Sony Vaio Z gets another update, as Apple's MBA lags well behind three Sony Z updates

[fuzzielitlpanda]

The i3 has double the TDP and gets 266 more MHz wow that is fail

and your point is? it's a very successful laptop. 5,500 replies don't lie:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ace...nge-info-benchmarks-tweaks-mods-upgrades.html

only the canadian model has the i3. it comes in i5 configurations too. it doesn't really matter though because the user can upgrade the processor themselves.

As an aside, the point of my post is to emphasize what another user already said: if you don't see what you're looking for from Apple's offerings, go somewhere else. There are a lot of great laptops out there and being narrow-minded will keep one from seeing them.

 

[Perdification]

Apple knows macs have inelastic demand, and that's why they're slow at updates. We all hear of Apple fans, but I've never heard of a PC fan, except the CPU cooler. That's why they can afford to take their time and charge high prices.

 

[gri]

One word: pathetic...
Bye bye Apple Computers, hello consumer gadgets... I wonder if there will be a Mac in 20 years. Maybe all PC and iTunes via cloud and a web-based portal.And we are all using iPads...

 

[CaoCao]

Apple knows macs have inelastic demand, and that's why they're slow at updates. We all hear of Apple fans, but I've never heard of a PC fan, except the CPU cooler. That's why they can afford to take their time and charge high prices.

I have, they are generally 80, 120 or 140mm fans used to compensate for shoddy components inside the PC

One word: pathetic...
Byby Apple Computers, hello consumer gadgets... I wonder if there will be a Mac in 20 years. Maybe all PC and iTunes via cloud and a web-based portal.And we are all using iPads...

How do you know they wont have come out with the iNeuraljack?

 

[Freecity88]

apple has already abandoned mba, go get an ipad instead.

The i3 has double the TDP and gets 266 more MHz wow that is fail

 

[tubbymac]

The MBA has less space than the MP?

I should have clarified that I was talking about portables. Don't really care about how much space the Mac Pro or the Apple TV gets.

 

[flat4]

I support over 145 Sony laptops for our sales force. Sony makes a good product until it fails and you need parts to repair it.

Sony laptops have three model numbers and depending on who you are talking to they will ask for a different one each time. Serial numbers can be the same on some models and they only way to distinguish is by the Service Tag number.

Its a pain sometimes to get parts or service, that said, if I had a choice of laptops I would choose MBP, hands down it might not have an i7 but the quality and customer service is worth not having the latest chips.

Typically we pay around 3500 for laptop with max ram and big HD, and onsite 4 year accidental policy. So it really not that cheap.

 

[halledise]

I support over 145 Sony laptops for our sales force. Sony makes a good product until it fails and you need parts to repair it.

Sony laptops have three model numbers and depending on who you are talking to they will ask for a different one each time. Serial numbers can be the same on some models and they only way to distinguish is by the Service Tag number.

Its a pain sometimes to get parts or service, that said, if I had a choice of laptops I would choose MBP, hands down it might not have an i7 but the quality and customer service is worth not having the latest chips.

Typically we pay around 3500 for laptop with max ram and big HD, and onsite 4 year accidental policy. So it really not that cheap.

thank you sir for your informed comments - good to read something other than pure speculative opinions for a change.

(plus it also backs up my comments earlier in this thread )

 

[madoka]

Is there a point to this thread?

I believe it's another one of Scottsdale's "Look how much I'm willing to spend on the MBA of my dreams" threads, which he also manages to do every third post or so. Plus he got to remind us that he's an Apple stock holder to boot!

 

[FX4568]

Ya. It is kind of sad that Mac hasnt updated their MacBook Airs.
I am a senior in high school and I travel around the globe to meet family and friends, and for this I really would like a computer. I first thought of the MBA but I realized that it is a 2 year old computer, so I am leaning towards the Sony Z series :/.
I always wanted to try Macs since I own an IPT and really liked the iOS. But I am not a loyal customer of Macs, so I rather pay a little bit more and get a good computer than have an apple computer.

But why would Steve want to upgrade the MBA? there is absolutely no reason at all.
He makes an enormous amount of revenue from the whole iOS "expierence" which include the iphone, ipad, ipod touch, applications.
All this gather up to an amount of 70% of his revenue.
While Macs are the other 25% and software is 5%.
And also from the macs, probably 50% comes from MBP series, and an insignifcant amount of I think 5% comes from the MBA.
So as a corporation standpoint, I would rather upgrade more frequently in the things that I generate revenue from rather than the little MBA that gives me little to nothing revenue.

