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Apple Announces New MacBook Airs with Haswell Processors and 'All-Day' Battery Life
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So I am seriously thinking of this new 13" MBA. I need a laptop like now (definitely cannot wait until an rMBP update in the autumn), and with the 8GB RAM upgrade, it is only at £884.40 with the HE discount.
This is compared to the non-Haswell 13 rMBP at £1074.00, and about £985 for the non-Haswell cMBP (£860 + ~125 for 120 GB SSD and 8GB RAM from Amazon).
I am going to wait until the Back to School promotion, which should be very very soon, so I can get my £70 iTunes voucher. I am slightly concerned about the 1.3 Ghz CPU, but there is Turoas said previously clock speeds do not tell the whole story, and I highly doubt Apple would have put slower CPUs (even if improving battery life). I don't think, given my expected light usage, that a £103.20 upgrade to a 1.7Ghz i7 is justifiable.
The 40% GPU bump is definitely more important. I'm excited!
This is compared to the non-Haswell 13 rMBP at £1074.00, and about £985 for the non-Haswell cMBP (£860 + ~125 for 120 GB SSD and 8GB RAM from Amazon).
I am going to wait until the Back to School promotion, which should be very very soon, so I can get my £70 iTunes voucher. I am slightly concerned about the 1.3 Ghz CPU, but there is Turoas said previously clock speeds do not tell the whole story, and I highly doubt Apple would have put slower CPUs (even if improving battery life). I don't think, given my expected light usage, that a £103.20 upgrade to a 1.7Ghz i7 is justifiable.
The 40% GPU bump is definitely more important. I'm excited!
Battery is nice, but realistically relatively few people are away from power for more than 8 hours. Apple didn't do anything for that update it came free with the new processor. All updates were inline with expectations, hence this was a minor update.
If I recall correctly, the Apple had issues with producing the screen for the rMBP. I suppose Apple likes to be able to release their computers instantly when they are announced so maybe this was the reason behind not releasing it today. I suppose they will just silently update it as I don't see them doing an entire conference just for them and I don't see computers fitting in very well with what they are supposedly releasing later this year. Hoping we won't have to wait more than a month or two.
Well I hope you are right -- have read of iMac shortages on other sights believed to be due to imminent update. But I have a late 2012 iMac now I'm using as a fill-in until the new MP ships so the longer the late 2012 remains the current model the better for resale.
From Apple MacBook Air Literature:
Intel HD Graphics 5000
Dual display and video mirroring: Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 2560 by 1600 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors
Which means your MBA won't be able to drive an external 4K Thunderbolt display. My bet is that the new Thunderbolt display will be like the present one, with USB 3.0 and an iMac like thin body.
Not today. But that could mean they are just waiting for the quad-core Haswell chips to become available.
My late 2010 MBA, had a 1.8ghz core 2 duo, 4gb RAMM AND 128GB flash storage.
At the same price point today, I get a 1.3ghz Dual Core i5, 4GB Ramm, 128GB Flash drive.
Yea I get it's faster and has more batter life and more ports but it's doesn't seem like much progress in nearly 3 years.
At the same price point today, I get a 1.3ghz Dual Core i5, 4GB Ramm, 128GB Flash drive.
Yea I get it's faster and has more batter life and more ports but it's doesn't seem like much progress in nearly 3 years.
This may be a silly question, but do you think the 15" Retina MBP will only receive BUMPS in hardware and nothing decreased? I'm not really familiar with mac releases but i want to make sure they're not adding less RAM or something just to make it more 'portable'
I have a 17" MBP that is fully maxed out because I use it on my desk with a cinema display, i want to pay more for the best hardware out there. and i really like the retina for the MBP when im programming on the go (for the 15" retina model)
Well, for what I use my machine for, 4GB is plenty. With the new OS X, memory management should be better.
The numbers might not look like much, but in terms of performance there's been a definite upgrade. The run faster, cooler, more efficient, and is $300 cheaper compared on release dates.
If you're happy with what you have I see no reason to upgrade.
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Looks like I hold onto my rMBP for longer. Would have pulled the plug if the air had a retina screen
It's night and day. Remember, at $999 3 years ago, it had only 64GB of Flash storage and 2GB of RAM. Now it has a processor 4 generations more advanced (think of it like a 4GHz Core 2 Duo), lasts twice as long, has twice the storage (and faster to boot), Thunderbolt, and USB 3.0.
The resolution and form factor haven't changed. I don't expect them to until Retina becomes feasible in a $999 Mac.
I'm surprised anyone is excited by this MBA refresh...
- Who really needs more than 7 hours of battery life? Weak selling point.
- Graphics performance has been brought up to par, hardly impressive.
- Reduced cost, but Apple overcharges for SSD storage in the first place.
- New wifi standard, but everyone will be offering this.
- Same poor quality screen. Same bundled OS.
- Same dated bezel, no design changes/tweaks whatsoever.
In other words, all technical improvements can be attributed to the Haswell processor, meaning Apple didn't do much "innovating" on this refresh.
I suspect they'll revamp their notebook line next month. If not, this company is sinking faster than I suspected.
- Who really needs more than 7 hours of battery life? Weak selling point.
