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13-Inch Haswell-Powered MacBook Air With PCIe SSD Tested
MojoKid writes "In addition to the anticipated performance gains that Intel's new Haswell CPU architecture might bring to the table for their new MacBook Air, there are additional component-level upgrades that Apple baked in to their latest ultra-light notebook; namely a higher capacity 54 Whr battery and a PCI Express-based Solid State Drive (SSD). Apple still hasn't seen fit to up the ante on the MacBook Air's display, opting instead to stick with the 1440x900 TN panel carried over from the previous generation 13-inch machine, with the 11-inch variant sporting a 1366x768 native res. But in terms of performance, this is Apple's fastest Air yet, with storage throughput in excess of 700MB/sec for reads and 400MB/sec for writes, along with graphics horsepower that rivals entry level discrete GPUs, thanks to Intel's HD Graphic 5000 core in Haswell. Battery life has been improved dramatically as well, with the new Air lasting over 9 hrs on a charge, playing back 1080p video content. Apple also reduced their MSRP by $100 versus last year's model."
Not too bad at around $1100. The 54Wh battery looks it improves the portability a bit.
That's actually a pretty competitive price. I can't find a way to configure, say, a Lenovo Ultrabook with an SSD and anywhere near comparable CPU for less than $1200.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Can it run Crysis?
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Just not on the embedded display...
And I love it. I get about 2 - 3 days of average use out of the battery (home use, after work, on the couch, 3 - 4 hours each night). I get an honest 12 hours from the battery with normal use. Snappy, and very usable. I thought I would miss my macbook pro, but I really don't.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
I thought I had disabled ads.
IMHO the "Mac Premium"
Mac is "mid range" for exciting premium products you have to look at companies like google with the Pixel
Umm .. I'd suggest that you don't understand what is meant by "mac premium".
http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pixel/,
The Chromebook is not in the same league as an Air .. they perform two different functions. If you don't have an internet connection then the Chromebook is somewhat crippled, whereas the Air is stand alone.
this low resolution laptop so electronics is not cutting it. no wonder Apple have had drops of 22%; 2; and 7% over the last three quarters...and the reason they are not selling is not the iPad which is down -14%.
I'm not disagreeing that Apple needs to pick up the pace, however those drops can be explained by commoditizing of the market, not that Apples products are suddenly inferior.
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I got the 2012 Air when it was released. Since then, my parents each bought one, plus an iMac.
When I got mine, they did the usual "oh, it's so light" bit and I thought that was the end of it. A few months later, I find out they bought the machines and got everything set up by themselves, including migrating data from their old computers.
Fuck off, troll.
The myth of the "apple tax" or "mac premium" has always been based on pretending that the largest distinguishing feature (the operating system) doesn't exist, or isn't worth anything to people in the market for a new computer. Windows 7 closed the gap a bit, but OS X is still less virus-prone, has better backup integration, doesn't use a registry, and benefits from less platform diversity / hardware+OS from the same vendor.
It also ignores the fact that for years, whenever PC magazines have tested Macs, they've consistently found them to be amongst the best-performing machines money can buy at time-of-release. Boot Camp changed things dramatically, in the sense that suddenly PC magazines could directly compare them to PC hardware with the same benchmark tools.
Apple is reaping the benefit of in-house design (instead of "show me what you got that we can slap our label on"), top-notch system architects, and aggressively securing rights with suppliers for major components to get the best stuff before everyone else.
Please help metamoderate.
The Mac Air has 56% marketshare in the ultraportable segment as of July 1st (http://bgr.com/2013/07/01/macbook-air-market-share/). So while you claim that "nobody is buying these", sales figures instead prove that "most people are buying these".
Losing 7% sales when global PC sales are down 12% is a net market share gain - and they are doing it all at the high end. I'm not sure that's a bad story.
Windows has its own problems with Windows 8. Saying others are doing worse...does not make Apple better. especially when its tablet sales are also taking a massive 14% drop.
