[cgriswald]

> 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$100, and the education discount brings it down to $999, making it the most affordable modern MacBook laptop ever (the outdated MacBook Air does not count).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.

[fjp]

I 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.

[tlobes]

I'd agree with the exception of the utterly awful keyboard & trackpad design that appeared in 2016 that seemed to skip any meaningful QA process inside Apple.

The popular dust complaints aside, a brand new machine has immediate problems for someone whose palms tend to touch the newly enlarged Force Touch trackpad during typing, a hand position I got used to with my Macbook Air 2013. Typing on the new design will cause repeated keystrokes, delayed or missing keystrokes, and instant cursor shifts during typing that make it so I need to approach the keyboard in the same way one would properly play a piano in order to get any meaningful work done. Great if you're a trained pianist, terrible if you want to get actual work done from a coffee shop where you don't have a stand or external keyboard on hand.

Apple knows they messed up with the butterfly mechanism and seem to be fixing that in the next design. In the meantime, there are a few things they could do now through software to alleviate these issues:

1. The ability to remap the Force Touch trackpad tracking area in Settings. Being able to remove 10mm from each side would fix my cursor shift issue. People currently use tape to solve this... on a $4000+ machine.

2. Ability to set a numeric value for Force Touch sensitivity as opposed to 3 constant values with a much higher threshold than is currently being used as "high".

I know Apple is all about limiting options for a customer's own good, however, these software changes would go a long way in helping people debrick an expensive laptop who don't happen to fit whatever hand size their QA team of classically trained pianists have.

[ebg13]

> The popular dust complaints aside, a brand new machine has immediate problems for someone whose palms tend to touch the newly enlarged Force Touch trackpad during typing

This has not been my experience. The errant contact dismissal in my 2017 MBP is so good that I never notice that my hands casually drape across swathes of touchpad geography.

[rickyc091]

So there has been a lot of complaints about the keyboard, but one thing they seemed to get right was protecting it from a coffee spill. A few weeks ago, I spilled coffee with milk over my laptop. Unsure what to do, I tilted it sideways covering every key with liquid; just imagine a pond over the keyboard. I ended up using a paper towel to absorb the liquid and then ran a damp paper towel across all the keys. The keyboard is still functional to this day!

I recall spilling coffee in the past and it would completely destroy the keyboard causing the need to replace the logic board. I'm sure if Apple dissembled my keyboard they would notice a gross stain under the plastic membrane now.

[schappim]

>> I'd agree with the exception of the utterly awful keyboard & trackpad design

Perhaps the purpose of which was to drive Touch ID adoption for those who "tend to use long passwords that you don't want to type in all the time". :-P

[Domenic_S]

Yep. 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]

The 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.

[threeseed]

Google could support H.264 or H.265.

The only reason they don't is because they want to push their format.

[untog]

I wouldn't say it's the only reason. H264/5 are not royalty-free codecs. YouTube is a powerful tool Google can use to push a royalty-free codec, much like Apple used the iPhone to push people off Flash. It's one of few areas I agree with Google being heavy handed.

[stephenr]

What, over and above the H.264 licensing that covers them for 1080p content?

It’s google doing what google always does: pushing a google controlled thing to become a “standard”.

[tpush]

Apple's MacBooks also got VP9 hardware decode support since several years, Apple could just enable it on the software side.

But they don't, so Safari users have to suffer.

[xnyan]

Is it unreasonable of Google not to want to use a royalty free codec that's controlled by the MPAA?

[umanwizard]

They could, but they don’t, so what is your point? It still means that watching YouTube on the Mac device in question is a crappy experience.

[oarsinsync]

Not the perfect solution, but I think changing your user-agent to iOS makes youtube deliver x264 instead of vp9

[PascLeRasc]

This Chrome extension will do it in a cleaner way: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd...

[oarsinsync]

Does anyone know of a similar Safari extension? Battery life remains a concern, and switching from vp9 to x264 is great, but then having to deploy Chrome instead feels like a 1 step forward, 2 steps backwards situation.

[givinguflac]

Using Brave or FF I can watch 4k no issues on my MacBook, though I wouldn't turn down lower power usage when doing so.

[swebs]

Do hardware decoders for vp9 even exist?

[vetinari]

Any Intel GPU since Kaby Lake can decode VP9 in hardware. So can AMD since Raven Ridge[1] and Nvidia since GM206.

