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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

having just bought the $1299 model last year, glad to see they're trying to offer a cheaper model. Lowest used to be $1199 a few years back - another $100 to $1299 (essentially $1400 with tax) was a big hit to take. Yes, $200 is just $200 - these new $1099 ones aren't free, but... this may make the difference between someone getting a new one vs not.

1.4ghz seems awfully slow, but... I suspect for a lot of what many people do - email, youtube, Facebook, a bit of iTunes music, this will be more than fine. But maybe not. I'd rather people not have a horribly bad experience on something too underpowered for the software. That said, they pushed out the retina mbp a couple years ago(?) and that experience was not all that great (imo) - laggy window drag, etc.

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I do all my development work (which involves a lot of heavy Scala stuff) on a 2012 MacBook Air, which is a wee bit slower than this one. The CPU really is not a problem.

There's no SSD or 'Fusion Drive' in this one, which will make it bog down a lot. It's a shame that Apple won't go for a $999 model with a 64GB SSD or something. Should be enough for classrooms and anyone who wants a basic computer.

Yeah, a fusion drive would be a perfect default for this type of computer. It would feel fast while still giving a regular desktop user plenty of space for their media.

It's not that necessary. Sure, I use macbooks now because they're kinda great hardware. When my parents were looking for a new all-in-one, they could get all this for about half the cost with a Windows PC that they already knew how to navigate around.

SSD and Fusion are BTO options just like on the rest of the iMac line.

My bigger complaint is that the RAM is non-upgradable even as BTO. I really couldn't imagine if I had to bring my computer back down to 8GB RAM from 16.

+$250 for either 1TB fusion drive of 256GB SSD.

I guess it's all in perception - I do a lot of Java work on a 2012 MBP 2.3 quad core with 16g and an SSD - still feels slow to me quite often. Have not even considered a MBA because of this.

I have a similar spec 2012 MBP. Are you using Trim Enabler? Otherwise, you may have lost a lot of SSD performance. Also, do you monitor RAM usage? Browsers can eat up your RAM. OS X needs RAM for disk caching for snappy performance.

I did on an older drive, but upgraded the drive in December, and lo and behold, it's not on. Rebooting now to see how this affects things. Thanks.

When using Trim Enabler, you basically have to re-check it after every system software update. (Not apps, but the OS.) I have the app set up start automatically, so I can take a look. I think there are paid options for more convenient facilities.

1.4GHz isn't as slow as you think due to Turbo Boost. The effective clock speed is much higher, it just runs in lower-energy mode most of the time.

Speaking as someone with a MacBook Air who does software development (compiling large projects like the Zend engine).

>I suspect for a lot of what many people do - email, youtube, Facebook, a bit of iTunes music, this will be more than fine

But honestly, a system targeting that demographic and use-case (and built minimally to serve them) should be several hundred dollars less.

What's your opinion of using this for a kids' first computer? (Let's set aside the "toy" computers sold at Christmas). I'm assuming it's more than adequate for most things. Won't be used for video-encoding, playing hardcore games, etc. Literally for the family which means very simple needs. Is 1.4ghz really that slow? Really??!!

I got my kid a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 when he was 5 years old. I bought it used for less than $200 and installed Linux Mint on it.

The small keyboard of the CF-18 is perfect for little hands, the rugged construction means he probably won't break it whatever he tries, and Linux Mint just works, as usual.

He uses it mostly for watching movies, playing educational games (GCompris and such), looking at small things with a USB microscope I got from DealExtreme, taking to Grandma on Skype, and recently, he has started making little Scratch programs. He's really proud to own a real computer.

Preschool children are not the target market of Panasonic Toughbooks, but they actually are a great fit.

The number of gigahertz is irrelevant these days - unless you're doing heavy computation or playing games.

I instructed my in-laws to buy the low-end iMac last year. I tried to get them to go for a MacBook, but they had to have a desktop. The SSD would have been tons faster, but for their purposes, this works great.

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