Apple will allegedly discontinue the MacBook Air because we need more performance?

[XDroidie626]

On 19/04/2016 at 3:42 PM, AluminiumTech said:

<sarcasm> It was so embarrassing that many people in my school use Retina MacBooks</sarcasm> . I've seen almost all colors IRL. Gold MacBooks, Space Gray MacBooks but not seen the silver one yet.

 

They are awesome apart from that Core M. Shove a Core i5 in there and if I had to buy a mac then I would buy a MacBook (only If they added an i5). The embarrassing part is the core M. Nothing with that machine is embarrassing. On the other hand, Anybody using USB in 2016 is an embarrassment, that was so 10 years ago.

 

I could definitely use a MacBook for what I do except price, RAM and CPU. Change the CPU to an i5 with Iris Graphics, change RAM to optional 16GB (or better yet just make 16Gb default). and lower the price to starting at $1099.

USB C is still not even widely adopted yet, while USB is still the standard connector, even thunderbolt hasn't come close yet, adding just 1 USB C port even on the 2016 model is just adding insult to injury and a pathetic choice, my work flow would not work with it, I have USB drives, monitors, stylus and all manner of things connected to my laptop.

You say you can do what you need to do with the macbook, then why ask for more ram, better CPU and GPU? obviously it cannot do what you need it to which is where of course the rMBP enters, its powerful and portable, well optimized and looks its price, the Macbook is a paper thin device that cant even keep up while costing more and offering less performance and battery life.

To me personally, there is no market for that, the retina macbook pro is the on that should exist.

 

[AlTech]

2 minutes ago, XDroidie626 said:

USB C is still not even widely adopted yet, while USB is still the standard connector, even thunderbolt hasn't come close yet, adding just 1 USB C port even on the 2016 model is just adding insult to injury and a pathetic choice, my work flow would not work with it, I have USB drives, monitors, stylus and all manner of things connected to my laptop.

You say you can do what you need to do with the macbook, then why ask for more ram, better CPU and GPU? obviously it cannot do what you need it to which is where of course the rMBP enters, its powerful and portable, well optimized and looks its price, the Macbook is a paper thin device that cant even keep up while costing more and offering less performance and battery life.

To me personally, there is no market for that, the retina macbook pro is the on that should exist.

 

All i need is a bit of power, decent amount of ram (partially for my maintaining my sanity when using OS X) and storage. I don't need many ports. Just let me plug in a projector if i need to or plug in charger.

[XDroidie626]

16 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

All i need is a bit of power, decent amount of ram (partially for my maintaining my sanity when using OS X) and storage. I don't need many ports. Just let me plug in a projector if i need to or plug in charger.

But why pay more for less? sure USB C is rather handy but 1 port lets it down, I have 2 USB 3 and 2 Thunderbolt, SD Card, HDMI and Magsafe, often I will use both USBs for SATA connections, HDMI for dual monitors (Thunderbolt for daisy chains) and SD Card for camera stuff.

I doubt I could do all this at once with a string of adapters on the Macbook

[LukeTim]

I never really understood the Air... I mean, I guess I understood that it was the cheaper option in the line up, but it's not that much thinner. It's got a weird shape and it's even thicker  than a pro at the back. Why not just spread it out to make a uniform thickness laptop, but a little thinner than the Pro with lesser specs that you can sell for a little cheaper?

I'm not even bothered about thickness really anyway. My rMBP is about as thin as I need. I can't imagine that any thinner than this would be particularly worth the effort.

[79wjd]

4 hours ago, XDroidie626 said:

But why pay more for less? sure USB C is rather handy but 1 port lets it down, I have 2 USB 3 and 2 Thunderbolt, SD Card, HDMI and Magsafe, often I will use both USBs for SATA connections, HDMI for dual monitors (Thunderbolt for daisy chains) and SD Card for camera stuff.

I doubt I could do all this at once with a string of adapters on the Macbook

Some people also care about size and weight.

1 hour ago, LukeTim said:

I never really understood the Air... I mean, I guess I understood that it was the cheaper option in the line up, but it's not that much thinner. It's got a weird shape and it's even thicker  than a pro at the back. Why not just spread it out to make a uniform thickness laptop, but a little thinner than the Pro with lesser specs that you can sell for a little cheaper?

I'm not even bothered about thickness really anyway. My rMBP is about as thin as I need. I can't imagine that any thinner than this would be particularly worth the effort.

The air was launched before the rMBP and was noticeably smaller and lighter. Then the 13 air was eventually released as was the retina lineup. So the 13" air made sense until early 2013ish when the rMBP wasn't priced significantly higher than the normal MBP. Nowadays it's just because it's cheaper, although imo it's not cheap enough to warrant getting over the pro -- $200 less for a much slower cpu (not necessarily important for everyone right now but it will matter in four...five...years) and a much lower resolution screen.