- Graphics performance has been brought up to par, hardly impressive.
- Reduced cost, but Apple overcharges for SSD storage in the first place.
- New wifi standard, but everyone will be offering this.
- Same poor quality screen. Same bundled OS.
- Same dated bezel, no design changes/tweaks whatsoever.
In other words, all technical improvements can be attributed to the Haswell processor, meaning Apple didn't do much "innovating" on this refresh.
I suspect they'll revamp their notebook line next month. If not, this company is sinking faster than I suspected.
11", 13", too small. Size matters, despite what your friends told you. I want a bigger one. Retina displays don't make up for it either. Let's go 15" or better 17".
While I like the minimalism of the Airbooks I'll hold off for a MacBook Pro and prefer one with the full complement of I/O ports. I've got peripherals I need to connect with in addition to wanting a screen I can read.
While I like the minimalism of the Airbooks I'll hold off for a MacBook Pro and prefer one with the full complement of I/O ports. I've got peripherals I need to connect with in addition to wanting a screen I can read.
It's a spec bump. If history is any guide they will do a radical redesign next year or 2015 when it becomes commercially feasible for them to sell an 11.6" Retina Display notebook for $999. They tend to keep a chassis about 4 years. The current one was released in late 2010. The rMBP spec bumps will probably come later in the year. Hopefully the 13" rMBP gets a quad-core Haswell chip.
The Air is their entry level notebook now. Sure, I'd like a Retina Display, but given that they had to drop the price of the rMBP I'm not surprised they didn't cram it into today's MacBook Air. Going to 1600x900 or 1650x1080 doesn't realy do much given Apple's "quadruple or nothing" approach to resolution bumps. In the meantime, I'll stick with my 13" rMBP for now. If they can find a way to reduce the weight of that one or stick a quad-core in it, I might give Haswell a look.
Well, I guess if anything good came from today's announcements, Apple saved me a lot of money today. Now that I see the roadmap of the Mac Pro and the modest improvements to the MA, I'm totally rethinking my computing needs.
I keep flipping through the posts' in this thread and I keep changing my mind as to whether to buy the 13 inch MacBook Air with the i7. My only problem is is that I don't have access to look at a MacBook Air display to see if it actually sucks as many of you have stated. If it's good enough then it may not be a bad choice for my international travels where battery life is a huge factor! If it can run Aperture3 and Lightroom5 then I'm good.
I keep flipping through the posts' in this thread and I keep changing my mind as to whether to buy the 13 inch MacBook Air with the i7. My only problem is is that I don't have access to look at a MacBook Air display to see if it actually sucks as many of you have stated. If it's good enough then it may not be a bad choice for my international travels where battery life is a huge factor! If it can run Aperture3 and Lightroom5 then I'm good.
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Yes, too bad. I was hoping for a 13.3" MBP Retina with enough power to actually drive that display smoothly.
Oh well, I'll limp along with my 2009 MBA (SSD, 2.13GHz, separate NVidia Graphics but only 2GB RAM, which kills it for heavy use) until that happens. Just use it one-serious-app-at-a-time.
Oh FFS... you got a refresh in March... here we are 90 days out, will the waiting never end? I'm sure you guys are jealous of all those Mac Pro desktop users who get updated all the time, including today
Comparing clock speeds is only valid when comparing two processors from the same manufacturer in the same generation. Comparing clock speeds for 2 different architectures (Intel Core vs ARM) is less than useless as it detracts from the reality of the situation.
It will be plenty fast enough. Consider the past. a 2GHz Core2Duo might only be running at 10% utilization, but sucking power like nobody's business. Not only that, but when you hit 100% on both cores, that was it.
Now we are running a much slower base clock speed that sips power while efficiently decoding HD video, browsing the web and writing your term paper. This gives us huge gains in battery life. But when you run that intensive game, the chip is able to ramp up to 2.6 GHz (DC) or 2.9 (SC). The chip can tap into reserved power (temporarily self-overclock).
This is something that Intel may have a problem with in their marketing. Years of shouting about faster clock speeds are coming back to bite them in the ass. On the surface it seems like the C2D is faster (2.0 vs 1.3), but in reality it's more like 2.0 vs 2.6 (and this doesn't take into account the hyperthreading that's built in to the new chips).
It would seem like you, personally, don't need this. Good ! Other laptops (like the 1 hour gaming laptops) are there to please you.
Good for you that you've identified gaming laptops to be what you want. By the way, what are you doing in a discussion on ultraportables ? Did you expect Apple to put a dgpu into an air all of a sudden ?
What some people forget is that new hardware features, like the new interrupt 'bundling' schemes in Haswell, require good software support to work well. Sure, Apple is piggybacking on Intel's war against ARM. But they're also doing their job of tuning the ultimate portable to the current hardware trends. 9 hours of battery, wifi ac and a decently fast processor+ssd in something that weighs the same as my last pda (admittedly a big one) ? I don't see how people could not be enthousiastic about this. Except if they were confusing different types of laptops, of course.
On the contrary battery life is a huge deal. No one wants to have to tether up to an outlet during the day. That's the whole point of a laptop.