| What real-word “more often than once a year” use case for a MacBook Air is affected by this change, that would not also require the CPU and RAM resources of a MacBook Pro to deliver in a human-acceptable time? Compiling requires a Pro due to the cores, so I/O won’t be your restriction due to the busy cores, and the small size of files and memory-cached directory structures. Video encoding a 2-hour, 50GB Blu-Ray rip is restricted to the performance of the hwaccel available, which is guaranteed to be less than 1Gbps of input for any plausible output, and thus not I/O restricted either. Any file size under 200M will be unaffected since it can be read from disk in one clock second on either old or new. So, completely seriously, who will be using an Air and negatively impacted by this change, such that it’s newsworthy and frontpage-worthy? Certainly not the students it’s targeted towards — unless they’re in data sciences, in which case they’ll need 2 minutes to process an entire drive full of data instead of 1 minute, having somehow overcome CPU and RAM limitations to do so. I believe such cases are possible, but I’m having a hard time constructing plausible ones. |