“Users of the MacBook Air have long been waiting for the ‘fabled’ MacBook Air Retina,” Noemi Tasarra-Twigg writes for Apple Gazette. “After seeing the MacBook Pro Retina in action, it just feels like something is missing from the MacBook Air.”
“Apple.club.tw shares some interesting details about the new MacBook Air,” Tasarra-Twigg writes. “First off, we’re going to get more colors: silver, gold, and space gray. Then it seems that we might be getting iPhone 6 features on the MacBook Air Retina – on top of the retina factor, obviously… Sources pointed MBA / MBP addition to the new colors are on top of each section of the touchpad will function Touch ID Fingerprint.”
Tasarra-Twigg writes, “Another feature that will be included is Apple Pay, which also makes sense as Apple is pushing the system hard.”
Read more in the full article here.
I don’t think that we’ll see multiple colors. Apple likes to keep its product lines as small as it can and providing different colors would complicate that. Laptops are more utilitarian than phones are and I don’t think that colors would be a selling point. Touch-ID has been widely rumored and it would be a nice feature addition.
You seem to have forgotten the “lickable” color families of MacBook, iMac, iPod, iPhone 5c…
Indeed the roots of success was based on colourful machines back in the day. Worth the extra complexity of production? Not sure without knowing the figures, we shall see.
Not only production but inventory management and logistics. Toyota drastically reduced the color options in 2012 for the Camry which probably greatly simplified production and inventory management and reduced costs. Apple is about making great products and Tim Cook is known for keeping expenses down.
Granted, fewer colors translated to reduced complexity. But Apple maintains incredibly low inventory, getting as close as feasible to JIT. As a result, Apple can quickly adapt its output to reflect customer preferences in terms of color, size, storage, etc. by country, region, or state.
I would like Apple to start using harder alloys of aluminum, particularly in their mobile products. I have been lucky over the years with cell phones, iPads, etc., but the relatively soft aluminum used in iPhones and iPads does scratch and dent rather easily. Different, alloys, post-machining heat treatments, and anodized colors rather than paint would all help.
I had repairwork done recently on my 2014 rMBP and I was shocked that they had a replacement motherboard in stock at the local store as my model was BTO. It appears that Apple has popular BTO models in regional depots so that customers don’t have to wait for them to arrive from Shanghai. Colors would complicate carrying BTO models in regional depots. I guess that it wouldn’t matter for spares. On phones, don’t most people use a case? I suppose that some people use a clear case or bumper case but I use a Beetle Case and you can only tell that it’s an iPhone buy the round home button on the front. Almost everything else on the phone showing the color is obscured by the case.
You mean iBook. MacBooks were black or white, with black being a rarer form.
iBooks came out with the G3 CPU. They were marketed the same way as iMac of the candy color veriety. They didn’t get the same treatment as the iMac, but were aimed at education. They also had a flip out handle to carry them. Clam Shell iBook. Blue, Amber, and I guess a few other colors but I didn’t see other colors much. I had a blue one, running Mac OS 9. After that, when the Titanium ProBooks came out, we were all blinded by this brilliant light of awesomeness.
I’d LOVE to see touchID on the MacBook air. I’d also love to see apple offer web site developers an apple pay API providing truly SECURE one touch payments for any website from any TouchID apple device (such as the next MacBook air)
Not so sure about an apple predisposition against multiple colors on their product lines.
Jony Ive was the man behind apples original translucent iMacs with a range of candy colors, and also responsible for the color choices on the gen1 iPod mini (the first iPod to sell 2 million units in a quarter). He’s also the guy who approved the current silver gold and space grey iPhones.
The look of the MacBook has been pretty static for quite some time and this rumor makes sense to me.
With the push towards fashion, I could well imagine colour coordinated ‘sets’ of products.
Personally, I wouldn’t touch a ‘gold’ one with a barge pole.
Don’t underestimate what the choice of iPhone-like colors could do to rebrand Mac for existing iPhone owners who are not yet Mac users.
These people are probably proud of their iPhone’s look and the physical similarity will make the transition to Mac seem that much more obvious.
Hmm. “Sources pointed MBA / MBP addition to the new colors are on top of each section of the touchpad will function Touch ID Fingerprint.”
At first glance this didn’t make any kind of grammatical sense but now I see it is in a very clever cypher. Brilliant really.
MDN’s editors must have had a high-school intern doing the copy/paste work today.
Oh no, even better, I see in the linked article that the wording is Google Translate’s handiwork.
TouchID I could see, but I don’t see the need for Pay. What, you’re going to walk up to the register at Starbucks and waive your MacBook Air around? That would just be plain silly, and something straight out of Dell.