 

i don't know...I feel like I'd really like something lighter and thinner (albeit without sacrificing cooling or battery life).

[suicidalfranco]

1 hour ago, djdwosk97 said:

i don't know...I feel like I'd really like something lighter and thinner (albeit without sacrificing cooling or battery life).

zenbook hackintosh?

only needs a better touchpad, maybe throw in the magic trackpad

[79wjd]

43 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

zenbook hackintosh?

only needs a better touchpad, maybe throw in the magic trackpad

Hackintosh isn't exactly an elegant solution. For starters you'll likely run into a lot of issues when setting it up/using it where you can't use certain features or you spend hours/days trying to get everything to work. And then, what's even worse is that it may or may not work when you eventually update.

[l.a.rossmann]

On 4/18/2016 at 9:15 AM, djdwosk97 said:

Same here. Although anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much to someone other than yourself. 

 

I I haven't watched that video (because I can't right now), but I'm always cautious with one of rossmans videos he tends to have a bias against Apple (if you watched his videos over the years) and he tends to go a bit over the top imo.

The newest retinas don't have that issue with the display assembly at all. 

 

The screen is ridiculously delicate, but that is more modern screen technology than anything. 

 

Adhesing the battery in is a bunch of bs, but that's another argument entirely.

 

Apple stopped the silly display assembly design in 2010 on 15" models, and 2012 on 13" models. On the 2008 macbook pro they di screw the hinge into the backplate instead of the thin LCD frame, which is great! However, the backplate was two pieces of metal held together by something that looks like a cheap version of liquid nails. The fans exhaust hot air right onto that part.. so you can imagine what happens there.  In 2010 they stopped using the two-pieces-glued-together-method on the 15" models. On the 13" unibodies with the cd drive they used that all the way up to the last one, but the retina has none of this silliness.

 

So the retina screen assembly is pretty solid in terms of not falling apart over time. but it isn't something I'd recommend someone get if they are careless or traveling a lot just because that screen is really easy to damage. 

[l.a.rossmann]

33 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Hackintosh isn't exactly an elegant solution. For starters you'll likely run into a lot of issues when setting it up/using it where you can't use certain features or you spend hours/days trying to get everything to work. And then, what's even worse is that it may or may not work when you eventually update.

I wouldn't recommend a zenbook because of its charging port. You can break that off looking at it the wrong way. I had someone bring one to get fixed a year ago, he owned the machine for one week. It broke off. I replaced it, and then let it sit in the slot to charge. I unplugged it, and the port I had just put in there fell apart.. you don't forget things like that. 

 

A big part of owning Apple products is that they just work. A macbook is not for me, nor is OSX, but I understand the appeal. You take it out of the box and it is just ready to go. None of that "oh you must be doing something wrong with your configuration", "oh this isn't made to run on your hardware" blah blah blah. You buy it and it's ready to go for its intended demographic. You want to run logic or final cut, it just works. I understand all of that. This comes at the cost of limited choices and a silly, non-traditional method of performing many basic tasks that might frustrate some longtime Linux or Windows users. 

 

I've never understood the hackintosh as a serious machine. It takes away all the plusses of Apple, a big one being that it just works out of the box, but gives you all the negatives of doing things within Apple's ecosystem. With the hackintosh project thing you are going to run into issues and have to do research/forum searching/experimenting. After this is done, you lose a lot of the plusses of Apple, but must deal with the negatives of being stuck doing things their way, inside of their ecosystem, using their OS. 

 

I have a hackintosh I use for 1 or 2 programs where pure CPU horsepower is helpful and allows me to get my day's tasks done quicker. At the time the i7-3770k was the best processor I could get for the money, so I put together a cheapo system that I could turn on and have process certain tasks with an OSX based program, and it's still here today, and works great. I spent about $600.. if I wanted that type of horsepower in an Apple product from apple.com I'd have been stuck paying something crazy. I didn't need a nice case(or a case at all!), I didn't need a GPU, or a screen better than some 10 year old VGA monitor. Here it made sense for me to get a hackintosh because I just needed to run one OSX program on a super fast processor for a cheap price. But I did have to drive myself nuts a little bit getting it to work, even though there were several guides on how to make it work on my hardware. 

 

I get it for those specific purposes, but as a regular home computer it's often more nightmare than it's worth unless you're someone who wants to tinker. and if you like to tinker... I dunno. Compile your own OS from scratch.

