible. My iPad Mini (2024 A17pro) is so close to being a perfect little laptop if iPad OS wasn't so limited.

Shout out to the Powerbook 12 inch for convincing me we don't need to go bigger ever again.

It'll never come from Apple at this point, if you want an 11'' device they'll sell you an iPad. But I think we're both going to be sad about the state of iPadOS for a long time to come.

imo the perfect small laptop has to have full-size keys and thus be at least ~11x5".

That rules out all iPads below the 12.9" due to their tall aspect (even in landscape).

The 11" MBA was ~12x8" and so darn near the minimum you could make it. ~11x7" should be doable but 2" is a pretty small trackpad.

imo the latest MBAs are more or less perfect: a great tradeoff of overall size vs. trackpad size. Although I actually preferred the tapered design of the M1.

>Although I actually preferred the tapered design of the M1.

Same, also greatly preferred its heatsink vs the redesign which doesn't seem to handle the M2/M3 nearly as well.

I still have my 2013 11.6” i7 and once I replace the battery and hinges (threw it across bed while open too many times) it’ll be good for another 10 years.

The original “MacBook” 12” retina could have been wonderful aside from the extremely poor performance, keyboard, and single USB, and battery life. Most of which Apple Silicon/lack of Jony Ive would fix.

I don’t know why, but for me about 1kg feels negligible for a laptop I carry constantly, where 1.5kg feels heavy.

You get used to a certain weight and then a larger weight feels much larger. I remember having a 12-pound cat and thinking it was very comfortable to hold her (in my lap, not walking around). Then I had a 9-pound baby and held her a lot, and suddenly a 12-pound cat felt very heavy.

(The cat lost a bunch of weight and died, and that 9-pound baby is 50-something pounds now.)

My last company _refused_ to buy me an air (what I use personally) and instead insisted on sending me their "standard" specced out 16" MBP and I _hate_ it. Flying with that thing to the offsite felt like I was smuggling a cinderblock through security.

Absolutely the same problem here. The 16" is portable, but it is not a laptop made for travel. It's to big and to heavy. You can't use it on a plane, you can't even really use it as a laptop, it needs to be supported by a table.

Traveling with that thing in my backpack is a nightmare.

These days I’m used to a 16” MacBook. Once or twice I’ve picked up a MacBook Air and thought it a featherweight.

> The original “MacBook” 12” retina could have been wonderful aside from the extremely poor performance, keyboard, and single USB, and battery life

“Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln”

> I still have my 2013 11.6” i7 and once I replace the battery and hinges (threw it across bed while open too many times) it’ll be good for another 10 years.

I doubt you would feel the same way if you had a M series MacBook Air.

While I don't have a 2013 Mac anymore, I do have both an M3 MacBook Pro, and a Ryzen 5 Lenovo for development work with different clients and I really don't find the Mac that much faster in day to day usage.

Sure in benchmarks it gets bigger numbers, but in normal usage it's negligible. That's probably more due to MacOS getting less efficient than anything else though.

It’s not about raw speed. If you want raw speed, you will be better off getting an x86 desktop or laptop. Except of course where the unified memory/GPU comes into play where an M1 Mac will win.

The benefit of the Mx Macs are the combination of speed, quietness, battery life and lack of heat.

> It’s not about raw speed

> The benefit of the Mx Macs are the combination of speed

Which I've stated is generally not that obvious to me. My compiling, and running of tests isn't massively different between machines.

> quietness... and lack of heat.

I can't think of a laptop I've had except the 2019 MacBook Pros that were so noisy and unnecessarily hot. It is a marked improvement over that, but that was a particularly low point in laptops.

> battery life

I'm sure it's really important for some folks to get more than 8 hours battery, and there's always someone here talking up their productive 15 hours flights, but I honestly don't get that much advantage from it, or have met someone who has. Definitely not enough to warrant more than £200 over the Thinkpad.

Unnecessarily hot? All x86 laptops are some combination of unnecessarily hot, underpowered or loud because of fan noise. It’s just the nature of x86 and a trade off you have to make

And you have never met anyone that thinks battery life is a big deal for a portable battery powered device?

The MacBook 12" with an M1 or M4 would've been amazing by today. Still lovely form factor.

Isn't that basically the new Air, minus the ports?

They're very similar, but handling both together my old 2016 12" is just slightly smaller and lighter in a way that is really appealing compared to my 2020 13" M1 Air. It's 350g lighter, which makes more of a difference than I would have guessed when throwing it in a bag.

the current macbook air is 1240 gram

the 12" macbook was 920 gram

There's similar weighing laptops out there. The LG Gram line for example, some of the ThinkPad X series.

11 inch is a bit too small. 13-inch is the sweet spot. I wish Macbook Air is powerful enough for MacOS/iOS research and development but everyone tells me that I need a pro for the emulator. Kinda makes sense though.

I use a pro at work and it is pretty heavy, sometimes I could barely pick it up with one hand if I had to extend my arm. Maybe more upper body exercises?

Macbook Air is fine for iOS development

The iOS simulator is neither a simulator or emulator in traditional sense. Rather it is software layer with graphics output where (simple) iOS apps can run. Everything runs as native code. Even if you test your executables on Intel, the iOS app is compiled to native x64 code.

