MacBook Air supplies dwindle ahead of WWDC, Intel CPU refresh | Hacker News Reader

MacBook Air supplies dwindle ahead of WWDC, Intel CPU refresh

arstechnica.com

39 pointsLibertatea46 comments

A month ago, I idly looked up BTO prices on store.apple.com/uk/ (I'm British) as part of my annual "I wonder where the sweet spot's moved to" check.

13" Retina Probook with 2.5GHz i7 processor, 8Gb RAM, 512Gb SSD, costs ~ £1650.

13" Airbook with 2.0GHz i7 processor, 8Gb RAM, 512Gb SSD, costs ~ £1600.

So for an extra £50, you can go from the Airbook to the 13" Retina Probook. You gain a vastly better display and 20% faster CPU, in return for a 300 gram weight penalty.

My reading of this is that the 13" rMBP has massively eroded the value proposition of the high-end 13" Airbook. So either the 13" Airbook price is going to have to come down significantly, or the spec is going to have to rise, or both. (Something like a 2.5GHz Haswell CPU and a £50-100 price cut would begin to make it appealing again.)

An alternative perspective - for people that travel a lot, that 300 grams (.6 pounds) - is a deal breaker. Also, you really have to be a power user to need more than a MacBook Air can give you in terms of performance - my 2010 4GB 256 GB SSD MBair is plenty fast for me, and I'm probably pushing it harder than 95% of "road warriors" do.

It may be the case that people value the mobility so much that Apple isn't dropping the price on the MacBook Air. (Or, alternatively, people are no longer buying the heavier MacBook Pro, so they've dropped it's price.)

The rMBP premium doesn't just get you more power, though -- it gets you that lovely screen. If you have any eye trouble at all, a less-than-best quality panel is a real deal breaker.

(I speak as a former user of a 2010 4gb/256 SSD MBair myself. Couldn't go back to it, these days.)

>An alternative perspective - for people that travel a lot, that 300 grams (.6 pounds) - is a deal breaker.

I travel a lot, and even the 15" rMBP is not a "deal breaker".

It's funny how pathetic it would look to our fathers that we find 2.5 kg to much to carry around in a bag...

Agree 100%. I travel a lot and need more power. I currently have a 13" MBA, and am waiting to see what the next refresh offers, but am seriously looking at a 15" rMBP for my next machine. The screen is sooooo much better that the extra weight becomes a non issue (plus all the extra CPU power is huge too).

> or people that travel a lot, that 300 grams (.6 pounds) - is a deal breaker

I travel for business quite a bit (20-50,000 airmiles/year) and I traded in a 13" MBA for a 15" rMBP upon its release.

For me, it was an easy deal to exchange the laptop weight differential through unnecessary clothes or travel accessories for this gorgeous display and added (dev) computing power.

"for people that travel a lot, that 300 grams (.6 pounds) - is a deal breaker."

Just to put this into perspective, a medium sized t-shirt usually weighs 6-10 ounces (160-285 grams) approximately.

OTOH, do you carry around a spare t-shirt in your laptop bag all the time?

I often keep a hoodie in my bag.

the 13" macbook air also has a higher usable resolution (1440x900 vs 1280x800) and none of the ghosting or other issues that have been plaguing 13" rMBP users. in my eyes, the retina macbooks are still early adopter unproven tech, i'd wait for the tech to stabilize before buying one. So for £50 less, you get a nice reliable machine that weighs less.

You are right (except about the usable resolution bit), and unfortunately this is something that is unlikely ever to be quantified reliably.

I have deployed several of each: 2011 and all subsequent MacBook Air notebooks, and every model of "MacBook Pro with Retina Display".

The Airs are inferior in most ways, but the Retina machines crash. Kernel panic, or also GUI death (where you can still SSH in but there's no more GUI until you /sbin/shutdown -r now).

Reliability is the magic sauce that makes computers awesome or not awesome... too bad we all don't have access to the telemetry that Apple and MS do. We just have the anecdata from the interweb tubes.

But IME the current generation Airs are pretty awesomely reliable, as far as notebooks go.

(Having said all that, I still go with a maxed out 15" Retina at scaled effectively-1920x1200, even though it does both ghost and crash every couple weeks. I just can't use those legacy LCDs anymore.)

It may also be worth noting that the difference in power is significantly greater than that, but still probably is not discernible in most situations.

The MBA has a 2-core i7-3667U-2.0GHz while the rMBP has a 4-core i7-3615QM-2.3GHz. There may be a "540%" difference between the highest performance rMBP (4x2.7) and the highest performance MBA (2x2.0) when naïvely considering just clock speed and cores.

