Apple silicon is very fast per size/watt. The mind blowing thing is the macbook air that has weighs very little, doesn't have a fan, and feels competitive with top of the line desktop pcs.
My M1 MacBook Air is honestly the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Still snappy and responsive years after release. Fantastic machine. But I’m starting to crave an M5 Air…
I appreciate your helping to strengthen my resolve. More importantly, my wife thanks you as well. That said, the increased RAM available on the new models is really what I want. I have lots of programs open simultaneously.
I'm on an M1. I talk myself out of upgrading by remembering that I after a few hours of happiness my actual day-to-day experience won't noticably change.
Yea, that’s what I have been telling myself. The 16 GB of RAM I have on the M1 is starting to be a limiting factor now. If the RAM was upgradable, I would do that and probably keep the M1.
If you’re happy with the M1 performance, you could look into getting a used M1/2/3 mini a run some stuff via ssh? Much cheaper, and maybe even much better.
Yea, I’ve thought about getting an M4 refurb or used off EBay once the M5 line comes out completely and Apple stops selling M4s. I have an old x86-based Mac Mini that serves as the family media server and backup server. I’ll need to upgrade that at some point to Apple Silicon as Apple stops support for x86. As is, Apple dropped support for it with MacOS 26, so just some security updates to Sequoia from here on. That said, I’m not a fan of Liquid Glass, so I don’t really care for the time being, but eventually I’ll have to upgrade. I tend to buy a lot of refurb Macs and run them into the ground before I upgrade, often pushing them to full EOL.
I looked into this for the M1 MBA and it had the exact same performance at full load as the MBP...for 7 minutes. Then the thermal throttling hits and it slows down. I'm not sure what the time limit is for newer models. Regardless, the MBA's aren't offered with Pro/Ultra chips, which I desire (and would thermally throttle much sooner than 7 minutes).
My recommendation to friends asking about MBP / MBA is entirely based on whether they do anything that will load the CPU for more than 7 minutes. For me, I need the fans. I even use Macs Fan Control[0], a 3rd party utility, to control the fans for some of my workflows - pegging the fans to 100% to pre-cool the CPU between loads can help a lot.
I edit tons of raw images and 4K video like it’s going out of style.
My used M1 mba is the fastest computer I’ve ever used. If a video render is going to take more than 7 minutes I walk away or just do something in another app anyway. The difference of a few mini means nothing.
I've got a cheap laptop stand with built-in fans that blow against the bottom case of my MBA. With my previous M1 and current M3 the stand keeps them from thermal throttling for longer periods. Most of the time it's completely unnecessary but I use it occasionally when doing long duration compiles or other long term heavy loads. Even without using the stand the tasks would complete in a reasonable amount of time, it just gives me a few extra minutes of "full blast" which is often all I need.
I’ve been amazed that while it absolutely uses a ton of battery, so has to be plugged in, my kid is able to play 3D online games with me using my old M1 MacBook Air. Not top of the line stuff (and had to change the resolution to 1440x900), but still. It gets hot, but doesn’t thermal throttle. I had half expected it to start throttling but we played for 3 hours last night with no issues.
What’s surprising is it DOES throttle using Discord with video after an hour or so, unless the battery is already full (I’m guessing it tries to charge which generates a lot of heat). You get way less thermals with a full battery and it using power instead of discharging/charging the battery during heavy usage.
Apple chips are very good especially for their power envelope but let's not get ahead of ourselves, the only way a Macbook Air feels competitive with a top-of-the-line desktop is if you're not actually utilizing the full sustained power of the desktop. There's a reason why Apple sells much bigger Max/Ultra chips with active cooling.
You would put these in polar orbits so they are always facing the Sun. Basically the longitude would follow the Sun (or the terminator line, whichever you prefer), and the latitude would oscillate from 90°N to 90°S and back every 24 hours.
No. Otherwise how would you power them? We could use nuclear power methods, like we did in the Voyagers for instance. But the press release doesn’t mention that and, for a constellation of satellites around the earth, it would be a terrible idea.
In American maybe thats the case. Im talking about situations where we are trying to implement an estate tax and the discussion is framed as basically forcing the receiver to sell the estate to pay the tax instead of presenting it accurately as taking a small loan to pay the tax.
Sure is! the issue is that people's attention isn't -- most people on the web stick to a few web pages; their social media of choice (facebook, tiktok, etc...) and their news provider of choice (CNN, Fox, NBC).