The iOS devices A-chips are all the same family as the M-chips, and some of the iPads even use M-chips. So performance should be equivalent or even a bit faster on the Air than what you experience on the final devices.

Only thing that is slow is (now deprecated) OpenGLES code -- Presumably because this goes through a software graphics layer.

Thanks, that's very nice to know. I never realized that the emulator is like that, thanks for enlightening me.

That said, I'll probably look into an Apple refurbished M1/M2 Macbook Air with as much memory as possible. 16GB feels like the lower end. My work laptop is a pro with 18GB of RAM and I got OOM notifications frequently (some Databricks webpages really eat a lot of RAMs, like a few GBs).

Everyone is lying to you. Assuming you're talking about the iOS Simulator, the MacBook Air will do you just fine.

I use an M3 air for my personal machine which is used for c++ development and music production — it’s an excellent machine and I have yet to encounter a task that would require a MPB (at least for the type of work I am involved with).

Thanks. How much memory does it have? I figured 16 GB might be a bit in the low end for XCode, the emulator, some other random software and a lot of Firefox tabs.

Will you be running a lot of containers for dev environment or background services?

I don't think so. I'll probably write some MacOS system software, like probing their battery APIs and such, but they are going to be small.

I'm not exactly sure how I'd proceed to learn the MacOS/iOS internals, I'll have to look into it, but I don't think I need to run a VM, unless I hack the XNU kernel? QEMU does run on MacOS so I guess that's additional 4GB - 6GB of memory for the kernel?

I dunno about lying; it used to be true in the Intel age so it might simply be a matter of their information being out of date.

Thanks, I'll do more research. This is becoming temping as Air is affordable so will attract less negative energy from *wife.

I'm not much of a MacOS fan, but his laptop is the best laptop I've ever owned. I got the 8GB/256GB version and it was worth the price because my kid still uses it every day. The 720p webcam is fantastic quality. The speakers are the best I've ever had in a laptop.

We just replaced the battery with a new one from iFixit and it's like a brand new machine.

The only downside i

Candlejack claims yet anoth

> The only downside i

Still waiting :D

I played a bit with one of these in an Apple Store. I really got the feeling that it was unsuitable for GUI applications, unless you had razor sharp, eagle-eye eyesight. If you just ran text mode apps all day, it might've been totally brilliant.

13 year ago I had a professor who had one of these 11" Airs for this exact reason. He was always tunneled into some other system and the Air primarily served as his terminal. He loved it for that.

It was also pretty great for media consumption on the go in a world before iPads. I always felt like it compared with the netbooks, and preferred the full OS on a real machine than the watered down netbooks, but agree it was most impactful for my time in editors and terminals and not UI apps.

I had one for a while. Usually I would have IntelliJ, a terminal, and a browser all fullscreen and I'd 3-finger swipe between them. It worked reasonably well.

When I had one, I found the ergonomics to be particularly bad because of how small the screen was. It was noticeably worse for my neck.

I loved the portability. It was so light and small that I could carry it with me almost without thinking about it. If your use case is to be "plugged in" to an external monitor most of the time, but you need the ability to pop open a laptop for brief periods while on the go, then I think this size is a good fit. If, on the other hand, you regularly engage in extended laptop use sessions away from a home or office, I would prefer something larger in spite of the inferior luggability. The 11-in is, in my opinion, too small for the "regularly work from a coffee shop" set.

My wife's 11 inch got retired this January.

She used it for almost 12 years and was very displeased by the selection of laptops available for replacement. If there was an 11 inch Air available still, she would have one now. It was very sick already. With the induced software incompatibility plague, with some physical troubles for the past 2-3 years, but she refused it being replaced until it's condition was causing overwhelming difficulties.

She got it when we were only a few months into our relationship. From me.

What is she using now?

A small Dell. But not that much.

This is what I learnt to develop on. Yes I could have done with some more screen real estate but this thing never skipped a beat. I wasn't exactly running LLMs with it but multiple local servers, lots of files open at once, lots of chrome tabs, it handled it all silently. Eventually I got my first job as a dev and got too used to a 15'' screen with 2 desk monitors and struggled to go back to it.

I had the second or third generation 11" MBA (the first gen whose performance was actually good for the time IMO). That laptop had 2 issues: low screen resolution, and too large a bezel. Fixing those 2 would make it the perfect laptop. The 12" MacBook did that but had appalling performance and an horrible keyboard. It was a good idea, poorly executed.

Wishing that apple would either allow macOS on the iPad pro or bring back the 12" Macbook with Apple Silicon.

I just gave away my 12" laptop a year ago to a family that used it more than I did and I miss that thing like crazy! I would happily, happily pay once again to get something with a similar form factor and weight.

Best laptop that I've ever owned. There was something magical about the 11 inch Air.

Incredibly small and lightweight when I bought it in 2015 I was on cloud 9. It was my first mac and it was insane how good of a machine it was.

Biggest problem for me with the Air is the lack of HDMI – connecting to a projector or other large display via a dongle being too unreliable for my needs. Much as I loved them, I have a Pro now.

We retired our family 11-inch Air last year. Awesome little laptop but it just kept feeling slower and slower. Replaced with a M2 MacBook Air.

I'd love a 17" macbook air

There really weren't any "gems" at all during that era of MacBooks just because they all had that awful chiclet keyboard that was possibly the worst keyboard of all time.

Don't for the Touch Bar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com