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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2019-08-19, 15:01

Honestly I think it would have been easier to get the base MacBook Pro down in price than it would have been to get the 12-inch MacBook down in price (which further suggests that maybe the names are messed up). I mean, it's $1299, now, with a fancy OLED Touch Bar thing. I can't imagine it would cost that much more to make than the current MacBook Air without it.

They're too close to the same computer.

Does the current MacBook Air feel weirdly like a rush job to anyone else? Like that weird 2009 plastic unibody MacBook. You really do get the sense that in Apple's ideal world, it wouldn't exist, and they'd just have the petite 12-inch and then the 13-inch "Pro." And then people just kept on buying comically outdated Airs, so they felt they had to do something.

Apple's been trying really hard to get the base price for a "real" MacBook to $1,299 for over a decade, and they keep failing, because they keep feeling like they have to have some old thing at $999 just so they can hit that price point and then they're repeatedly shocked when everybody buys that instead of their new shiny thing. This happened when the unibody aluminum MacBook was supposed to replace the plastic one, this happened when the 12-inch MacBook was supposed to replace the MacBook Air, this happened when the two-Thunderbolt-port MacBook Pro was supposed to replace the MacBook Air...

I guess Apple's finally learned. Just kill the $999 product. No, but seriously, the MacBook Air does feel like it can hit $999, so I guess that's something. No terraced battery structures there.

I really don't understand it, though. Using 7W processors is weird. Having a fan but not having that blow directly over the heatsink is weird. All for a notebook that isn't that much thinner or lighter than the old 15W one, and most of that increase in thinness can probably be attributed to the keyboard.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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