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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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