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Apple To Release a Cheaper MacBook Air Later This Year (9to5mac.com)
According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities, Apple doesn't appear to be axing its MacBook Air line, despite it being on the market for ten years. Kuo says Apple is planning to release a 13-inch MacBook Air "with a lower price tag" during the second quarter of 2018, which should help push MacBook shipments up by 10-15 percent this year. 9to5Mac reports: Details on the new MacBook Air are sparse, but this report from KGI corroborates a similarly vague report from Digitimes earlier this year. The MacBook Air line has been largely stagnate in recent years as Apple has shifted focus towards the 12-inch MacBook and MacBook Pro. Currently, Apple sells the 13-inch MacBook Air starting at $999, and KGI seems to think it will get even cheaper this year. Despite its neglect by Apple, the MacBook Air remains a popular choice for college students.
It's been unmodified for 3 years. 2015 was the last major update (CPU upgraded from Haswell to Broadwell, faster PCIe bus for SSD, Thunderbolt upgraded to Thunderbolt 2).
The "2017 update" actually just replaced the Broadwell CPU with another Broadwell CPU that's 0.2 GHz faster (and was available in 2015). You'd think they could've at least updated to Sky Lake (available late 2015) or Kaby Lake (available late 2016/early 2017). But apparently they didn't want to go through the effort of designing a new mainboard for a newer CPU, so they did the cheap and easy thing and just swapped one Broadwell CPU for another and called it a "new" model.
You can pay $1,000 for Apple's bottom-of-the-line MacBook Air, or for just $150 more, you can get an Alienware 13.
Besides being a beast of a (small) laptop, the Alienware...has a headphone jack! And an RJ45, 3 USB 3 ports (type A and C), Thunderbolt, and HDMI.
If I were to buy a small laptop for around $1,000, I know which one I'd pick!