Matt Gemmell:
Rumours abound at the moment about an upcoming new 12” MacBook Air, with a Retina display, further-reduced thickness and weight, and of course a slightly larger screen. I’m intrigued, and all other things being more or less equal, I’ll certainly buy one.
It’s tough to see what the next step will be, though. My wish list has been exhausted. Every checkbox is checked.
But what more is there to really do?
Matt makes a good point that, for the vast majority of us, Apple’s present laptops do more than we actually need them to do. I know my next laptop will likely be an Air if only because I no longer need the power of a full desktop CPU.
I’ve been saving my pennies for the new 12″, but the port situation gives me pause to think about it a bit more, as does the potentially smaller keyboard. With the port thing, I think people are overlooking the fact that there is another side that a port (or ports) can go on.
I definitely don’t think every checkbox has been ticked. When you can get a tiny retina 12″ Macbook Air with plenty of ports, great battery life, in-built LTE connectivity and lots of storage and memory and awesome CPU speed for a good price – then we can talk. 🙂 It’ll happen, but not just yet.
That said, in terms of ‘good enough’, I actually find my 2011 13″ MBA is still amazing. It’s coming up on 4 years old this year but still feels new. It ticks all my ‘must have’ boxes, but definitely not all my ‘would like to have’.
This flavor of the MBA wouldn’t do it for me. With my older eyes, I like the larger screen of my MBP and I still use optical discs, however outdated Jobs seemed to think they were.
Interesting that Jim’s not given his trademarked “nope” response to this rumor.
Some useful features are
I’m actually hoping there won’t be a thinning of the MBA because of likely limitations in I/O port availability.