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Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

arstechnica.com

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Re: Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

#291

Post by seanmcdirmid »

8ytecoder wrote: post #290
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #150

Love the device but I can't get over how expensive it has gotten. A 20% price bump... Sure, there's still the old Macbook Air around, but it wasn't updated and is based on a decade old model with a CPU/GPU that's a 3 years old (5th gen i5 from 2015), and a 128 PPI screen, that's a bit ridiculous. If you want a modern machine you're looking at $1200 for the cheapest model. That isn't even too bad but when you go abroa…

Is that price inclusive of VAT? US prices don't include it by default and it can be up to 7.25% depending on the state and city.

It can be higher than 7.25%, but I'm only 2-3 hours away from Portland Oregon so whatever.

Re: Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

#292

Post by briandear »

koolba wrote: post #2

Summarizing a bit: * Starting price of $1,199 * 13" display with trimmed bezels * 2.75 lbs * Higher resolution screen ("Over 4M pixels") * HD front facing camera * No Touch Bar (Yay!) * No USB ports (Boo!) Assuming it doesn't have any odd dust or logic board issues cropping up in the next couple months, I can see myself getting one of these.

And no firewire!!! OMG.

Re: Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

#293

Post by suprfnk »

sreque wrote: post #273
starbugs wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought my first 15" MBP in 2006 after Apple switched to Intel. I was a student back then and I got it for about 1800 EUR. It was a beautiful machine, I could replace the battery myself without unscrewing anything, and if I wanted to upgrade the memory or HDD I could do that easily. Now here we are 12 years and a couple of Macs later. The current MBP is a bit more beautiful than the first one I got, it's noticeably…

I don't know how anyone could reasonably conclude Apple's software is vastly superior. Apple has always been and continues to be a hardware-first company; their software always lags behind. In the past two days I've had to reboot my mac twice because the headhone jack stopped working. At my previous job, the terminal program segfaulted at least once a week. Bluetooth is notoriously flaky and requires frequent reboots…

I'm currently working in a Microsoft shop, and Windows is driving me up the wall.

- Visual Studio (2017) crashes at least once a week without any kind of error reporting. It just closes. Gone.

- PowerShell is absolutely terrible and all terminal emulators are terrible. They are slow, clunky, and never feel 'native' to the OS.

- About a month ago I was in the middle of a problem, walked over to a colleague to discuss, and come back to a forced updating PC. This took upwards of an hour before I could work again.

- I regularly have files or folders that are apparently 'locked' in another process (which one?!), and to do anything with them I have to sign out and sign back in.

- Allowing any application to steal focus is just... The worst UI design decision that was ever made.

I could go on. There's so many annoyances, big to small. This is on a ~2 month old machine with equally fresh install of Windows 10 Pro and Visual Studio Professional. I really like C# and .NET, but Windows is driving me away.

I haven't used Mac OS seriously for about a year or two, so I won't comment on that. My Linux machine is the complete opposite, however. It never does anything that I didn't expect or put there. I always know exactly what is running, what it is doing, and what is isn't doing. I haven't had emacs crash on me yet. I update whenever I feel I have the time, but it's never as intrusive -- even big updates are done in a few minutes. Updates don't require restarts. Again, I could go on.

It's interesting how our experiences can be polar opposite, yet both be valid.

Re: Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

#294

Post by kayoone »

cauthon wrote: post #231
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #150

Love the device but I can't get over how expensive it has gotten. A 20% price bump... Sure, there's still the old Macbook Air around, but it wasn't updated and is based on a decade old model with a CPU/GPU that's a 3 years old (5th gen i5 from 2015), and a 128 PPI screen, that's a bit ridiculous. If you want a modern machine you're looking at $1200 for the cheapest model. That isn't even too bad but when you go abroa…

> Love the device but I can't get over how expensive it has gotten. A 20% price bump... I got downvoted for posting this as a top-level comment, but it's insane to me how Apple's hardware specs have stagnated while maintaining the same price. In 2014 I bought an entry-level Macbook Pro with retina display, 2.6 GHz i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 128 GB SSD for $1300. In 2018 I can buy the entry-level Macbook Pro with…

The new CPUs are a couple of generations ahead and considerably faster and at the same time more efficient. Just looking at the clock speed does not make sense.