 

[vikingdave]

Only one problem with the VAIO Z

There is only one problem with the VAIO Z ... WINDOWS

 

[cleric]

Sony caring about its customers? When did Sony make the switch?? Ive owned plenty of their products and whenever something goes wrong, I always get the same reply "Really? Its not working? Well.... that sucks but good luck to you! "

Not to mention the hundreds of times they tried to just straight **** us all for money. Remember when they wanted to make it illegal for us to resell CDs? Sony doesn't give a **** about anyone its only there to rape and pillage(make everything proprietary and overpriced).

 

[fyrefly]

The i3 has double the TDP and gets 266 more MHz wow that is fail

It's pretty well-known that clock for clock, the iX processors beat the core2duos by 10-15% at least. So faster clocked I'd expect a 15-25% increase.

Hell, if Apple switched to the Core i3's at similar clocks, I'm sure they'll advertise that it's 2X faster or something and find some wacky benchmark to prove it.

 

[colourfastt]

I've posted it before, and this is the last time I'm going to speak to the matter. Does the MBA do what you need it to do? If yes, then buy one. If no, then go buy a plastic laptop from Dell, Sony, HP, or what ever company is your choice and shut the H**L up!! Quit bi**hing about the updates or lack thereof to the Air ... Apple may or may not update it at its leisure and NOTHING anyone complains about on here means a D****D thing.

 

[macbook123]

I've posted it before, and this is the last time I'm going to speak to the matter. Does the MBA do what you need it to do? If yes, then buy one. If no, then go buy a plastic laptop from Dell, Sony, HP, or what ever company is your choice and shut the H**L up!! Quit bi**hing about the updates or lack thereof to the Air ... Apple may or may not update it at its leisure and NOTHING anyone complains about on here means a D****D thing.

Can you please speak one more time on the matter? ;-)

No seriously, I think you're missing the point of these debates, which is that people are confused about the untypical lack of MBA updates and those who actually NEED a laptop of its kind have a natural tendency to want to understand Apple's motives for not offering a modern version. I understand that this motive may be hard to see through people's evident frustration, but it's not very clear either what might be your motive to enter this space just to tell people to shut up. Hope that makes sense...

Peace,
macbook123

 

[Perdification]

and your point is? it's a very successful laptop. 5,500 replies don't lie:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ace...nge-info-benchmarks-tweaks-mods-upgrades.html

only the canadian model has the i3. it comes in i5 configurations too. it doesn't really matter though because the user can upgrade the processor themselves.

As an aside, the point of my post is to emphasize what another user already said: if you don't see what you're looking for from Apple's offerings, go somewhere else. There are a lot of great laptops out there and being narrow-minded will keep one from seeing them.

Its not just the hardware. It's apple software that people are looking for too. Look at OSX then look at Windows. BIG difference.

 

[Perdification]

I've posted it before, and this is the last time I'm going to speak to the matter. Does the MBA do what you need it to do? If yes, then buy one. If no, then go buy a plastic laptop from Dell, Sony, HP, or what ever company is your choice and shut the H**L up!! Quit bi**hing about the updates or lack thereof to the Air ... Apple may or may not update it at its leisure and NOTHING anyone complains about on here means a D****D thing.

Relax pal, we're just discussing for the sake of discussion. No one is angry with anything, everyone's cool around here. Chill...

 

[Perdification]

I have, they are generally 80, 120 or 140mm fans used to compensate for shoddy components inside the PC


How do you know they wont have come out with the iNeuraljack?

Heh, nice one, you're thinking along my lines.

 

[Bernard SG]

Sony Vaio Z doesn't really compare to MBA . MBP got its fair share of updates.
My guess is that the MBA design makes it hard to add CPU power because of heat and battery management issues.
MBA is too expensive for my taste. Great piece of technology, certainly, but the price-tag is a deterrent to make it a really successful product.

 

[Perdification]

Are all macbook CPUs soldered onboard? If not we could upgrade it ourselves. Too bad the i5 has a different socket from C2D.

 

[Abbas]

I really dont think you can compare MBA to VAIO Z- the Air is a CULV based machine while the Z is a regular CPU based machine. In the last three years, I've gone from the MBP 15" to MBA to VAIO Z to MBP 13" to (new) Z which I just sold last month and came back to MBA.

Yes, I agree that an upgrade to MBA would be nice but other than 4GB of RAM, I really dont think there is much that is needed in such a class of machine. Even on my OLDER 1.6GHz/80GB HD based MBA, I can do a bit of Photoshop, Office, iTunes and Web. The C2D model with the NVIDIA GPU and the SSD should be significantly faster and good enough to handle most tasks.

What exactly do you want to use the MBA for that requires an i5?

