My 2012 13" Macbook Air is starting to show its age. The battery is down to about 65% capacity, I’m nearing a full SSD, the trackpad requires more force to click than it used to, and some of the (not even particularly resource-intensive) games I play peg the CPU/GPU and drain the battery very quickly.
But Apple decided not to update the Air line any more. So my Apple options are to pay hundreds of dollars more for a computer with less battery life and power than what I have right now, to pay even more hundreds of dollars more for the Pro (and then another hundred probably in dongles and adapters) and still get less battery life than my 4-year old computer had when it was new, or buy the last update of the Airs, and basically pay new prices for 2ish-year old technology. You do get a higher resolution screen with the two other options, so it’s not like there’s no improvement. It’s just an improvement I don’t care about, and it’s come at the expense of battery life and money, two things I do care about.
I tried buying a Dell XPS 13, which is supposedly the best Windows competitor to an Air, but the one I got was broken on arrival. The wifi connection was incredibly flaky and the audio clipped while playing on speakers or headphones. Also (and I’m blaming Windows for this one) the default 100% size for fonts/UI was way too tiny, and weird things happened when I increased size in the system preferences. Dell offered to fix it, but I have no confidence in their hardware if their QA process doesn’t involve the equivalent of “go to Youtube and play a video for 30 seconds”, since that basic operation proved that the hardware I got was broken. Also, the trackpad was awkward, which is why I’ve stuck with Macs for so many years. Other makers never seem to get the trackpad right.
Maybe I’m being too picky? Maybe there’s another Windows option I should try? It looks like Microsoft is doing cool things, but only at a higher price point. It seems crazy to me that I bought what I consider to be a great computer for about $1000 four years ago, and I can’t find something high quality at that price point any more.
FWIW, my new 2016 MacBook Pro gives me 10-12 hours of battery life, even with the screen brightness up, and constantly connected to WiFi. The reports of bad battery life are due, IMHO, to people running old versions of software that are telling the OS to use the high-performance GPU.
Oh, and the machine is faster than my benchmark desktop machine, an 8-core Sandybdrige core i7 2600k Hackintosh.
The Apple-advertised runtime of the 2016 MacBook Pros is shorter than the Macbook Airs (10 hours compared to 12). That’s not a terrible downgrade, but it is less. And I of course never actually got the full advertised life out of my existing Air. Could be that I’m running suboptimal software, but it is the software I like to run.
But mostly the problem is that it’s just out of my price range right now. It’s like 25% more than the Air with the same storage and memory, and that’s before the adapters I’d have to buy. You do get faster stuff and a nice screen, it’s just not stuff I care that much about.
Good to know that you’re getting good battery life out of it.
Time to go custom. Clevo/Sager, MSI, Falcon, Origin, etc…
Almost anything you buy from any of those builders will kick the shit out of anything from Apple for the same money, and I say this as a someone who owns a ton of Apple stuff: MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, 2x Apple TV, at least 4 generations of iPod.
I don’t have direct experience, but I have good friends in the IT industry who have said the MS Surface is a great piece of hardware. Needs docking/keyboard/mouse/extra monitor etc.
None of those look like what i want at all. They’re all big and heavy and I’m sure quite powerful, but not what I’m looking for. I basically want a Macbook Air, but updated. The Dell XPS 13 would have been perfect. Small, light, plenty powerful enough for me, runs for 12+ hours and < $1000. But it was junk.
Heh. One of my coworkers hates his. Although I think he hates Windows more than the hardware. But, either way, I want an actual laptop with a keyboard, since I do a lot of my computing with it resting on my actual lap.
Take your chances on an old refurb. I got my Win-7 Dell Latitude for $130 two years ago, flawless so far. At that price, if you get a lemon, throw it away or save it as a spare, and order another.
I’d recommend going to the Microsoft Store, if there’s one nearby, and if not, go to Best Buy. Both stores have a variety of notebook models from several brands that you can play with and test before you actually buy one. There are some things it’s best to buy in person and not mail order and this may be one of them. In particular, you’ll want to check the resolution of the screen and how comfortable the keyboard and trackpad/pointing stick are.
As for this, there are the Microsoft Surface tablet PCs but there is also the Surface Book, which is an actual notebook computer. It’s not cheap, though. But it gets really good reviews.
I agree, and I don’t think you’re being too picky. I see the same problem with cell phones, and the problem is that the things that some of us value are not the things that serve mainstream demands, so “newer” is not necessarily “better”.
Compared to my old and still very serviceable laptop, I greatly dislike the new ones because of Windows 10, because of the silly flat keyboards that don’t feel anything like real keyboards, and because of the ridiculous 16:9 widescreens instead of a more reasonable 4:3 (or at least 16:10). The fact that new trackpads are often awkward compared to the old ones is just adding insult to injury. Not to mention that virtually none of them have optical drives any more, which might be a supportable tradeoff but it does make certain recovery procedures trickier and means you have to figure out how to create a bootable flash drive equivalent.
I have no idea what the solution is. I have in the interim continued to use my ancient Dell laptop. I’ve upgraded it to Windows 7, expanded the memory to max, and replaced the hard drive with an SSD, and it works perfectly well. I like it better than anything I’ve seen that is currently for sale.
You can get real good, reliable reconditioned models. I wanted a 17" and that was it. Modern software, SSD. I have also had other reconditioned MacBooks and Pros, and it beats shopping with Apple.
The ability to run macOS is a nice-to-have feature. I’m willing to pay extra for a Mac because I prefer the OS to Windows. I do run Windows in a VM to play one game (Magic Online) which is not particularly taxing (I can run the game in a VM on my 2012 Macbook Air with 4GB of memory without issue).
But I’m not willing to pay way more. I’m comfortable with Windows. My desktop is a Windows box, because Apple’s desktops are a terrible value in my opinion.
The Asus machines look pretty good. Thanks for the recommendation.
Yes, it does, but the laptop one is called a “Surface Book”, so I figure when people say “Surface”, they mean the tablet.
The laptop one does look really cool, but it starts at $1500, same as the Macbook Pro, and seems fairly comparable to it (it has cool additional features like a detachable touch screen, but they are features I don’t care about at this point). Given my preference for Mac OS, I’d just buy the Macbook at that price point. But if Microsoft and Apple continue on their current hardware trends, I expect my next laptop will be a MS one.