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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

It has a slightly faster processor (don't be fooled by "1.3GHz", the MBA's top CPU speed is 2.6GHz) but there's a 500GB non-solid-state hard drive, it's heavier, the graphics are older, and it has a lower-resolution screen. Why would anyone want it?

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It's probably a diminishing use-case, but I personally still need an ethernet port. There's a surprising number of times when I visit somewhere (offices, universities) and they can't figure out how to get me logged onto the guest wifi, but I can just plug in to the wired network without a problem. Also some hotels have only ethernet, though that's getting less common.

Yes, I suppose the Ethernet is useful. But it doesn't seem worth sacrificing everything else for. Why not just get a USB or Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter?

Huh, I hadn't seen the Thunderbolt ones. The USB ones are notorious for not really working (they seem to have driver issues). Hopefully the Thunderbolt ones are better?

Thunderbolt is just PCIe under the hood, so it would hopefully work as well as a PCIe Gigabit Ethernet one.

Although the fact it's Apple-made is probably more important, since they'll have made sure it works.

I'd second the thunderbolt recommendation but I would question the concerns about USB – until upgrading to Thunderbolt, I had no problems with daily heavy usage (along with several coworkers). The main drawback is that the USB devices can't go over 100Mb.

I don't know for MACs but for 2 years at work I used a Windows laptop with a USB to Ethernet adapter and it ran absolutely fine.

"Oh, you want to hook your Firewire drives up to it? That's another adapter. Oh, you want to play or burn CD's? You need to get an external drive then. You want to use your old Magsafe power bricks? Sorry, we changed the connector. You want to lock up the computer while it's at your desk? Sorry, there's no Kensington slot anymore."

At which point the SSD and Retina display sound nice, but that other stuff seems like it's going to a pain in the neck on a daily basis.

Apple tend to deprecate and remove stuff often and quickly. The PC world and Microsoft don't. For those of us who like living on the cutting edge, we're fine with it, but it's not really for everyone.

Remember when the iMac was the first USB-only computer, and had no floppy drive? Both were really unpopular at the time.

(Lack of Kensington is stupid though, I'll agree on that.)

It's not thick enough to fit a Kensington slot unfortunately.

Ah, so that's the reason. Apple's relentless pursuit of thinness is nice, but it has its drawbacks. That's also why it lacks Ethernet, AFAIK.

Yeah, go and buy a thunderbold ethernet cable, they are really cheap and work fantastically.

The only downside is on Linux you have to reboot if you unplug the ethernet, but apparently that's being improved in 3.15.

What happens if you don't reboot?

It doesn't work :).

I see :-)

RHEL 7 will be a problem then, I assume, as it seems to be based on 3.10?

I run the 2013 on Arch, and apart from the thunderbolt issue it actually works very very well. Totally silent laptop with incredible battery life is a major winner.

I think the reason Windows and Linux seem to behave awkwardly with Thunderbolt is that Thunderbolt is actually PCI-Express, and they're not exactly used to hot-plugging PCIe devices! But that's just speculation on my part.

Or get a (third-party) USB 3 adapter.

Or you can get an Airport Express or similar adaptor, and use it in bridge mode.

I think for a lot of people the issue is storage. Most don't know the difference between an ssd and a mechanical hard drive and don't want to have to pay an exorbitant sum to get to 500+ gb. They have lots of pictures and music and other things they want to keep around, even if they rarely access them.

Yeah. They go in to the Apple Store and the salesmen says that SSD is faster. But the buyer has heard that computers will be faster a lot in their lives, and usually it's only a 10-25% performance increase, which isn't that noticeable. So they don't put much stock in that. We're all so used to SSDs that the huge performance gains don't surprise us anymore.

Given that, the MBP is also turbo-boost to 3.1 GHz.

just to play devil's advocate on this one, you can put 16 GB of memory in it (not from Apple, but by user replacement)

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