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New MacBook Air Released – $100 Cheaper
- protomyth 12y agoNo Thunderbolt 2 upgrade. I was going to pull the trigger on a couple of these, but I'm not sure now.
- nedzadk 12y agoexcept for the price and 100mhz faster processor is there anything else different than on model from 2013 (i am asking since i bought 2013 model couple days ago :))
- tbassetto 12y agoAs far as we know so far, nope, no other differences. Maybe a teardown my iFixit will reveal something new but I doubt it.
- akumen 12y agoI think you can call Apple and get a free upgrade to the latest model if you bought yours within 30 days of release of the new ones.
- rickyc091 12y agoYep, they'll upgrade you. It's the same as returning the product and buying a new one. I think the return policy is 14 days though.
- bobbles 12y agoan extra hour battery life
- chrisBob 12y agoAlong those same lines: be careful if you buy an Air at a retail store for a little while. It might be different now, but a few years ago when I got my MBP I waited until the day they were released, called to confirm they were in stock, and when I got to the store they tried to sell me one of the older models that were still in stock.
- benihana 12y agoPut another way, 7.6 - 10% price reduction
- danso 12y agoFYI if you're unfamiliar with the previous specs, a writeup from MacRumors: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/04/29/updated-macbook-airs-faster-haswell/ http://www.macrumors.com/2014/04/29/updated-macbook-airs-fas... > All standard models of the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air now come with a faster 1.4 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor along with the same 4GB of RAM. Both entry-level configurations of the 11-inch and 13-inch models now sell for $899 and $999 with 128GB of flash storage, while the higher-end 11-inch and 13-inch models now come in at $1099 and $1199 with 256GB of flash storage, respectively.
- bitL 12y ago1366x768 in 2014?
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoI imagine Apple are optimising for battery life and cost here, rather than for sheer resolution. Edit: Also, that's the 11", I doubt they can squeeze many more pixels in there before it becomes unreadable. The 13" is 1440x900, which is more reasonable (I'm using it as we speak, actually!)
- bitL 12y agoThis argument won't stand. New phone displays have significantly lower battery consumption than the old ones and substantially higher resolutions. And you can always employ tricks like reducing refresh rate to lower the consumption even more.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoWhy not? If they push the resolution of the 11" much more, it'll become harder to read the screen. If they double the resolution to make it "retina", the battery will take a hit, as will the cost.
- anextio 12y agoNew phones are also not tied to the x86 platform, and generally run software that has been optimized from the start for performance. There are other considerations too. Phone usage patterns are way different to computer usage patterns. The vast majority of phone usage occurs in small blips of activity during which execution can be optimized for the CPU to race to sleep state as soon as possible. Computers don't have the same usage patterns at all, and have a legacy of first and third party software (on all major platforms) that have not yet been optimized for performance.
- rayiner 12y agoThere isn't a retina notebook yet with the kind of battery life the Air has.
- tehabe 12y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong but I thought the top line MacBook Air had 8 GB of RAM before, now it is 4.
- joezydeco 12y agoWhen you select a model to order you can choose 8GB as a $100 upgrade.
- tehabe 12y agoThat was my point, Apple reduces the price by $100 but reduces the memory to 4 GB. Which you can get by paying the $100. It would have been better if the price stayed the same but with 8 GB instead of 4.
- chrisBob 12y agoWhy is this news? I am a proud Apple fan, but I don't think a slight bump in their cheapest laptop needs to make the front page of HN. I feel like I am missing something.
- Touche 12y agoPeople might be waiting for a new one to come out, that makes it news.
- laichzeit0 12y agoBecause people browsing https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest decided to click on the upvote button. It seriously only takes 3 upvotes for something to end up on the front page.
- javindo 12y agoThis opinion might be unpopular, but I've found over the past decade or so that any reasonably sized tech community seems to have a huge hard-on for Apple. I saw it on Engadget in the early days, reddit as it grew, now HN and so on. They're a cool company and all but I agree, fortunately things like this have a way of sliding off the HN frontpage fairly quickly.
- saint-loup 12y agoThe non-retina 13" Macbook Pro seems less and less relevant.
- abrowne 12y agoI'm surprised they didn't get rid of it today.
- netcan 12y agoI agree. One thing Steve Jobs seemed pretty keen on was a rational, minimal product line. Allowing the product line to evolve and fit all the little niches crevices is not Apple's style.
- smackfu 12y agoOTOH, keeping some out-of-date products around just for the educational market is a long-time Apple trend.
