81–90 of 99 posts
1366x768 in 2014?
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!)
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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.
You couldn't fit all of that in a 13" MBP.
Lenovo can fit most of that it in their 14" T440. I'm sure if Apple set a team of top engineers on the problem they could find a way to make it work.
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I agree. One thing Steve Jobs seemed pretty keen on was a rational, minimal product line. Allowing the product line to evolve and fit all the little niches crevices is not Apple's style.
OTOH, keeping some out-of-date products around just for the educational market is a long-time Apple trend.
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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.
Yeah, go and buy a thunderbold ethernet cable, they are really cheap and work fantastically. The only downside is on Linux you have to reboot if you unplug the ethernet, but apparently that's being improved in 3.15.
The non-retina 13" Macbook Pro seems less and less relevant.
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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.
The 13" Retina should persist for some time. That model's entry price is only $100 more than the non-Retina 13" MBP entry price. I don't really see the appeal of the non-Retina version at this point. The Retina display is really great and worth the extra $100, in my opinion, and I think the MBA offers much better value.
OWC $142 Apple $300
Apparently the SSD in the retina models is upgradeable but only to PCI based SSDs