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The non-retina 13" Macbook Pro seems less and less relevant.
It has a slightly faster processor (don't be fooled by "1.3GHz", the MBA's top CPU speed is 2.6GHz) but there's a 500GB non-solid-state hard drive, it's heavier, the graphics are older, and it has a lower-resolution screen. Why would anyone want it?
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I imagine Apple are optimising for battery life and cost here, rather than for sheer resolution. Edit: Also, that's the 11", I doubt they can squeeze many more pixels in there before it becomes unreadable. The 13" is 1440x900, which is more reasonable (I'm using it as we speak, actually!)
This argument won't stand. New phone displays have significantly lower battery consumption than the old ones and substantially higher resolutions. And you can always employ tricks like reducing refresh rate to lower the consumption even more.
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It's probably a diminishing use-case, but I personally still need an ethernet port. There's a surprising number of times when I visit somewhere (offices, universities) and they can't figure out how to get me logged onto the guest wifi, but I can just plug in to the wired network without a problem. Also some hotels have only ethernet, though that's getting less common.
Yes, I suppose the Ethernet is useful. But it doesn't seem worth sacrificing everything else for. Why not just get a USB or Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter?
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This is for the 11" model. The 13" has a more appropriate 1440x900. Retina would be nice though.
If Apple made a retina Macbook Air then nobody would buy the Macbook Pro.
Admittedly the market for high end powerful 13" laptops might not be that big.
The non-retina 13" Macbook Pro seems less and less relevant.
I really hope they keep the 13" Macbook Pro around. The Macbook Air is a fantastic machine but being able to stick a reasonably priced SSD and 16GB of ram into my work 13" MBP has improved my output dramatically. I wonder how long it will be before Apple prevent after purchase customization at all.
I still wonder, how well is windows 7 or windows 8.1 supported ? how fast does xcode runs on it ?
Windows is supported. I imagine Xcode is almost completely unusable with that CPU and the tiny amount of RAM.
Still, no 16 GB memory. The only thing left tying me to the MBP.
While there are obviously users that can use more than 8GB of memory (or heck, even more than 128 GB of memory) it's probably less than 1% of the Mac Using population that requires more than 8 GB of memory, and Apple expects that 1% to use the MBP. I don't think the Air will see more than 8 GB of memory for at least another 5 years.
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If Apple made a retina Macbook Air then nobody would buy the Macbook Pro.
They could differentiate by making the MBP a lot more powerful than the MBA with things like a high end quad core CPU, up to 32 GB of RAM and a fast Nvidia GPU. Admittedly the market for high end powerful 13" laptops might not be that big.