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Comment by Panino | Hacker News Reader

> Won't upgrade a single Apple product in my house until we get a resolution on MacBook Air.

Just curious, what's the problem and resolution? (I'm not familiar with recent Apple hardware.)

My wife is considering switching from Win8 to OSX for various reasons and the Air looks like the best bet. The show-stopper against buying a Pro was the lack of normal USB and HDMI, and at least the Air has full-sized USB3.

There don't seem to be any good options for us. She wants to switch away from Windows but Apple seems to oppose that idea. We might instead get a refurbished laptop and throw Ubuntu on it. (Gotta keep the existing Windows laptop for specific software needed when working from home.)

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The main problem with the Macbook Air is the actual resolution: At 1440 x 900 a non-retina display like this is plain outdated and doesn't fit the premium price tag, even if this is Apple's most affordable laptop. The Air is also somewhat abandoned in recent years and hasn't seen an upgrade for a while. There are people that are fine with the low resolution, however these days I would not buy any non-retina displays/devices and opt for the Macbook if it has to be a small, portable, lightweight laptop.

However if you aren't in a rush you should obviously wait for the actual product announcements we're discussing here.

@panino, thirdsun makes great points and he hits it square on that the point of the issue is the screen. You have to ask yourself what are you buying for $1200 today that you couldn't have bought 3 years ago? To be honest I wouldn't even buy a new one if I was you; I'd go buy a used one about 2 years old. I've actually been doing this the last 5 years, because there is no reason to buy premium new prices when you are almost literally getting the same product with small tweaks over the last 5 years.

Aside from the screen though I'd read some of the others below. There is a great long-form from another user and I followed up on my initial comment with further detail; I don't mind repeating myself, but others may not take kindly to me adding in blocks of largely replicated answers.

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