On Android, it has been mandated by CTS for several years already.

[1] Except Radeon VII, which is technically Vega.

[zerocrates]

There's accelerated decoding on at least some of the modern mobile platforms, and from all the major graphics providers on laptop/desktop.

[ksec]

I am guessing for high motion content you mean 60fps video?

[umanwizard]

No, they mean content where things are moving a lot. (Imagine how fast the picture is changing on a mountain biker’s GoPro...)

[ksec]

I don't see the relation of High Motion Video, ( Sports ) to Video Codec and Resolution. Why cant H.264 not be used? ( Which is the standard used world wide now for All Sporting Events )

[natrik]

I have a 2014 MBP 13 as well, any other differences (positive and negative) you noticed in switching to the new MBA?

[Domenic_S]

The keyboard... I miss the chiclets. But it's lighter & smaller, TouchID is amazing, despite being a "downgrade" in model it's substantially faster for the things I do (raw photo editing, photoshop, web coding). Truetone is great, I don't feel a need for flux anymore. Also fewer bugs with iCloud - I could never get my airpods to show up in the sound menu on my mbp 13 but they work perfectly on the mba.

[darkteflon]

Truetone doesn’t work with external displays, unfortunately.

[KSS42]

Keyboard is a big difference.

[cmroanirgo]

Just looked at the new specs. The obvious differences to my maxed out mba 2013 is double the ram (16gb) and double the ssd (1tb). Losing those few ports I have is a bit of a blow though (but that's long standing gripe with newer mba), and is the one thing holding me back from an upgrade, but the above upgrades are a definite sweetener in the deal.

[ElCapitanMarkla]

That terrible keyboard is my only sticking point at the mo. Rumor has it that is getting addressed in the next revision but we will see. Hopefully my trusty 2013 MBA keeps chugging away until then :D

[viraptor]

You can get the same from other companies at similar price. Just with a traditional fingerprint scanner rather than touch id (Same thing really), or a face unlock (which at least works when you have wet hands)

[lloeki]

I may be a weirdo but I usually like to refrain touching my computer with wet hands.

[viraptor]

Depends on the definition of wet. I can't use touchid for a bit after washing my hands. It doesn't matter how much I dry then. This makes using fingerprint unlock on any device really hard while cooking.

[swiftcoder]

It may be the same thing from an end-user experience PoV, but it doesn't seem like any of the PC laptop manufacturers can offer equivalent security guarantees.

[jandrese]

My experience with traditional fingerprint scanners on laptops is that they're extremely picky and won't work if you are a bit sweaty or the air is dry or the day of the week starts with a T or something. Having it fail to read your finger several times on a login pushes me back to regular passwords.

The enrollment process takes forever for each finger too.

Also, it doesn't work in Linux.

[viraptor]

That is in many ways not true. I'm a happy user of a fingerprint scanner on Linux (for login and sudo). It actually took about the same time to enroll as touch id. How the scanner deals with moisture depends on the model so it's not all the same. Lenovo x1 for example it's in my experience just as bad as touchid on that scale.

[jandrese]

If you have the magic to make the BCM5880 work on Linux I'd love to hear it, because that chip is behind every fingerprint sensor I've tried to set up thus far.

[tjoff]

Actually 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]

There 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]

Cryptocurrency-driven demand for GPUs comes to mind as well...

[morganvachon]

Not 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.

[_ph_]

As I wrote below, slower SSD for lower prices is something I agree with, their SSD prices are just completely disconnected from the market.

[cpuguy83]

Touch Bar, no... but Touch ID?

[cgriswald]

Like 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]

I'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]

I had sudo setup to use fingerprint, but at some point it quit working... config files are still correct. Not sure what happened :(

[cheeze]

ITerm2 support broke, you need to turn off "Allow sessions to survive"...

https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/7618

[cpuguy83]

OMG thank you!

[saagarjha]

Are you using iTerm2? There's a new feature that interferes with the Touch ID PAM module working for sudo.

[cbuq]

I think Touch ID on a laptop / desktop would make a lot of sense. I don't actually know any of my passwords.

[cgriswald]

I 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. :)

[exadeci]

For such a small price drop wouldn't it be better to buy a used 2018 then?

Better specs for cheaper...

[djsumdog]

They probably could have saved money by ditching the worthless touchbar.

[Eric_WVGG]

The Air never had a touchbar.

[Krasnol]

I'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.