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Early Benchmarks Put Retina MacBook CPU Performance in Range of 2011 MacBook Air
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Not really. They make more than 1 product, because there are people with different needs.
Not really. You do know the differences between the MacBook lineup, right? The MacBook isn't about power. If I really need to explain, the MacBook is all about how light and thin it is and the Pro is simply all about power.
Also, for a machine without a fan, that is good.
You're the joke here.
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I seriously can't believe there are people here defending this... "It's alright for some" "Its aimed at consumers".
No it isn't aimed at consumers, it is aimed at people who prefer looking good over having functionality, one of the most common criticisms levied at Apple users is being confirmed by this product, at least the Air and Pro add something that the competition didn't have but the last range of products and upgrades and product introductions? smh.
No it isn't aimed at consumers, it is aimed at people who prefer looking good over having functionality, one of the most common criticisms levied at Apple users is being confirmed by this product, at least the Air and Pro add something that the competition didn't have but the last range of products and upgrades and product introductions? smh.
Get real........
Let's think about this...... I don't think it is 3 times the price for the same value.
iPad Air 2 with 128Gb & 2Gb memory & 9.7" retina screen. $700
MacBook with 256Gb & 8 Gb memory & 12" retina screen & keyboard. $1300
Value wise you must add maybe $130 for extra Gb, $70 for keyboard & $100 for larger screen = $30. So really we are looking at $1,000 vs $1300. But with the iPad you will need to carry a keyboard along in order to get the functionality of the Macbook.
I would rather have the all-in-one Macbook rather than a tablet + keyboard.
I have a 2011 Macbook Air 1.7 with 4Gb and the speed is quite acceptable even with iPhoto editing. I would expect if the new Macbook is at a similar speed then it is just fine for the average user. I also have a rMBP 13" and it is great but for average use it is not much different from my older Air. It does do better on Video and Photoshop of course. For travel I prefer the lightest laptop with a retina screen. So I will be buying one when it is out. It is much easier and faster to edit photos with a laptop vs. a iPad.
Soooooo.
an iPad Air... with a keyboard... for 3x the money as an iPad Air.
f'n lol
Let's think about this...... I don't think it is 3 times the price for the same value.
iPad Air 2 with 128Gb & 2Gb memory & 9.7" retina screen. $700
MacBook with 256Gb & 8 Gb memory & 12" retina screen & keyboard. $1300
Value wise you must add maybe $130 for extra Gb, $70 for keyboard & $100 for larger screen = $30. So really we are looking at $1,000 vs $1300. But with the iPad you will need to carry a keyboard along in order to get the functionality of the Macbook.
I would rather have the all-in-one Macbook rather than a tablet + keyboard.
I have a 2011 Macbook Air 1.7 with 4Gb and the speed is quite acceptable even with iPhoto editing. I would expect if the new Macbook is at a similar speed then it is just fine for the average user. I also have a rMBP 13" and it is great but for average use it is not much different from my older Air. It does do better on Video and Photoshop of course. For travel I prefer the lightest laptop with a retina screen. So I will be buying one when it is out. It is much easier and faster to edit photos with a laptop vs. a iPad.
No, it's aimed at anyone who wants a thin & light machine & doesn't mind paying a premium to get it.
I have to laugh at most of the comments in this thread. Did people expect it to be on par with the 2015 Air/Pro? How the heck could that work bearing in mind how small this machine is?
Some people have unrealistic expectations due to them not having enough technical knowledge to understand just how impressive this new 12" MacBook really is.
I agree that just 1 port is absolutely pathetic and is inexcusable though.
Not crying about the price, crying about crap performance...
My iPad air 2 with 2GB of RAM, LTE and 128 GB of SSD is cheaper, better, faster and the only thing it doesn't do is run OS X...
Hopefully ipad pro wil bridge the gap and raise it by country mile...
one can only hope so...
I'm the one who should be annoyed. Because you guessed wrong.
I still have a PowerBook 2400 (released in 1997) that occasionally sees some work in my office. And two of our five everyday production machines are first-generation (2006, one white, the other black) MacBooks.
The point I was trying to make earlier (in a humorous way) is that a machine that goes on sale in 2015 shouldn't be spec'd for 2011 especially if Apple expects us to run current-generation software on it.
The 2008 MBA was not a good machine, with some major limitations. And in some ways this is like the 2008 MBA. The next revision should address these.
