Tag: macbook air

Apple’s Ground Floor

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Macbook Neo

Apple had a busy week: new displays, a new iPad, 3 new MacBooks, and a new iPhone. The individual products range from incremental to genuinely interesting, but the more you look at the whole picture, the headline to me is that Apple has figured out how to lower the entry point to their ecosystem without making anything that appears to be junk. That’s harder than it sounds.

The Neo and the 17e

This week’s headliner, the MacBook Neo starts at $599. It has an A18 Pro chip, 8GB of memory, a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, solid battery life, and the build quality folks have come to expect from Airs and Pros. Getting to that price point obviously requires some creativity on Apple’s part. What it doesn’t have: MagSafe, Thunderbolt ports, a haptic trackpad, or a backlit keyboard. The $699 model adds Touch ID and 512GB of storage, and that’s the one worth getting for most folks.

For that money, you’re not getting a compromised Mac. Frills are stripped away, sure, but I think that Apple has threaded that needle pretty well here. Schools and families are going to buy a lot of these, and for good reason.

The iPhone 17e tells a similar story. It gets the A19 chip from the standard iPhone 17, starts at 256GB (double what the 16e launched with) at the same $599 price, and finally adds MagSafe, which was a strange omission last year. The camera situation is still the main thing separating it from the “regular” or Pro line, but for most people that’s an acceptable trade. The Pro phones have become genuinely hard to recommend to anyone who doesn’t have a specific reason to want one. Personally, I have a 17 Pro and feel like it might be my last Pro phone.

Taken together, these two products represent something worth paying attention to. Previously, handing down an older device to a kid felt like the sensible move. Now there’s a real argument for buying them something new and selling your own device when you’re ready to upgrade. That shift reflects both how long people are holding onto their hardware and how good Apple’s entry-level products have gotten. It’s also an additional sales opportunity for our friends in Cupertino.

MacBook Air and Pro

The M5 MacBook Air is now $1,099, which stings a little, though the base storage doubling to 512GB softens it. This seems like a trend we’re seeing more of this year with higher RAM prices, so I’m not surprised. I think we’ll see more companies push bigger entry level spec bumps with accompanying higher prices to keep their margins healthy. If you’re on an M2 or earlier, the jump in numbers is legitimately impressive. The Air remains the default answer when someone asks what laptop to buy.

The MacBook Pro line got M5 chips with meaningful gains, particularly around AI workloads. If you need a Pro, you’ll know. If you’re asking whether you need one, see above. Get the Air.

iPad Air

The M4 iPad Air is mostly an under-the-hood story: faster chip, 12GB of RAM (up from 8GB), 120GB/s memory bandwidth, Wi-Fi 7 via Apple’s N1 chip. It’s a good iPad made better. Cool.

The Displays

Apple updated the Studio Display and introduced the new Studio Display XDR. The standard display gets a 12MP camera, which is a welcome improvement. The XDR is genuinely impressive on paper: 5K with mini-LED, 2000 nits peak HDR brightness, 120hz with Adaptive Sync, and Thunderbolt 5. It’s a legitimately great display for people doing serious color work.

Apple’s monitors have always been the one area of the lineup where even fans do a double-take at the price. That hasn’t changed. I bought my Studio Display when it came out mainly because I was building out a home office and I’d think a lot harder about it today given the alternatives. But they’re still here, still beautiful, still priced accordingly.

The Bigger Picture

The “Apple tax” isn’t gone. The XDR display exists, after all. But the ground floor has moved considerably, and Apple has managed to do it without reaching for cheap materials or cutting corners on what actually matters to everyday use. The Neo appears to have great build quality and keep the things that make a Mac a Mac. The 17e is a real iPhone. While not announced today, even the Watch

Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t taken their foot off the gas for pro users. The MacBook Pro, the XDR display, the continued push into pro app subscriptions – there’s no sense that they’re trading one end of the market for the other. They’re doing both, which is the interesting part. It’s too early to say if they can walk and chew gum here, but lately their limitations have been on the software side, not the hardware one.

