are you for real? your problem with the MBA is the fan noise? The fan is super quiet for a fan. Big deal. Deal with it. Oh no your super thin laptop with hardly any space to remove excess heat is spinning a fan so it won't overheat. Apple must get rid of it so I won't hear anything but will probably overheat it anyway.
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Warming-up for the all-new redesigned retina 2014 (2015?) MacBook Air
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are you for real? your problem with the MBA is the fan noise? The fan is super quiet for a fan. Big deal. Deal with it. Oh no your super thin laptop with hardly any space to remove excess heat is spinning a fan so it won't overheat. Apple must get rid of it so I won't hear anything but will probably overheat it anyway.
"Newspapers" is quite the euphemism for what usually ends up being idiots writing stupid things on (essentially) personal blogs.
As an example, I remember that it was conventional wisdom more than a year ago that the MBA would get a retina screen for the 2014 refresh. So what happened to all of those reliable sources etc.?
The only news source that has proven consistently reliable (or even sort-of reliable) WRT Apple rumors and prerelease information is the Wall Street Journal. Apple almost certainly leaks information to them.
To my knowledge, all other sources have had horrible track records. I'm happy to be proven wrong though if somebody wants to point me at a particular source.
You are right. The reliable sources are little more than educated guesses.
I see that Apple fans usually worship the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo because of some predictions he made that turned out to be true. To me, his predictions are not more than educated guesses, and there is no reason to give so much credit to him. He made some on-spot predictions, but he missed a lot as well.
The fact is, there is no reliable information available. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal has some Apple leaks, or perhaps it just publishes information which was leaked from so many sources that it is safe at the point it is published.
Anyway, a retina MacBook Air should be a given, because Intel processors currently allow for such kind of product; retina displays have become cheaper; the current design is 4 years old; and competitors are already cramming retina-like displays in ultrabooks. All these elements point to a MacBook Air redesign at some point. It has probably not happened because of the delay in the release of Broadwell chips.
Agree that a retina MBA is inevitable. Of course it will happen sometime between the next 0 and 50 years.
Now that Apple has proven that they can make relatively energy-efficient, high resolution panels with the recent iPad Air 2, there isn't much preventing a retina MBA anymore.
I take issue with the assumptions/rumors that the next MBA will have no fan though, which is clearly an impossibility with Broadwell, or that it will necessarily be thinner.
But updating to Broadwell and Retina which sense would have then the 13 inch retina pro?
I don't think they will,i suppose they will just put the retina but keeping the old chips ( as with mac mini ) while giving to the 13 pro the Broadwell dual one.
I really hope Intel will end to build any dual at all and maybe with Skylake we could have less energy needed for that new quad?I'm asking you as total profane.
Some of you guys make it sound like using Broadwell is some kind of monumental engineering challenge or product planning decision.
It isn't.
Broadwell is simply Intel's latest generation of chips, and if that's what they're selling, then that's what Apple will use. Apple won't refresh a design with old chips the same way you wouldn't go to the store and ask for milk that's a week old.
I don't know why everybody is making such a big deal about Broadwell. I think it's mainly because of Intel's stupid presentations about fanless designs, now everybody seems to think that Broadwell = fanless = completely redesigned MacBook. This is completely wrong-headed.
No ,in my case, i see just Skylake for the arrival of Thunderbolt 3,
if Thunderbolt 3 would land with Broadwell i will be happy to wait less.
But that wasn't my question.When Intel will stop making dual cores?
Mainly because,if next Air will go with a retina screen i really really hope to see a quad landing
in the 13 inches pro,to have my " Air Pro".Don't wanna see dual on Retina Air and still a dual in the 13 inches Pro,Broadwell or not.
Dual vs. quad core doesn't have anything to do with graphics and retina displays.
Quad core only gives you a performance boost in fairly specific circumstances. If you don't already know that you would benefit from quad core, then you probably wouldn't benefit from quad core.
It has nothing to do with retina/GPU, as you said. What he means (if I understood) is that having a MBA retina with a dual core (less clock speed, but still quite similar to the MBP dual core in performance, in opposition to dualcore vs quadcore difference) wouldn't make sense.
