The Apple Silicon fanless MBAs are great until you end up in a workload that causes the machine to thermal throttle. I tried to use an M4 MBA as primary development machine for a few months.

A lot of software dev workflows often require running some number of VMs and containers, if this is you the chances of hitting that thermal throttle are not insignificant. When throttling under load occurs it’s like the machine suddenly halves in performance. I was working with a mess of micro services in 10-12 containers and eventually it just got too frustrating.

I still think these MBAs are superb for most people. As much as I love a solid state fanless design, I will for now continue to buy Macs with active cooling for development work. It’s my default recommendation anytime friends or relatives ask me which computer to buy and I still have one for light personal use.

While I agree that the slowdown is very noticeable once the MBA gets hot to the touch, I joke that it's a feature, encouraging you to take a cooldown break every once in a while :-)

More seriously though I agree it depends on workload. If you've got a dev flow that hits the resources in spikes (like initial builds that then flatten off to incremental) it works pretty well with said occasional breaks but if your setup is just continuously hammering resources it would be less than ideal.

It is just Apple’s way trying to tell you not to use microservices.

It's all related to things outside the CPU and GPU that made me choose a base model M5 Macbook Pro. I prefer the larger 14-inch screen for its 120hz capability and much better brightness and colour capability. I adore that there are USB-C ports on both sides for charging. The battery's bigger. That's about it.

If nothing else, I’ve learned that for me personally, 14” is the sweet spot for a laptop. It’s just enough over the 13” to be good, without being obnoxiously large.

I also like NanoTexture way more than I thought I would, so there’s that.

I’ve hit limitations of M1 Max pros all the time (generally memory and cpu speeds while compiling large c++ projects)

Airs are good for the general use case but some development (rust, C++) really eat cores and memory like nothing else.

What are your specs?

That does seem to fit the bill though of being more of a niche use case for which MBPs will be best suited for going forward.

Seems like most devs who are not on rust/c++ projects will be just fine with an Air equipped with enough memory.

> Out of curiosity, what are some good use cases for a MBP now with the MBAs being so powerful?

Local software development (node/TS). When opus-4.6-fast launched, it felt like some of the limiting factor in turnaround time moved from inference to the validation steps, i.e. execute tests, run linter, etc. Granted, that's with endpoint management slowing down I/O, and hopefully tsgo and some eslint replacement will speed things up significantly over there.

The Macbook Pro has a HDMI port and a Micro SD slot, it’s great to not have to look for a dongle. Steep price difference though.

Running a LLM locally on LM Studio. I find that that can tax my M4 Pro pretty well.

It's a personal thing how much you care, but the speakers on the MBPs are pretty amazing. The Air sounds fine, even good for a notebook, but the MBPs are the best laptop speakers I have ever heard.