It's not a student discount, it's an educational discount. Which is why I'm getting a new Air and I'm 70 -- because I'm a professor.
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Apple Announces Redesigned MacBook Air With M2 Chip, Notch, MagSafe, New Colors, and More
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Glad I waited as well. I‘m coming from a 2020 intel MBP and it was bad timing on my part buying it two years ago but I needed a laptop for school so It couldn’t wait. Once the M1 machines came out I was bummed out and tempted to upgrade but told myself to wait another year and I’m super glad I did. Can’t wait to offload my current noise maker on ebay and get my hands on this work of art 🙇♂️
From the tech spec
Two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports with support for:
- Charging
- DisplayPort
- Thunderbolt 3 (up to 40Gb/s)
- USB 4 (up to 40Gb/s)
- USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s)
MacBook Air 13- and 15-inch with M4 Chip - Tech Specs
See all technical specifications for the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air with M4 chip.
www.apple.com
Well, their target demographic likely isn’t “consumers who already own a M1 MacBook Air.”
People outside our little happy bubble usually keep their laptops/desktops/tablets/phones/smartwatches/terminators for longer than a year.
They’re not like, “oh CRAP — SkyNet made a a new T-800 in a midnight color! Time to throw my gold 2021 T-800 that I’ve only had for six months on Swappa so I can pre-order this new human infiltrator-hunter the second the store updates!”
Christ, I would hope so — if you own a 16 M1 Pro, you’re one lucky dude! You should be pumped — I’d sell my brothers kidney for one 😆
This reminds me… here’s a true story. It’s not necessarily directed at you. Just a recollection, I suppose.
In 2013, I was getting ready to start grad school. Over several months prior, I’d saved up for and was finally able to purchase a brand new, early 2013 15 inch MBP Retina (upgraded to 16GB of RAM).
I think it was somewhere around $2400. I grew up poor, and I’d never owned a computer — or really anything — that fancy and nice in my life, lol. (I even took photos of it from various angles to send to my mom, haha. “Boy, did you get lucky,” I remember her saying.)
Alas, only THREE WEEKS into owning it, my 7 year old wiener dog — who I’d adopted from the wiener dog rescue in Dallas only 11 months prior — suddenly got very sick. It was a Friday morning — Black Friday, to be exact— so I took him to the Vet ER.
She said he had a blockage that was preventing him from urinating, and that he was in really bad shape — basically, he needed surgery or he was going to die, and soon. She could do it, but it would cost at leastseveral thousand dollars. “At least.” The exam alone was almost $500.
I couldn’t pay her. Not then, at least. So we went home and I started brainstorming. I needed money. Did I have anything worth any money?
Damnit. Lol.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t return the MBP, because it was past the 14 days. Sure, maybe I could have told my story to Apple and they would be sympathetic and refunded it, but probably not. And they would have probably refunded it my debit card, which would take a few days to post, considering it was the day after Thanksgiving— Freaking Black Friday.
No, he needed surgery ASAP — like that day, or the next morning. I didn’t have time to screw around.
I got home, started making calls, and soon I discovered that a friends friend was a Vet, and in the same city as me. We talked and she said that she would do it the next morning — and for much less than the Vet ER. It was still a good amount of money, though, and I didn’t have enough to pay for it (I couldn’t put it on credit cards, bc I didn’t have any at the time).
So, my only option was to sell my shiny, 3 week old MBP to the first person willing to buy it at a price that would cover the surgery, as well as post op stuff.
A few hours later, I sold my three week old MBP Retina — at a $1100 loss. Because of course I did, for so many reasons.
Because he was my best little buddy and he was sick and scared and I was scared, too.
Because his photo was the MBPs desktops wallpaper.
Because he’d been through enough before I adopted him.
Because he’d just conquered his fear of going up and down the steps to go for walks (I used to have to carry him).
And because I could always replace a really nice expensive thing made of aluminium and glass but I could never replace him and the goofy way he ran leaning to his left side, or the way he used to sleep in my bed beside me every night, with his head on the other pillow, like he was a person, and how if my light sleeping/constant moving around too much kept waking him up, I’d hear a muffled, annoyed “grrrr…”
He had his surgery the next morning. He made it through and recovered great. After that, we had another seven amazing and adventurous and crazy years together, until an ordinary Friday night, two years ago, he quietly passed away from old age while lying next to me.
Again, those three weeks with the MBP Retina were really nice. Sucks I had to sell it. The seven years after, though? Boy, did I get lucky.