However, while you have a point about the weight difference having shrunk to only 300 grams (or 1/2 lb) with the retina version of the MBP, I think the performance difference won't be noticeable to people who aren't performing 'exotic' and computationally intensive tasks.

The new integrated GPU's power and greater energy efficiency may make a retina display likely on the Air, so I see the segmentation becoming pretty obvious and increasingly based on specific users' profiles rather than budget alone. For example: are you more interested in portability and probably battery life; or, are you doing some compiling or scientific computing away from your desk?

I think only the 15" is available with the 4-core. (And more RAM. And dedicated graphics.) But a 15" laptop now feels to me like what a 17" used to - unwieldy.

Oops, you're right.

It is getting difficult to see why there isn't just one line with 11", 13" and 15" versions that vary in only weight and power.

I can live without Retina. I can live within 512GB SSD. But I really need 16GB RAM... fingers crossed.

Haswell demos at IDF last year were pretty awesome, so I think longer battery life at the same travel weight (and better overall performance) is pretty much a given.

We'll see about idle time, but active time won't be much better. The 17W IVB chips will be replaced with 15W Haswell chips. Performance will only feel better for "retina" laptops, because of a stronger GPU. The Haswell GPU will barely be "adequate" for retina displays though. So don't expect to be "wowed" or anything. IVB GPU wasn't adequate at all for retina displays. Haswell is really the first generation that can begin to handle retina displays with a "PC OS".

If you don't use retina, you won't feel much of a difference, except in games (if you were playing games on an Intel integrated GPU before). Haswell has been generally overhyped. The improvements are relatively minor compared to IVB. CPU wise I think it's only 5-10% faster.

IVB is adequate for retina display ... if paired with a sidecar like the GeForce GT650M. Or used solely for typing and similar non-graphically-intensive activities. (As on this rMBP 15").

Haswell promises cheaper adequate performance, on less power. And speaking as someone with retinal (eyeball, not electronic) trouble, I'm really looking forward to a portable (i.e. 13") laptop with adequate performance that I can work on. (My 15" rMBP is great for work in the home office, but a bit heavy/bulky/expensive for carting around airports and foreign parts.)

(Don't expect to see a retina display on Macbook Air this year, though -- too power hungry. It'll probably just be a better 13" retina Probook for now.)

> IVB is adequate for retina display ... if paired with a sidecar like the GeForce GT650M. Or used solely for typing and similar non-graphically-intensive activities. (As on this rMBP 15").

Completely agree -- I think there were early performance issues which were due to unoptimised drivers causing e.g. laggy Safari scrolling and that's caused a lot of misinformation to be out there. The truth is that, in practice, the IVB GPU has been more than fine for me unless I'm doing something that would require a dedicated GPU anyway.

Finger crossed for a retina 11" model with a very big SSD... if it does not happen I'll probably use the money to get a big replacement SSD for my current 11" model instead, that's fast enough with its i7 for most programming tasks.

Edit: apparently my mid-2011 model is not capable of installing big enough SSDs, so I'll have to upgrade anyway to the new model.

>Edit: apparently my mid-2011 model is not capable of installing big enough SSDs, so I'll have to upgrade anyway to the new model.

Are you sure ? It sure can take in these ( the same max capacity as the 2012 or 13" ones) http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Air_2011

Note : Apple doesn't upgrade the Macbook Air's SSD post purchase so you'd have to get a third party one like the macsales one anyway.

A note of caution: though you can upgrade the SSD on recent Macbook Airs, you cannot upgrade the RAM after purchase.

Intel reserving their "Iris" class graphics for non-ultrabook CPUs strongly implies that this year's Airs won't have Retina screens.

I have the first 13 Macbook Alumium, upgraded with SSD and 8gb of ram and sometimes I'd like to upgrade to something newer but the thing is still working perfectly. No crashes, no melting, no anything, simply indestructible.

When I will have to switch, it'll be a sad day.

I have that one as well and it's unbreakable indeed. I have also 8gb and SSD and the thing is rocksolid. However, it's too slow when i'm working with Xcode, Eclipse, Chrome and high performance apps. So I bought a 15 inch i7 to go with it. Horrible machine; crashes, feels(!) slower for normal work than the 13 inch one, has a broken magsafe internal (I soldered the wires to the board otherwise it wouldn't load anymore; one day i'll pick up a new magsafe from ebay but I still don't like the price of the real verified ones) just after the warranty. Recently the 'asd' keys just stopped working (no moist or anything, just stopped working). The machine makes it capable of doing intensive eclipse + xcode + simulator work on it while the 13 inch doesn't, but when doing anything else, i'm working on my trusted 13 inch macbook (which is much older).

I hope they will make the next line as robust as that one.

