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The 2020 MacBook Air

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Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#161

Post by Despegar »

ksec wrote: post #55

The most important thing to me about the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air 2020 is ( hopefully ) the confirmation of price trend . $999 Retina Mac with 256GB Baseline Storage? Somewhere along the line in 2016, Apple's product value proposition went off. Everything from Mac to iPhone, they either had the same price but not as much improvement or a price hike with new feature. At first it was thought Apple is moving into…

That was also the period when NAND/DRAM prices were up. They've lowered the price after their costs have come down.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#162

Post by snazz »

andrekandre wrote: post #157
snazz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a decently unpopular opinion---6 hours of battery life is atrocious for the use case the Air is competing in.

maybe for the market of the air, but would definitely appreciate a lighter design option personally, so maybe there is probably a market for it, but maybe just not big enough for apple i guess

Fair enough. What are you using yours for that requires it be so light? Apple is probably trying to market the iPad Air in that space.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#163

Post by pmichaud »

robotresearcher wrote: post #141
bambataa wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a non-touchbar MBP with just two USB-C ports and nothing else. Two, on the same side, and one is always used for charging. So one free port on a pro laptop. I still can’t understand how they ever thought it was acceptable. Why bother moving to USB-C if you’re going to cripple their usefulness?

> I still can’t understand how they ever thought it was acceptable. > I have a non-touchbar MBP. You or your employer bought it. This leads them to believe it was acceptable. [edit: this comment was pedantic and unhelpful. I do understand what the parent meant. See another comment down thread.]

I don't think this is a nuanced enough way to think about it. Most of the reason I still use my macbook and basically the only reason I'd consider buying a new one when the time comes is "soft lock in". I'm not literally stuck, but I'd have to carefully consider how to do literally everything differently, and learn whole different workflows and software packages and keyboard shortcuts. I'd have to consider how various other hardware would or would not work with it. Etc. Orrrr... I could get a macbook that has a lot of annoying shit about it and just deal with it.

And sure, you could say that is the definition of "acceptable"--after all, on the balance, I "prefer" to just deal with it. But I'm saying that there's a qualitative difference (that you'll see in the long term prospects of the company if they don't get their shit together) between deciding something is the best option vs feeling stuck with something.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#164

Post by andrekandre »

aczerepinski wrote: post #123
scarface74 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $10,000 Gold first generation Apple Watch, the trash can Mac Pro, the 12” MacBook, and the dumpster fire last generation keyboards.

I disagree on the 12" MacBook. My wife has one and I think it's a fantastic product. With only 0.2 lbs separating the Air and Pro right now, I don't think both lines really need to exist. If they had kept iterating on the ultra-light MacBook it would be such a great product to recommend to parents, etc.

yep, the first iterations of the macbook 12 were pretty awful but the last generation is actually quite a competent computer

4k display @ 60hz works fine through usb-c

up to 16GB ram

up to dual core i7

no fan

keyboard is improved over the first generation

i can run clion, xcode, docker, quiet a few safari tabs, terminals and other apps at the same time... the only thing is large compiled of course take a long time, but for lighter workloads, for people that are on the go a lot (like me ^^) it’s quite good imo

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#165

Post by artimaeis »

Niccizero wrote: post #27

I don't see the reason to buy a such a compromised machine over a X1 Carbon or a XPS 13. No ports, crappy soldered everything, worst company for consumer rights, etc. They have nice screens I guess? And you can't deny the brand appeal of the Apple logo.

Macbook Air vs XPS 13

So right off the bat in trying to compare these computers Dell's site is leading me to 2 XPS 13s: the XPS 13 and the "New XPS 13". I'm going to assume new > old so I'll start with the "New XPS 13" which seems to be an XPS 13 9300.

Starting price winner: Macbook Air! $999 vs $1299.

So really the difference here is that Apple is selling a baseline i3 model with 256GB of SSD, while the base Dell is an i5 that's probably more similar to Apple's $1299 off-the-shelf option. Difference being by getting the better model Apple you also get double the SSD (512GB) while Dell is leaving you with 256GB. Which leads me to...

Storage: hard to call a winner. Dell's is similar to smaller for-the-price, but seems to be replaceable. Apple's disadvantage being a lack of upgradability, but higher amounts of it per dollar. Personal preference?

Memory: perfect tie, they both include 8GB of LPDDR4X at 3733MHz, and they're both soldered on-board.

Display: resolution win goes to Apple for including a 2560x1600 display while Dell's is only 1920x1200. Looks like Dell _does_ include some upgrade options for $100-300 if you want to go with a touch screen and/or get 3840x1200 worth of pixels.

