March 19th, 2020 at 1:09 AM
It's the storage and the lack of upgradability that really kills them. For the longest time, their base models came with 128 GB of storage (unacceptable in 2020 when Word alone is 10GB), and you couldn't upgrade it.
256 GB is still not good for a 1,000 dollar laptop, but at least you can actually fit everything you need on it and still have some room to spare. If I'm doing music production, I will still need to go get an external drive, but hey, I could give Windows 64GB, and have 192 GB for programs, a small linux virtual machine, and some files, and all the big stuff could go to an external drive. 256GB is absolutely workable.
The other thing was the dual core CPUs. I'm fine with dual cores. My 2012 has been through hell and back with an Ivy Bridge dual core, and it's fast enough for everything I need to do, but when most laptops are shipping with four in that price range, it always surprised me that Apple went with two. For the most part, their specs were good before, but the storage and CPU cores were a bit of a black mark. They've really stepped up their game it seems.
Music production and gaming is where four cores shine the most. And the new macbook air might actually be capable of handing some games now, and probably will do just fine against previously more powerful laptops with dedicated graphics.
256 GB is still not good for a 1,000 dollar laptop, but at least you can actually fit everything you need on it and still have some room to spare. If I'm doing music production, I will still need to go get an external drive, but hey, I could give Windows 64GB, and have 192 GB for programs, a small linux virtual machine, and some files, and all the big stuff could go to an external drive. 256GB is absolutely workable.
The other thing was the dual core CPUs. I'm fine with dual cores. My 2012 has been through hell and back with an Ivy Bridge dual core, and it's fast enough for everything I need to do, but when most laptops are shipping with four in that price range, it always surprised me that Apple went with two. For the most part, their specs were good before, but the storage and CPU cores were a bit of a black mark. They've really stepped up their game it seems.
Music production and gaming is where four cores shine the most. And the new macbook air might actually be capable of handing some games now, and probably will do just fine against previously more powerful laptops with dedicated graphics.