- abrowne 12y agoThe education discount for the non-retina MBP 13 is (and has been) $200, rather than the $50 for other models around that price. At least now the MBA 13 starts at a lower price after the discount.
- oleganza 12y agoThey will, after MacBook Air with retina display.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoIt has a slightly faster processor (don't be fooled by "1.3GHz", the MBA's top CPU speed is 2.6GHz) but there's a 500GB non-solid-state hard drive, it's heavier, the graphics are older, and it has a lower-resolution screen. Why would anyone want it?
- Demiurge 12y agoMy 2012 is fine! I think the only upgrade that will make sense is to the Retina version.
- Jhsto 12y agoSuddenly I don't regret buying a 13" Retina MBP at all.
- turnip1979 12y agoI thought Apple was waiting for new chips from Intel before the laptops would be refreshed. I'm surprised.
- Spittie 12y agoI totally missed some events, or Apple just "dropped" those in the store without any writeup/presentation? Even if this is a minor upgrade (price cut and slightly faster processors), it still feels very weird to me.
- neiled 12y agoThey're just minor bumps to specs and a reduction in price, they normally don't do big announcements for something like this. Now if/when the retina MacBook Airs come out you can be sure there'll be an announcement for that...
- rsynnott 12y agoThey do that from time to time; announcements are mostly only for substantial changes.
- vkjv 12y agoStill, no 16 GB memory. The only thing left tying me to the MBP.
- ghshephard 12y agoThe combination of SSD + absolutely ridiculous efficiency sharing libraries on OS X, means that it's entirely reasonable to be running 25-30 applications simultaneously, including a VMware instance of Windows 7, All the Office Apps, Network Simulators, etc... While there are obviously users that can use more than 8GB of memory (or heck, even more than 128 GB of memory) it's probably less than 1% of the Mac Using population that requires more than 8 GB of memory, and Apple expects that 1% to use the MBP. I don't think the Air will see more than 8 GB of memory for at least another 5 years.
- dimillian 12y agoReally ? With an SSD you can even go with 2GB of RAM you won't see any difference.
- dimillian 12y agoyeah the 2GB part was a bit too much. Especially for Mavericks requirements (I was not aware). My point is, with an SSD, you can swap, it won't be slow as the good old HDD days. On my workstation with 8GB of RAM and a 512 SSD (MBPr), I often have 8 or more GB swapped, it's not noticeable at all. The only downside is that yeah, the VM file size will reduce your actual available disk space until you clean it up (reboot).
- nwh 12y agoYou completely misunderstand memory. 4GB is the bare minimum for Mavericks, any less and even on an SSD you're delving into swap hell. 8GB is really skimpy to have just as an upgrade option, I'm constantly hitting my limits on 16GB (though admittedly my workload isn't typical).
- dimillian 12y agoyeah with 4GB you'll swap a lot, but as an SSD is really fast (no as fast as RAM of course, but still..) you won't notice it a lot.
- Shivetya 12y agoConsider all prices to still be +249 because owning one without the extended warranty is at times worthwhile, it can help resale if you sell it within the warranty period
- jokoon 12y agoI still wonder, how well is windows 7 or windows 8.1 supported ? how fast does xcode runs on it ?
- nwh 12y agoWindows is supported. I imagine Xcode is almost completely unusable with that CPU and the tiny amount of RAM.
- yulaow 12y agoIs Xcode so much resource hungry? VS runs nicely on that spec, and I thought VS was the hungriest ide ever
- nicholassmith 12y agoI use XCode on the previous generation, it's fine. Interface Builder bogs down on large Storyboard situations but aside from that it more than happily runs XCode, Photoshop, Simulator and all the usual expected tools (iTerm 2, Chrome, Sublime, Spotify/iTunes/whatever music player) without much complaining.
- Hopka 12y agoI guess this means they won't be announcing Retina MacBook Airs at WWDC in June.
- bavcyc 12y agoAnyone heard if you can upgrade the SSD on these?
- taude 12y agoAnyone know if new MB AIRS still make a ton of noise with their fans? (BTW ton = any noise) I have a 15" MB Pro and love the fact that it's dead silent, unless I'm rendering video in Adobe Premiere or After Effects. I'd like to get an 11" form factor for all my pogramming stuff, and migrate the 15" into some form of desktop computer. Edit: Probably what I'm looking for in a non-existant 11" MB Pro.
- tdicola 12y agoI have a slightly older (ivy bridge) 13" MBA and it is totally silent. The only time I have ever heard fans was while rendering some high definition video in iMovie.
- j2kun 12y agoNow I can only buy three decent chromebooks for the price of one MacBook Air instead of four.