I just bought a HP Elite X2 1011 G1 hybrid with Core M-5Y71 not too long ago.
Its very subtle but audible fan noise annoyed me quite a bit until now (since I considered Core M a fanless chip), but after reading this I realize that I'd prefer this over the alternative.
The fact that the Intel graphic appearing about halfway down the page suggests that the Core M is more suitable for "premium tablets", and "2 in 1's" further suggests to me that Apple has introduced the worlds most expensive netbook. Which will likely pair well with their five-figure watches as well.
There was a comment on another similar article I read awhile back where an Intel employee commented on how the Core M is a "premium Atom".
Well that's his point. If you have a chip that's used in an ultra thin laptop, whose performance-grade suits tablets, then you can slap a derogatory 'netbook' label on it.
And I can definitely see why you might say that. If you look at the Macbook Air 13", it's a cheaper and more powerful device, despite being among the most portable devices, without generally a need for externals like USB hubs, or even a charger with its excellent 12h battery life. And it wasn't considered noisy either.
Instead of improving that MBA: USB-C to make it slightly thinner. Full HD resolution to make it slightly sharper. Butterfly keyboard and zero-click magnetic touchpad to allow it to be thinner. Slightly smaller bezels and a slightly bigger keyboard to make it smaller. Layered battery to make it last longer, or use less space.
Instead of that, they said 'prettiness first, let's make it as thin as possible', and then let's see what performance we can squeeze in. And that performance came in behind a cheaper, older MBA, and its because uses a chip that you find in tablets.
Now I'm excited about the new Macbook, not the first one but future generations will likely be something quite special. And I fully understand and even appreciate why they did it. Set a new standard, a new model, for mobile consumers, in a world where even laptops are squeezed by tablets/phablets, and where most consumers don't need the performance of a MBA (that blurred the line between consumer & pro. The MBA's are popular lightweight development machines for example). And set the stage for increasing wireless/cloud.
And I also appreciate that mocking it as a mobile chip is a bit myopic. It's actually quite fast and seems to do nicely in the early benchmarks. But yeah I see his point, it's still a bit weird to see a performance downgrade from the 'mobility line' in the Air, with a price bump and weird things like 1-port, or a 480p camera that is humbled by a the 2010 iPod Touch 720p camera. Expecting a 2nd generation of this Macbook, especially when USB-C takes off, skylake launches and the Air stops selling, to make a lot more sense than it does today.
The MBA is portable enough, and it's plenty fast. A little thinner and smaller bezels would have been nice, but the killer downgrade is the screen. Still a TN panel. Why not atleast a upgrade to IPS?
It seems Apple just went out of it's way to create product line differentiation and the easiest way to get a person to stretch budget was to handicap the screen.
Is there anything really wrong with that approach though? Car manufacturers often make the most powerful and high-tech cars they can make as a proving ground, then that technology trickles into the rest of their lineup. The Tesla Model S wouldn't exist without the Tesla Roadster, which was a pile of junk but proved the technology. Mercedes S Class cars are horribly overpriced and sometimes impractical, but they're the first place you'll find tech that will be an option for all cars in 5 years and standard in 10 years. The original Surface sucked, but they kept revising it until people could at least give it some faint praise.
The most generous complaints are that "it came out one year too early." That's better than never coming out at all.
> Is there anything really wrong with that approach though?
No I absolutely get it, it's a good approach.
As a consumer, I'd love if they'd just updated the Air. It's already light and thin with awesome battery and great performance, they could have iterated on that (e.g. butterfly keys, layered batteries & no-click touchpad), give it a 170 PPI screen (1920 x 1200), thinning out the bezels, or add USB-C etc.
But instead they did something a bit too radical. Thin beyond necessity, a 480p camera while a 2012 ipod Touch had 720p/1080p, just a single port, and most importantly releasing a device that's slower than an already existing, last year, 'air' model.
But I do get it. You need to do some big sweeping changes every 5 years or so. They iterated on the Air for 7 years, turned it into a low-performance $1800 device with 5h of battery, into a sub $1000 machine with 12h of battery, great performance, improved screen and ports.
And now it's time for something new. If for example instead of releasing the 'air', they iterated on the Macbook endlessly, we'd probably never have gotten the air.
> The most generous complaints are that "it came out one year too early."
Pretty much. I can make that complaint about the Apple Watch (in 2 years an expensive Apple Watch will look dumb when a thinner device with smoother animations and longer battery life and better sensors come out), iMac 5k (thermal throttling?) etc. And that's indeed fine, a complement in a way.
