The MacBook Air has no clothes | Hacker News Reader

The MacBook Air has no clothes

blogs.zdnet.com

17 pointsedw51920 comments

A couple people I know and whose opinions on such matters I trust say that the MBA does just fine performance-wise. Obviously this guy has a different feel, but honestly--an Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB is quite a bit of computing horsepower. About what my MacBook Pro has and I've never seen it get sluggish. A bit puzzled by this.

The processor is the MacBook Air is different (lower voltage, lower clock speed, lower performance). Add in a slower hard drive (only 4200 RPM) and the difference in performance between it and your MacBook Pro is no surprise.

Add the Solid State disk though, and from what I hear, compiling code is extremely fast.

Of course, I could never justify the cost of the SSD today.

I didn't go for the SSD and the performance is fine for me.

I should have qualified extremely fast: From what I hear, it can make compiling go faster than the MBP, despite the slower processor, solely because disk reading is so much faster. With a large project and lots of small files, disk access adds up.

On Gentoo, where compiling occurs nearly every time a program is installed, one common method used to speed up compiling is to use the -pipe option to gcc as well as to mount memory onto /var/tmp/portate (the location where files are written before actually being installed). These two measures alone can speed up compile times dramatically, as the disk is never touched in the middle of compiles. Instead, the only time reads occur is as the source is read in, and writes only occur when the final binaries, libraries, and configuration files are installed to their homes on the file system.

If your source files are located contiguously on the hard drive [1] and writes are cached to occur in big blocks, while also using some compile-in-memory techniques like those outlined above, I imagine compile times would not vary much on flash-disk MBAs as compared to those with conventional laptop drives.

[1] This could be accomplished by keeping your project in a compressed file and loopback-mounting it to your project's working directory.

Yes. It's the same with every portable device: Customers complain if the thing weighs too much, they complain if the thing runs too slowly, and they complain if the battery life is too short. Unfortunately, since it is nigh-impossible to improve all three of these factors at once without fundamentally improving battery technology [1] -- a glacially slow process compared to Moore's Law -- to build a portable device is to sign up for a torrent of customer complaints.

I'm sure that various aspects of the Air's performance have been deliberately throttled to ensure that its cute little credit-card-thin battery doesn't crap out after half an hour. One thing to try is simply plugging it in. There's no mention here of whether that made a difference.

And Parallels? Geez. How many computers worth of computer does this guy expect to fit in a manila envelope?

[1] You would think that each generation of improved processor designs would improve performance. And it does. But every time processors speed up, our desktop-wielding developers dream up an incredibly fun, more-processor-intensive thing to do with all those new cycles, like render more polygons or playback multiple Flash videos or use IMAP or do real-time JOINs between your friends' friends' Facebooks, and these two factors roughly cancel out.

One word: Fujitsu.

Just bought one of their S6410s. 13-inch screen ultralight with good performance and great battery life. Don't know if the machines are available in the US yet, but the laptop rocks. Small enough you can use it on a plane with the screen fully open, or throw it in a knapsack. Large enough to be my main computer, although I like to browse the web with F11.

My gripe with the Mac is that it's too expensive for what you get. I've never been inclined to put a laptop in a manilla envelope though, so I'd guess I'm not their market. Only problem with Fujitsu is that the company seems actively disinterested in selling their products (took ages to find a local reseller) and the company has literally nothing in the way of Linux support, not even "unofficial" drivers. They also do that awful "backup as a partition" that screws up when you repartition the hard drive to do things like install useful software.

Ubuntu is up and running now though, and it's great.

I suspect the 4200 RPM drive to be the culprit of most performance woes on the MBA.

How would the CPU and disk performance of the MBA compare to a Powerbook G4? That's what I use now.

The CPU will be faster, and the disk will be faster if your PB also has a 48k RPM drive (higher data-density at the same RPM == more bytes read per rotation). Otherwise you'd actually have to look at the transfer and seek rates of the drive

Yah - except you can easily (and cheaply) upgrade the PB to a 72K RPM drive, something not possible with the MBA - given it's 1.8" form factor.

I would suspect, with an upgraded drive, a 1.5Ghz PB would be more responsive opening applications & starting, while the MBA might be able to handle more simultaneous apps running, due to the 2GB ram and faster processor.

Yeah, talk about an inflammatory title...

Now, if he had said that "The MacBook Air Is Wearing Those Awful Low Slung Jeans That I Hate", rather than claiming that it is actually naked, maybe he would have a point.

Jason, maaaate, let me explain something to you: with your needs, the MacBook Air is not a good choice. Apple makes a machine for you, it's called a MacBook Pro. Three types of spaghetti sauce and all that good stuff...

An MBA with the SSD drive also seems like it would perform well for him. But then, the MBP should be cheaper.

I have a laptop with similar specs that I use for Linux, and I have no real problems at all. I have a 1.6 GHz Athlon 64 X2 with 1 GB ram. The only major difference (other than memory) is that I have 2 better hard drives, with the root directory on an 80 GB 7200 RPM drive, and a 100 GB 5400 RPM drive for music and backups. Moreover, I use cpufreq to scale my frequency down to 800 MHz during low usage.

With all that said, I can kill and restore Firefox (with 20 plugins) with 16 tabs open (including a YouTube video) in about 10 seconds, at the same time that I am running Pidgin (IM client), 4 terminal sessions, compiling a kernel, and copying /dev/random to another machine over SSH (through fuse). In my opinion, that is quite acceptable, considering that such extreme usage is completely atypical.

To call a dual-core, 1.6 GHz processor with 2 GB ram "pokey" seems to me to be a bit absurd. This coming from someone who's never owned a Mac and who would never buy an Air. (I tend to use my DVDRW drive a lot, and occasionally use Gigabit Ethernet.)

This review irks me. The reviewer seems to have no idea about what contributes or detracts from the performance of different kinds of apps. The most likely culprit for the slow performance is the 4200 RPM drive. The processor and 2GB of RAM should do fine for most purposes.

I was one of the first people to buy a MBA and I love it for what I use it for. If I was doing video editing or intensive photoshop work it would definitely not be my choice, but its absolutely perfect for what I need - a truly portable machine that is powerful enough to let me do my job. Indeed, I have been pleasantly surprised with how I've not missed the multiple ports and have only needed to use the DVD drive twice (I purchased the external). After using this machine I've gone back to my MacBook Pro (15") a couple of times and I know that I made the right choice now for a PORTABLE machine.

That's why I thought this was an interesting post. If I were doing live video switching or something it would have been obvious that an Air might not get the job done.

But I would have expected the kinds of things he describes doing -- some tabs in a browser, mail, Parallels -- to be fine.

The MacBook Air is wonderful for some people.

If you travel a lot, you care about size and weight more than normal people. If you're like me and 95% of your time is spent in vim and Firefox, you probably don't care about speed all that much.

Every product does not have to be all things to all people and the MacBook Air is a niche product.

On the travel aspect, I wish Apple had made a "MacBook Mini" (something with a form factor closer to the Asus EEE) instead of the MacBook Air.

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