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Apple Updates MacBook Airs with Faster Haswell Processors and $100 Price Drop [Updated]
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Nice price drop! But I think the middle of the road Macbook Pro Retina is still THE Mac to get. If you go with the Air and you want any sort of future proofing, you've got to bump RAM to 8 GB and get the 256GB drive. At that point you are only looking at $200 more for the faster CPU, better graphics and Retina screen that the Pro gives you. I think that is the way to go in almost every situation.
If Apple can make the MacBook Pro 'as thin as Air' it will be interesting to see if they redesign the MacBook Air, and make it even thinner.
GHz and GHz is not the same. "1.8 GHz" means "1.8 billion processor cycles per second". But newer processors do a lot more work per cycle, so a 2013 1.3 GHz processor will do more work per second than than 1.8GHz processor of 2011. On top of that, the 1.3 GHz processor can for a short time work at about twice that speed. Only for a few seconds (don't know exactly how long, but only for a short time) because then it gets too hot, but most of the time you don't use the full power for more than a few seconds.
Most important thing is the year when the MBA was released. All the other things are hard to compare correctly, mostly because Intel makes these things intentionally hard to compare.
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Retina is higher than 1080p / Chromebooks hardly count as personal computers. If they do, they're the worst PCs ever made.
$100 reduction in US price, plus 20% VAT, plus a more favourable exchange rate.
And my 2008 Fujitsu LifeBook T5010 supported 8 GB of RAM. I didn't upgrade the RAM until DDR3 prices started getting reasonable back in 2010 though.
Yep, you'd think this was would be a rare case in which $100 really did equate to £59.37, rounded down to a £50 reduction.
That's a rumoured number coming from one analyst. And we know how clueless analysts are in general. Now consider that for years Apple has told everyone that 3.5 inch or 4 inch screen is better than a larger screen (and I agree with that), so they can't charge more for a larger screen. That means an iPhone 6 would need some incredible improvements in order to justify a $100 higher price. It would need some significant improvements to justify the same price. If I was Apple, I'd sell it cheaper than the 5S to demonstrate that big screen = cheap and all the Samsung lovers have paid through the nose for a cheap phone.
Wow, an $899 11" MBA is now just $100 more than a 128GB iPad Air...that's pretty significant. Pricing the 13" at $999 is also big because the 11" is probably too small for a lot of people so having a MBA below the daunting $1000 price point should help sell a bunch...especially to people who avoided Macs in the past because of price.
Now a similarly equipped Windows machine doesn't look as attractive when you consider what the Mac gives you out of the box that Windows doesn't.
Now a similarly equipped Windows machine doesn't look as attractive when you consider what the Mac gives you out of the box that Windows doesn't.
This does not apply to this current situation, but often times innovation is a price drop, ford did not make the first car, he pushed price down so everyone could afford one though and many would call that innovative.
But a 100 dollar price drop is not very significant I agree, I have a feeling Apple is dropping the price of these to make room for the 12" Retina MBA.
You cannot compare a US$100 price drop to what Henry Ford did. There are already tons of laptops sold for under US$500, and an US$899 MacBook Air won't change the landscape of the computer market.
Tim Cook: "Our North Star is to make the best product. Our goal isn't to make the design for this price point or this schedule, or line up other things, or to have x number of phones. It's to build the best."
Tim Cook said more than once that the goal of Apple is to make the best product, and not the best product for a particular price point. And now it comes down to this...
The MacBook Air is a nice laptop, but its time to tell the truth. The Screen is resolution is horrible, the bezel is unbearrable and why would apple release a product in 2014 with last years processor and specs?? Whats going on????
Because that's supposed to happen every year. Or I missed the sarcasm. I'm going with the latter.
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Inventory Clearance Sale
My bet is that these prices are essentially inventory clearance for the retina models to come out. It seems you've forgotten that Apple tend to buy huge pre-stock numbers to get the lowest price and then has to find ways to use up the inventory. In this case, I'm guessing they're grossly overstocked on conventional laptop displays and are trying to clear out the excess.
My bet is that these prices are essentially inventory clearance for the retina models to come out. It seems you've forgotten that Apple tend to buy huge pre-stock numbers to get the lowest price and then has to find ways to use up the inventory. In this case, I'm guessing they're grossly overstocked on conventional laptop displays and are trying to clear out the excess.
Apple is learning. When they debuted the rMBP at a higher price point some people were freaking outeven though they dropped the price on the base model 13" from $1199 to 1099 and kept the non-retina 15" model at $1799. Then I believe later on they dropped the price even further on the non-retina 15" model and dropped the price of the retina models as well.
This time it seems like they are dropping the price of the non-retina MBA which makes them look like good guys. Then later on they can introduce a new class of retina MBA at a higher price point and justify it as being a separate class of MBAwhich it likely would be. Then they can phase out the old MBA over the next year or two like they've been doing with the non-retina MBP. You can't even buy a new 15" non-retina these days. Only the 13". I would bet they'll discontinue the non-retina 13" by autumn.
I wonder if they'll be able to reduce the bezel around the displays in the future to make the footprint even smaller? I'd also be interested to see a quad-core A8 in a MBA. I plugged in the Geekbench scores for each generation iPad into Excel and used the Forecast function. Came out to 3496 for a theoretical A8. For reference, the iPad Air is 2518. A quad-core chip could theoretically double that 3496 score, which would come out to around 7000. The high-end 2013 MBA had a score of 6166. So a quad-core A8 could, in theory, get in the ballpark for performance. I wonder what the wattage would be for that? If you could do an octocore A8 could you really get MBP performance with a lower power requirement? That would be crazy. Though using only quad-core could explain the rumors of a fanless design for the new 12" model. But would Apple really switch processors again? ARM does have a bright future as it continues to take over with mobile devices. If the majority of processors in the world are ARM, and Windows has an ARM version, it could make sense to switch to ARM for Macs too. Especially if the performance to watt ratio is good. Imagine a Macbook Air that is slightly faster, 24 hour battery life, thinner, lighter, retina display, and runs iOS apps natively as widgets or what have you. Could that make iOS development easier too? Interesting things to ponder.
This time it seems like they are dropping the price of the non-retina MBA which makes them look like good guys. Then later on they can introduce a new class of retina MBA at a higher price point and justify it as being a separate class of MBAwhich it likely would be. Then they can phase out the old MBA over the next year or two like they've been doing with the non-retina MBP. You can't even buy a new 15" non-retina these days. Only the 13". I would bet they'll discontinue the non-retina 13" by autumn.
I wonder if they'll be able to reduce the bezel around the displays in the future to make the footprint even smaller? I'd also be interested to see a quad-core A8 in a MBA. I plugged in the Geekbench scores for each generation iPad into Excel and used the Forecast function. Came out to 3496 for a theoretical A8. For reference, the iPad Air is 2518. A quad-core chip could theoretically double that 3496 score, which would come out to around 7000. The high-end 2013 MBA had a score of 6166. So a quad-core A8 could, in theory, get in the ballpark for performance. I wonder what the wattage would be for that? If you could do an octocore A8 could you really get MBP performance with a lower power requirement? That would be crazy. Though using only quad-core could explain the rumors of a fanless design for the new 12" model. But would Apple really switch processors again? ARM does have a bright future as it continues to take over with mobile devices. If the majority of processors in the world are ARM, and Windows has an ARM version, it could make sense to switch to ARM for Macs too. Especially if the performance to watt ratio is good. Imagine a Macbook Air that is slightly faster, 24 hour battery life, thinner, lighter, retina display, and runs iOS apps natively as widgets or what have you. Could that make iOS development easier too? Interesting things to ponder.