Putting up a website is easy, pulling traffic away from bigger sites is much more difficult
Hey, I think you're a superhero for making this place such wonderful forum for deep and interesting conversation, but isn't there some point where you might consider putting your finger on the scale to help stop the slide into authoritarianism? This seems like the moment, maybe?
It's a matter of taking his finger off the scale... Stop taking down threads with productive discussion just because they conflict with your worldview (and financial interests)
What you call "taking finger off scale" would turn HN into a politics / current affairs site. I know that some of you want that, and a few even wonder how we can possibly be so evil as not to do it, but it is simply not the kind of site that HN is. That is the case regardless of what terminology you use - fingers on scales, curation, moderation, - which are different ways of describing the same thing.
I'm not sure why you need to invoke cynical motives for us running HN this way, since the reasons we give for this (which are quite real) explain things better. (for example, if we only cared about suppressing this stuff, why would HN be having frontpage threads about it at all? that doesn't make much sense.) But that's just me.
I think it would help you guys to understand that most of the HN community, even most who agree with you politically, do not want us to throw in the towel and let HN become like the rest of the internet. Only a small portion of users want this, though they do post intense (and sometimes even aggressive) comments about it. Given that HN has always stuck to its mandate and that the community wants us to keep doing so, I don't see this as a close call.
Most of the social spaces that I frequent don't have the amount of political topics posted as HN.
Would you like to know the difference between those spaces and here? It's that in those spaces, regardless of if the members are left right or center, the community is on the same page in terms of authoritarians, and authoritarian apologia will get you tossed.
Therefore, there isn't the same sort of desire - or need - to point out the obvious and show the uncomfortable realities to the crowd.
Refusing to take a stand on this sort of thing and leaving it for the community to sort out will only make things worse. It's functionally no different than the kind of combative environment you get on major social media networks; the only difference is the amount of tone policing caused by the user-facing moderation tools.
Currently there is not a single remotely political post on the front page, as the moderators intended. But yes I should believe you and not my lying eyes
Not only could you not allow the article posted, but even my comment on your actions was flagged. Stop censuring criticism because it makes you uncomfortable
> Currently there is not a single remotely political post on the front page, as the moderators intended. But yes I should believe you and not my lying eyes
This was on the frontpage for 18 hours yesterday: ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117 - Jan 2026 (861 comments). 18 hours is about as much coverage as any frontpage story gets. It was there when I posted my GP comment and for a good 7 or 8 hours after that.
What you call "believing your eyes" depends on what you notice, which depends on how you feel (and particularly on what you dislike [1]). If you felt differently, you would notice different things and make different generalizations. (I don't mean you personally, of course—we're all this way.)
Your comment seems to assume that there must be one or more political stories on HN's front page at all times. There's no such rule. I get that you want more—everyone wants more of their preferred topics on HN's front page, including me. You're simply at odds with the kind of site this is and what we optimize it for [2], as well as with the bulk of the community, which wants something different than what you want. Treating that as moral failings of evil admins, accusing us of lying and so on, is not an interpretation I think most people here would agree with.
> even my comment on your actions was flagged. Stop censuring criticism because it makes you uncomfortable
Anyone who reads HN regularly knows that there's tons of criticism here of the site, the admins, the community - in fact, every aspect of HN is constantly being criticized and complained about. It's a bit odd to call that "killing all discussion that is critical."
Glad to see this post didn't get flagged like the one that was posted yesterday on a similar topic about ICE data mining and user tracking.
Obviously I'm not the only one noticing the one sided censorship. If you want to ban political discussion, just be honest about it.
You called my parent comment false, yet this post is still flagged... Add gaslighting to the list. I better hush up before my whole account gets banned...
I'm not saying we always make the right calls on individual stories—we don't—but we try our best to apply those principles, as well as to explain them clearly.
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Edit: you edited your comment after I replied - if you do that, can you please note where you're editing it? Otherwise it's unfair to readers, who can't track in what order the conversation developed.
I'm not sure I understand the last bit, but your comment which I called false is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758424, and that was because everything it says is false. I didn't flag that post, didn't kill discussion, don't "protect the interests of this administration", and don't kill all discussion that is critical.
We don't ban accounts for criticizing us. We ban them for breaking the site guidelines.
I'm replying to you, and that seems to be working!
If other users need this information, there are thousands of other posts where they can get it, and we post more every day. It's more or less always the same information because the underlying principles don't change, or at least haven't in a long while.
> isn't there some point where you might consider putting your finger on the scale to help stop the slide into authoritarianism? This seems like the moment, maybe?
posting isn't praxis. what do you think more articles on this site will achieve?
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