Not so sure, they were clearly getting rid of stock. It’s still $50 off for online orders. Wouldn’t surprise me if Air and MacBook gets consolidated in someway.
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New Entry-Level Mac Notebook Expected to Adopt Retina Display, Likely Launch at WWDC in June
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Not so sure, they were clearly getting rid of stock. It’s still $50 off for online orders. Wouldn’t surprise me if Air and MacBook gets consolidated in someway.
Wow, the hatred over the MB line is strong here. Not that I'm disagreeing. I have not been in the market for several years but, since they went with the new keyboard and made the devices much smaller, I wonder how anyone uses the danged thing. Frankly if I was going to get one I'd want a huge but light device - 15" screen minimum, with room enough to not cramp up my hands while typing.
I would expect MBP screen, MB12 internals (fanless Core Ms), $999 price point but only 128GB for the entry level. Also maybe Thunderbolt since it doesn't have any licensing fee anymore.
One of the main reasons for the screwed up line is a mis-prioritization on thinness and weight. Honestly, and I know I'm being a bit facetious here but it's rooted in 100% earnest opinion: If Apple came out with these 3 levels of macbooks, I think the line would make a lot more sense:
MacBook Pro: Most powerful MacBook. Power over thinness & lightness. 2-3 USB-C, magsafe, and a "real" keyboard and "real" non-forcetouch trackpad and real function keys PLUS touchscreen. Retina display. Replaceable RAM/SSD/processor/battery.
Most expensive.
MacBook: lightest of the light macbooks and all about portability 1st over power. Thinness over power. Just 2-3 USB-C ports, and the thinnest keyboard, forcetouch trackpad possible, with soldered-on RAM/SSD/everything. Retina display. Real function keys or touchbar, I don't know what people who want the smallest/lightest laptop possible would prefer. Middle-range cost; less than MBP, more than MBA.
MacBook Air (or new name, since MacBook would take the "airy" light spot): Flexible functionality first over weight & thinness & power. Not as powerful as MacBook Pro. Retina screen would be nice but not necessary (this *is* a 11" & 13" screen on a *laptop* after all, where portability is more than size/weight and also about ability to stay powered-up long w/o plugging in as well as be easy to connect to & use w/o having to carry a sack o' dongles...) to keep the cost down, 2 USB-C, 1 USB-3.0, magsafe, headphone/microphone jack, function keys, displayport port, SD card slot, replaceable RAM/SSD/processor/battery. "Real" keyboard & real trackpad. Not as light as a MacBook but the flexibility more than makes up for it.
Instead we're stuck with Apple focusing on reducing, thinning, simplifying, and eliminating first instead of power & function/flexibility, resulting in a complete mishmash.
Hey Timmy & J-Ive - Problem solved, free of charge!
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Well probably what Apple would prefer you to do anyway -- replace the laptop with the iPad. I'm a bit further from that point than you. Maybe I have a higher pain point, or maybe using an iPad full-time would be more painful to me than the current MBP w/ current keyboard. But it does seem that Apple's MO to is to "force" migrate people to iPads by making MBPs so amateur.
they should really fix the screwed MBPs rather than coming up with this nonsense. "Cheaper" in Apple words always means some limitation - you will either get something old(er) or you will be missing something .. Is the current MB and MPB line insufficient so they need to come up with something else? It's similar to their messed up iPhone lineup where only those willing to pay absurd $ "deserve" OLED display .. in 2018? really?
In the medium term, the current 12" MacBook probably will be a sub-$1000 laptop (following pretty much the footsteps of the MacBook Air which also started as the ultra-light, ultra-thin (for its time) expensive laptop and now occupies the $1000 price-point and that of the cheapest Mac laptop).
When the 2016 revision of the (13" and) 15" MBP came out, a large part of the backlash against it was argueing that Apple 'needlessly' made it noticeably thinner and lighter at the expense of battery life (and indirectly of the maximum RAM amount). I think it is hard to say that the 15" MBP isn't a decent compromise between 'power' and portability but as a compromise it will always make people unhappy on both sides of the size vs power spectrum. And when one tries to alleviate the problem of compromises by adding more models, one runs the danger of not making it clear enough which model a consumer should buy (ie, for whom is the 13" MBP w/o Touchbar).
I’ll reply to my own post, the Air is also $200 off at BestBuy.
They appear to be purging all stock of Air and MacBook. Consolidation looks likely.
Sure... it will probably be a retina MacBook with a bigger screen (...at a cheaper price...?) or a non-touchbar MBP with the same faults and less power.... but we can always dream that Apple might wake up and smell the responsibly-sourced deconstructed Americano...
The 17" MacBook Pro was an amazing machine and from another time when Macs were user serviceable, had a built in superdrive, the RAM and Hard Drive were upgradeable. The quality of which Apple are incapable of producing today.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/314...pro-17-and-make-your-laptops-great-again.html
All things equal, a removable battery requires more space than a 'built-in' does. And if you look at the terraced battery in the MBA, that difference can be quite significant. And you might not like it: But since the vast majority of customers, and not only of Apple products, prefer a more compact (and lighter) laptop, tablet, or phone, batteries in most of these products aren't user-swappable, and this is extremely unlikely to change.Again, I know this doesn't fit their "pure" aesthetic and making things simpler (to the point of being more complicated). I was offering a fantasy of a Mac laptop for the rest of us.
That doesn’t mean anything there are regular sales of Mac’s at different places and at different times of the year.
