- thermal throttling under sustained heavy load, though apparently there is the possibility to add thermal pads to get rid of throttling, probably at the expense of comfort

- no Linux support

Otherwise I agree, it is a wonderful machine. I'd replace my crappy thinkpad if I could.

My 2014 Air is still going strong for light web browsing and terminal use.

> thermal throttling under sustained heavy load

This gets mentioned a lot, but I do quite a bit of dev work on my M4 MBA and have never even felt it get warm. Sustained heavy loads are extremely rare with how quick this thing is.

And the fact that there is no annoying fan noise ever is just priceless.

With the way most consumer laptops have their fan curves set, you open a new web page and get an annoying ramp up. It is not just a hardware thing, but mostly a self inflicted wound of having a fan curve that is way too aggressive.

Even if it had fans. If they are like the Pro, you won’t hear them. I did extraction with LLMs for a long time to the point where they came on and I had to get my ear close to them to confirm they were on

If it's not aggressive then quickly laptop will be too hot to touch. For instance, I did tune the fan on my friend's laptop so that it wouldn't be waking up everyone for light browsing, but then it was getting uncomfortably hot. None of such issues on Macs.

How long are your compile times?

Fairly short, I'm a Go developer generally working with terraform and microservices. I'd expect some throttling if you're doing 3+ minute compiles, I think. But I think the problem is overblown by the tech video reviewer population that regularly does extremely intensive workloads.

I wouldn't call my personal project "heavy load", but I have a cross-platform C++ project that I am developing on both a Windows gaming PC and a 2020 M1 macbook air.

I use clang to compile on both machines. The M1 mac has noticeably faster compile times.

> for the general consumer

linux does not apply here. General consumer doesn’t even know what linux is.

Are the think pads at $1000 crappy?

Imagine if we had people that actually listened to scientists, reduced their carbon footprint and changed their habits.

And who are the customers of big companies driving the demand? Regular people or other companies who also produce for those people.

WDYM personal decisions don't matter? Industrial and agricultural sectors, which both in sum contribute 50% of total greenhouse gas emissions, produce what is in demand from consumers. Another 15% of emissions is from personal vehicles. Changing personal habits is the only way we can ever reach some utopian climate targets. Utopian because old habits die hard.

Once again, personal decisions on the consumer side doesn't matter here. Unless all consumers cooperate to force a ban on practices that are bad for environment. However that basically means forcing specific decisions on the 1% that control laws and business.

If consumers stop buying gas guzzlers, the impact of personal transportation on the climate will reduce. Are you suggesting the 1% controls the minds of the 99% to do things that are harmful to the environment? Past some point, there is at least some level of personal responsibility?

Several car companies had plans to stop making ICE cars at some point in the near future. Everyone stopped buying their cars and they have had to backtrack (e.g. Porsche). We have all collectively decided that environmentalism is hot air (tee hee) and we'll just continue with business as usual.

They've been doing hybrids for a while now. Not to mention the F1 and LeMans prototype cars. This car is more like the iPhone SE or 16/17e line of phones.

Hyundai Ioniq 5 N nailed it perfectly.

I think by simulating a transmission you mean those internal combustion engined cars with CVT transmissions. Those are terrible yes.

All the necessary controls are fortunately physical in the Ferrari.

This is way better than what VW and other manufacturers have been doing in the last 5 years. At least VW is going back to physical controls as customers weren't satisfied with the capacitive buttons and hidden menus for essential functions.

I'm not sure there are any essential functions in a menu on a VW. Indicator, light and wiper controls are on physical stalks (kind of wild that "has an indicator stalk" is no longer common ground in cars), while ADAS, audio, climate controls and seat heating have dedicated touch buttons or sliders. The button experience of these touch buttons is mediocre, not as bad as bad physical buttons (since the touch buttons still gives very clear feedback whether they are activated), but certainly not as good as decent physical buttons. The sliders work fairly well, though for volume adjustment specifically it keeps feeling awkward, a rotary knob would be clearly better.

From this point of view the announced change in e.g. steering wheel buttons seems mostly cosmetic rather than fundamental. I hope they still keep the slider functionality on the wheel, it's quite intuitive and quicker imho. The bigger change would be that they're adding a central switch bar back, which seems to have the functions on it that are currently dedicated buttons in the main display. This seems like a clearer UX win to me.

BYD has physical controls, which I really like.

What's wrong with a USB-C -> 3.5mm adapter? You can even get one with an additional port for charging.

I’ve used many brands of these at various price points (and also usb-c headphones). They work fine for like a month, but the connection degrades over time (maybe it wears out or gets dirty?), and I haven’t found a way to recover stability once it starts to randomly disconnect. It’s super annoying because when it disconnects, the software doesn’t handle it well, and I usually have to unplug it, plug it back in, unpause the music, and hope it doesn’t do it again as I gingerly place it back in my pocket. Basically, I think that USB-c is just not as consistent or sturdy of a port when you’ve got the playback device moving around in your pocket.

How about not limiting yourself to specific services? If you've built your product around specific cloud providers services then that is the problem not the fact that there aren't alternatives to those seevices.

Until two years ago, I did not need Google Dataflow as a very specific example. But then new business requirements came in and there were two options:

- develop something internally and support it

- use a cloud provider offering, fire it up and forget about it

The choice was pretty straightforward.

How about we start creating well optimized software again that doesn't need ridiculous amounts of compute and money?

That's up to you (and the customers) to understand that the location where the compute/data is happening is as important a criteria to consider. As it is today.

What if your customers disagree?

Businesses generally shouldn't be trying to fight ideological battles, they should just be trying to meet their customers' needs. As long as they're not doing anything immoral/illegal like engaging in discrimination or dumping toxic waste.

Totally.

Risk = (probability of it happening) x (cost when it happens)

That a man/administration decides to cut off, or take hostage, or tax, online services because they are hosted on their premises, but benefits to/operates for "once good friends but now very unfriendly, bad, incompetent, the worst people", this is definitely not a law of nature.

But, that he/they decide to trigger absurd actions with long-lasting damaging consequences, while not a law of nature, that happened more often than not in the past 12 months than in the whole century before. Or, granted, maybe not "absurd", but definitely "not in line with a century of rather predictable behaviour".

So... you'd be rational to consider that the risk has moved from "low" to "med high" or "high" category in a lot of areas you do not control.

If the customer disagrees, fine: their business, not mine. My duty stops at notifying and documenting the risk.