 

[Perdification]

I really dont think you can compare MBA to VAIO Z- the Air is a CULV based machine while the Z is a regular CPU based machine. In the last three years, I've gone from the MBP 15" to MBA to VAIO Z to MBP 13" to (new) Z which I just sold last month and came back to MBA.

Yes, I agree that an upgrade to MBA would be nice but other than 4GB of RAM, I really dont think there is much that is needed in such a class of machine. Even on my OLDER 1.6GHz/80GB HD based MBA, I can do a bit of Photoshop, Office, iTunes and Web. The C2D model with the NVIDIA GPU and the SSD should be significantly faster and good enough to handle most tasks.

What exactly do you want to use the MBA for that requires an i5?

Well, some of us power hungry folks complain when we can't run virtualisation as well, and yeah, for that kind of pricing, there are expectations, beyond normal ones. Also, I know its not meant for heavy editing and gaming but occasionally, you know, we want to be able to stretch the boundaries a little. The last reason is to future proof it. It's been quite some time that i5 has come out, and its not like MBA has had an update recently.

 

[CaoCao]

THE MBA HAS THE BEST CPU FOR THE TDP, THERE IS NOTHING BETTER!!!!!!

I'm being serious, the CULV i7s top out at a whooping 1.33GHz, now I know i7>C2D, but it isn't 50% better

 

[Scottsdale]

I really dont think you can compare MBA to VAIO Z- the Air is a CULV based machine while the Z is a regular CPU based machine. In the last three years, I've gone from the MBP 15" to MBA to VAIO Z to MBP 13" to (new) Z which I just sold last month and came back to MBA.

Yes, I agree that an upgrade to MBA would be nice but other than 4GB of RAM, I really dont think there is much that is needed in such a class of machine. Even on my OLDER 1.6GHz/80GB HD based MBA, I can do a bit of Photoshop, Office, iTunes and Web. The C2D model with the NVIDIA GPU and the SSD should be significantly faster and good enough to handle most tasks.

What exactly do you want to use the MBA for that requires an i5?

NOT TRUE. The MBA has a LOW VOLTAGE CPU NOT a ULV nor CULV. Get it straight if you're going to make these assertions.

The MBA also has a CPU to upgrade to, Intel provides the Core i7-6x0LM low voltage CPU as the successor to the C2D SL9x00 CPUs in the MBA. These are NOT CULV CPUs either... they run at 2.13 GHz and boost to 2.93 GHz... who doesn't consider that an upgrade???

Apple's issue is solely that it only has its vision on the iOS products and software right now. Until it can do multiple things at once, we're stuck with an outdated MBA. In addition, I consider all the 13" Mac offerings and Mac mini SERIOUSLY AND COMPLETELY OUTDATED. One cannot tell me that a two year old chipset and CPU combination is updated or current in any way. The 320m is the same old thing as the 9400m; just in a work that was created as the successor design to the 9400m, the 320m was probably designed before the v 2,1 MBA was released in October 2008. That is two full years.

In addition, I believe the 15" and 17" MBPs lacked any innovation in their most recent updates... the only update this year that actually moved forward were the iMac updates... and it wasn't a whole lot of progress. Until Apple is willing to let go of some cash and EXPAND its operations to allow development of BOTH iOS and Mac product lines, we're stuck with old low-grade components in high-grade casing (that is inexpensive just nice to look at), and we're stuck paying high prices for outdated Macs that don't compare in any way to competitors... this is Apple holding its OS hostage and nothing more. It knows its fan base will put up with this crap, because it's the only way they can run OS X... sorta ignorant on their behalf, because Windows 7 is completely successful and just as stable as OS X. Until Apple is willing to innovate its Macs, it will continue to sell to us old faithful idiots but not expand to a new customer base wanting new Macs before shelling out premium cash for old components in a pretty shell with a hostage-held OS.

 

[Spacekatgal]

I just have to say, it's pretty ignorant to say the Mac Mini is the only Mac Apple has seriously updated this year. The new i5/i7 MacBook Pros are by far the finest notebooks Apple has ever released. I can run Maya on a laptop well, finally.

It didn't get a big CPU speed boost, but the white MacBook and the 13 inch MBP were also changed in ways that really made them a great value. My 13 inch Macbook DOES have a 10 hour battery, which is astonishing. It can also run TF2. Those are significant upgrades that really add to the user experience.

Other than the redesigned case and HDMI port, what one earth is awesome about the new Mac Mini? It looks like the last gen Apple TV now? WOW. I have a Mac Mini server from the previous generation, and am not tempted at all to upgrade - there is no significant increase in performance.

With every day that goes by, the Macbook Air feels like a product of the past - not the future.