Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
The Macbook Air - the gold standard for all laptops
- Thread starter Meister
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I suppose you answered your own question then =)
What you listed adds up to be more than 256GB, so that isn't an option for you if you want everything on the internal drive.
All good.
A lot of Apple's leverage comes from Tim Cook's leadership both as COO and CEO. Apple can dictate the terms because the have the up front capital for expenditures and the volume to soak up capacity.
Recall the sapphire plant story. A deal with Apple can make your company or break your company, and even a company like Intel can be bent to Apples whim (though certainly not completely controlled). The A-series chip is a great motivator to Intel, especially the A8X in the iPad Air 2 with respect to performance and battery life. Intel seems to be taking them (and ARM) seriously which is good for us all.
On that note, I do wonder what the focus of the A9/X will be. It seems like the chip team just pushed the pedal down on an open road and we got the awesome A8X out of it. And the software to really take advantage of it was left behind as a result. I doubt the chip team has taken the past year off.
That view of what's taking up space on your computer is known to be buggy.
If you want a better way to see what's going on, I recommend a shareware program called Disk Inventory X.
The improvement with the A8X is just that Apple added an extra core, so it has 3 cores whereas the A8 has 2 cores. That gets you bigger Geekbench numbers but usually not much else. Most software just runs on 1 core. So they didn't really do anything special. It's not hard to slap an extra core on a chip these days, and they had the power and temperature budget to do that in the iPad (and not the iPhone).
The A8 isn't that much faster than the A7. It's not too surprising, it had to happen sometime. Intel has been aggressively pushing the limits of high-performance computing for decades and they're on the logarithmic end of the improvement curve now. There's no reason to think Apple is on a different curve, they're just earlier on the same curve. So they will get closer and closer to catching up with Intel, the question now is just how long it will take them.
The interesting thing to me is that per GHz, according to Geekbench, the A8X is actually a little faster than Intel's fastest chip.
So what would be interesting is knowing what clock speed Apple could hit with the A8X if they cranked up the power. In other words, I don't know how much of the A8X's clock speed is limited by the power budget and how much it's limited simply by the design of the chip. If they could throw watts at it and get their 1.5GHz chip up into the 2.5GHz range, it might make a credible competitor to some of Intel's budget chips. But it would still be a ways off of Intel's 4GHz...
Pro won't go, the Air will be removed in my "opinion". Air was just about portability and lightness - that gaps been taken by the rMB. The air has become the ginger haired step child. Maybe the 11" will stay around. Who knows..
They've still kept that non-retina MBP around, with little changes, if I recall correctly, because it still serves a particular market niche. I could see the Air in that category as well.
Two "active" lines and one maintenance one...as you say, who knows?
You are talking about future design choices and I agree.
But then: have you talked to children lately?
If you have, then you won't claim that the new macbook design has any future.
Going on the models available now, the air is still the gold standard
I own a rmbp
I love my rmbp, because of the screen and power, but the Air is still the all around winner.
Anyway, touchscreens are the future. Kids do not even consider keyboards, mice and trackpad.
Those are for old people.
I own a rmbp
I love my rmbp, because of the screen and power, but the Air is still the all around winner.
Anyway, touchscreens are the future. Kids do not even consider keyboards, mice and trackpad.
Those are for old people.
The other thing they don't consider is wired connectivity...to them the furor over ports in the rMB is an anachronistic joke. My preferences, and yours, aren't theirs. And for a significant number, you're right about the touchscreen. Even my wife, who's a university professor, relies on a touchscreen and stylus for the computer she uses during class. The lack of a touchscreen and on-screen stylus support completely rules out any MacBook for her, and there are a lot of people like her out there. MR is an echo chamber.