And in typical Apple fashion the price to get the SSD doubled from the laughingly small base of 128 to 256 ($188) is more than it would cost to but a drive 4 times that size.
New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
121–130 of 198 posts
Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they mean content where things are moving a lot. (Imagine how fast the picture is changing on a mountain biker’s GoPro...)
I don't see the relation of High Motion Video, ( Sports ) to Video Codec and Resolution. Why cant H.264 not be used? ( Which is the standard used world wide now for All Sporting Events )
It's a huge topic and I'm not a professional, but tldr Google's implementation of h264 compression is not suitable for high motion video and the changes they would need to make in order to make it suitable are not worth it in view of the trade offs of size and other factors.
Why can't a $1K general purpose computer efficiently decode a royalty-free codec (hint - it may have something to do with the fact that apple has a major stake in a competing for-pay closed codec). I really do like apple, but I see apple as microsoft 2.0 in this.
Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I just picked one up a couple weeks ago, it's my first non-MBP but seeing as I have a company-provided i7 MBP I didn't feel like I needed another powerhouse machine for side projects and occasional coding for fun. I love that I have no touch bar but I do have Touch ID. Coming from a 2014 MBP 13 I definitely didn't notice the slower SSD speed -- editing raw camera files in Lightroom is really fast and the display…
I have a 2014 MBP 13 as well, any other differences (positive and negative) you noticed in switching to the new MBA?
The keyboard... I miss the chiclets. But it's lighter & smaller, TouchID is amazing, despite being a "downgrade" in model it's substantially faster for the things I do (raw photo editing, photoshop, web coding). Truetone is great, I don't feel a need for flux anymore. Also fewer bugs with iCloud - I could never get my airpods to show up in the sound menu on my mbp 13 but they work perfectly on the mba.
Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to agree Apple makes a great trackpad. Most other manufacturers' hardware seems to consistently detect a movement as a drag action. Constantly detecting the wrong movement and drawing a box instead of moving the mouse pointer. It could be Windows OS that's bad or macOS that's good or a mix of OS and hardware. The Apple OS is nice but too restrictive for me. Windows I find is kludgy and bloated. Linux is nice i…
How is macOS restrictive?
In the same line as Ford's 'you can have your car in any color you want as long as it's black', Apple isn't restrictive at all! ...as long as you want to do things the Apple Way™, and only such things as Apple has deigned to allow you to do. Start wandering from the common path much at all and you just straight run in to walls.
Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they mean content where things are moving a lot. (Imagine how fast the picture is changing on a mountain biker’s GoPro...)
I don't see the relation of High Motion Video, ( Sports ) to Video Codec and Resolution. Why cant H.264 not be used? ( Which is the standard used world wide now for All Sporting Events )
For 4k video, H.265/VP9 have better quality at the same file size, or equivalent quality at a smaller file size. Bandwidth usage matters for keeping people on the website and viewing Google's ads, so Google wants to ensure a smooth streaming experience. And since YT compresses so heavily, uploading in 4k increase the quality at lower resolutions (it seems weird but a 4k video uploaded to YT and streamed at 1080p will look better than a 1080p video uploaded to YT and streamed at 1080p).
And as xnyan said, high motion video really destroys video quality on YT, this video really shows how bad it can get: https://youtu.be/r6Rp-uo6HmI
Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's had this model for over a decade at least where the base models are fairly priced but you can really make the thing uncompetitively priced through outrageous ram/storage upgrade pricing. That's exactly where things go off the rails -- in fact, it's pretty apparent to me that Apple is normalizing profit margins over expected upgrade volumes (so that entry level machine sells at lower than the profit margin app…
Yes, their upgrades had always been expensive, but at a price point, where would be willing to pay the markup for the convenience and simplicity. Today I fear, that the pricing is driving away a lot of users. I would be interested in a new laptop, but I am not going to pay 2000€ for an Air with 16/512. And that doesn't include mandatory Apple care. The company I work for basically has dropped Macs from the list of av…
$100 would be old-school Apple markup price for 8GB of memory at current prices (under $50 for good, fast laptop memory). Instead they want $200. It's nuts.
If their memory and disk upgrades were $100/step—which is still very high—I'd have probably already bought an Air to replace my 2014 Macbook Pro (the new Pros are now solidly out of my price range for a personal machine) but they're double that, so instead I've given them $0.
Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
#1271.3 GB/s vs 2 GB/s read. I think it's perfectly reasonable given most users aren't going to be doing high I/O, and if they did, they'd just get a MBP.
It's perfectly reasonable and wouldn't be noticed by the overwhelming majority of users. There is a point of diminishing returns for most uses, and this is far beyond it.
Further this sort of single-sample analysis of a vendor like Apple's products is always folly. Apply doesn't advertise specific SSD units, speeds, etc, and we know that they often vary them within a product, sometimes with multiple variants on the market at the same time with slightly varying performance.
Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats giga bytes per second. You’d need a 10Gbps+ internet connection to even start getting close to saturation.
The MBA has Thunderbolt 3 ports good for "up to 40 Gb/s", so all you need is an external box to convert that to 10gig ethernet. Sonnet sells one: it weighs 3 lbs, has a 60W power adapter, and costs $500. It's the perfect accessory for your 2.75lb, 30W, $999 laptop!
Those have been slowly coming down in price. You can get a bus-powered TB3 10G Ethernet adapter for $150 now.
Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, their upgrades had always been expensive, but at a price point, where would be willing to pay the markup for the convenience and simplicity. Today I fear, that the pricing is driving away a lot of users. I would be interested in a new laptop, but I am not going to pay 2000€ for an Air with 16/512. And that doesn't include mandatory Apple care. The company I work for basically has dropped Macs from the list of av…
$100 would be old-school Apple markup price for 8GB of memory at current prices (under $50 for good, fast laptop memory). Instead they want $200. It's nuts. If their memory and disk upgrades were $100/step—which is still very high—I'd have probably already bought an Air to replace my 2014 Macbook Pro (the new Pros are now solidly out of my price range for a personal machine) but they're double that, so instead I've g…
I am in the same boat. I don't need a laptop urgently, but would be willing to spend up to 1500 for the named configuration of 16/512g. As it is, the last Apple laptop I bought was the late 2008 Macbook. Which already had 4g of main memory for around 1200€.
There is also an elphant in the room: the keyboards. Until shown otherwise, I wouldn't trust their longlivity beyond the 4 years waranteed by Apple.
Re: New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's prices used to be non-insane. Marked up, yes, but not nuts. Wasn't even that long ago. You'd have people post stuff about "look I can get a PC that's just as good for 40% as much, what a ripoff!" but it'd always turn out they were choosing worse parts. These days, though, between price hikes, mediocre to poor base memory amounts and disc sizes, and massive markup on upgrades, it's not true anymore. Their pric…
Also interesting is that the SSD in the base model is still the same size as the SSD in the base model of the MacBook Air Mid 2013. Sure, the SSDs became faster, but it is quite insane that a model that is six years newer still comes with the same capacity (at roughly the same price). Other than that, it seems like a great laptop for its price. It's nice that the 'budget' models now have retina as well.
Minimum disk capacity requirements haven't really grown in quite a while. An OS plus a web browser still fits in 128GB with lots of room to spare. 128GB of flash now accounts for a much smaller portion of the machine's BOM, but the entry-level capacity itself still makes sense.