That's right, Mr. Meader- don't look here for thoze rum0rz...

Intel's been pouring some money into their graphics, lately. I don't know if they'll ever match nVidia and AMD, but they are good enough for a lot of gaming on my MBA 2011 now. Light years ahead of the MBA 2010.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/macbook-air-pro-apple-to-combine-notebook-lineup-says-source/ + salt

Oh, if true, that's got me really pissed...

That is not a "pro" laptop...

There's always room for a gamerz laptop, just by a Dell. If you want a mobile video editing suite, buy the 17" MacBook Pro. Most people I know with Macs don't care about video performance, other than the fact if it can play their HD content full screen without any dropped frames.

I for one would very much welcome a 15" Air with 8 or 16 Gb RAM.

why don't they just run two lines? macbook air 11/13/15/17 and macbook pro 13/15/17 ? i have no desire for a heavy hot shot that nukes my gonads while hurting my back … but i want a 15" mba, even a 17"!  

DVDs and Hard Drives are going the way of the dodo, that is clear. Regular MBPs will also go that way. There'll be a high end laptop, but it will probably not be sexy enough to warrant a lot of attention in Cupertino. Witness the MacPro.

So local storage is going the way of the dodo? If I can't store my photos, my music, and my movies on my main computer, then I will buy no more MBP's. NAS does me no good when I am not at home, the Cloud is slow and untrustworthy at best, and I am NOT carrying around an external HD just because Apple doesn't want to put one inside! After all, it's not like iPhoto and iTunes deal well with libraries split across volumes as it is.

I was wishing the DVD had been phased out when I bought my MBP back in early 2011. I guess it will be a good selling point for the crazies who think it's necessary when I finally sell it on eBay.

I can live without an internal optical drive, though I like having an external USB one around for extraordinary situations.

Well, John. Do we really need terabytes in local storage? I've thorougly cleaned my harddrive of my late 2008 MBP and it now contains 180 Gb of data in total. That includes around 12K of pictures in Aperture, but I don't have movies on it, nor music (Spotify). 250 Gb SSDs are around 300 dollars these days and they're only getting cheaper. I'd say, by next year that kind of money buys you 500 Gb, which should make 250 Gb affordable to install in an average laptop.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2012 08:32AM by tliet.

I need a terabyte, if I'm going to Boot Camp and have all my desired data (and reasonable room to grow). I could live with 750 gb. It's great that you don't need movies or music on your disk, but I have been strongly encouraged by Apple to have both there, and my usage has evolved around that. When I sync my iPad or iPhone, for instance, it needs to pull photos from iPhoto, movies, podcasts, audio books and music from iTunes, etc. And I need to sync every couple of days to keep my podcasts up to date for work.

I understand the "light" lifestyle; I love my MacBook Air. But it cannot be the center of my digital life. And I don't want to buy a desktop Mac just to be a sync hub and photo and movie repository.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2012 11:24AM by John Willoughby.

Would you agree that with 4G networks coming online now (forgetting for a moment the dinosaurs that are currently running such networks) that Apple would eventually come up with a way to store it all in iCloud and bring it to you when you need it?

I don't want to use my personal anecdotal stories as an example, but I see whole chunks of my data currently in the cloud (on an encypted disk image on DropBox). Couple with the convenience of the AppStore's (and iTunes') redownload services I can envision a future where data is available on demand.

But, for the time being there'll definitely be room for a power users MacBook Pro, I think it'll be expensive and somewhat neglected though, just like the MacPro.

I like DropBox, but I can't always count on it being there. Or having fast access to it. Or wanting to pay for bandwidth to get to it. The cloud will always be a useful adjunct to my computing experience, but it doesn't work for anything I count on.

I am amazed by some of the mindless fanboy groupthink going on here about adjusting one's computer habits to suit the whims of Apple, rather than Apple trying to please their customers like any other company would.

Don't complain about the lack of optical drives - you can use external ones or the cloud! (yay Apple! Go team!)

Don't complain about shitty graphics - if you wanna play games buy a PC (yay Apple! Go team!)

Don't complain about lack of local storage - you can use external hard drives or the cloud! (yay Apple! Go team!)

You wanna watch DVDs? That's soooo 2002. Download them from iTunes/netflix/whatever. Streaming works flawlessly everywhere you "crazy" non-apple one-true-way person. (yay Apple! Go team!)

Connectivity? Ethernet? Are you a luddite? There's wireless and the cloud, which always works, is just as fast, and never has lag! (yay Apple! Go team!)

If any other tech company made customers jump through hoops like this to use their products they'd go out of business. But because Apple has their shiny industrial design and bulletproof marketing they could release an Apple branded polished dog turd and it would be gobbled up by their legions of unthinking admirers.

When did the lot of you become such a mindless pathetic cheersquad?

To be fair, I've always been a mindless, pathetic, cheersquad. It's only the recent (rumored) direction of the MBP that has brought me into opposition of the Mothership.

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John Willoughby
I like DropBox, but I can't always count on it being there. Or having fast access to it. Or wanting to pay for bandwidth to get to it. The cloud will always be a useful adjunct to my computing experience, but it doesn't work for anything I count on.

This. The cloud is a supplement, and it can be a facilitator, but it isn't a substitute for local storage, and I can't see it being a substitute for local storage for quite awhile yet. 4G doesn't change that--even on good wi-fi, it just takes too long to move big chunks of data around.