Ironically the fasting growing point of the PC market is the sub $300 with chromebook...Linux is quietly gaining converts too.
Apple's Strategy has never been Sales Growth (as that's not a sustainable long-term strategy). It has always been to make quality products that customers will pay a premium for. This strategy dug the company out from near bankruptcy and molded it into the industry power-house it is today. They don't need to have more than a 50% Market Share in order to make a ton of money and they don't need their profits to grow every quarter. The fact that they still had a VERY profitable quarter compared to most of their competitors should be evidence enough of that.
I got a 13", 1.3GHz, 8GB RAM, 256 GB hard disk.
Very impressed with the battery life.
Doing browser and light word processing in Mac Office and Google Docs, I've gone 13 hours and 11 minutes between full charge and needing to recharge or else.
Chrome OS does not require an internet connection
I said crippled, not dead. And from the link you supplied Storage:
One terabyte Google Drive cloud storage for three years1
32GB solid state drive (64GB on LTE model)2
Once you have no network connection that 32Gb is really going to get you a long way </sarcasm>. The Airs come with a minimum of 128Gb of flash and you can spec them out from Apple all the way up to 512Gb .. so once again .. they are different beasts with different design considerations.
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"Rational Profits" != Exponential Sales Growth over a Sustained Period of Time
They *have* Market Share right now. They're making *rational profits* right now. Sounds like the strategy is working as planned. Once market share stabilizes the number of sales/quarter should start to drop and eventually stabilize at a reasonable level.
Have a previous generation 11", and not buying another air. Reasons:
- heavy. It looks like it should be light, but it's just as heavy as my 15" vaio.
- no backlit keys. This is pretty much a show stopper. No keyboard should not have backlit keys.
- only two USB ports
- no HDMI out without external adapter
- need an external converter for ethernet
- aluminum is a terrible material for the case. Dings, scratches and cuts.
- low screen resolution
- proprietary SSD
- no way to move remap control key under windows
Trouble is there are facts available.
What a shame you chose not to avail yourself of them!
The first is that Apple charges for the OS so you don't need to pretend it's value is greater than it is.
Not for new systems, and for upgrades it's usually around $20. You are totally missing the point of word "value" of course, you took it literally but the original poster was referring to usability over other systems, and of course things like AV software not being a mandatory full-time process.
Second is that Apple uses commodity hardware and has since the switch to Intel...Third is that Apple uses less "in-house" design than at any time in their history.
Here's where you really left the fact train and wandered off into the wilderness. It seems that at first jump to Intel that they used mostly commodity hardware, but over time that has been *less* the case. Stuff like very custom fans, power supplies, batteries, motherboard, keyboards, storage chips in place of SSD... etc. etc. Why on earth do you think Apple has *less* custom stuff now than before?
Apple refuses to even offer products that would have significant demand, like a midrange desktop that's not an all-in-one for instance.
And yet Apple's computer market share is holding steady while the market share of all those offering such systems is in decline. HMM...
More often they can't be bothered to get the best stuff ever, like the aging Mac Pro for instance.
And here your argument plummets to the earth in a giant fireball of nonsense, oh the humanity!
You say that Apple hardly does any custom PC stuff anymore. You say Apple doesn't really get the best stuff much. Well then, we have the Mac Pro to laugh at you with a fully custom design, many custom components and very high end memory chips, buses, IO ports and so on. I mean, come on!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't forget their cheapest desktop that can hold two hard drives and an optical drive is the Mac Pro.
The operative word being "holds". With USB and Thunderbolt, there is *zero* reason to have more than one hard drive slot inside a Mac.
The next Mac Pro doesn't have *any* internal drive bays. None of the creative pros, whom the machines are targeted at, are complaining. They're happily going to connect multi-terabyte RAID arrays to it via any of its six thunderbolt 2 ports, each of which offers more bandwidth than a multilane 6Gbps SAS port.
Please help metamoderate.