New MacBook (Air?) 2018

Anyone else excited for the potential release of a new Macbook/Macbook Air next week? It seems all but certain that it will be unveiled.

Key considerations which may determine whether it is a success or not (other than price)

- Screen/Bezels. Will it give it a meaningful update.
- CPU. Will it use Kaby Lake Refresh (old) or Whiskey Lake (new).
- TouchID. Rumors of it including TouchID have been circulating, but if they don't deliver this, they will be behind all those that offer Window's Hello
- Battery. The previous Air was loved for it's really long battery life, will it continue to deliver.

Will be interesting to see what direction Apple goes with this, it could be a huge hit.

The original Air came out 10 years ago, back in 2008, so Apple may make a big deal out of it.

 

I highly doubt that it would have Touch ID, I mean everything else has Face ID and all of a sudden this new product has Touch ID? That does not seem likely to me..

 

Macbook Air is secretly my favorite Apple laptop, I hope it gets a decent refresh instead of being truncated. MBA is faster, more useful, cheaper than the "Macbook" lol. Coupled with student savings and best buy events, I was able to get a 13" model for 750$ brand new a couple years back.

 

The only way they could implement FaceID is if they use the solution Window's laptops use, which is IR only (not that secure) - which I don't think they will do. The FaceID they use on the phone (with its dot projector), from what I've read, technology isn't there to implement on the laptop without making the screen significantly thicker.

Perhaps they have made those advances, though I doubt it since the MacBook Pro's still don't have it.

 

For developers (who most of the time are writing code), it is the best because for us, comfort is king on the go. It will be slower when doing builds/etc but most of the time, since you're just writing, it is a good balance between performance and usability.

If I was a video/photo editor with large exports/encoding which take sometimes over 10-20 minutes, I can see why an Air won't cut it. But in development, this is rarely the case, even more so as we use a lot of VM's etc in our work which do the major horsepower stuff.

 

All MacBook Pros have touch ID. Why would it surprise you if the new Air would have it too?

 

900p screen

 

13" display

 

I'd at least go with FHD even on a 13" display tbh

 

I’d be surprised if Apple even replaces the MBA. Isn’t the MacBook 12” basically the modern MBA already?