On the education side, the Neo is an obvious Chromebook challenger at $599 ($499 with education pricing). Apple has a decent story to tell there: real software, real Mac apps, Apple Intelligence built in, free OS updates, solid build quality. The MDM management story is still more complex than Chromebook’s cloud-first simplicity, though it also opens doors that ChromeOS can’t – including more fine-grained device control for admins (the kind of thing a scrappy company like Kolide by 1Password does well). There are also a lot of professional and creative apps that simply don’t exist on ChromeOS, and an Android port rarely, if ever, fills the gap. If Apple gets serious about the cloud-first management story for schools, they have a real shot at making inroads.

It was a good week to be in the business of selling computers. The hardware is ready. Guess we’ll see what they do with it this summer.

Time to upgrade …?

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My home iMac is getting comically slow and I think it’s time to either sell it before the hard drive dies or pay the price to upgrade to SSD. I’ve been considering a handful of options to get a machine that doesn’t take 10 minute to fully start up and they break out in the following series of flawed options. Before I get to those, let me break down what I actually do on my Mac these days, because it’s not a ton.

  • Acts as a ‘poor man’s NAS’, serving up music for use with Airplay around the house and streaming movies that I have ripped to our Apple TVs.
  • Web development and light Photoshop / Sketch work
  • Novice iOS development
  • Family photo management
  • iMovie use a few times a year
  • Playing 5+ year old games from time to time
  • Web surfing, banking, social media … standard consumery stuff

Nothing too taxing, really. I tend to keep a computer for 4-5 years though, so I want something that will last but not cost an arm and a leg. With that said, here are the options I’m looking at currently:

Buy a 13 inch MacBook Air (approx $1700)

I actually have a MacBook Air at work (current gen, i7, 8gb RAM) and it’s a great machine and does everything that I need it to. However, nothing is perfect.

Whatever I buy, I’ll need to stick with for the next 4-5 years. Do I really want to go retina-less with a new computer? Honestly, if the air had a retina display I’d pull the trigger here and be done with it. Also, buying a laptop as a ‘desktop replacement’ means a desk full of cluttered wires, dongles and such. Additionally, to get anything close to the 27" of real estate I’m used to will require the purchase of another monitor. Dual displays are a crappy soultion in my mind.

Buy a 13 inch MacBook Pro (approx $2200)

A MacBook Pro has almost all of the pros and cons that the Air have, but the added benefit of an even faster machine, a retina display, and the new trackpad. Still, these features come with a price tag of about $600. The biggest con here is definitely the price, as otherwise it is the most ‘future ready’ machine of the options I’m thinking about. I just don’t use my home computer very much these days.

Buy a top of the line Mac Mini (approx $1600 + monitor)

This makes the list of options simply because it checks the “always on, home server” angle that I like about my iMac. Nearly every review I’ve read of the new Mac Minis seem to think it’s basically one elaborate joke from the folks in Cupertino, as the benchmarks perform worse than a 2+ year old Mac Mini for a lot of tests. I’d still have to buy a new monitor, which means any of the ‘new computer’ options will require a new monitor. However, this specific option would require it on day one. Good monitors in the 24-27" range typically will set you back around $300-500, so this ‘cheap’ computer is no longer very cheap.

All that said, I like the idea of a small, quiet, power efficient machine that will probably be more than enough for what I do (web development and basic computing tasks) for quite some time. And it doesn’t clutter / complicate things the way a laptop does.

Replace the old hard drive in my iMac with a SSD (approx $500)

This Samsung 850 EVO drive gets good reviews and is stupid cheap right now. Now, swapping out a drive on an iMac isn’t easy, so I’d need to get this OWC kit to do it, but I’m still upgrading for under $400, and that should last me for quite some time as long as the screen or any other crucial part doesn’t fail me.

The 2011 iMacs have a SATA II controller, not a SATA III controller, which means even upgrading to one of these fancy new drives will only net half the speed promised. Throw in the lack of more modern bluetooth versions and this option isn’t perfect either, given the cost. It’s now or never to sell this thing if I want to do it now.

So, where does that leave us?

Not really sure, honestly. I feel like the MacBook Air is a fine computer today, but it’s saddled with already ‘older’ tech that won’t age very well. The Pro is definitely more future ready but it comes at a price that I’m not sure I really want to pay. The Mac Mini is unfortunately hobbled and would require an immediate investment in a monitor, which drives up the actual cost of the machine. And upgrading my iMac is a band-aid that could very well be $500+ down the tubes when something else dies on it in the next year or so.

I might just do nothing and buy a new computer when the iMac blows up.