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I have owned 3 Macbook Airs. Two first-gen ones broke down too often, the second-gen one Apple gave to me for free. Most people complained it's pricey. It puzz

I have owned 3 Macbook Airs. Two first-gen ones broke down too often, the second-gen one Apple gave to me for free. Most people complained it's pricey. It puzzles me. Think of how many hours a day you spent touching it. A $2000 price-tag divided by 2 years, 10 hours a day, that's cheaper than your daily beer habit. It is absolutely worth it to buy the best machine you can afford.

slantyyz 16y ago
Especially if you are using that machine for work. I always buy the laptop with the nicest screen I can afford. That alone makes Macs price competitive with non-Macs.
- jbarham 16y ago
  I have to concur that MacBook screens are very nice (modulo your take on the glossiness). I bought a Thinkpad T410 w/ a high-res screen and I must say that I'm disappointed w/ the poor viewing angles compared to the MacBook screens. Longer term I'm planning on buying a Dell IPS "Ultrasharp" LCD to hook up to the Thinkpad, but it wouldn't be as necessary w/ the MacBooks.
  - slantyyz 16y ago
    The weakness up until recently with Mac screens has been the res. I actually didn't buy a 15" Macbook Pro because it didn't have 1680x1050 when I was in the market. I figured if I was going to be annoyed by 1440x900 at 15", I may as well be annoyed and save a bundle by going with a lowly Macbook. 1440x900 on a 13", however, makes things interesting. My next purchase was going to be a 15" Macbook with the 1680 screen. Now, I'm not so sure. I think my shoulder prefers that I carry a lighter load in my bag.
pyre 16y ago
> It is absolutely worth it to buy the best machine > you can afford. I'm assuming that most people that are complaining about price don't have huge wallets.
- ivanzhao 16y ago
  I am a poor student myself : ) To me it's actually cheaper this way. As absolute price never matters as long as you can pay it upfront. Then the long term cost per usage-time will pays off (plus better usage experience). The same philosophy applies to shoes, furniture and other daily items.
  - slantyyz 16y ago
    Absolute price matters when you're paying cash. Not so much when you're doing it on credit.
  - pyre 16y ago
    If you're paying on credit, you also have to factor in the interest... It's no long just about the up-front cost.
    - DougBTX 16y ago
      If you're paying on credit, you're not paying up front.
drats 16y ago
It's not the best machine you can afford though for a lot of people. I have a X200 thinkpad at 12" which is 600 grams more than the 11" and 300 grams more than the 13". But it has a dual core i5 at 2.5 gigahertz which is a fair bit faster than low clocked cpus of a generation that was released in 2006, 4 gigs of ram (rather than 2) and an Intel 80gig SSD running Ubuntu 10.10. The battery is 7 to 11 hours. With their batteries in it it'd be even lighter than it is, most of the difference is right there. It already has an app store with nearly a 100/0 free/paid split (I think I've heard there are paid apps in there somewhere). It cost $1150 or so with the SSD as an extra $200 (but I have a 500gig external drive now too). It's the classic very attractive "they use these on the space station" thinkpad case, well designed with water-spill catching design et cetera. So yes, the macbook is a good machine. But for people who aren't developing for OSX and still want well designed hardware it's hard to argue there aren't other options that are easily better if you can handle 300 grams of extra weight. And yes, I've had macbooks fail on me (case cracking and hdd failure within one year) so I think they are probably average quality in that regard (i.e. the internals don't match their good looks and are possibly compromised by them sometimes).
- wtallis 16y ago
  The MacBook Air's Geforce 320M is a significantly better GPU than anything Intel has shipped.
  - drats 16y ago
    Ah ok. My usage is business and development so I suppose the cpu matters much more to me, as do open source reliable drivers. I see the point for a fast GPU for entertainment usage, but going all the way down to a 1.4 gighz core 2 duo seems like it would cancel out a lot of the gaming potential that the GPU gains.
    - wtallis 16y ago
      Gaming's not the only advantage that a Geforce chip has over Intel's graphics, since the NVidia chip supports GPGPU. Used properly, OpenCL could make up for the slow CPU for things like Photoshop effects and video editing. It's a tradeoff that's highly dependent on what kind of software you want to run.
bergie 16y ago
Fully agreed, the portability is simply amazing. And unlike my iPad I can actually use this for development work anywhere. That said, I'm a bit disappointed about the battery life estimates on the new MBAs. The lease on my old Air will run out in spring and now the contest will be between the 11" and the 13". Though I'm also waiting to see if Nokia ever does a refresh of their Booklet that had integrated 3G and 10h battery

slantyyz 16y ago

Especially if you are using that machine for work. I always buy the laptop with the nicest screen I can afford. That alone makes Macs price competitive with non-Macs.