[Heesleemer]

3 minutes ago, l.a.rossmann said:

I wouldn't recommend a zenbook because of its charging port. You can break that off looking at it the wrong way. I had someone bring one to get fixed a year ago, he owned the machine for one week. It broke off. I replaced it, and then let it sit in the slot to charge. I unplugged it, and the port I had just put in there fell apart.. you don't forget things like that. 

 

A big part of owning Apple products is that they just work. A macbook is not for me, nor is OSX, but I understand the appeal. You take it out of the box and it is just ready to go. None of that "oh you must be doing something wrong with your configuration", "oh this isn't made to run on your hardware" blah blah blah. You buy it and it's ready to go for its intended demographic. You want to run logic or final cut, it just works. I understand all of that. This comes at the cost of limited choices and a silly, non-traditional method of performing many basic tasks that might frustrate some longtime Linux or Windows users. 

 

I've never understood the hackintosh as a serious machine. It takes away all the plusses of Apple, a big one being that it just works out of the box, but gives you all the negatives of doing things within Apple's ecosystem. With the hackintosh project thing you are going to run into issues and have to do research/forum searching/experimenting. After this is done, you lose a lot of the plusses of Apple, but must deal with the negatives of being stuck doing things their way, inside of their ecosystem, using their OS. 

 

I have a hackintosh I use for 1 or 2 programs where pure CPU horsepower is helpful and allows me to get my day's tasks done quicker. At the time the i7-3770k was the best processor I could get for the money, so I put together a cheapo system that I could turn on and have process certain tasks with an OSX based program, and it's still here today, and works great. I spent about $600.. if I wanted that type of horsepower in an Apple product from apple.com I'd have been stuck paying something crazy. I didn't need a nice case(or a case at all!), I didn't need a GPU, or a screen better than some 10 year old VGA monitor. Here it made sense for me to get a hackintosh because I just needed to run one OSX program on a super fast processor for a cheap price. But I did have to drive myself nuts a little bit getting it to work, even though there were several guides on how to make it work on my hardware. 

 

I get it for those specific purposes, but as a regular home computer it's often more nightmare than it's worth unless you're someone who wants to tinker. and if you like to tinker... I dunno. Compile your own OS from scratch.

I think that is why hackintosh's are more of an enthusiast toy, rather than a work station, I know people that built a hackintosh as an editing work station, only to pick up a MacPro later due to stability issues or having the latest OS, etc. 

with that said, building a hackintosh is quite frustratingly fun, with an emphasis on both F's. I run one myself, just to have final cut pro x and final cut 7, as adobe CC is making my hair fallout at an early age.  

[l.a.rossmann]

4 hours ago, LukeTim said:

I never really understood the Air... I mean, I guess I understood that it was the cheaper option in the line up, but it's not that much thinner. It's got a weird shape and it's even thicker  than a pro at the back. Why not just spread it out to make a uniform thickness laptop, but a little thinner than the Pro with lesser specs that you can sell for a little cheaper?

I'm not even bothered about thickness really anyway. My rMBP is about as thin as I need. I can't imagine that any thinner than this would be particularly worth the effort.

The air has more sales on it than the retina usually, so it can be had cheaper. It is just as fast as the retina for people who don't do anything CPU intensive, it's lighter, and the last part(that most people probably don't care about anyway)..... you don't risk blowing yourself up replacing the battery. They haven't glued it in yet!

 

Now, the real issue here. Call me nuts but....

 

There is no way they are discontinuing this because people "need something more professional." The Macbook Airs after 2011 have great longevity and are quite fast. iPads are being designed fairly disposable now in terms of servicing them. The biggest issue companies like Apple face are producing devices that are so good, no one wants to upgrade. For your average user, a 2011 air is just fine. It has an SSD so it feels snappy, it is still thin and light by modern standards, and the battery is replaceable with a screwdriver. Facebook, youtube, quickbooks, online banking, and small online games run fine on a sandy bridge, dual core, ultrabook class processor. Retinas all suffer from this nonsense of glued in battery which many end users will not replace. Those same end users would have no problem popping out 15 tiny screws to replace a battery on their own air.

 

I feel like Apple is realizing that they created a product that is going to hurt future sales by nature of being too good. For a lot of their core demographic of average users, a sandy bridge dual core ultrabook processor in a slim case with an SSD and a nice screen is all they need, and they don't feel like upgrading, and it's harder to slow down a laptop computer via OS updates than it is a mobile device like an iPad over time.

 

Try putting a new version of iOS on an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2, they're from 2011.

Then try putting the newest version of OSX, el capitan, on a Macbook Air sandy bridge dual core from 2011. 

 

Which one runs well, and which one runs like it was taken out back and shot? 

 

Planned obsolescence. Gotta make sure they don't make something TOO GOOD!!