Not a chance. The Air isn't going anywhere.
Well without retina it is a no-buy given the stuff on offer from the competition at the same price or cheaper.
With retina, it's entirely too similar to the new Macbook or a 13" macbook pro.
I think you're mistaken. The niche it once filled is now filled by other machines, especially if apple update the design of the Macbook Pro as they are rumoured to be doing.
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Yes there are still software applications out there that only runs in a windows environment for which this would not be an option. Fortunately that is not as big a problem as before. My father, an architect, never wanted to get off windows because AutoCad had not ported over. They have now to OSX, but not fully to iOS. In my work everything is on the web, so platform is not as big a deal, unless you find one of those flash based websites. MS-office already works on iOS, and there are sufficient alternatives to Visio and Project that I really do not have any issues. But I recognize that there are specific applications that still require Windows. I am lucky not to need any of them
I said "x86" not "windows".
Running ARM would require all current OS X software to be recompiled and ideally certain parts perhaps re-coded to be optimised for the Ax CPUs.
Or you'll end up having to do something like Rosetta, which will totally kill any battery life advantage (if any, intel has been making great strides there in recent years) you may see from the Ax CPU.
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This guy gets it. I travel a lot and I can never unfold my 15" with the seat tray. The new 13" MBP should be more than powerful enough to do what the 15 MBP does (even without a dGPU). The Skylake chips have 40% faster Iris Pro integrated graphics, closing the gap.
Needless to say, I've sold my 15" MBP and will be buying the new 13" Skylake MBP for a perfect balance of power vs. mobility.
This was exactly my reasoning behind going for the broadwell 13" this time around.
in 99% of what I do, the CPU and GPU are plenty strong enough. the battery life, weight and form factor are far, far more useful for using as a portable machine.
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I didn't see anyone make this point for the 15" rMBP...
In the last refresh, Apple switched the dedicated GPU option to AMD over Nvidia. I wonder if the staggered launch/holdup isn't on the CPU, but the GPU. Perhaps Apple wants to put the new Polaris architecture in for the dedicated GPU.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/feature/...is-release-date-price-specifications-3634118/
I think apple's switching GPUs may have settled on AMD for a while due to the way their GPUs work. They're a lot better than Nvidia at GPU compute, which is what I think Apple are trying to really push with OpenCL.
Going Nvidia and letting CUDA run on their gear again would undermine the push for OpenCL.
So until CUDA is well and truly dead, i think you'll see Apple stick with AMD.
A lot of the decisions that Apple make are long-term strategic (pushing a technology or standard) rather than purely financially motivated or whatever.
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If Apple really wants to stay in the game, expect to see quad core processors in the Skylake rMBP 13, since that's what you get with the 13 inch Microsoft Surface Book.
Maybe, maybe not.
In that form factor you are thermally constrained. Quad core CPU running at low clock speed due to throttling, or dual core that is more free to clock higher. Dual core will be cheaper and run single threads faster; and under thermal constraint probably be just as fast.
Speculation... but more cores is not automatically better. My Surface Pro 3 throttles like hell and that's only a dual core.
