Waiting for next update on MBA. Anyone?

[MRU]

Core 2 DUO is very old technology and I feel that it would be so outdated by end of this this year or early next year. I am planning on buying MBA this summer to get Mac OS lion right out of the box.

what are the chances that apple will update MBA by this summer like June/July/August time frame? Anyone?

Any thoughts and inputs would be appreciated.

Given the intel sandy bridge issues, I'll stick with core2duo for now. Also if Apple did switch to a ULV i3, the chances are it would be using intels integrated graphics. So you lose the nvidia chipset, so it would prob balance out the performance boost of the CPU by the weaker intel gpu.

 

[iRun26.2]

Microcenter in Rockville had one for $850. I went and looked at it, and it's a damn sexy machine. But I just couldn't pull the trigger. $850 to browse the web, send off an occasional email, YouTube, Facebook, watch movies on the go, edit documents? I sat there and said to myself, isn't that what my Ipad is for.

On the way to five guys for dinner I kept telling myself I did the right thing. $900 ( w/tax) for C2D, 2 gb, 64 mb is definitey not worth it to me.

Sent from my Ipad, which really is a cool little gadget

Then you definitely made the right decision for yourself. For me, for my MBA uses (MATLAB analysis / XCODE coding & debugging ), I definitely could not use an iPad. I do not see the MBA as a iPad upgrade.

I have trouble seeing why I would want an iPad when I have an iPhone 4...

 

[TheRealDamager]

Then you definitely made the right decision for yourself. For me, for my MBA uses (MATLAB analysis / XCODE coding & debugging ), I definitely could not use an iPad. I do not see the MBA as a iPad upgrade.

I have trouble seeing why I would want an iPad when I have an iPhone 4...

Agreed - I don't see the IPad and Air as in the same space at all. If the IPad meets your needs, then you should stick with it.

 

[chrono1081]

The Core 2 Duo processor is fine and plenty power. And the reason Apple stuck a Core 2 Duo in there was so they didn't have to use Intel's integrated GPU. I'd far rather have a Core 2 Duo that was slightly slower than graphics being compromised.

Only thing I'd wait for if they were ever to be included is an antiglare option and backlit keyboard.

Apart from that, performance is fine! You aren't going to be using the Air for rendering hours and hours of video are you?

+1 the airs are MUCH faster then most people think they are. I use mine for Maya and ZBrush as well as Unity and XCode.

 

[samiznaetekto]

What's the cost of wait? If you can resell your MBA in a year with $369 hit (which is, I think, unrealistically high), that's $0.99/day. Do you value yourself that low as to subject yourself to excruciating wait for the whole year for the cost of small cup of coffee every day?

MBA 11" is the best portable computer ever made. Which costs less than 99 cents a day to always have the latest model. This is truly a magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price.

Just get it and stop overANALyzing.

 

[fyrefly]

How long did the last refresh take? It was years, not months. If you need the laptop now, then buy it. The grass will always be greener and sometimes you need to think about it from the perspective of how much enjoyment will you loose by waiting?

The long wait between the Mid-2009 and late 2010 refresh was an anomaly. The Air was updated 3 times in 18 months when it first came out (Jan 2008, Oct 2008, July 2009).

The point is: no-one knows how long till the next update. But currently the Airs are selling well, and the Sandy Bridge chipsets have been delayed due to a SATA error, so while I would have said a summer update would/could have been likely, that seems less likely now.

It'll surprise me if the Air goes more than 12 months again w/o an update.

I'm sitting here writing this on a quad core i7 iMac, 2.93Ghz with 12GB of RAM.

I've also got a 2.13 C2D MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM.

For simple use (web, Word, Excel, Mail, VMWare etc) the MBA destroys the iMac for speed. For ripping/reencoding, the iMac destroys every machine I've seen.

But for light tasks, the MBA is simply amazing. Flash vs traditional HD is the difference, clearly. Not the processor.

Yep! My question is: what happens when the 2010 MBA's get to be a year old, and the flash drives (w/o TRIM) have degraded in speed... then how are the 2010 Air's gonna fare?

I'll bet you now I'll still have the C2D MBA in three years' time.. and I'll still be happy with it.

It's not always the processor too - it's the Flash Drive, the RAM and the 320M. The current airs are a neat package... but I had a 1.6Ghz Late-2008 Air with SSD that at the time I thought was the fastest thing on the planet.

Cue 2 years later and I sold my revB Air 'cause it felt slower than any other computer that I own.

 

[ImAlwaysRight]

if you want to keep it for 4-5 years+ you should definitely wait, there's no place for a C2D in 2014.

Thanks for your post. I turned my '10 MacBook Air over and etched in 1 pt. font (use a magnifying glass to read it) it says "This laptop will explode at midnight on December 31, 2013."