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The rMB - IS - the retina MBA. As soon it is affordable enough it will kill the MBA.

Exactly, the MacBook Air is an antiquated design with huge bezels and an low res screen, also with a larger footprint then the MacBook Pro 13"

It's going to be MacBook and MacBook Pro as the only options in a couple years
 
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It's about time Apple start killing the MacBook Air line-up and reveal 3 different models of the new MacBook Retina, of course, alongside the nice MacBook Pro line-up.
 
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What would I do with a A-series macbook? Run Microsoft Office... no... wait... That's built for x86. Okay, run ____. Nope, also built for x86. Run Windows under bootcamp or virtualization? Nope.

Well, I suppose you could browse the web, but then it's little more than a chromebook - and a freaking expensive one at that... at least until others work through the platform transition and make fat binaries like its 2006 all over again.

Well, I suppose Apple could make a iCloud service to host your x86 apps in the cloud and deliver them to you on the fly... but wait. Apple absolutely sucks at cloud anything.

You do realize you would probably be able to run every single iOS app right off the bat. So you'd have your MS office, also you'd have it online.

It'd be more of a "hey, you already have an iOS app, just scale it up".

As for your iCloud argument, you'll find no differing opinion of it from me. I wouldn't go as far to say it "sucks" because I've never had an iCloud issue personally, but many on the forums would say otherwise.
 
Just give us a Retina Macbook Air already!! :mad::mad:

The successor to the MacBook Air is the MacBook. Eventually the MacBook Air will get discontinued after the MacBook becomes "good enough". No point in adding a Retina display to it.

I find the branding m3/m5/m7 rather odd as these processors have identical core counts and cache. With the ability to increase performance at a higher power output, you could easily find one company's M3 outperforming an M5 due to higher power draw.

The branding is just for consumer purposes, so they think that 3 is basic, 5 is good, 7 is best.

Core i3, i5, i7
Atom x3, x5, x7
Core m3, m5, m7
 
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You're perusing the wrong degree if you want to learn about hardware - CPUs are covered in Electrical and Computer engineering, not CS. CS focuses more on software, while EE/CE focuses more on hardware.

But of course, the real mistake you're making is that you think a degree is worth it at all. With a few exceptions, almost everything useful that I ever learned, I taught myself outside of school. I learned mostly by searching on the internet, asking questions on forums, and tinkering with my own equipment (an Adruino, an old Mac Mini, a Motorola surfboard, etc). The most valuable part of school wasn't the actual lectures or the assignments, but the access to office hours to sit down and discuss things with your professors - the good ones know a lot more than what they cover in class.

I agree, but the one thing it does give you is that magical piece of paper that a medium to corporate sized company wouldn't look at you otherwise. I suppose it all comes down to what you want to do in life. Me personally, the connections I made in school and the degree (ECE), got me my job at a computer hardware corporation.
 
You do realize you would probably be able to run every single iOS app right off the bat. So you'd have your MS office, also you'd have it online.

It'd be more of a "hey, you already have an iOS app, just scale it up".

As for your iCloud argument, you'll find no differing opinion of it from me. I wouldn't go as far to say it "sucks" because I've never had an iCloud issue personally, but many on the forums would say otherwise.

Congratulations, you just obsoleted the rumored iPad Pro... or maybe the iPad Pro obsoletes the theoretical A-chip rMB :confused:

Personally, I'm hoping for a convertible rMB next year.
 
I've been waiting years! for the new rMBP, I have mid 07' Imac that desperately needs upgrading...lol!
 
The MBA going away makes little sense to me. 1. who wants a 12" screen over a 13", no thanks. The MBA is a pretty great road warrior for business people (I am on my 3rd gen now), and to think I want a gimped smaller one that can is thinner than paper is a no-thanks.

Upgrade it to a better processor, fix the damn bezel, give it retina w/16 ram- done deal. Keep the ports, and add a usb c.
 
The MBA going away makes little sense to me. 1. who wants a 12" screen over a 13", no thanks. The MBA is a pretty great road warrior for business people (I am on my 3rd gen now), and to think I want a gimped smaller one that can is thinner than paper is a no-thanks.

Upgrade it to a better processor, fix the damn bezel, give it retina w/16 ram- done deal. Keep the ports, and add a usb c.
Aside from price ($200 if you configure to 8GB RAM), half-a-pound weight increase, and slight decrease in battery life, you are better off with 13" rMBP.

And 13" rMBP can be configured with 16GB RAM, so I am not sure why you are so obsessed with MBA.
 
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The rMB - IS - the retina MBA. As soon it is affordable enough it will kill the MBA.
I'm not sure why people can't understand this simple fact?!?

The rMB weighs only half a pound more than the MBA to allow for enough battery to run the power hungry retina screen.