It wouldn't make sense because MBA would kill the 13" MBP sales because they would be almost the same, so with the arrival of Skylake (less heat, less power consumtpion) there wouldn't be the typical excuses of "can't put a quad-core on a 13" computer because of the heat generated/small termal design". So that would be the way to differentiate the MBA and 13" MBP. The problem then, would be that nobody would go to the 2K bucks 15" MBP, because they would have a powerhorse in a portable 13" laptop (best things of both worlds). So maybe there, the way to "attract" people to 15" would be on graphics (4K maybe? a laptop with the recent nVidia Maxwell GTX 980M beast?), but seeing that Apple has killed discrete GPU's to increase profit margins (and get more bucks from who that needs/wants a mediocre discrete GPU), I don't think it happening... But hey, who knows, if they made a 5K iMac, everything is possible.
Broadwell is simply a die shrink of Haswell. It has nothing of new architecture on it.
Still, Broadwell is more energy-efficiently because of this change in manufacturing process. This may allow for a redesign of the Air.
Remember that the 13" MBA came out before the 13" rMBP. There wasn't much of a reason to buy a 13" MBP when you could get the MBA and it had the same or better specs, was lighter, had better battery life, etc. Apple doesn't seem to fear cannibalization much so I wouldn't use that to predict which products they will release.
When the redesigned version of the MBA came out, it was late 2010 and two years after the release of the unibody MBP. The MBA had a weaker processor and less disk space, and did not have an optical disk drive. It was lighter and had SSD, though. A trade-off. Cannibalization to a certain extent, but there MBA was not better in all respects.
But note that Broadwell has yet to deliver on that promise: http://www.fool.com/investing/high-...pple-incs-next-macbook-air-wont-use-inte.aspx. The Broadwell Y Core M chip, the latest Intel iteration in the series, has performed poorly. So the last chance to realize fanless design using Broadwell will be with their U chip that is being released early next year. Otherwise it will be left to see if the next generation from Intel in Skylake can do the trick in second quarter of 2015.
You keep repeating that in every posts, but can you explain us how do you expect a higher TDP chip to be more capable for a fanless design?
Low-power also mean less heat.
If Core M Broadwell chips need as much power and then deliver heat to sustain decent performances, no higher TDP Broadwell chip will make it for a fanless design, that will only get worse.
You'd have to wait for a new chip design to offer more performances at a given size and TDP, and that's what SkyLake is all about being a tock. Broadwell 4.5W Core M chips get too hot, but a SkyLake 3.5W Core M chip with same performances could be the deal.
I recognize the conundrum, as well as the assumption that if a 4.5W Broadwell Y Core M chip cannot achieve fanless design then such wattage or lower will be necessary to pull it off.
Broadwell U is supposed to be an even better chip, so theoretically it may have such capability at the same low wattage as Broadwell Y Core M. And I agree that perhaps it will take Skylake, or even beyond (Cannonlake), to produce fanless design that can drive a retina display without loss of processing power (though I am guessing slight battery life loss would be acceptable to Apple).
Maybe in the next iteration of MacBook Air Apple scuttles fanless in order to maintain processing speed and battery life with the additional burden of driving retina display? If the microprocessor is not yet there to do everything that Apple wants with the next MacBook Air then they will have to look at tradeoffs.
No, Broadwell U is not supposed to be better. It's the same chip, just configured differently to use more power in order to perform better. You are getting confused because Intel is using more codenames (or codeletters) for this generation of chips but it's really no different than 15W Haswell parts vs. 55W Haswell parts. I don't recall any discussion of the 55W parts being "better" than the 15W parts.
I'm very curious about why you're trying SO hard to figure this out.
Is it because you desperately want a thinner, fanless MBA? Is the current MBA too thick and loud for you?
Or are you completely convinced that these rumors about fanless MBAs are true and you're trying to square them with reality in order to... well... I'm not even really sure why you would care?
Can somebody answer this question: who is the most reputable source claiming a fanless MacBook in the near future?
I want to check out this person's track record.