My iTunes library is over 1TB. Some of that is movies that I ripped myself (legally, from DVDs I own), and some of it is stuff that's no longer on the iTunes Store. Being able to redownload purchases from the cloud won't help in either of these cases.

Lion made me very nervous about my future with the Mac--in particular, the suggestion that the file system might go away, to be replaced entirely by iOS-like files associated with and organized within apps sounded like a disaster in the making. Mountain Lion offers some faint reassurance that the file system won't disappear imminently, but I'm still worried that Apple's apparent direction is taking the Mac in a direction at odds with the way I use it, both for work and for play.

Sorry, I think I forgot my happy pills this morning.

My point was some people on these boards seem to accept whatever Apple dishes out to them nowadays and go to incredible lengths to rationalise that a bad decision is somehow for the greater good.

And laptops with more expensive & smaller HD space is a step backwards.

Tony, I think you rate people on this board higher than an average fanboy. But with Apple, there's only one way.

Their way.

And you can just see it coming, it doesn't take to be a genius to see where it's all heading. Just like Final Cut Pro, the PCI slots, FireWire, expansion options (iPad, Mac Pro, iMac -harddrives-), Apple Extended Keyboards, OS X Server, you name it... Any 'Pro' equipment or solution has constantly been sacrificed for the general consumer. of which there are many many more people on earth than the power user.

Edit; and BTW, I do think hard drives are legacy technology. Yes, yhey have a purpose and will have a purpose for some years. But this too doesn't take to be a genius to see that for Joe Average a SSD will have many advantages. And there'll definitely be options for the power user; witness iPod.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2012 09:00PM by tliet.

It's not fanboyism to note that DVD drives are the first thing to fail on my computers, make them significantly larger than they need to be, and are completely unnecessary for 100% of the software I use. It's not fanboyism to note that 90% of my DVDs are streamed on Netflix, and the remaining 10% will always be watched with the blu-ray player on my big-screen TV, not a small-screen laptop.

It's not fanboyism to note the spinning beachball of death (aka, traditional hard drive) is probably the most frustrating experience with my computers, most frequent source of crashes, and virtually nonexistent with SSDs.

It's not fanboyism to note that AMD and Nvidia are incapable of manufacturing their latest video chips, routinely miss deadlines by 6-12+ months, and are generally a full generation behind Intel on process technology.

It's not fanboyism to note that ethernet cables miss the entire frickin' point of a notebook computer, that I haven't used one since the first iBook was released in 1999, and even my 82 year-old dad can't stand being tethered to a wire.

In short, it's not fanboyism to note the clunky old ways that people did things a decade ago are no longer necessary, and prevent significant improvements in modern hardware.

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It's not fanboyism to note that DVD drives are the first thing to fail on my computers, make them significantly larger than they need to be, and are completely unnecessary for 100% of the software I use. It's not fanboyism to note that 90% of my DVDs are streamed on Netflix, and the remaining 10% will always be watched with the blu-ray player on my big-screen TV, not a small-screen laptop.

Congratulations, there is a laptop for your needs. It's called a MacBook Air. How nice that you get a reliable movie streaming service, btw.

I'll also note for the record that I have never had a CD or DVD drive fail on an Apple computer I've used. The DVD/CD combo drive on my 2004 iBook still works fine. I have had two logic boards fail (PM 6100, iMac G5), a laptop battery die (2004 iBook), RAM "go bad" (iLamp G4), faulty capacitors (iMac G5 - fixed as a known fault) but never a dead DVD/CD drive.

So I guess YMMV with the "DVD drives fail first" comment...

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It's not fanboyism to note the spinning beachball of death (aka, traditional hard drive) is probably the most frustrating experience with my computers, most frequent source of crashes, and virtually nonexistent with SSDs.

While read/write bottlenecks are less likely with SSDs and the overall system should be more snappy, you're grossly exaggerating to claim the spinning beachballyness is "virtually nonexistent". Safari and/or flash is usually the biggest cause of beachballs for me, most of which is not hard drive related. If users of MBAs are having a beachball free browsing experience please let me know - maybe it'll be worth looking at a MBA after all.

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It's not fanboyism to note that AMD and Nvidia are incapable of manufacturing their latest video chips, routinely miss deadlines by 6-12+ months, and are generally a full generation behind Intel on process technology.

Not arguing about AMD and nVidia's manufacturing dramas. More arguing against the narrow-minded "if you want to play games, get a peecee" snobbery.

(It does beg the question however about how numerous PC laptop manufacturers manage to include a discrete GPU while Apple can't or won't)

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It's not fanboyism to note that ethernet cables miss the entire frickin' point of a notebook computer, that I haven't used one since the first iBook was released in 1999, and even my 82 year-old dad can't stand being tethered to a wire.

Obviously when you get a new computer, you just throw the old one away and don't bother to back up any old data. Have you ever used migration assistant to copy a 500G drive over a wireless 54 Mbs network? It takes DAYS. Gigabit ethernet is nearly twenty times quicker (faster than USB2 or standard firewire). Ethernet is also handy when you need to change settings on a frozen wireless router (somewhat hard to do via wireless) or when the goddamn wireless router is flaking out. Wireless does not always work perfectly.

I guess where I differ from you and tliet is that if Apple products have a particular feature that I don't use, I don't assume it's not used by anyone and therefore should be scrapped. For eg - I've never needed/used a PCI slot in my life but I do think the Mac Pros should have them for folks that need them.

My ways are not clunky or old James, you're just narrow-minded and constantly amazed when other people do things differently than you...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2012 11:10PM by Tony Leggett.