Apple Unveils New MacBook Air Models, Now Available For Purchase Discussion

Apple shows off new MacBook Air models, with its 13-inch notebook sporting 12 hours of battery life.

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YES! i can be the first to say meh...

 

and I will be the second one to say it. .... longer battery life big shock we all knew Haswell was made for battery life. Guess that means I can look forward to almost 20 hours on the refreshed x230 on one battery then, and 35 with the slice.

 

that depends on what things are getting on standard voltages as well, from what i see so far, only the ultrabooks are getting the big numbers

 

That's it??? Just better battery life??? No better display??? No newer design etc??? Very interesting

 

Nope just the lower wattage Haswell chip for battery life. the IGP will be faster too but I cant see it being too spectacular ( prob 20 - 30% in real life )

 

So...they're doing battle with the wave of second-gen convertible tablets (Vaio Duo 13 and XPS 11 and such) that all have at least 1080p IPS screens...with a 1366x768 Air that costs $999? Well, that's one way to go...

 

oh wait it now packs 128gb of sheer storage in the mba 11 at 999, its a bargain!

 

This is my thought exactly... Way to be innovative apple. I remember when apple was known for "different" and that is when I was an avid apple user. Its great that apple is updating their entry model to haswell, but come on... at least up the displays too. (Sidenote, they did increase the ssd space on the cheapest model to 128 from 64gb... worth noting, but still...)

 

they are known to keep the same design for years, if you guys think thats different sure, go ahead

128gb of nein nein nein (999)

 

btw they are using PCIe SSDs on the mba, this raised to the almost nein

 

Minor upgrade, but better than nothing. I guess they're not going to be putting the Retina display on it any time soon?

 

My prediction is that we're not going to see a Retina display before next year when Broadwell CPUs are released. That group of CPUs will show much better performance gains than Haswell but will retain Haswell's battery life. Therefore, with these CPUs Apple will be able to power their Retina Displays and not have videos and scrolling be laggy the way it is on the Chromebook Pixel. While there are many Windows notebooks coming out with super high resolution displays, there are likely to be a few performance problems such as the ones seen on the Toshiba Kirabook (then again, all Toshibas come with problems, its part of their 'features list'). The only way that an ultra high res display can be supported is if a top of the line i7 ULV CPU is implemented, and that's not even taking into consideration battery life comparisons with 1080p notebooks...

 

We don't need 2880x1600 in the MBA 11. Just SOMETHING better than 1366x768 would be nice. How about 1440x900, or 1680x1050? Or if they're going to stick with 16:9 on the MBA 11, like it is currently, how about a 1080p panel like so many PC manufacturers are offering right now? My Vaio Duo 11 runs just fine with an Ivy Bridge i3, so there's no reason to wait for Broadwell.

 

I personally like the idea of better battery life - but I don't know if I would purchase a new machine solely for that.

 

True, but then again, Apple typically has not been a fan of a high unscaled resolution on their smaller Macbooks (which is why they kept the MBA 11.6inch at 768p rather than 900p). However, they'd want their display to be retina (therefore if you had to keep the same pixel real estate, it would have to be 2732x1536) - so that the user would essentially not see a single pixel, even though pixel size at 1080p pixels are virtually invisible but then again Apple has their belief in relatively low res. for the MBA (my previous point) . Regardless, having a high res. such as 2732*1536 on such a small notebook would present several difficulties performance and longevity wise.

 

I don't understand why Apple didn't introduce touch screen laptops. They can do it on the iPad but can't on laptops? The Haswell chip is a minor upgrade when everything else is the same.

 

they dont have an OS that actually supports that, its just a minor detail

 

Also, as of now, they do not support touch screens on laptops due to perceived gorilla arm syndrome (but tell that to Win 8 users, and you might learn otherwise very quickly).

 

As someone who has used a Vaio Duo 11 for nine months as my primary PC, I feel confident saying that "gorilla arm syndrome" should be filed away with other ergonomic "truths" like (1) nobody wants a 7" tablet, and (2) the perfect screen size for a smartphone is 3.5".

 

Exactly my point. In fact, unless I am using the touch screen exclusively and for a very long amount of time, my arm doesn't even tire when using a Cintiq 24HD as an oversized Wacom tablet-come-desktop monitor.