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The Argument for an 11.88-Inch Retina MacBook Air
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All I really want is an 11" macbook pro with 1920x1080 Touchscreen and 16 hours battery life.
Portable, FullHD and no higher so there is longer battery life.
8Gb Ram as standard as well as 256Gb SSD Full size HDMI, SD Card reader and RJ45 connector. I don't want to have to carry adapters unnecessarily.
Removable Blu Ray disc slot optional with extra battery option.
If a touch screen was used the bootcamp users would be tripping over them selves to buy as well as any digital artist if there was a good quality digital pen available to go with it.
Portable, FullHD and no higher so there is longer battery life.
8Gb Ram as standard as well as 256Gb SSD Full size HDMI, SD Card reader and RJ45 connector. I don't want to have to carry adapters unnecessarily.
Removable Blu Ray disc slot optional with extra battery option.
If a touch screen was used the bootcamp users would be tripping over them selves to buy as well as any digital artist if there was a good quality digital pen available to go with it.
1920x1080 is terrible for a 11" notebook. Everything is too small at the native resolution and the resolution is too low for the HiDPI mode. Apple won't do it until they can use the 2x trick.
That'll require a touchscreen and a flip hinge. I doubt Apple will make a flippable Macbook Air anytime soon.
This line up seems perfectly logical to me: 11.88" rMBA, 13.3" rMBP, 15.4" rMBP
And these weights: 2 lb, 3.5lb, 4.5 lb
And these weights: 2 lb, 3.5lb, 4.5 lb
I disagree, 1920x1080 would work perfectly if they stretched the glass closer to the edge of the bezel and if it was a 12" then even better (this increases pixel size and lowers price).
There are plenty of competitors out there in the market selling those spec'd or higher machines. A hinge is a simple problem for apple to overcome.
Apple is falling behind its competition. Acer s7, Lenovo Yoga2pro, Asus TAICHI 21 or zenbook, Sony VAIO Flip etc. The asus even has 2 screens so no hinge issue, Yoga has best hinge design that I like.
I completely agree. As someone who has a beast of a Hackintosh for my work I would love something like a 11.88" rMBA for DIT work in the field and a rich, color accurate retina screen for my photography. I need portability and enough under the hood to run it smoothly, not a desktop replacement. This is also why I don't think Apple would switch to ARM. Consoles just switched to x86 and PCs have been on it for decades. To abandon the decade old Mac ecosystem and decades more of optimization in the industry is beyond unreasonable.
Also the switch to from Motorola to PPC and from PPC to Intel were justified by the significant performance gains. Yes ARM has tremendous performance/watt but they are nowhere close to the performance of an i7 or Xeon. Apple did not release a new Mac Pro on Ivy Bridge Xeons just to turn around 6 months later and change architectures.
I'm expecting an 11.88" rMBA with a dual core i5. It will probably be ~1.5 GHz since it will be still be based on Haswell so they'll have to amp up the frequency to accommodate the pixel density. Iris graphics are a given and using an IGZO panel will allow them to shrink the size and battery but keep its battery life somewhat reasonable.
Besides obvious concerns of its technical lifespan (let's face it, first gen Apple products never last as long as their younger brothers, I'm talking to you bulbous iPad, iPad mini, EDGE iPhone, Core Duo (not the 2!) Macs and 1st gen MBA) but rather its physical dimensions. Personally I adore the 13" size for productivity and find the 11" too small but can Apple make a smaller and thinner laptop and retain that productivity comfort?
Still doesn't solve the main issue. 1920 x 1080 makes things look too small on a 11-12" screen and the resolution isn't high enough for the 2x hidpi mode. Apple will move to a higher resolution display when they can have a 2560 - 2880 pixel wide screen on the Air, not 1920.
It's possible but I doubt it given Apple's recent history. They'll try to address the market with a larger iPad, not a flippable Macbook Air. I'm not saying it's a better or worse way of addressing it, that's just my prediction on how Apple will approach the market.
Problem with all this phasing out of the older less expensive models is that the Retina models are still expensive and mostly can not be upgraded.
If Apple would just be realistic with their prices and bring the new models down, I think they would sell more, I love my Macs and work in IT so will never buy a Windows based machine, however most of the grumbles I hear is the pricing. There are people who do not need all the fancy things and just want a machine like the old White MacBook for $999 but we will see what they do in the next several months, I am holding off on a MBA until I see what happens by October
"All I really want is an 11" macbook pro with 1920x1080 Touchscreen and 16 hours battery life."
