4 ms·

I have a late 2013 Macbook Air and I love it. I do most of my work on a Xubuntu desktop, but the Air is great for travel, working outside, or carrying around th

I have a late 2013 Macbook Air and I love it. I do most of my work on a Xubuntu desktop, but the Air is great for travel, working outside, or carrying around the house. I use it every day. I bought it to replace a heavy plastic dual-boot Dell laptop that was falling apart. It felt weightless and the battery lasted 10+ hours. Every time I see a new Apple laptop now I dread that I'll have to go back to a non-Apple Linux system instead. In theory a Linux laptop would be great for me, but when I read about my options there's none I feel great about. But my Air with its 8GB of RAM is feeling under-powered whenever I have to run docker/k8s/vagrant, and now the screen is starting to flicker. I can't tell yet whether this model is enough to keep me in the Apple fold. It sounds like they improved a lot, but they're really parsimonious with those ports. My old Air is anxiety-free: it gives me power, 2 USBs, and DisplayPort. I routinely use them all. So the 2020 model is still going to feel like a downgrade. At least it still comes with a standard headphone jack, I suppose. :-/

0xff00ffee 7y ago
Let's hear it for 2013 Macs! My 2013 MBP is going strong. I do 100% of my work on this computer, and half of that is through AWS EC2 instances (x86 and ARM linux, and Windows for testing); if I need a local OS I run VMWare images of Ubuntu and Windows. I've had 0 issues with this computer. It really blows my mind how good it is. By comparison: my first laptop was a Toshiba Portege (sic) in 1992 that was monochrome for about $4000... and then my various jobs usually gave me IBM Thinkpad / Lenovo thinkpads, buit would waterfall them routinely. But my MBP2013? this is the longest I've owned any computer in my life (work or personal), and I have absolutely no reason to replace it.
theluketaylor 7y ago
Fellow lover of the 2013 air. I maxed it out on everything but storage when I bought it (core i7, 8 GB ram) and I'm glad I did, since a computer I planned to own for a couple years and then swap upwards has put in 7 years of hard labour. The battery capacity is down to 70% (plus in the last couple months shuts down below 50% when it's cold) and I'm on my third charger due to cable fray, but this remains the best computer I have ever owned. When the retina macbook pro arrived in 2015 I assumed it wouldn't be too long before high res screens trickled down to the whole lineup. I'm not sure I've ever been more wrong about product direction. I have been waiting for years for Apple to release something that hit the size, performance, versatility, and value I have gotten from my air. I was tempted by the 2016 macbook pro non-touch bar, but it was so expensive for what you got I just couldn't justify replacing my air. I was incredibly disappointed by the 2019 retina air. Finally a retina display the air had been needing for years, but the performance wasn't great. That would be forgivable, but the price was just too high (plus the keyboard they saddled it with really didn't seem pleasant to type on). This time they seem to have gotten the 2013 air recipe right. I wouldn't turn down a couple USB-A ports to avoid dongle hell, but otherwise this seems as close to the 2013 successor we're going to get. I have an order in for the 2020 air with the core i5 upgrade and in case it winds up needing to serve another 7 years I got 16 gb of ram. We'll see if I miss my air enough to return it and switch back or not. I'm really hoping apple announces arm macs in the next year or 2 as I'd love to have the ipad pro guts inside a roughly air sized form factor. I use the console and other general purpose computing things far, far too much to make the leap entirely to iOS, but mac os running on the ipad pro would be a great spiritual successor to the macbook air line.

0xff00ffee 7y ago

Let's hear it for 2013 Macs! My 2013 MBP is going strong. I do 100% of my work on this computer, and half of that is through AWS EC2 instances (x86 and ARM linux, and Windows for testing); if I need a local OS I run VMWare images of Ubuntu and Windows. I've had 0 issues with this computer. It really blows my mind how good it is. By comparison: my first laptop was a Toshiba Portege (sic) in 1992 that was monochrome for about $4000... and then my various jobs usually gave me IBM Thinkpad / Lenovo thinkpads, buit would waterfall them routinely. But my MBP2013? this is the longest I've owned any computer in my life (work or personal), and I have absolutely no reason to replace it.

theluketaylor 7y ago

Fellow lover of the 2013 air. I maxed it out on everything but storage when I bought it (core i7, 8 GB ram) and I'm glad I did, since a computer I planned to own for a couple years and then swap upwards has put in 7 years of hard labour. The battery capacity is down to 70% (plus in the last couple months shuts down below 50% when it's cold) and I'm on my third charger due to cable fray, but this remains the best computer I have ever owned. When the retina macbook pro arrived in 2015 I assumed it wouldn't be too long before high res screens trickled down to the whole lineup. I'm not sure I've ever been more wrong about product direction. I have been waiting for years for Apple to release something that hit the size, performance, versatility, and value I have gotten from my air. I was tempted by the 2016 macbook pro non-touch bar, but it was so expensive for what you got I just couldn't justify replacing my air. I was incredibly disappointed by the 2019 retina air. Finally a retina display the air had been needing for years, but the performance wasn't great. That would be forgivable, but the price was just too high (plus the keyboard they saddled it with really didn't seem pleasant to type on). This time they seem to have gotten the 2013 air recipe right. I wouldn't turn down a couple USB-A ports to avoid dongle hell, but otherwise this seems as close to the 2013 successor we're going to get. I have an order in for the 2020 air with the core i5 upgrade and in case it winds up needing to serve another 7 years I got 16 gb of ram. We'll see if I miss my air enough to return it and switch back or not. I'm really hoping apple announces arm macs in the next year or 2 as I'd love to have the ipad pro guts inside a roughly air sized form factor. I use the console and other general purpose computing things far, far too much to make the leap entirely to iOS, but mac os running on the ipad pro would be a great spiritual successor to the macbook air line.