

Ask HN: Is the new MacBook a downgrade? - jason_slack

If I have a MacBook Air that is:<p>1.4ghz Core i5<p>8gb Ram<p>256gb SSD<p>Intel 5000 graphics (1.5gb RAM I think)<p>The new MacBook is<p>1.1ghz Core M<p>8gb Ram<p>256gb SSD<p>Intel 5300 graphics<p>So besides the Retina display, larger battery and oversized trackpad, is the processor a downgrade?
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bt3
The part you've omitted in the comparison is the year of your machine. I say
this largely because measuring a processor by it's gigahertz isn't the most
definitive measure of a "better" or "faster" processor. If your MBA is a few
years old, I might expect that Core i5 you have to be Haswell
microarchitecture based, whereas the new Macbook is most definitely Broadwell.
The key differentiators between the two, according to Intel:

 _" [Broadwell is] 30% more efficient than Haswell's ones, using 30% less
power while providing slightly better performance at the same clock speed."_

Having said that, the new Macbook is the most expensive netbook I've ever
seen. Gorgeous, but expensive, which makes it tough to justify the price for
the specs you're receiving.

~~~
jason_slack
hmm, my employer bought me this machine in May 2014. System Profiler says:
`MacBookAir6,2`

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MichaelCrawford
I regard the Retina display as a significant improvement. I now find it
unpleasant to look at conventional screens.

You have to ask yourself what you're going to do with it. If you're going to
browse the web and do email, the new MacBook is far more than enough.

If you're going to be doing really hardcore hacking, you probably want a
MacBook Pro. That's wha I've got.

~~~
jason_slack
I don't have any retina display machine now.

My job is a lot of git, c++, markdown, Xcode, etc. Sadly I have 3 machines and
they all feel very similar to me. Even my wife's 4-5 year old 13-inch MacBook
Pro feels fine. My son's newer Mac Mini is the only machine I can say feels
slow to me.

2014 MacBook Air, Core i5, 8gb, 256gb SSD (work provided)

2014 iMac (October 2014), Core i7, 16gb, 1tb (family shared machine)

2012 MacBook Pro 15 inch, Quad Core i7, 16gb, 1th SSD (mine)

~~~
MichaelCrawford
The Xcode compiler - clang/lldb - would be plenty fast on the MacBook, but the
Xcode GUI would feel sluggish. I fault Apple for that, as I was using
responsive IDEs on an 8 MHz Mac 512k in 1988, but Apple's developer tools
people simply assume you're going to use a high-end machine.

It pisses me off, but there it is.

If you do go with the MacBook, I expect it would work a lot better to use
BBEdit for your source code. I presently use TextWrangler for HTML/CSS, but
havent really tried to use it for editing the source that I build with Xcode.

Anything that's purely on the command-line would work really well on the
MacBook.

A real nice thing about today's SSDs is that the computers boot really really
fast.

~~~
jason_slack
Good point about BBEdit. I usually use it on a regular basis. I could always
use a Bash script and `xcodebuild`. Only go into Xcode to debug (or learn gdb
finally)

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acomjean
I'll agree that it is. The SSD is faster, but the 1.1 core m is a question
mark.

Apple is one of the few companies that has released slower computers to
replace previous ones (Where is the quad core mac mini?).

I like my macbook pro, but I sometimes feel Apple's target market isn't me.

~~~
bt3
The "Core M" is an interesting bit because although it's technically a
Broadwell, it was released in September 2014, versus the other Broadwell Core
i3/5/7's coming out in January of 2015.

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rkho
I read that the new MacBook's performance is similar to the 2011 Air's Ivy
Bridge processor. That's my only concern with this machine, but I
realistically only need it for development purposes.

~~~
jason_slack
ah ha:
[http://9to5mac.com/2015/03/16/macbook-12-benchmarks/](http://9to5mac.com/2015/03/16/macbook-12-benchmarks/)

Although the retina display probably requires a lot of power and they were
comparing this to a core i7 MacBook Air?

------
mattkrea
I'd say that is a significant downgrade. Even on the Air that I just replaced
with a MacBook Pro I was tired of the sluggishness that I sometimes
experienced and this new one is far slower.

~~~
jason_slack
I'm not sure the retina display, longer batter and larger trackpad are worth
the loss in speed. I just write c++ code.