Yes!!!
I am ready to purchase when the next 11.88" MBA comes out. I daily use my Late 2010 11" MBA model and love it. But it's time for an up grade.
What do I use my MBA for?
I have multiple apps running for books, Xcode, Internet access and MS Word at the same time.
I use my desktop for video work.
I keep stopping here to see if there are any "real" rumors about the new models coming in the fall.
My Late 2010 11" MBA 1.6 gig, 4 gig memory 240 gig SSD
Yes!!!
I am ready to purchase when the next 11.88" MBA comes out. I daily use my Late 2010 11" MBA model and love it. But it's time for an up grade.
What do I use my MBA for?
I have multiple apps running for books, Xcode, Internet access and MS Word at the same time.
I use my desktop for video work.
I keep stopping here to see if there are any "real" rumors about the new models coming in the fall.
My Late 2010 11" MBA 1.6 gig, 4 gig memory 240 gig SSD
If Apple switches processor architectures, it will be all at once. The last thing they need are some Macs running ARM and others running Intel. So right now they can't switch because ARM can't give them enough high-end performance, and I don't see that changing for many years.
I have an iPhone 5S and a Mac Mini with the 2.3GHz i7 option. The Mac Mini is 5 times faster at integer workloads and 10 times faster at floating point workloads, and it isn't the fastest computer Apple sells, not by a long shot. It would be suicide for Apple to switch to processors that are literally an order of magnitude slower than what they sell now, not to mention what the competition sells.
Are they? Because it seems like their products rarely have the same resolutions. The 13" rMBP is 227 DPI, the 15" is 220 DPI, the iPad Air is 264 DPI (IIRC), and the iPad Mini is 326 DPI.
If there were such economies of scale to be had, it seems like at least the rMBPs would have the same resolution, right?
Not to mention the cost of coming out with an entirely new size of MacBook Air, how much redesign/retooling would that require, supposedly just so screen resolutions could match... ??
Apple (or any other name brand electronic co.) doesn't really 'make' much of anything. For the most part, they buy componentry from 3ʳᵈ parties that is built to spec.
That being said, CNCing an aluminum case for and 11.9 in computer can be done with the same tools on the same lines that doing the same for an 11.6, 13.3, 15.4 or 17.7 in computer, and Al trades around $1/lb.
So the question becomes is Intel willing to supply a 'board that will fit in such a machine? Probably.
What display will Sharp, Samsung or whomever supply at that size, and for what price? That realy depends on the opportunity cost of fufilling Apple's orders instead of other orders.
On top of all that, Retina, unlike SD, 720p, HD, 4k and 8k has no perscribed aspect ratio or pixel count(densities vary with screen size), but the term means different things on different machines. On something handheld ~300 ppi seems to be the standard, those devices that have keyboards, and ergonomics dictates that they be operated much further from the face, ~220 ppi seems adequate.
Display costs seem to rise geometrically with pixel densities.
This new machine, should it arise, will probably, in base specs be cheaper than all other MB's to the exclusion of everything but the classic 13" MBP, and fully spec'd it is liable to cost about the a little more than the base 15"MBPr. I would be alarmed to see an iPad-quality display in it when an MBPr-quality display would suffice.
There's more to making a new product (or in this case, possibly a product line) than being able to produce a single example case with a CNC machine. A different-sized MacBook requires all sorts of different stuff--case, hinge, batteries, etc.--which all must be designed and then tracked separately during the manufacturing/assembly process. Even though Apple might not do the manufacturing themselves, they definitely have to pay some "ramp up" costs when they want something new, vs. the million-and-oneth copy of something. They also have to design packaging for it, including the box design, add more SKUs, update their web sites, documentation, service manuals, every case of when products are listed/identified in OS X, decide where it will be displayed in the stores, etc. etc.
Of course Apple comes out with new products (and new product lines) on a pretty regular basis so they are used to all this stuff and probably have it pretty streamlined, but it's still a cost to them. And I doubt that cost is outweighed by whatever small pricing benefit they might get by using a particular size and resolution of screen.
(BTW, you might be interested to know that Apple designs their own motherboards, so there's no issue with Intel having to design/"make" one for them.)