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> Before you go and start casting aspersions at Apple, the move makes a lot of sense. It'd be one thing if it did this and raised the price, but it actually low
by cgriswald 7y ago
> Before you go and start casting aspersions at Apple, the move makes a lot of sense. It'd be one thing if it did this and raised the price, but it actually lowered the price by $100, and the education discount brings it down to $999, making it the most affordable modern MacBook laptop ever (the outdated MacBook Air does not count).
Which is fine for the entry-level model. Is it true for the more expensive model? The article doesn't say.
> With that as the background, Apple was bound to make a sacrifice or two to reached the aggressive price point and it did so with the SSD. Most people will take that over it removing something like Touch ID or another feature they'd use on a daily basis. It's also worth pointing out that given it is an entry-level point product, most users who pick up the new notebook likely won't notice the difference at all.
I'm not sure that most people would, given the choice, have gone that route. There are plenty of Apple features (including Touch ID) that Apple thinks people want, but I'm not convinced that most people definitely want them. The last sentence is the only one that counts: most people won't notice.
- _ph_ 7y agoAs I wrote below, slower SSD for lower prices is something I agree with, their SSD prices are just completely disconnected from the market.
- cpuguy83 7y agoTouch Bar, no... but Touch ID?
- cgriswald 7y agoLike I said, I'm not sure. The vast majority of people I know who have an Air or MBP have an older model without Touch ID. They might appreciate it if it is there, but they won't miss it in its absence. The only two people I know who've ever owned one that had it both returned it because they otherwise hated the device. For me personally, Touch ID makes sense on a phone, because I can do it with a single hand. For a laptop, I'm going to have my fingers on the home row anyway, and typing in even a complicated password is fast.
- lukifer 7y agoI'm on a 2018 MacBook Air, the only model has F-keys and Touch ID, and I love it. Once you get used to sudo using your fingerprint, it's hard to go back. :)
- cpuguy83 7y agoI had sudo setup to use fingerprint, but at some point it quit working... config files are still correct. Not sure what happened :(
- saagarjha 7y agoAre you using iTerm2? There's a new feature that interferes with the Touch ID PAM module working for sudo.
- cheeze 7y agoITerm2 support broke, you need to turn off "Allow sessions to survive"... https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/7618 https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/7618
- cpuguy83 7y agoOMG thank you!
- cbuq 7y agoI think Touch ID on a laptop / desktop would make a lot of sense. I don't actually know any of my passwords.
- cgriswald 7y agoI could see that, and I think using it for sudo (as in many sibling comments) makes a lot of sense even if that's not a common use case. Perhaps ironically, I know my laptop/desktop passwords by touch. :)
- fjp 7y agoI actually think the current MacBook Air configuration with Touch ID & Retina - $1100 - is basically exactly what I (and many people) want in a personal laptop. It's light, easy to use, plenty fast for anything I do on a regular basis, and the Retina display is excellent. Unless I have reason not to trust it, Touch ID is the perfect way to log in when you: 1. want to have your computer lock after a short period of inactivity and 2. tend to use long passwords that you don't want to type in all the time.
- Domenic_S 7y agoYep. I just picked one up a couple weeks ago, it's my first non-MBP but seeing as I have a company-provided i7 MBP I didn't feel like I needed another powerhouse machine for side projects and occasional coding for fun. I love that I have no touch bar but I do have Touch ID. Coming from a 2014 MBP 13 I definitely didn't notice the slower SSD speed -- editing raw camera files in Lightroom is really fast and the display is phenomenal.
- bleomycin 7y agoThe biggest bummer of these machines is apples lack of vp9 hardware decoding in macos, it makes 4k youtube unwatchable. For high motion content (mountain biking videos) 4k is the only way to watch even on a tiny laptop screen due to youtube’s horrific compression. Its an absurd limitation considering the hardware has full support for it! I know it sounds insane but I returned mine for a quad core 13” mbp just to brute force software decode playback of these videos.
- oarsinsync 7y agoNot the perfect solution, but I think changing your user-agent to iOS makes youtube deliver x264 instead of vp9
- PascLeRasc 7y agoThis Chrome extension will do it in a cleaner way: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdccplidncghkekgioiakgal?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd...
- Krasnol 7y agoI'm sure people used to paying Apple prices wouldn't mind those 100$. This is probably aimed at people from outside the Apple customer base and comparability.
- tjoff 7y agoActually lowered the price... it's not like hardware ever becomes cheaper with time? I guess apple have improved recent years but previously this was quite apparent. "Wow, new much faster model costs the same as the old one!" Yeah, that's because the old one is insanely overpriced - unless you bought it on launch day. Conveniently that's the only day of the lifetime it is ever compared to the competition.
- djsumdog 7y agoThere was a time around 2016 when DDR prices went through the roof and didn't go down for quite some time. There were a lot of market factors: Samsung's massive Note recall meant they needed a lot of memory for their own devices, plus they had contractual burdens to meat for people who had already paid for RAM, so everyone else got screwed on chips (Samsung, Micron and SK make the majority of memory, and their pipelines all had shortages). We even saw priced for old DDR3 chips go up as well as people were trying to reuse older board for non-CPU intensive stuff. So tech prices don't always go down. They usually do, but sometimes market demands cause shortages and even non-vintage/collectable old tech can go up in price.
- lemoncucumber 7y agoCryptocurrency-driven demand for GPUs comes to mind as well...
- djsumdog 7y agoThey probably could have saved money by ditching the worthless touchbar.
- Eric_WVGG 7y agoThe Air never had a touchbar.
- throwaway-hn123 7y agowow, you're dumb
- morganvachon 7y agoNot to mention, 1.2GB/s is still far faster than a SATA SSD that would be in many slightly larger laptops; those tend to top out around 550MB/s. I also doubt one would feel the difference from 1.2GB/s to last year's 2.0GB/s unless they are constantly reading a ton of data, not a normal use case for a device designed to be one's secondary computer. It wasn't until Apple started putting PCIe SSDs in their computers that they became performant enough for stress-free everyday use (in my opinion). Just going from a spinning hard drive to a SATA SSD took my 2012 Mac mini from agonizing to acceptable. I've played around with newer Macs with PCIe storage, and the difference is night and day. They finally feel like real Unix workstations with nearly instant response to user input, and almost no spinning beachballs to be found.
- exadeci 7y agoFor such a small price drop wouldn't it be better to buy a used 2018 then? Better specs for cheaper...