MacBook Air now marginally faster, $100 cheaper

[Scorpus]

Apple has quietly updated their MacBook Air offerings today, bringing a slight change to the system specifications to make the CPU faster, while also dropping the price by $100. At its new price, you can get an 11-inch MacBook Air for as low as $899, making it an even more attractive option for a device of this form factor.

The slight change to system specifications sees the CPU's clock speed boosted by 100 MHz: the standard clock speed for the dual-core Intel 'Haswell' processor is now 1.4 GHz, and the Turbo Boost speed is up to 2.7 GHz. It appears Apple has simply swapped out the Core i5-4250U for the Core i5-4260U, which was recently launched and, apart from clock speeds, is identical to its predecessor.

All other specifications remain the same. The 11.6-inch model features a 1366 x 768 display while the 13.3-inch model has a 1440 x 900 display, and both contain 4 GB of LPDDR3-1600 RAM, up to 512 GB of PCIe-based solid state storage, two USB 3.0 and two Thunderbolt ports, and Wi-Fi 802.11ac.

With the new pricing structure, the base model 11-inch is now $899, while the base model 13-inch is $999. Top-end 11- and 13-inch systems are $1,649 and $1,749 respectively, if you choose to upgrade to a 1.7 GHz Core i7-4650 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB solid state drive.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/56572-macbook-air-now-marginally-faster-100-cheaper.html

 

[VitalyT]

For anyone who ever used Macbook Pro with retina screen, Macbook Air seems far behind the curve. That's why they are upgrading it to retina with the next iteration.

 

[Guest]

Yes, Retina screen is fab. It might make scrolling jerky for complex and zoomed in web sites (not on latest Safari though), but once you've got it, there's no going back to normal screens.

 

[Guest17]

Ho hum.

 

[St1ckM4n]

*Sigh*

No change for Australia. Still $1,099.

 

[SNGX1275]

*Sigh*

No change for Australia. Still $1,099.

Bummer, I think NZ saw a pretty significant savings.

Also I'm not entirely sure the article is correct. I'm about to go to bed and thus don't feel like looking it up, but I'm pretty sure the SSD got moved from SATA to PCIe.

 

[St1ckM4n]

Bummer, I think NZ saw a pretty significant savings.

Also I'm not entirely sure the article is correct. I'm about to go to bed and thus don't feel like looking it up, but I'm pretty sure the SSD got moved from SATA to PCIe.

Correct, it is PCIe now. Not sure what it was before, I have a feeling it's been PCIe for a year now?

 

[SNGX1275]

Yeah, mid 2013 Air moved from SATA (or mSATA?) to PCIe.

I posted that because I think the original posting of the article said sata.