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I'm the one who should be annoyed. Because you guessed wrong.
I still have a PowerBook 2400 (released in 1997) that occasionally sees some work in my office. And two of our five everyday production machines are first-generation (2006, one white, the other black) MacBooks.
The point I was trying to make earlier (in a humorous way) is that a machine that goes on sale in 2015 shouldn't be spec'd for 2011 especially if Apple expects us to run current-generation software on it.
Valid point.
I know owning a 4 year old iPad and updating to the latest IOS , the performace is okayish but far behind the fluid experice on a iPad air 2.
Once people buy them, they will come to understand this limitation . Some will accept it , some will complain, it's like the 2008 MBA, on paper awesome , in real life a somewhat poor experience.
CPU is not really a trouble anymore. The last real speed bump came with SSDs, don't forget that.
Im still not buying one because I will wait for Gen 2, but this isnt something that would prevent me from buying this machine.
Im still not buying one because I will wait for Gen 2, but this isnt something that would prevent me from buying this machine.
They don't make products to serve people's needs. They make products to serve themselves and their chic image and people pay out the eyes to be a part of that image they've created. Their products are becoming less and less expandable ... and they're continuously removing basic functionality to conform to their misguided idea of design aesthetics.
What do you think Apple's target audience is these days? I mean seriously ... in order to get a MacBook Pro with a discrete graphics card, you have to pay, at minimum, $2,500. Not only are you paying $2,500, you are getting a very old and underwhelmingly underpowered GPU for that price. Performance "updates" are becoming less and less frequent and when they finally do update their product line, they're already outdated. They keep the same underpowered hardware going for a year or two at a time without updating the internal components while still charging the same premium price. Do you have any idea what kind of laptop you can buy at the price of a fully spec'd rMBP? By the way, a fully spec'd rMBP is $3,200 ... which is also wildly underpowered for that price). A laptop for that price will wipe its ass with the rMBP. A laptop half that price will still wipe its ass with a fully spec'd rMBP.
I never thought I'd see the day, but after this latest laptop release, I'm about ready to jump ship. I love OS X, but this is getting ridiculous. Apple is running a circus show right now and they've got everyone brainwashed into their mega culture they've created. Apple has forgotten what made them so great. But they don't care cuz they're rolling in mountains of cash. I'm happy for them, but I'm done.
I think that, for the first time in a while, software has not gotten bloated enough to require newer hardware to be faster. I can't remember the last time I've worried about specs running normal software (i.e. not playing computer games or doing some kind of number-crunching task like simulating Hearts games or finding primes). Yosemite also seems faster than Mavericks, maybe even Mountain Lion. That is assuming you disable folder actions, which otherwise loops and take 100% CPU.
They've run out of things to waste CPU cycles and RAM on, I guess.
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You'll best get help with this on the OS X forum. This thread is only about the article.
Like a lot of people here, the lack of power doesn't surprise me. Considering how high it scores in portability and battery life, I would expect power to take a big hit.
It was the price that surprised me considering the power drop... at first. Then I did some breakdowns and came to a slightly different conclusion. I took the current 13" mba (which is priced at $1200) as a starting point, then I asked myself how much more I'd EXPECT to pay for what I gain from the new macbook (even if I don't really want the particular feature)--retina, 33% more portability, bells and whistles like force touch and new keyboard; and how much less I'd expect to pay for what I lose--power, battery life (3 hours less than 13" mba), 1" of screen diagonal... (I left off the ports issue because I think the assumption is this is targeted toward people who don't need extra ports.) And I came out about even, back at the mba price, which is only $100 less than the new macbook. That's just my personal gut instinct assessment of course.
The only unknown for me though is exactly how much of a performance hit I'd be taking. As a non-techie those benchmark numbers don't mean a whole lot. I'll have to wait for some hands on reviews. But I have a feeling it wouldn't make a big difference for me with the kinds of tasks I would be doing on it.
I used a $400 netbook for awhile. I could barely check my email on that thing. I refuse to believe Apple would make something that horribly unusable. But I guess we'll see.