Re: Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

#295

Post by yubiox »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #258

The old 13 Inch Macbook Air had a resolution of 1440 x 900. The new Macbook Air has a resolution of 2560 x 1600, but at 200% dpi scaling, so the usable resolution is only 1280 x 800. It'll be prettier for sure, but you're getting less screen real-estate than on the old models! You can adjust the dpi scaling, but then the scaling won't be even and everything will look a bit blurry. I honestly would have much preferred…

With the Display Menu app you choose from lots of resolutions. They are not blurry whatsoever. I use 4096x2304 on 27" retina imac, 2880x1800 on 15" retina mbp, and 2304x1440 on 12" retina mb. Plenty of real estate.

Re: Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

#296

Post by matt4077 »

binoculars10 wrote: post #254
finchisko wrote: post #184

Am I the only one, who is excited and considering buying this thing? I'm still on 2012 Air. It's good device, but showing it's age (slow CPU and only 4GB of Ram, the screen resolution is joke). But new Air seems very compelling to me. I'll miss the magsafe though. Also I would like to know if the SSD can be upgraded later (unofficially of course). 2012 Air SSD can be replaced, using cheap reduction (from proprietary…

Well don't be very excited. Have you heard of Louis Rossmann? He has some videos on Youtube regarding Apple's tactics to make its hardware hard to repair and ripoff people who get them repaired at the Apple Stores. Even CBC did a story on it.

This tired conspiracy theory neglects a few thing:

- Consumers have aptly demonstrated that they prefer low weight and thinness over expandability and replaceability. That's one of many reasonable explanations that do not assume bad faith.

- While repairs have gotten more difficult, reliability has increased at an even faster pace. Notebook components have failure rate far lower than a decade ago. The largest single change was the transition from mechanical, failure-prone HDDs to SSDs. The second largest change were improvements to batteries: these have an expected useable lifetime of 5 years+, whereas in the past it was maybe two years, and only you took specific care such as regular draining.

- Material science and manufacturing have also improved, allowing tighter specification: If your washing machine survives two decades that is a major failure of engineering.

That's because over-provisioning is wasteful, and ecologically harmful. Even in cases grow fond of such old machines, it is actually better to have them fail at some point, because improvements in power consumption more than compensate for shorter lifecycles.

Re: Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

#297

Post by lostgame »

I'm a little upset we are now without a $1000 ($999) introductory-level Apple notebook.

Even though it was gloriously underpowered, it still presented an entry-level device for students and those generally with less cash.

The extra $200 also makes the differential between the 'Air' and the standard 'MacBook'...well, um...can anyone specifically tell me the differences, even?

Re: Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

#299

Post by matt4077 »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #217
andr wrote: post #15

Given that 15 minutes later, in the iPad part of the event, they claimed the new iPad is faster than 92% of all notebooks sold in the last year, the writing is on the wall. For me, the next Macbook to be excited about, would be one with an ARM processor. Still, really disappointing that for the new Air they do not allow you to go to 1TB SSD, but they won't allow you upgrade from a dual-core i5. Feels like a political…

It won't be a MacBook. They'll just sell you a $200 keyboard for the iPad pro and expect that to be good enough. I've long been convinced the intention is to kill off the MacBook lineup.

Isn't the longevity of such a theory a rather convincing argument against it?

Re: Apple Finally Updates MacBook Air with Retina Display, Touch ID

#300

Post by [deleted] »

pentae wrote: post #209
ksec wrote: post #152

I wonder if a lot of people are leaving the Mac ecosystem. Apple has been selling roughly ~19M Mac per year since 2012, and its new user to Mac has also been steady at ~50%. Apple has had 60M Mac user in 2012 announced in WWDC, and they has been nearing 100M since early 2017. I assume that actual number is larger than 90M at the time, so after nearly 20 Months, ~20M New Mac Users on board, it manage to add a total ~1…

Apple executives are probably telling themselves these people are just trading in their old laptops for iPads hence why they have been doubling down on iOS for the last 5 years. Milking the entire ecosystem for 30% compared to 0% on a laptop sure hasn't hurt, either.

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