The new Macbook differs a little bit for me because it's not a completely new technology like the Apple Watch, or a new Smartphone or Tablet. It wasn't a question of 'do this or do nothing'. It was a question of 'handicap the Air and don't make a big investment in the line and do a new less capable Macbook at $300-400 more', or 'make engineering investments to improve the air'. I think that's a genuine consumer complaint one may have.
As a consumer I'm bummed they didn't go with the latter. Would have really liked an Air with at least full hd, layered batteries, thinner bezels etc. Now my options are a premium netbook, or a MBP. I went with the rMBP.
As an 'analyst' though, the rMB makes a ton of sense and if I were at the board of Apple I wouldn't have rejected, rather, applauded the current path.
Does it, really? I think it depends, for me personally I'm not so sure it does. So first they're 16:10 displays, meaning 1920x1200 not 1080, I should have said WUXGA instead of Full HD, sorry.
My rMBP is my main driver, I love it. And its PPI is 227, nice and sharp. Similar to the new Macbook (226). While a 1920x1200 MBA display would be 170 PPI. Big difference?
So the generally considered quite beautiful iMac sits at 109 PPI. Even the 5k iMac is only 218.
It's true, it's not quite a 12" Retina at 226 PPI. But if you asked me if I'd rather have a 13.3" screen with 170 PPI, or a 12" screen with 200+ PPI, I'd go with the former. For me, anything above 100 is good enough for computing, anything above 150 is starting to get really nice, and 200+ is an unnecessary bonus that I can still discern, but not get really excited about. 170 PPI would have been plenty for me.
So I agree it's better, but significantly better? While researching for a new buy I took 3 friends to the Apple store while we were in the neighbourhood, and none of them could easily discern the iMac from the riMac at first glance. After I told them and let them do side by sides, they sorta saw. Which really surprised me, I could definitely notice, but for me too both displays were awesome. There are some real diminishing returns to ever increasing sharpness.
You remember the Dell Ultrasharp U3011, a 30" monitor a few years old. It had 84 PPI, and this is still a nice display. Double that and you get 168 PPI, ought to be plenty, right? Double the pixel density of a few years old 'ultrasharp' by Dell. Still, it's less than the proposed 170 PPI on a Macbook Air. One may wonder if a PPI of 1 million would be 'significantly better', because at laptop distances of say 18" or so, eyes start to stop being able to discern pixels at 165 PPI or so, all the way up to the 260ish PPI range where virtually all eyes even with perfect vision lose the ability to discern pixels at laptop ranges.
At the end of the day, few people are going to be doing high-res photoshopping or video editing on their 12" Macbook with Intel M Core, where 200+ PPI is useful. At 170 PPI, I think it's generally sharp enough for text & video.
At the end of the day it's subjective, 226 vs 170 PPI may well be a significant difference for you. Not for me. And if I could have more performance, more battery, 1.3" more screen, more ports etc, I'd prefer the latter.
It takes a lot of work in software and design to make 100PPI look good. Ya, we can do it, hinted fonts, manually red lined and aligned pixel output from illustrator, etc... 200PPI+ is just so much easier to develop for...the vectors render with much fewer artifacts.
I have a 150 PPI 4K desktop display and I'm pretty disappointed compared to my retina class laptop. But this disappointment comes from the extra work needed to make my software look good. I really can't wait for the day when all screens are 200+, it will be much easier for us.
I think it's a segment worth having... I took down my home servers last year, one of which was an 8-core AMD (FX-8350) that I put into my aging HTPC case... the power usage was pretty high, so I started shutting it off when not using it.
I just got in a Gigabyte Brix Core i3-5010U, which is supposed to sit around 15W of power (around 1/8-1/10th of the amd), with similar single-core performance and roughly 40% multicore... I do browsing and watching a lot of 1080p video on it. With the i3 I can just leave it on... if I could get similar performance (real-world usage) with 1/3 of that power, I might have been willing to pay another $150 for it. Another issue is when the fans kick in... I want quiet and good enough performance.
The same is true of laptop use for most people as well... honestly, other than only having a single USB3 port, I think the new macbook is a good (if a bit overpriced) fit.
Its very subtle but audible fan noise annoyed me quite a bit until now (since I considered Core M a fanless chip), but after reading this I realize that I'd prefer this over the alternative.