TLDR; Who the hell even knows?
Good point. And also there are some of us older people still going to school. I am a lifelong learner, close to retirement age, and have never stop taking college or graduate level courses since I was 18.
You have it the other way around. The MacBook is the most popular laptop in the world as it is. Fancy colors will just turn off a lot of people.
No, I do not have it the other way around. If they release a MacBook in "fancy" colors, they will also release it in some shade of black or silver or gray. There will still be a "boring / corporate" color choice for anyone who is afraid of "fancy" colors.
Or are you suggesting that the mere existence of those fancy colors will be too much to bear for the folks who have to go into the store to buy their silver MacBook. Like they'll just freak out that they saw a red one when they walked in and they'll run away and buy a Windows PC instead? Because, if so, those are some pretty fragile people.
People today do seem pretty fragile to be honest
I can't wait to see the Air in person, but I don't think it will tempt me away from my 14" M1 Pro even though I barely scratch the surface of capabilities of the MBP.
My wife is still on her 2009 white unibody - if they had come out with a white keyboard/bezel Air I'd likely be ordering but she hates black bezels (still on her iPad Air 2 and iPhone 7+). So count her in for 'fancy colors'.
Sorry that is totally irrelevant and does not justify what is happening with M1/M2 laptops. And you got your facts wrong. And many people I see in various forums would not agree with your assessments -- nobody likes the idea of paying $1,299 for a "pro" laptop that does not have built-in dual monitor output, especially considering that almost all Windows laptops over $600 support this basic thing.
What I'm saying is that because of supply restraints due to the pandemic Apple probably had to prioritize between something that has always worked and something that might scare off a majority of the fanbase. According to sources, they were also planning to release a 15" Air but decided to wait.
Also, dang bruh... took you a month and a half to respond? You didn't attempt to commit suicide after my post, did you?
Month and a half? What? Your post (#362 on July 4th) is quoting my post (#359 on June 14th), which in turn quotes your post (#358 on June 13th - literally the previous post). Looks to me like I answered you about 34 hours later and then you took 3 weeks to reply. How are you getting a month and a half out of that? Your joke is in poor taste and doesn't play well after your bad math.
You seem to still be suggesting that due to supply constraints, if they made any in pastel colors, they couldn't also release one in some color like black, gray, or silver. I would expect them to always release one in a black/gray/silver color whether or not they release any of those other scary colors. Like if they wanted to do seven colors, and then decided they could only do 4, or 3, they wouldn't keep all the pastels and drop black, silver, and gray, they'd drop some of the pastels and keep at least, say, silver. They'll always keep a "corporate friendly" color in the lineup, because they know some of their customers can't tolerate anything remotely fun or pretty.
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Yeah, you're right, you answered me immediately. It's just that the notification for your reply I didn't receive until yesterday or whatever, so I made a mistake.
Anyway, my reasoning was that the colored MacBook Airs would've probably been made from different materials than the standard ones (polycarbonate for white, for example), that's how it looked from the photos. Rather than creating 2 models it was more efficient for Apple to stick with one.
"They'll always keep a "corporate friendly" color in the lineup, because they know some of their customers can't tolerate anything remotely fun or pretty."
It's not about being remotely fun or pretty, it's about going into work with an orange laptop, it looks ridiculous. And for the record, the colored MacBooks in the photos looked awful. Perhaps the lineup of iMacs that Apple released recently with the pastel colors didn't sell well, who knows?
Do you think red iPhones and Watches are made with polycarbonate, or some kind of inherently red metal? They're not. They made with either steel or aluminum. The aluminum is anodized to color the surface, the steel is treated with something like a PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) or DLC (Diamond-Like Carbon) process. They start with the same chassis and casing regardless of what color they're making.
Why do you expect that they wouldn't do the exact same thing for a colored MacBook Air? It's a technology they already have in wide use. Hell, do you think the silver and space gray MacBook Pros are made out of two different kinds of metal that naturally have those colors? Well, they're not. They're the same exact kind of metal, coming off the same production line, but the space gray ones are anodized to the darker color. It would literally just come down to loading up a different color of pigment to anodize them to red or blue or bright pink or whatever.
And what, precisely, makes an orange laptop ridiculous? Please explain this in terms that don't simply lead back to "because it's ridiculous" or "everybody knows...". I don't care if you haven't seen one like that before, or "nobody else in the office has one that color" - so what? How, exactly, does that make it ridiculous? It's starting to sound a lot like you're just afraid of a little color.