New MacBook Air Released – $100 Cheaper

https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html

by nitinag • 12 years ago

54 96 12 years ago

nedzadk• 12 years ago

except 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• 12 years ago

As far as we know so far, nope, no other differences. Maybe a teardown my iFixit will reveal something new but I doubt it.

akumen• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Yep, 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• 12 years ago

an extra hour battery life

chrisBob4• 12 years ago

Along 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• 12 years ago

Put another way, 7.6 - 10% price reduction

danso• 12 years ago

FYI if you're unfamiliar with the previous specs, a writeup from MacRumors:

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.

bitL4• 12 years ago

1366x768 in 2014?

TazeTSchnitzel8• 12 years ago

I 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!)

bitL4• 12 years ago

This 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.

Kurtz79• 12 years ago

I'm still quite happy with my late 2010 13' Air, as a second/travel/coffee shop laptop.

About your edit: remember that how Apple does it in the "Retina" models is increasing the definition, without affecting the actual size of the UI elements.

I would buy a "Retina Air" in an heartbeat.

taude2• 12 years ago

Explain high density 10" iPads, then.

pedrofelipe• 12 years ago

12 hours of battery life in 2014? puff

zimpenfish2• 12 years ago

How many other laptops of similar spec can beat it though?

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

This is for the 11" model. The 13" has a more appropriate 1440x900.

Retina would be nice though.

hackerboos2• 12 years ago

If Apple made a retina Macbook Air then nobody would buy the Macbook Pro.

chrisBob4• 12 years ago

This is their cheapest option and has an 11" display. If you want pixels then you should pay a little more and not complain when it is a little heavier:

http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/

bitL4• 12 years ago

I have a 15" rMBP. This is about MBA. iPad doesn't have a problem having retina display, just MBA.

rm445• 12 years ago

People are defending the 11" Macbook Air with that resolution, but you make a fair point.

I have the 2012 model, and it is an absolutely superb machine, but the lack of vertical pixels is its weakest feature. Reading documents is far from ideal: it is distracting to read a wide-columned pdf with a relatively small number of lines on the screen, and the screen isn't quite good enough to allow much zooming out. There is a noticeable difference in the usability of the machine when my eyes are tired. A higher-resolution screen would presumably help on both counts.

Because the software is generally well-put-together and the touchpad is excellent, the resolution is not so much a problem for actively using software, creating documents and so forth. But scrolling around and zooming in and out has an overhead, which again, more pixels would reduce the need for.

tehabe3• 12 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the top line MacBook Air had 8 GB of RAM before, now it is 4.

joezydeco2• 12 years ago

When you select a model to order you can choose 8GB as a $100 upgrade.

tehabe3• 12 years ago

That 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.

chrisBob4• 12 years ago

Why 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• 12 years ago

People might be waiting for a new one to come out, that makes it news.

laichzeit0• 12 years ago

Because people browsing 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• 12 years ago

This 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• 12 years ago

The non-retina 13" Macbook Pro seems less and less relevant.

abrowne3• 12 years ago

I'm surprised they didn't get rid of it today.

netcan• 12 years ago

I 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.

oleganza• 12 years ago

They will, after MacBook Air with retina display.

TazeTSchnitzel8• 12 years ago

It 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?

_delirium2• 12 years ago

It's probably a diminishing use-case, but I personally still need an ethernet port. There's a surprising number of times when I visit somewhere (offices, universities) and they can't figure out how to get me logged onto the guest wifi, but I can just plug in to the wired network without a problem. Also some hotels have only ethernet, though that's getting less common.

cowsandmilk• 12 years ago

just to play devil's advocate on this one, you can put 16 GB of memory in it (not from Apple, but by user replacement)

dnissley• 12 years ago

I think for a lot of people the issue is storage. Most don't know the difference between an ssd and a mechanical hard drive and don't want to have to pay an exorbitant sum to get to 500+ gb. They have lots of pictures and music and other things they want to keep around, even if they rarely access them.

smackfu4• 12 years ago

Given that, the MBP is also turbo-boost to 3.1 GHz.

JamesBaxter2• 12 years ago

I really hope they keep the 13" Macbook Pro around. The Macbook Air is a fantastic machine but being able to stick a reasonably priced SSD and 16GB of ram into my work 13" MBP has improved my output dramatically.

I wonder how long it will be before Apple prevent after purchase customization at all.

ssharp• 12 years ago

The 13" Retina should persist for some time. That model's entry price is only $100 more than the non-Retina 13" MBP entry price. I don't really see the appeal of the non-Retina version at this point. The Retina display is really great and worth the extra $100, in my opinion, and I think the MBA offers much better value.

Demiurge• 12 years ago

My 2012 is fine! I think the only upgrade that will make sense is to the Retina version.

Jhsto• 12 years ago

Suddenly I don't regret buying a 13" Retina MBP at all.

turnip1979• 12 years ago

I thought Apple was waiting for new chips from Intel before the laptops would be refreshed. I'm surprised.

Spittie• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

They'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• 12 years ago

They do that from time to time; announcements are mostly only for substantial changes.

vkjv• 12 years ago

Still, no 16 GB memory. The only thing left tying me to the MBP.

dimillian3• 12 years ago

Really ? With an SSD you can even go with 2GB of RAM you won't see any difference.

nwh2• 12 years ago

You 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).

jackvalentine• 12 years ago

You are joking, of course?

morituri2• 12 years ago

My wife has the entry level 11in MBA with 2GB RAM. Limited RAM+limited disk space is a problem, even with the SSD.

dimillian3• 12 years ago

yeah 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).

ghshephard• 12 years ago

The 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.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Consider 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• 12 years ago

I still wonder, how well is windows 7 or windows 8.1 supported ?

how fast does xcode runs on it ?

nwh2• 12 years ago

Windows is supported. I imagine Xcode is almost completely unusable with that CPU and the tiny amount of RAM.

yulaow• 12 years ago

Is Xcode so much resource hungry? VS runs nicely on that spec, and I thought VS was the hungriest ide ever

nicholassmith• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

I guess this means they won't be announcing Retina MacBook Airs at WWDC in June.

bavcyc• 12 years ago

Anyone heard if you can upgrade the SSD on these?

protomyth• 12 years ago

No Thunderbolt 2 upgrade. I was going to pull the trigger on a couple of these, but I'm not sure now.

taude2• 12 years ago

Anyone 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• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Now I can only buy three decent chromebooks for the price of one MacBook Air instead of four.

New MacBook Air Released – $100 Cheaper

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