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New Slim 12" MacBook and MacBook Air Updates Soon

I have no interest in a 12" MBP. I have a iPad air and would only get a 15" laptop. Don't want something in the middle. Retina+ would be great on the current 15" though. :cool:
 
Menneisyys2 said:
Lolz, even in this very thread there have been several 17" fans posting (incl. me) so he is certainly not alone. Not even here.
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I'd argue, despite what you believe, you're both not real 17" fans. No one really is, because you can't be a fan of a single spec. All the people who claim to be fans, previously owned a 17" MBP themselves and have learned to equalize this one measurement with gorgeous display quality. But in fact 17" means nothing, megapixel and pixel density are equally important and overshadow the meaning of screen diagonal and area easily. All the people who are not used to this specific screen size, do not understand how someone can be so religious about it. They look at the 13" and 15" rMBP and recognize them as gorgeous displays. There is no reason to be fanatic about 17" other than being used to it.

But only because things used to be in some way, is the worst reason to keep them that way. Everything including HDD, ODD, FW, IR, LAN, dGPU, RAM etc. has to justify its existence looking into the future. If a better computer can be build with soldered RAM, glued in Battery, integrated GPU and fanless ULX CPU than progress can not be hindered. People complain about everything. Optical drives are slow, unresponsive, impractical, heavy, noisy, spacious, power-hungry and error-prone. Still some people want to keep them, if not in their notebooks than at least in their iMacs and Mac minis. It's mind-boggling, every little change has an opposition. You can't do away with anything without protest.

Apple as a company wouldn't even exist anymore, without its (Steves) willingness to piss people off. Otherwise we would still have floppy drives in our Macs.
 
Mattsasa said:
So say the retina brings it down to 9 hours. But the actual size of battery will go down from what they could fit in a thicker 13" notebook down to a thinner 12inch notebook.
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Compare the 13" rMBP (72 Wh|9hrs) to the 15" rMBP (95 Wh|8 hrs). Yes, the bigger device has more space for a higher capacity battery, but due to a lower TDP CPU and fewer pixels to backlight, the smaller device still has one hour more battery life. So it just depends on the internals. A CPU is basically transforming electric energy into heat (and computing as a side-effect). If those ULX CPUs (ultra low extreme TDP) can be cooled only by a heat-sink without a fan, than it means they are basically consuming no energy at all. Think in terms of energy consumption of an iPad and expect battery life for fanless notebooks to go up not down.
 
Renzatic said:
I wouldn't doubt Apple has a few Macs running on ARM chips lying around in their labs. From a purely technical standpoint, there's no reason why it couldn't be done. No reason why it couldn't run the same applications roughly as well.

But, like I said above, there aren't many technical advantages to using ARM chips when you start playing around in the higher end of the CPU spectrum. With Haswell, Intel has come very, very close to matching ARM chips on a performance per watt basis. ARM still has a slight advantage. It will run a little cooler and give you a little more battery life than an equivalent Haswell era chip. But can an ARM chip scale as well on the high end? Are the gains worth the disadvantages?

If you ask me, they're not. It's a lateral upgrade that sacrifices too much to make the jump. Mainly in applications. Yeah, they could use an emulator to support x86 applications that haven't been ported to ARM yet, but that would entirely negate the reason for jumping over to ARM in the first place. Emulators are computationally expensive. Apps like Photoshop, Pixelmator, Lightroom, or Aperture wouldn't perform even half as well as they would native, and it'd require a helluva lot more CPU time to run them. That'd eat through the battery like a chubby kid eats through cake.

Though these same apps running natively on ARM would work about as well and last a little longer on battery. But the difference wouldn't be night and day. Haswell MBAs can last up to 14 hours on a charge. An ARM MBA wouldn't offer you much more than that. Maybe 15-16 hours on a pure guesstimation. Would that extra 2 hours be worth having to wait a year or two for everyone's favorite apps to get ported over to the architecture? Would they perform better? Would ARM MBA's sell during that downtime?

I just don't think there are enough advantages to justify an ARM MBA.
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Yes, I would imagine there is very very few times where people would see any kind of benefit going from 14 to 16 hours of battery life. I have about 3 hours on my 3.5 year old Macbook Pro 15" and rare is the day that's not enough. The other fact is that a Haswell processor in a Macbook Air is probably somewhere around 2-3 times more powerful than an A7. The main disadvantage to Haswell is that it costs about $200 vs $35 or so for an A7.
 
But when is this update ?? Everybody is saying "soon, soon !!!"
But how soon ??

Kind regards,

igmolinav : ) !!!
 
this whole statement sounds like huge BS to me.
since intel is not updating their processor this year, apple will not put in a retina display. also, this is just ONE person who says that they put in a retina display. so one source, and 1 million websites state it as a fact.

apple won't release an update and say, "YES we have retina!! But SORRY we lost 2h of usage in a laptop that is build to last."

yes, they may change the air 11" and 13" to 12", if they think it is needed (i don't think so) and remove the fan, but that's it (i never heard the fan in my mba?!)

BUT until the new processors are out, nothing will happen.
and saying it will be cheaper, lighter, better etc. is also wrong.


So let me just summarize:
the 2014 MBA is:
-cheaper
-lighter
-only 12"
-no fan
-more powerful
-same lifetime
-retina
 
Gudi said:
There is no reason to be fanatic about 17" other than being used to it.
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30% more screen estate, which is a MAJOR advantage for me. (As I know a future rMBP 17", if it's ever released, won't have an optical drive, I don't list dual-spin either, which was also great in 17" models.)

"Being a fan" means I'll look at 17+" PC's capable of running OSx86 if Apple refuses to reintroduce the 17" model (or something even more interesting / enticing; for example, a 4K 20" tablet like the Toughpad.) 15" is simply insufficient for me.
 
bigpics said:
OK, I'm confused...

You wanna explain how running an OS without any touch API's on touch-enabled hardware turns mouse-clickable bits into touchable targets??
Click to expand...

touch-base.com sells touchscreen device drivers for PC/Mac/Linux/etc.
 
xmichaelp said:
The button-less trackpad sounds stupid though. I much prefer tap to click, but you need to click for some things, like dragging windows. There better be a better way to move around windows with the new solution.

----------



No please. 16:10 is far superior for laptops.
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You mean how I drag 3 fingers on the trackpad right now and it drags the screen? Works amazing. You should try it. Its in all the trackpad options.

----------
Mr USneun said:
this whole statement sounds like huge BS to me.
since intel is not updating their processor this year, apple will not put in a retina display. also, this is just ONE person who says that they put in a retina display. so one source, and 1 million websites state it as a fact.

apple won't release an update and say, "YES we have retina!! But SORRY we lost 2h of usage in a laptop that is build to last."

yes, they may change the air 11" and 13" to 12", if they think it is needed (i don't think so) and remove the fan, but that's it (i never heard the fan in my mba?!)

BUT until the new processors are out, nothing will happen.
and saying it will be cheaper, lighter, better etc. is also wrong.


So let me just summarize:
the 2014 MBA is:
-cheaper
-lighter
-only 12"
-no fan
-more powerful
-same lifetime
-retina
Click to expand...

Intel is updating processors this year though. Broadwell should start showing up in laptops this holiday season.
 
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