Why does the Air brand still exist? The author notes that he fully expects Apple to give the MacBook Air a processor upgrade, but not a re-design. Who is still buying the Air over the MacBook?
Coding, testing, Lightroom, Photoshop and some FCP, with >10 hours battery light and extremely light for carrying around every day.
I had hoped they would have released a 16gb RAM version sometime over the last 4 years, but alas no, here we are debating if it has been abandoned or not.
There are no compromises with this machine. Even the integrated graphics chip has seen improvements in both drivers and how newer frameworks use it. Its a beast. More RAM would future proof it for another four years.
Once you get used to Retina, that is unfortunately not true anymore.
The 2013 Air with the Haswell CPU is the one which gives you far more than 10 hours of battery life.
- Performance (CPU wise)
- Price
I would rather ask why are people buying a macbook over a macbook air? The macbook air has a better price/performance ratio. And the form factor cannot be a logical argument... The macbook air compact enough to fit in everyones bag.
It also has amazing battery life.
You couldn't convince her to drop hours of battery, an inch of screen space, a few ports, a few hundred bucks, better performance, in return for a marginal portability value that approaches 0 in her daily bag, default storage she doesn't use (she's approaching 30gb of use!), default ram she doesn't use, and pixel density she can't see. (she's likely an exception here, I definitely notice the density myself like most would, although I wouldn't pay a few hundred extra for it, but she can't even notice it.) There's just nothing the Macbook offers her that's worth it. I expect this to change within 1-2 years though.