I have a 2011 15in i7, it's been rock solid, are you sure you didn't just get a lemon? You should take it in...

Yeah it could be, but it's too old now... I should've taken the 3 year warranty, but as I said; my previous experiences (were I did have 3 years warranty) I didn't need it so I didn't take it for this either. That bit me badly...

This is why I recommend my friends and family to buy macbooks. Not because of OS X, especially not because they are "faster" (CPU, HDD, GPU are quite slow for it's price), nor for the "pretty" factor. I do it because they are very, very reliable machines. What good is a 1500 euro HP with massive amounts of GPU power, when the battery sucks, the audio jack is broken, the screen won't stand up and some keys are loose...

I'm still good with my mid-2011 model, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 13"... Old adage of updating Macs every 3 years still holds I guess.

I've got a Late 2010 MBAir, 4 GB, 256 GB SSD, 13". This device gets used about 14-16 hours/day, and has traveled all over the planet with me - Brazil, Portugal, UK, Luxembourg, Germany, Singapore, .... It's a little bumped up (I just toss it into my backpack) - but don't really feel any need to upgrade this year. I'm holding out for 802.11ac, 16 GB, 512GB SSD < $1400.

Retina holds no value for me (personally - I know there are people who love it) - in fact, I'd probably pay $100 extra for non-retina if it would give me another couple hours of battery life.

I think all the stars are aligning for that MBAir to land in mind-late 2014 - I can see sticking with that laptop for five+ years.

This thread amazes me. I'm writing on a 2007 vintage white plastic Macbook which has been my main and only non-scientific machine for the past half decade. It "feels" nearly as fast as my friends' much newer MBAirs and Pros (except boot time, ofc) and is hilariously more responsive than the new Windows laptops owned by people in my lab.

Which OS?

Snow Leopard. It can't run anything newer.

While it's no surprise that a new MacBook Air might be around the corner, Apple could still better itself - Retina for Air, higher reliable/capacity SSDs, Longer battery life, etc.

I wonder if OS X itself would be tweaked a bit to facilitate enhanced power efficiency. An Air with long(er) battery life + Retina + decent crunching power could potentially threaten the "Ultrabook" segment.

The Ultrabook segment was defined as a response to the (original) MBA, and I've yet to see an Ultrabook that truly competes with the MBA on performance/price.

Despite all of the sponsorship from Intel, it also wouldn't surprise me at all to see Ultrabook OEMs trailing Apple by weeks/months getting Haswell based stuff out the door.

The ASUS zenbooks were pretty damn good as far as I could tell. I've heard decent stuff about the Dell XPS ultrabooks.

Not exactly an ultrabook, but thinkpad x220/x230 was pretty amazing except for the low screen resolution. IPS screen, great keyboard, great performance aside from integrated graphics, space for an mSATA SSD as well as SATA HDD/SSD, battery slice to boost it to 20+ hours, removable battery, and great linux support.

How are the Thinkpad machines these days anyway? I've heard good things about the x220, but not so good things about the build quality and keyboard of the x230, and also a few similiar complaints about the X1 Carbon vs the old X1.

I've got a mid-2010 mbp 15" that still works just fine, even if I could use it to cook food at times (any time the power adapter is hooked up), I guess I will eventually have to replace it but with an SSD and 4G ram it's doing just fine at the moment.

Typing this on an x230 - it's the best keyboard I've ever used, bar none.

The one and only complaint I have is the low resolution, but 768 is not that bad on a 12.5" screen.

Ah, well good that someone likes it! I haven't tried a newer thinkpad machine, I've just heard lots of complaints from friends.

> Apple could still better itself - Retina for Air, higher reliable/capacity SSDs, Longer battery life, etc.

The first thing it needs to do is put more RAM in the thing, even more so because it can't be upgraded over time. There really needs to be a 16GB BTO (and if there can be a 32GB one even better, even if it costs an arm and a leg, 16GB is not enough to be comfortable when you need to juggle half a dozen VMs)

Yeah, I mean RAM is a crucial part. I'd be willing to be the extra for that. Considering the leaps in RAM tech, we'd better see >8 GB RAM on devices shipping this year.

I dimly recall reading that RAM needs to be balanced against battery life.

It'd be cool if we could "power down" some RAM dynamically, energy saver modes and so forth.

I doubt Retina and longer battery life go together so well. The first Retina MBP was really taxing its GPU to achive the resolution. This is most likely better but still - double the resolution, 4x the data rate, more shaders and other GPU units required...

Damn. Just bought one. :(

ha. Same. I was planning to wait, but then my home laptop died.

I made the same mistake once. Managed to return it though, loosing $200, but the new one was worth it.

Since then, this has been very helpful: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

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