Was really interested in this for the bigger screen, but was bummed when it confirmed not coming with the M3. Pulled the trigger on a new on sale 1TB/16GB 16 inch M1 Pro for about ~$1770USD equivalent in my country, instead.
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Who's buying the 15" MacBook?
- Thread starter DHagan4755
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Not sure anything is really confirmed until the actual announcement...
Great machine at what seems like a great price!
You also got a way better screen than I expect this new 15” Air to have
Assuming the MBA has the same screen as the current MBA, you are for sure correct. I have both the M2 MBA and M1P
MBP and the screens aren't close. The MBA is fine but in comparison to the MBP it is clearly inferior.
Looks like the scaling argument worked reasonably well. But it's nice to see that, to the extent there was a deviation, the 15" Air came in somewhat under the predictions.
Part of the problem is I didn't have an accurate values for the screen size. With that, I would have predicted the weight of the 15" Air would be 2.7 lbs x (15.3/13.6)^2 = 3.4 lbs. which would have come a bit closer.
What's interesting, though, is that they clearly did try to keep the weight of the 15" Air low. You can see that if you contrast the 13" vs 15" Air with the 14" vs 16" MBP. The 15" Air weighs a bit less than would be predicted based on the weight of the 13" and the ratio of their screen areas; while the opposite is the case with the 16" MBP: It weighs a bit more than would be predicted based on the weight of the 14" and the ratios of their screen areas: 3.5 lbs x (16.2/14.2)^2 = 4.6 lbs, as compared to its actual weight of 4.7 lbs. Different design choices.
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The rated battery life of the 15” is the same as the 13.6”. A pure linear scaling might give it a longer battery life but at the cost of increased weight. It is possible that they did not scale the battery linearly. That would limit the weight gain of the size increase.
That's a good idea to compare their batteries. They do have the same listed life, but the 15" actually does have a bigger battery (66.5 wH vs. 52.6 wH), which is nearly exactly proportionately larger: 52.6 wH x (15.3/13.6)^2 = 66.6 wH. Even though the 15" has the same processor, it needs a larger battery to get the same life b/c of the larger display.
This also suggests the power consumption in Apple's testing is overwhelmingly from the display/GPU.
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Real world use confirms the as well. For basic tasks (web, email, office, streaming) the biggest factor on battery life is how bright one sets the display. If you really want to see this in action instal Vivid on a MBP and run it at full brightness.
I just ran a test on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16. The power adapter is hooked up to a power meter most of the time and the difference between max brightness and minimum (basically the display is off) is 10 watts. I was quite surprised at the amount of power that the display can use.
Even the 13" M2 MacBook Air display has a wide range of power usage when using max brightness. I don't have a power meter but I do have command line tools that use macOS ioreg values to read the battery stats. Display off and mostly idle is discharging at about -1.87 Watts. Max brightness and mostly idle is discharging at about -8.87 Watts. So about 7 Watts. The difference in predicted battery life at about 75% charge is about 20 hours remaining vs 4 hours remaining. Under my normal brightness in use it is -3.39 Watts and about 11 hours remaining (at mostly idle) at 75% battery.