Edit: The reason I ask is because it seems like a fairly obvious and likely scenario that some a**hat saw Intel's presentation about Broadwell enabling fanless laptops and immediately assumed Apple would use said parts and started this rumor, without any actual knowledge of anything to do with Apple or their plans.
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Much better screen is the really important thing...
motrek wrote:
"Is it because you desperately want a thinner, fanless MBA? Is the current MBA too thick and loud for you?"
No, I agree with you that the highly questionable push towards a thinner and thinner device is not what I care about. (On the contrary: Higher risks for screen problems, trade-offs regarding battery time, and what not are not worth it, IMO.) About a new designed MBA being fanless, I will say that for me that IS a strong and good idea, even though most MBA owners do not complain about the present models being noisy.
But above all, IMO: The present MBA screen is so sub-optimal with today's standards (compared and contrasted to so-called retina screens) that this point is for me the most critical.
motrek wrote:
"Is it because you desperately want a thinner, fanless MBA? Is the current MBA too thick and loud for you?"
No, I agree with you that the highly questionable push towards a thinner and thinner device is not what I care about. (On the contrary: Higher risks for screen problems, trade-offs regarding battery time, and what not are not worth it, IMO.) About a new designed MBA being fanless, I will say that for me that IS a strong and good idea, even though most MBA owners do not complain about the present models being noisy.
But above all, IMO: The present MBA screen is so sub-optimal with today's standards (compared and contrasted to so-called retina screens) that this point is for me the most critical.
Yes, I agree that the screen needs to be updated especially since Apple has been demonstrating that they can make high-resolution displays that consume very little power. So there's getting to be no reason NOT to put one in the MBA.
But thinner and fanless are not essential or even necessarily desirable.
Agree. The big problem here is the screen. It is sub-optimal compared to retina displays of the rMBPs and also to the high-resolution displays of premium Windows ultrabooks.
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The reason why Apple has not yet put a retina display in the MBA is probably battery life. When Apple released the Haswell MBA in 2013, it could have opted for including a retina display, given the boost in battery provided by Haswell. However, for some reason, Apple opted to include the Haswell processor in the current form factor and battery life reached new heights. Now Apple cannot take it back. But, with the improvements in battery provided by Broadwell (at least as Intel says), and more energy-efficient screens, the retina MBA should finally arrive in 2015.
As for thinner and lighter, I would like to see the laptop with a larger screen cramped in a form factor similar to the one in the 11-inch MBA (but with a 16:10 screen ratio).
The reason why the MBA Haswell didn't get a retina screen is because it would have asked more often CPU single-thread performances and more often GPU performances. The Air can't sustain performances long, it throttles to prevent heat (and it also prevent power consumption and enhance battery life).
There is probably many reasons, marketing and segmentation is probably considered too; Apple needed to keep the distinction with the rMBP features. But it was not only a question of craming in a retina display or not; the implication were not the battery life hit, it rather was overall performances.
The promise with coming intel chips at 14 nm starting with Broadwell is better performances for lower TDP chips i.e. performances reached with higher TDP chips of previous generations now accessible on lower TDP chips. A 15 W TDP Broadwell chip might be 5% faster at the same clock, but more importantly, it can sustain performances longer before heating. But a 15W chip is still a 15W chip, the battery life won't improve as you seem to think, and a rMBA with a 15W Broadwell chip won't get thinner or lighter.
My Haswell MBA will happily run at full turbo boost indefinitely, and the fan doesn't even spin up that much.
My theories about why Apple hasn't put a retina display in the MBA yet:
1) Product differentiation
2) Price -- people are buying MBAs for $800 or less on sale. That's pretty cheap, even compared to comparable Windows laptops. A retina display would just drive up the cost of entry into the Mac laptop world
3) Graphics demands would probably require a more expensive processor from Intel, so, again, price -- the rMBP has Intel Iris graphics
4) Power consumption -- Apple seems to have made advancements in making high-resolution displays that require low power, if you look at the iPad 2 and the claimed reduced power requirements of the retina iMac. But both of these products are relatively recent. Apple might be waiting until the technology progresses enough to put it in the MBA. Probably getting close now.
I think one, some, or all of these might be factors.