jbarham 16y ago
I have to concur that MacBook screens are very nice (modulo your take on the glossiness). I bought a Thinkpad T410 w/ a high-res screen and I must say that I'm disappointed w/ the poor viewing angles compared to the MacBook screens. Longer term I'm planning on buying a Dell IPS "Ultrasharp" LCD to hook up to the Thinkpad, but it wouldn't be as necessary w/ the MacBooks.
- slantyyz 16y ago
  The weakness up until recently with Mac screens has been the res. I actually didn't buy a 15" Macbook Pro because it didn't have 1680x1050 when I was in the market. I figured if I was going to be annoyed by 1440x900 at 15", I may as well be annoyed and save a bundle by going with a lowly Macbook. 1440x900 on a 13", however, makes things interesting. My next purchase was going to be a 15" Macbook with the 1680 screen. Now, I'm not so sure. I think my shoulder prefers that I carry a lighter load in my bag.

pyre 16y ago

> It is absolutely worth it to buy the best machine > you can afford. I'm assuming that most people that are complaining about price don't have huge wallets.

ivanzhao 16y ago
I am a poor student myself : ) To me it's actually cheaper this way. As absolute price never matters as long as you can pay it upfront. Then the long term cost per usage-time will pays off (plus better usage experience). The same philosophy applies to shoes, furniture and other daily items.
- slantyyz 16y ago
  Absolute price matters when you're paying cash. Not so much when you're doing it on credit.
- pyre 16y ago
  If you're paying on credit, you also have to factor in the interest... It's no long just about the up-front cost.
  - DougBTX 16y ago
    If you're paying on credit, you're not paying up front.

drats 16y ago

It's not the best machine you can afford though for a lot of people. I have a X200 thinkpad at 12" which is 600 grams more than the 11" and 300 grams more than the 13". But it has a dual core i5 at 2.5 gigahertz which is a fair bit faster than low clocked cpus of a generation that was released in 2006, 4 gigs of ram (rather than 2) and an Intel 80gig SSD running Ubuntu 10.10. The battery is 7 to 11 hours. With their batteries in it it'd be even lighter than it is, most of the difference is right there. It already has an app store with nearly a 100/0 free/paid split (I think I've heard there are paid apps in there somewhere). It cost $1150 or so with the SSD as an extra $200 (but I have a 500gig external drive now too). It's the classic very attractive "they use these on the space station" thinkpad case, well designed with water-spill catching design et cetera. So yes, the macbook is a good machine. But for people who aren't developing for OSX and still want well designed hardware it's hard to argue there aren't other options that are easily better if you can handle 300 grams of extra weight. And yes, I've had macbooks fail on me (case cracking and hdd failure within one year) so I think they are probably average quality in that regard (i.e. the internals don't match their good looks and are possibly compromised by them sometimes).

wtallis 16y ago
The MacBook Air's Geforce 320M is a significantly better GPU than anything Intel has shipped.
- drats 16y ago
  Ah ok. My usage is business and development so I suppose the cpu matters much more to me, as do open source reliable drivers. I see the point for a fast GPU for entertainment usage, but going all the way down to a 1.4 gighz core 2 duo seems like it would cancel out a lot of the gaming potential that the GPU gains.
  - wtallis 16y ago
    Gaming's not the only advantage that a Geforce chip has over Intel's graphics, since the NVidia chip supports GPGPU. Used properly, OpenCL could make up for the slow CPU for things like Photoshop effects and video editing. It's a tradeoff that's highly dependent on what kind of software you want to run.

bergie 16y ago

Fully agreed, the portability is simply amazing. And unlike my iPad I can actually use this for development work anywhere. That said, I'm a bit disappointed about the battery life estimates on the new MBAs. The lease on my old Air will run out in spring and now the contest will be between the 11" and the 13". Though I'm also waiting to see if Nokia ever does a refresh of their Booklet that had integrated 3G and 10h battery