You can thank me for the MacBook Pro update, since I bought an Air on June 14th. It was too difficult to keep waiting, and most of my “if only” excuses were essentially removed during the Air’s 2017 update. The entry level got a slightly faster processor and 8 gigs of RAM on the bottom end, just enough to get by. And look at all the ways it’s better than a MacBook Pro…

• USB-A ports.
• SDXC card for cameras
• Magsafe
• DisplayPort
• A reliable keyboard

The last sticking point for me was the price. At $1000, it’s too steep. But Best Buy had a sale June 14th for the bottom of the line Air for $700 plus tax. You can’t beat that. That’s competitive.

I’d been holding out for a new MacBook for literally years now, having gotten a Lenovo gaming laptop to use as my programming rig back in 2016 when I thought Apple had created a MacBook that wasn’t really for Pros with this new generation of MacBooks. Phil Schiller said as much, when he claimed the new 13“ Pro could replace the Air, and Walt Mossberg agreed, saying that ”if these new MacBooks simply didn’t carry the Pro label, we’d all have a lot less to complain about". Wow. This is a consumer laptop.

You might recall my comparison of bottom of the line MacBook processors. Even after last month’s update, nothing’s changed there, at the low end. The MacBook Pro “Escape” 13“ still has a crappy i5–7360U, with a top-end only about 80% higher than the Air. The 12” MacBook is only 6% faster. None of these are speed demons. You’ve got to pay $1799 to get to the new processors in the latest refresh.

Neither step up from the Air are worth the price. The calculus said that I’m much better off spending $770 after tax on an Air, and putting the difference between the Air and Pro (even when the Escape was on sale at B&H for $1200 (which was tempting)), towards a new desktop or a future MacBook. In a sense, I can get an Air to bide me over now, and bank over $400 of my budget to put towards my next MacBook.

Marco agrees

Heard a lot of my reasoning coming out of Marco Arment’s mouth on the most recent episode of The Talk Show. He basically said that laptops are optimized to run [predominantly] at a nice, low clock speed that sips power. You can get this low-power mode from an Air or the most powerful 15" Pro. Your compilations will suffer, but as I said when I talked about my $100 Lenovo S100, small computers with great battery life are a lot more useful than you’d think. Work on headless tasks in console apps (rather, make your tasks into many headless programming tasks), and you’ll be surprised how much you can get done.

Laptops – all laptops – are made for low power tasks. If you want as much power as you can carry, sure, max something out. But unless you’re okay with a “tall” gamer laptop (Marco actually talks about this) with the requisite fans and sorry battery life (hello, Lenovo Y700!), you’re not going to be able to cool your proc, no matter who you are.

You really want power? Stay at home and get a desktop.

At some point, I’d settle for a quality mini upgrade, which sounds like it could happen soon, but I’m hopeful the new Mac Pro will have an entry level that’s worth a look.

But you get the point. If I want portable macOS, the answer was and, I think, remains the Air on sale. It’s cheap, convenient, and reliable. Even after the update, it’s not worth paying $300 more for a 8250U i5 8210Y (4141 score) and a Retina screen. Instead, I’ll pocket that cash and hope for something that makes sense later.

To date, the only thing I really dislike is that HDMI out (via DisplayPort adapter) is limited to 1920x1080. You have to use DisplayPort input on your monitor if you want higher resolution. This has been a Mac hardware limitation for a while that I’ve never really understood.

Labels: apple, bargain, benchmarks, best buy, hardware, lenovo, mac pro, macbook, macbook pro, marco

The battery in my Lenovo Y700-14ISK is finally getting to the point that it's holding me back. I might get 60-70 minutes out of it just with casual programming. That's not crazy. It's a gaming laptop, and it's obviously meant to stay plugged in. It also has a pretty phat processor for a laptop (an i7-7700HQ) that made it an attractive programmer's box two years ago.

But two years later, the battery's ready to go.

I've been waiting for a MacBook that was worth buying, and that I dodged buying two years ago with this Lenovo, and I remain hopeful yet again that this will be the year to get back to portable macOSing.

I want portable Windows with battery life, but I don't want to break the bank to buy a ThinkPad, since I'm planning to grab a Mac this buying cycle as my "real" work box.

I've purchased stuff like the cheap IdeaPads before, and they're more computer than you've paid for. Great battery, decent keyboard, and almost able to keep up with server and javascript work. But, ultimately, not fast enough for real production.

Acer Inspire: Where has this been?

Then I ran into the Acer Inspire while looking at cheapy laptop comparisons on Amazon. Wow. Look at these two...

• Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM for $350!
  • 15.6-Inch
  • Intel Core i3-7100U 7th Generation
  • 4GB DDR4
  • 1TB 5400RPM HD
  • Intel HD Graphics 620
  • Windows 10 Home
  • Looks like a real 9-10 hours of battery !?!!

That's not bad, but the real kicker is that it seems like this laptop was made for people willing to upgrade. Look inside this thing:

One panel and you've got your SATA drive, RAM, and an m.2 slot accessible. It's like they expected you to swap and/or upgrade this box! Insane!

But once you start adding up RAM and an SSD, well, you're pushing up to around $550. Which almost exactly where the Inspire's next step up lives:

• Acer Aspire E 15 E5-576G-5762 for $600
  • 15.6" Full HD,
  • 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8250U
  • GeForce MX150
  • 8GB RAM Memory
  • 256GB SSD
  • Same 9-10 hours of battery life.

Well, hello. This is getting close to too much to pay for making Windows portable, but isn't the better processor worth an extra $100? Here are some ballparks from cpubenchmark.net -- this first is the i3 in the cheap Inspire, then the i5 in the $600 version, then the one I got in my Lenovo:

Now, for $250 over the cheap Inspire, we get an SSD (though not the one I'd've purchased, and we lose the TB of spinning platter space) and just enough RAM to squeeze by for a while -- and the chance to upgrade to 32! That's nice. Eat 32 gigs, MacBook Pro.

And the processor? Those numbers are close enough to my old i7, I could probably trade it in and not feel it too badly.

It's bigger than I'd like. I don't need the DVD drive. It's still got VGA, which even I finally removed from my desk setup recently. The Inspire is a dinosaur.

But it's an easily upgradeable dinosaur with a good drive & the latest processor for $600. That, my friends, is a proverbially impressive piece of kit.

Do I worry about the cheap keyboard? Yes. Yes and no.

Six hundred simoleons is a bit more than I wanted to spend for the equivalent of a new battery. I always think, "If you could have $X off of your next laptop by not buying now, what could you the afford to get?" And $600 would be nice to put towards a MacBook Pro with its own nice battery.

But any way you slice it, if you want a nice Windows box for some work, and don't mind not having Pro, the Acer Inspire looks like it should be your value baseline.

Labels: apple, bargain, hardware, laptop, lenovo, truck