It was the price that surprised me considering the power drop... at first. Then I did some breakdowns and came to a slightly different conclusion. I took the current 13" mba (which is priced at $1200) as a starting point, then I asked myself how much more I'd EXPECT to pay for what I gain from the new macbook (even if I don't really want the particular feature)--retina, 33% more portability, bells and whistles like force touch and new keyboard; and how much less I'd expect to pay for what I lose--power, battery life (3 hours less than 13" mba), 1" of screen diagonal... (I left off the ports issue because I think the assumption is this is targeted toward people who don't need extra ports.) And I came out about even, back at the mba price, which is only $100 less than the new macbook. That's just my personal gut instinct assessment of course.
The only unknown for me though is exactly how much of a performance hit I'd be taking. As a non-techie those benchmark numbers don't mean a whole lot. I'll have to wait for some hands on reviews. But I have a feeling it wouldn't make a big difference for me with the kinds of tasks I would be doing on it.
Apple Inc...
Kills $400 netbooks by creating iPad
Turns existing product lines into $1300 netbooks
I used a $400 netbook for awhile. I could barely check my email on that thing. I refuse to believe Apple would make something that horribly unusable. But I guess we'll see.
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100% of the people using this statement repeatedly as an excuse for an underpowered, overpriced, overly thin machine that strips basic functionality for skewed aesthetics need to get over it. This costs the same as the pro and the pro doesn't even have a discrete GPU until you pay $2,500. What point are you trying to make exactly? Do you think someone that just plays in iPhoto and checks their e-mail wants to shell out over $1,300? Whatever you're smoking, you need to share.
Exactly, people really overestimate how powerful their machines need to be. On the UC Berkeley computer science Facebook group, someone asks every week whether a brand new (insert Apple laptop) is good enough for computer science classes. The answer is always, "My junky laptop from '06 is good enough, so you should be fine."
So 5% makes it total flop for Apple...
Apple doesn't listen to its users, they make them lisistened to...
MacBook will sell regardless of what we say here, it's Apple way...
As much as I love Apple products and I have most of them, I hope they will take a plunge on their two recent useless products - MacBook and Apple Watch.
Apple really needs a wake up call and these two latest releases will hopefully achieve this.
And they serve themselves by offering products people want to buy. They have not removed any products here, they have added one additional product. Which is why I found the comment made by CIA so odd, I agree with him but so what, don't buy this machine then..
I think you are a bit over dramatic, the latest Air update added a new stock PCIe SSD with 1.4Gb/s read speed. I don't know of any other laptop SSD that have a PCIe SSD or with that performance, just to give one example.
Also this introduction is very similar to the original Air, which costed $1800, lacked ports and an optical drive and had a spinning hard drive. As I see it, it's catered to a specific group of early adopters that are prepared to make the jump, i.e don't have dependencies on wired peripherals, rarely or never hit 100% CPU utilization etc.
Be that as it may, it's not an excuse to sell outdated hardware at the same premium price year after year until an update finally arrives, only to have almost the same performance as older models. The problem here is not the performance of the machine for everyday tasks, it's charging people out the ass for hardware that continues to perform comparably to older hardware time and time again. While pretty much every other computer company that makes laptops in this price range continues making laptops that **** all over anything Apple makes, Apple keeps focusing on unnecessarily changing the appearance of their laptops while neglecting performance and touting everything they do as "revolutionary."
Pretty much 100% of the people that require that amount of transfer speed are not going to be using a laptop. They'll be using a workstation. That is the only part of the thin Apple laptop line that is completely overkill and entirely underused. That is not a point in Apple's favor. PCI-E flash is simply the direction SSDs are going. It is not a merit for the underwhelming performance overall. Being an Apple apologist isn't going to sugarcoat the direction Apple has been taking lately. Sorry.
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Amen.
Been saying this for years.
Every year Apple gives less for more; more profit margin that they eek out, squeezing every last drop from it's customers. It's sigh-inducing.
That's completely wrong, you get higher performance in a smaller portable format. A lot of people who use a workstation but could use a smaller machine, would. PCIe flash may be the direction SSDs are moving in but it goes completely against your narrative that Apple uses outdated old hardware as a norm.
yeah.
I'm starting to get annoyed by all those people claiming they perfectly know how to align hardware with consumer experience.
Like they know perfectly well how to pinpoint synthetical benchmarks and numbers on paper about hardware and extract them to a general experience. Even when it's hardware they never even touched in their lives.
"oh no, X score on this benchmark, I can't do photoshop now, what a piece of junk"...