Apple Lowers Prices on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro and Adds New Features (cnbc.com) 65
Apple today announced updates to the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. The MacBook Air price is being lowered to $1,099, but it will be offered to college students for $999. From a report: It will be sold in the same configurations as before, starting with 128GB of storage, but Apple updated the screen with new TrueTone technology. That means it sets the colors on the screen to match the lighting of the room for a more comfortable viewing experience. It also includes the updated keyboard design that Apple first launched in updated MacBook Pros back in May. It should help to prevent some of the sticky key problems experienced in Apple's MacBooks. But this is not the full keyboard refresh that's rumored to ship with an entirely new keyboard configuration. The new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro starts at $1,299 (or $1,199 for college students.) and includes a quad-core processor in the entry-level model for the first time and improved graphics performance. Like the refresh in May, the entry-level models now also come with new keyboard materials to help prevent sticking keys.
It's Apple... (Score:5, Funny)
So can someone explain why this change is evil? I know you guys can do it.
Re: It's Apple... (Score:1)
Because slashdot doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode, thatâ(TM)s why
Re: It's Apple... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: It's Apple... (Score:4, Informative)
I went on to Apple's website and the 15" MacBook Pro is using 9th generation (Coffee Lake) because Intel didn't have an 8-core 8th generation mobile CPU. The 13" MacBook Pro still comes with 8th generation CPUs, but they're all still Coffee Lake. The IPC hasn't improved much at all since Skylake anyway so you're not getting much more outside of hardware mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, etc with a 9th generation chip. Additionally, I don't believe that there are any 9th generation U parts (which have a lower TDP of 28W as opposed to the 45W in H model parts) so Intel technically hasn't replaced the CPU being used in the 13" Pro. Furthermore, even though those parts are listed as 8th generation, they're actually just as new (in terms of actual release date) as many of Intel's 9th generation parts.
The same goes for the Air which uses Amber Lake (ultra-low power Kaby Lake derivative) which doesn't have a 9th generation replacement yet either. However that particular 8th generation part (i5-8210Y [intel.com] that they're using came out in October 2018 so it's less than a year old, even though it's a previous architecture and not just a previous generation of the current architecture.
In summary, I don't believe that any ~2 year old chips are being used. Even if they were, Intel hasn't done much improvement in terms of IPC over that time anyway.
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So can someone explain why this change is evil? I know you guys can do it.
Ummm, lessee.... Let's try this. Apple i their infinite evil, is trying to disrupt the world's economy.. Something something Tim Cook, something something brave....
Nahhh, I gont nothing.
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Apple SSD expansion prices also way down (Score:5, Informative)
More interesting to me than this price drop, is that Apple SSD expansion pricing for all kinds of systems are now much more reasonable.
That bodes well for SSD pricing in the upcoming Mac Pro...
Probably for the non-Apple people it would have ben nice to bundle this store with the previous Macbook story. :-)
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Wish I had mod points. A 1tb SSD is ~$100 now.
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But not all SSD cells are created equal.
You are comparing sheet metal to aluminum foil here.
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More interesting to me than this price drop, is that Apple SSD expansion pricing for all kinds of systems are now much more reasonable.
That bodes well for SSD pricing in the upcoming Mac Pro...
Probably for the non-Apple people it would have ben nice to bundle this store with the previous Macbook story. :-)
As a fan of Mac's since their was Macs, I had noticed that their prices were oddly high until this drop. This is good news.
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And as a fan of Mac's since there was Macs, you are still as blind as ever, because the prices are still oddly high. Compare the models - $200 for a bump from 128GB to 256GB. For $200 anywhere else, toss in another $30 and you could have a 2TB SSD. Apple is charging 8x the RETAIL price.
Shit dude - you're shitting your pants about how Apple's are so expensive. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money wasted futzing around with Windows computers. Doesn't take much employee wages to wipe out your savings.
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What? Must be why most companies use windows. Makes sense.
With an army of support staff. Millions for support staff. And everyone is worried about the cost of the devices. Some good sense.
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I use a Mac for work (and have done since 2003), but the Mac is pretty much completely nonviable for large enterprises.
There is something about the way a mac computes that simply will not work for enterprises. The ones and zeros are backwards, and it has been proven impossible to write one piece of software for the enterprise.
Simply not possible! Only possible on the Windows ecosystem. Which is just a different way of writing what you wrote.
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LOL yup everyone using Windows is DOOMMEDD DOOMMMED I tell ya.
Well now - there's a non sequitur for ya!
Oh, my little turdmuffin, I use whatever tool is available that will do the best job. Some software I need isn't available on Windows, so I use my Mac. Some software I need isn't available on the Mac, so I use Windows. If available on both, I use it on the Mac .
I have Mac, Windows and Linux. 99 percent of the problems come from the Windows PC.
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Shit dude — if you're replacing your MacBook entirely because its keyboard was sticking, your entire refresh belongs under the category of "futzing around" with also the outflow of real money.
Show me a computer where you never futz around, and I'll show you a computer
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Shit dude — if you're replacing your MacBook entirely because its keyboard was sticking, your entire refresh belongs under the category of "futzing around" with also the outflow of real money.
Nice try, but if stuck keyboards are your touchstone, they happen on Windows machines. The Stockholm syndrome in you is very strong.
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For $200 anywhere else, toss in another $30 and you could have a 2TB SSD.
Where is that? The Samsung SSD 970 EVO 2TB is $550 on Amazon [amazon.com], and Dell charges over $1200 to upgrade their Precision 5540 [dell.com] to a 2TB NVMe SSD (their current Latitude models don't show it as an option)
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Re:Apple SSD expansion prices also way down (Score:4, Insightful)
Upgrading from a 128 gig SSD to 256 costs $200. I can buy one from NewEgg, retail, for $30. Yeah, a 600%+ markup is "reasonable".
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Heck, can we talk about how the base model, $1100 laptop comes with a 128gb SSD to start with?
LOL what a ripoff.
They're still expensive! (Score:2)
Also, I wished Apple would increase their default SSD sizes without having buyers to customize them. Make them 1 TB by default. Frak cloud storages.
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glossy finish display emperor
Apple has developed the best matte display on the planet so not sure why the lame shot, bro.
Better (Score:2)
Now they're overpriced by less.
"Updated" keyboard (Score:2)
Note that this is still the butterfly keyboard, which many of us loathe - it just includes the little dust condom underneath.
It's not the scissor-switch keyboard they're rumored to be moving to on the next generation.