Connectors: In count they're seemingly tied, 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports and a headphone jack. Dell pulls ahead with the microSD card slot though. Bonus points for having a port on both sides of the laptop potentially simplifying would-be cable-messes that could come of single-sided ports.

Everything else seems pretty similar. Props to Apple for the touchId sensor -- similar props to Dell for including the IR camera for Windows Hello support.

I dunno, I'm looking pretty closely here and I don't think either of these machines are "compromised" in any meaningful way. Apple includes the MacOS license of course, while the Dell comes with a Windows license. User preference and all.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#166

Post by pivo »

ghshephard wrote: post #131
pivo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience with family members who have 8G laptops, they are not fine. Even my mother who just uses a web browser, mail.app and occasinally Photos is not fine with 8G. Her MacBook Pro regularly ground to a halt. I replaced it with a used model that was almost exactly the same except that it has 16G and now she is fine.

Beg to differ - I slam my MacBook Air (2015 i5 w/8GB ram) pretty hard, and I don't run into a lot of problems. I usually have a nice mix of office, iphoto, itunes, acorn, chrome with a dozen or so tabs, jupyter + pandas running doing some data -engineering. It's a pretty good workhorse - I don't run into many issues with the exception that occasionally I'll hit a web page that spins up the CPU hard enough that the fa…

It was mostly an issue with memory use in Safari. Might be due to the kind of web sites she visits, with tons of video and animated adverts. Restarting Safari always fixed the issue. Anyway, I got tired of her complaining and got her the 16G machine and she's been fine since.

By the way, I had been fine with an 8G machine and I do dev work so I was surprised that it was an issue for her.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#167

Post by blablabla123 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #143
ksec wrote: post #55

The most important thing to me about the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air 2020 is ( hopefully ) the confirmation of price trend . $999 Retina Mac with 256GB Baseline Storage? Somewhere along the line in 2016, Apple's product value proposition went off. Everything from Mac to iPhone, they either had the same price but not as much improvement or a price hike with new feature. At first it was thought Apple is moving into…

Apple tends to use roughly the same physical design over many years, and every new physical design is usually accompanied by a price increase. Generally speaking, every new physical design requires a lot of work and upfront cost - so this is arguably fine. Except the 2016-2019 models (except the new 16-inch model) didn't offer good value - largely because the "redesigned" keyboard was unreliable, the touch bar was la…

One should definitely do some research before buying anything expensive. On the other hand I think some models are extremely reliable and despite (or because of ;)) the fancy design far most robust than most PC laptops.

128 GB is really ridiculous, on the other hand it's possible to upgrade that. I think the higher price tag is reasonable for a laptop that lasts so many years. Also for anything compute intensive I think it's anyway more practical to rent out a VPS somewhere...

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#168

Post by asnyder »

snazz wrote: post #38
Niccizero wrote: post #27

I don't see the reason to buy a such a compromised machine over a X1 Carbon or a XPS 13. No ports, crappy soldered everything, worst company for consumer rights, etc. They have nice screens I guess? And you can't deny the brand appeal of the Apple logo.

For the kinds of people who wouldn’t be running Linux on the other laptops, maybe they just like macOS better than Windows? It’s not like Hackintoshing is trivial. It’s not necessarily a developer machine.

Windows now has native Linux: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10, https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18534687/microsoft-windows...

Personally I just recently switched back to a Lenovo Yoga from a MBP and am much happier.

Re: The 2020 MacBook Air

#169

Post by JohnTHaller »

rsync wrote: post #62
JohnTHaller wrote: post #19

Pro Tip: The MacBook Air line of today has taken over for the MacBook line of old. It's not like the original air which was so much thinner and lighter than everything else. Thickness of the 13" MacBook Air is 0.63" vs 0.59" of the 13" MacBook Pro and weight of the Air is 2.8lbs vs 3.0lbs for the Pro. The MacBook Air is the lower-end MacBook now.

"Pro Tip: The MacBook Air line of today has taken over for the MacBook line ..." OK, I think that is correct. But then what is the MacBook Air now ? I am typing on a 2015 11" MBA that is, in my opinion, the high point of laptop design and execution ever . With this laptop, Apple solved the laptop - the same way that they solved the tower form factor with the original Mac Pro.

> But then what is the MacBook Air now ?

There isn't one. There's the MacBook Pro, which is the higher end laptop line and the MacBook Air, which is the lower end. That said, both the current Pro and Air are thinner than the original MacBook Air and the same weight or slightly lighter.

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