MacBook Air Refresh With Broadwell Processors and Intel HD 6000 Graphics Appears Imminent

[That70sGAdawg]

The Air was never meant to be a powerhouse. I use mine for work -- email, drafting dox, etc. and it's more than adequate. If you need to edit large photos, movies, etc., the Pro is the way to go. I think the Air serves most users as a supplement to a desktop (iMac, MacPro, Mini).

Of course, a MacBook Pro with the Air size/shape/weight/battery would be killer!!

Why to you need a Retina pro to edit video or photos when all you need to do is plug your i7 , 8gb ram, Turbo (to 3something mHz) Air into an HD monitor and do the editing in 1080P? Not many need to edit video or photos on a laptop the move....

 

[DudeDad]

Why to you need a Retina pro to edit video or photos when all you need to do is plug your i7 , 8gb ram, Turbo (to 3something mHz) Air into an HD monitor and do the editing in 1080P? Not many need to edit video or photos on a laptop the move....

Some people only use a laptop as their only computer, and may not have stand-alone monitor. I agree that when editing photos/video, a large, high quality, calibrated monitor is key.

 

[zhenya]

First machine:
Late 2008 macbook aluminum unibody 2.4GHz Core2Duo, 8GB ram, 320GB HDD, running Yosemite. 20 Safari tabs open and iTunes. Smaller apps: google drive, dropbox, adobe creative cloud manager, day-o calendar, scroll reverser, memory clean.

Second machine:
2012 Mac Mini i7 2.3GHz, 16GB ram, 1TB HDD, running Yosemite, Mostly the same software setup with around the same amount of tabs open, maybe more. Same smaller background apps.

20 Safari tabs is your problem. That's probably eating 4GB of RAM in and of itself.

 

[jclardy]

Since when have Apple systems been priced reasonably on a hardware-specs basis?

Never, really, but the MBA is extremely long in the tooth.
- TN display panel (Versus IPS in literally every other machine they sell)
- Poor resolution (Versus retina in everything except the old 13" MBP)
- Outdated design (Changed in 2010, I believe..now 5 years old)
- Larger footprint than the 13" rMBP...seriously Air has literally no meaning to the line anymore, especially now with the retina Macbook.

To me it seems if you want the best ultraportable you go with the Macbook. If you want more power you go 13" rMBP. The Air just sits in a weird space being slightly more affordable, but losing out on pretty much all the new technology in Apple's other lines.

Personally I think Apple's notebook lineup is getting too convoluted. Drop the Air line, move the Macbook to a $999 price point next year and everything else is a retina pro.