And if you don't need the retina screen, why not just save the dough and get a MBA?

(Personally, I'm waiting for the 3rd or 4th generation rMB as my future dream machine.)
 
You do realize you would probably be able to run every single iOS app right off the bat. So you'd have your MS office, also you'd have it online.

It'd be more of a "hey, you already have an iOS app, just scale it up".

As for your iCloud argument, you'll find no differing opinion of it from me. I wouldn't go as far to say it "sucks" because I've never had an iCloud issue personally, but many on the forums would say otherwise.

You do realize that ARM chips are still not powerful enough compare to Intel's x86?

Going to ARM chips mean huge downgrade with overall performance, and not to mention that it essentially killed what a computer is meant to be. Running iOS apps mean nothing for productivity.

It would be a really stupid move of Apple to do that, especially the capability of running Bootcamp is a huge surplus for tech industry and engineering environment.
 
I'm out to learn about everything. Not just what's limited to a cs degree. What's the fun in limiting yourself?

I agree. Don't limit yourself. Besides, depending on how you want to go as a CS major, you absolutely need to know about CPUs and the hardware. You might not need to know if all you want to do is program websites and front end apps, but if you want to go deeper and deal with the hardware-software interface, then you absolutely need to suck this info in, including what new instructions a chip is introducing, etc. Most of the time the compiler deals with that kind of stuff, but compiler bugs and the need to write assembly snippets for optimization are not unheard of even now a-days.
 
I wonder when Apple will have their Ax CPU ready for notebooks.
I bet Apple hates having to wait for Intel (like IBM - G5 and Motorola G4, G3, etc... before) to be able to make the best computer.

It's much more likely that Apple will start building Intel based iOS devices in the future, or bring iOS app support to Mac. At WWDC 2015 Apple announced a new technology called "bitcode" which allows iOS developers to submit their applications to Apple with an intermediate representation of the application binary. This allows Apple to recompile the application binary for new/other CPU architectures and start shipping these changes with zero action on the part of the application developer. Bitcode is on by default in Xcode 7, and so all new applications and most existing applications will support it once they are updated.

So in a matter of time Apple will be able to recompile most iOS apps in app-store for whatever architecture they want. This means that in the coming months if Apple introduces a new iOS device that runs Intel, they will not require emulation to run most existing iOS apps there. You could easily imagine an Intel based device that runs both OS X and iOS, for example, or a super performing Intel based iPad. Alternatively Apple could easily move existing iPad and iPhone lines over to Intel in the future, although this scenario is harder to imagine because I don't know what benefit it would provide.

However, what is clear is that Apple will not be moving Macs to ARM any time soon. If they were, they would have also introduced Bitcode for Mac apps. But they have only done so for iOS apps.
 
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Because the only mobile processors from Intel with four cores are HQ ones — and they drain 47 Watts, which is more than ten times the amount of a Core m. A rMB with a HQ-Processor would have one hour battery life. Yay.
Not to mention the thermal issues.

off topic I know, (and you make a great point as it compares to a super portable laptop) but any insight into why they've dropped quad core from mac mini? I'm one of many many people who were waiting for the upgrade to the mini to be stunned to see the quad dropped, making it insufficient as my main home machine.
 
1. This Macbook is a piece of crap. They did a BIG mistake by replacing Macbook Air dGPUs with Intel iGPUs, then they made a HUGE mistake by doing the same on Macbook Pros making them basically unusable for any pro graphic, computing, science, gaming, business or design applications.

This has been very annoying and disastrous as Macbooks which used to have up-to-date or at least decent and usable mobile GPUs, have since been so underpowered that no matter the performance gain of each Intel iterations, it's still years behind todays basic mobile GPUs standards and drivers, making it almost useless (some 10 years old games and emulators hardly work on my rMBP).

No wonder lots of people, pros or artists who've made the jump to Apple and laptops years ago are starting to go back to a PC tower with an actual GPU and The Retina Macbook is worse: the idea to start so far behind in terms of performance just to make it .3mm thinner is stupid, it'll take them years to even match the current Macbook Air performance which is already pretty low, no wonder they sold very few of them.

2. However the point of Skylake, and the reason why they released the rMB too early, and that nobody's talking about, is the intergrated wireless chips: not only do they have the last Wifi standards, but they also have very efficient native WiGig (data transfert and synchronisation at speeds up to USB 3.0 speed) and WiDi 2.0 (4K30fps, 1080p60fps streaming) which means no more (or way less) cables!
 
I wonder when Apple will have their Ax CPU ready for notebooks.
I bet Apple hates having to wait for Intel (like IBM - G5 and Motorola G4, G3, etc... before) to be able to make the best computer.
It's not like Apple can produce better processors or update them more quickly.
 
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