Very happy that I purchased one of those discounted Airs while they are still around to purchase. Put in storage to use when my 2012 Air finally fails. The best machine Apple has ever produced and based on projections it is the best they will ever produce.
The screen problem is WAY over talked about, and a "retna" screen would just take away battery life. The very few times I needed "retna" I just attached a big screen.
Apple doesn't care about the Mac line anymore, just milking it.
The screen problem is WAY over talked about, and a "retna" screen would just take away battery life. The very few times I needed "retna" I just attached a big screen.
Apple doesn't care about the Mac line anymore, just milking it.
The answer is simple. Apple needs to return to focusing on function & flexibility for the customer, not fashion and anorexia-thinness for Marketing and the pleasure of Jony Ive. But I think we'll be stuck with a confusing and non-user-friendly product line-up as long as Apple keeps letting a chief designer whose vision for a "rich, Christmas wonderland is a dimly-lit & shadowy drab grey/silver/white tinsel tree landscape" run the show.
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Am I the only one rather baffled at the relationships between various USB, thunderbolts, and displayports? Help anyone?
The ntMBP is exactly what u are asking here for. Retina, i7, fan.
And it's smaller, thinner and same weight as the Air.
So why is it less portable?
My predictions: This is gonna be a MacBook Air with Retina, and maybe updated processors, keyboard, ports, and will be marketed as a "MacBook." Probably it will be cost-effective as they might just reuse the same body.
The 12'' MacBook is gone.
The 13'' MacBook Pro without TB is gone as well.
This is what methinks.
The 12'' MacBook is gone.
The 13'' MacBook Pro without TB is gone as well.
This is what methinks.
When there is more room for battery and a better keyboard Apple will never use the more room for that...they will always eliminate it and give us a thinner machine. They are uninterested in increasing battery size. Likewise, I don't see them adding a keyboard that is radically different than their current design...they tried to make it better the second time around, but my understanding is it's still flawed...I imagine they'll do another iteration that's better this time around, but I don't think they'll go back to anything that compromises the space they save with the current designs...just my perception of them
Apple is pushing hard to get their devices in the hands of many many more people.
Services here we come.
Stock hitting all time highs today.
Services here we come.
Stock hitting all time highs today.
How could it be more "entry level" than that god-awful Retina MacBook with its one port? Will it have no ports at all and an all-glass keyboard? Maybe an even more anemic battery life?
If this was really going to be a "MacBook Air" with some updated specs, I'd be psyched -- but I have a feeling we're looking at another gimped laptop that sells for close to $1K.
If this was really going to be a "MacBook Air" with some updated specs, I'd be psyched -- but I have a feeling we're looking at another gimped laptop that sells for close to $1K.
Sort of an off-topic ramble, but I do not understand why Apple won't just make a simple tower.
Put a reasonably high-end regular old motherboard in it with two or three regular old M.2 slots, a regular old 8700K or Ryzen CPU, regular old DDR4 RAM, and some regular old PCIE expansion slots.
Let me buy it stripped down so that I can add my own storage and RAM and GPU, and then I can have macOS on a machine that doesn't start at US$5,000 that can also dual boot Windows for some gaming.
A MacBook Pro with a decent keyboard, a decent GPU, and enough thickness to cool it would be nice, too.
I mean, surely Apple realizes there is a fair bit of market space between "folks who want to surf the web and write emails" and "folks who need to model and render the inside of a collapsing neutron star in real time," right? You'd think ...
Sometimes I think maybe that's why Tim Cook thinks everyone should just buy an iPad, and why they're pushing the whole "what's a computer" silliness in the iPad commercials. They seem to believe that the market really IS either casual consumption or extreme pro-level creation with 256-core Xeons and 16TB of ECC RAM all for the low, low price of $16,000.
Put a reasonably high-end regular old motherboard in it with two or three regular old M.2 slots, a regular old 8700K or Ryzen CPU, regular old DDR4 RAM, and some regular old PCIE expansion slots.
Let me buy it stripped down so that I can add my own storage and RAM and GPU, and then I can have macOS on a machine that doesn't start at US$5,000 that can also dual boot Windows for some gaming.
A MacBook Pro with a decent keyboard, a decent GPU, and enough thickness to cool it would be nice, too.
I mean, surely Apple realizes there is a fair bit of market space between "folks who want to surf the web and write emails" and "folks who need to model and render the inside of a collapsing neutron star in real time," right? You'd think ...
Sometimes I think maybe that's why Tim Cook thinks everyone should just buy an iPad, and why they're pushing the whole "what's a computer" silliness in the iPad commercials. They seem to believe that the market really IS either casual consumption or extreme pro-level creation with 256-core Xeons and 16TB of ECC RAM all for the low, low price of $16,000.
There usually is for at least something on these threads the MacBook Air got the same kind of reception initially, it’s very different with the average consumer tho. The MacBook is a great machine for a lot of people, personally I want a bigger version the only thing that puts me off at the moment is the small 12” size, if they do indeed add a 13.3” version or even add retina to the Air I will buy either one of those.
Amen to all of that.
Why no simple tower? Because today's Apple is more about fixing non-existing problems with "solutions" like an unintuitive stripped-down iOS7+, an unattractive (IMHO) and stripped-down OSX, a stripped-down-hardware set on laptops/phones just to have something 1/4 mm thinner and lighter than last year, but where the weight loss is replaced by weight & inconvenience increase from the bag of dongles & connections you must now carry to use your phone & computer as conveniently as you did just 3 years ago, and courageous reinventions like disappearing function keys and frustratingly non-hinged trackpads because...um because.
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