I really hate you. Now I want an iPad in space ghost. Space grey is so boring.
I like my 11" Air, but the non-retina screen hurts my eyes these days. I have damn near eagle eyes at reading distance; I could tell the difference between 3 and 4pt paragraph breaks. But yeah, the Air was an iconic, amazing laptop.
After thinking about it, I think the 12" MacBook remains for two reasons: People who want ultra-thin, can tell the difference between the .75 pound difference, don’t use peripherals, or it’s a secondary machine that people like me use iPads for; and it will probably be the first machine Apple puts an Arm chip in. Which leaves the nTB “MacBook Escape” as the Tim Cook’s Apple of keeping old crap around in some weird price point. An older Apple would have killed off its children, called the new Air the MacBook and shitcanned the non-retina Air and the 12" MacBook.
It also feels like Apple caught in the middle of an unannounced transition period. The new iPads are pretty powerful, laptop-class machines, but the apps and OS aren’t there yet. Fast-forward to iOS 13, where we will get a better picture of the Marzipan apps, what iPad features they add to iOS 13, and we will start to see an OS that will take advantage of the new Pros.
Also of note is Gruber commented that there was no mention of Intel on stage other than on a slide. The smart money is on Apple building their own SOCs for laptops, which brings us back to the 12" MacBook.
I’m glad my OG 12.9 and 15" 2016 MBP have some life left so I can see where this all shakes out.
Prices silly for Air.
I got a Thinkpad T480s with 16GB RAM, 14" WQHD screen, 128 GB SSD, quad core 8350u i5, IR camera/fingerprint reader/smart card reader, lots of ports (including USB-C and Ethernet) for $1275 including tax.
Replaced the SSD with a 500 GB Samsung EVO 970 PCIe-NVMe drive I picked up for $170, total $1445 (oh, right, it has a RAM slot and SSD, battery and WWAN are user replaceable).
About $1950 for Air in similar config, after tax.
$200 increase for additional 8 GB of RAM? What?
Not like there are big sales with Macbooks, most I see is something like $100 off.
You can. $400 upcharge for 512 GB from base.
It’s not that bad actually. The 13” Air Baseline in 2014 was also $1199.
Welp, new pencil only works with new iPad Pro. Kudos Apple. Once again, you get me to upgrade for the minor device (first Apple Watch, now the pencil, sigh).
Yes, but they didn’t have the competition in the ultrabook category they have now. Lots of more affordable options.
To be fair, the higher end Thinkpads and other business laptops are pretty expensive as well. But they usually come down in price within a few months of release.
And with constant sales/promos you can get a nicely configured machine for a good price, eventually. Also, you can buy the base and upgrade some components yourself and save quite a bit, too.
For me, paying a premium for a machine where If I need to, I can upgrade to 24GB RAM and a 1 TB drive in the future, replace the battery, connect to Ethernet, not have to carry around a bunch of dongles/adapters is worth it.
Just feel like with the Air, you’re just getting a basic laptop for a lot of money, especially when you start configuring it with more RAM/storage.
Exactly, high end PC laptops made of metal with quality displays aren’t any cheaper than Macs. You also getting the Apple support where you can walk in to a store and get help. There is more to a laptop than specs.
That isn’t to say that Apple memory and SSD upgrade prices aren’t insane.
Yes they are. The Dell XPS13 is much cheaper than even the Macbook Air, much less the Pro. And that’s list prices, Dell has discounts all the time. Oh, and it’s faster, has smaller bezels, more CPU cores, and both storage and memory upgrades are cheaper.
Apple very simply isn’t interested in competing on price. That worked well 10 years ago, but these days many Windows laptops are extremely high quality.
Sure there is a lot of competition in the PC market. Fact is a nice Surface isn’t much if at all cheaper than a MacBook Pro. When I was shopping for a PC laptop a couple of years ago, anything that wasn’t made of plastic was expensive.
And again, I have owned more Dell computers than Apple. Build quality, software, and support don’t even compare to Apple machines.
They also aren’t direct competitors for most customers. People either want to be in the Mac ecosystem or they don’t. Sure there are probably some people who switch to PCs because of price, but I wonder how big that group is. Like like Apple anything has ever been synonymous with inexpensive.
Ouch! Normally here the new models are introduced at the same price as their equivalent predecessors…not this time. The 256gb 12.9" pro is $500 more. 2nd generation no longer offered on our Apple Store.
Was going to replace my 5 year old ipad 4 but hmmm…even the 64gb model is $250 more than the 256gb 2nd gen pro.
Apple is only making MacBooks for those that buy Apple no matter what. Price is basically irrelevant since they haven’t used a windows machine since they were a kid in school. Hence the ridiculous prices.
I didn’t grok how expensive the new iPad would be. I guess for my use case it makes more sense to buy the existing low-end iPad rather than fork over $800 for a new fancy one that will be severely underutilized.
Check out Micro Center for deals. I got my recent gen iPad Pro 10.5 256GB on sale for $599.
And yet I am a 20 year Mac user (30 year PC user, I own and use both daily) that wouldn’t touch their current line up. Seems the general consensus among Mac users is that Apple has lost their way with laptops. Crap like the touchbar appeal to people who aren’t heavy users.
I think you have it exactly backwards.
I certainly don’t like the current MBP keyboard, and I wouldn’t buy one myself until they fix those issues. And they are certainly expensive.
But at work, most of our development team uses Macs. Having used Macs and PCs for development, I gotta say I overwhelmingly prefer Macs (unfortunately, our IT guy, who’s been buying the mid 2015 ones - the last non-touchbar non-butterfly keyboard versions - just told us his supply of those just dried up. So he’s sitting in the corner crying).
I use both PC and Mac on a daily basis. There are some programs (like Microsoft BI) that just work better on PCs. I have a Macbook, a 15 inch Macbook Pro that is docked as my work computer and an iMac at home. I use PC when I have to, but Mac for everything else. I tried just using PC (I have various flavors of Thinkpads and Thinkstations) but little annoying things like constant updates, some small dll file that is broken that I have to find and fix seems to occur too often, or there is some other glitch that I am searching in Google to solve. Not so with OSX.
I think that I am like some others: the PC is the light machine with nothing relevant, while the Mac is where the work is done and the sensitive data are stored.
As a die hard MacOS fan, the OS X transition was an horror I couldn’t cope with for the longest time — until screen estate was so large there was enough space to fit all of that stupid interface ;) I guess the keyboard situation will last a while as well, and I’ll hang onto my old fashioned keyboard meanwhile!
I was going to get the new iPad 12.9. But not at those prices.
Poor Apple. So little profit, they have to juice their margins.