Marco Arment: The new MacBook Air
marco.org
marco.org
With regard to slow networking, I wonder if a gigabit ethernet/USB adapter like the Belkin F5D5055 would help. Obviously USB 2.0 maxes out at around 30-35MB/s, but if the adapter can actually attain those speeds it should be fast enough when you need a bit more than Wifi.
Generally, I'm very tempted to go for the maxed-out version of the 13" MBA. I'll probably take a look at the screen at a retail store though, I'm not keen on the glossy finish, and my old 2006 MacBook has terrible angle dependent colour representation. Going to make this the motivator for launching my first product. :)
Still, that's 3-4 times slower than USB (in theory).
That said, there are existing solutions for this, they just suck, e.g.:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/laptop-hdd (only 4GB Flash, WTF?)
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/02/03/silverstone... (this is just a dumb partial RAID)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost (designed to work with USB sticks of all things, and isn't terribly smart about what to cache)
Plus, that sort of file-based system doesn't cache file system structure/metadata, which is a major source of disk head movement.
If you only store your OS and programs on the boot drive, space isn't a big concern and you gain a lot of flexibility. It's less hassle to repave the OS, migrating your data to new machines is simple, and it's easier to upgrade the boot drive as faster ones are available. That's especially nice with SSDs because you no longer have to care very much about the write limit. If my SSD boot drive wears out, I have 0 data recovery/restoration to worry about.
I'm thinking of it myself, but I also thought it out further and concluded that it could be completely automated. In my case, if one just kept all files larger than 100MB on the HDD, that would be enough. Better still, I could specify certain directories to be kept on the HDD. I could do all of the above with symlinks, but setting that up once and getting the desired result automatically could be even better.
The optical drive has been very much neglected by Apple: there is no Blu-ray drive in any Mac they sell. Removing all optical drives in the next year or so certainly wouldn’t surprise me. (I actually hope that they will do just that. I’m going to buy a 15" MBP next year and I sure would like it to be a bit lighter and with a somewhat bigger battery.)
It has a few huge improvements:
* Much higher resolution: 1440x900, up from 1280x800. This brings it from the 13” class to the 15” class. I’ve always wanted a light 13” notebook with a 15”-class screen resolution, and Apple just released one.
* SSDs only. The old Air base-model’s 1.8” hard drives were unbearably slow. SSDs have always been the only sensible option for the Air, and it’s nice that they’re now the only option.
* Two USB ports instead of one. This matters more than you’d think.
* An SD-card reader (13” only). Useful if you often needed that USB port for a card reader, although this isn’t a great photo-management computer.
* Ports that are perpendicular to the desk and aren’t behind a flip-down door. So you can probably use any square-ended MagSafe adapter you already own to charge it without hanging the corner off the desk like with the old MacBook Air.
"""
My Lenovo x200s from like two years ago has a 12.1" 1440x900 screen, an SSD (option when I bought it, I did not, but the option was there), three USB ports (though I tried to plug in a bus-powered external drive today and the two plugs it had did not reach the spread of the ports on the laptop, thankfully it worked fine without the second plugged in), and an SD card reader. Just sayin'.
They 13-inch air and x20[01]s are very similar. Thinkpad advantages might be gig-e, vga port, thinkpad keyboard (if you like it), and possible i5 in the 201, and its built out of normal parts. To match the air's battery though, you have to get the big one, which bumps weight up to about 3.5 pounds, and the thinkpad costs more. The air does have nvidia graphics too.
I'd be tempted by the air if I hadn't bought the thinkpad a year ago, which to me, is the ultimate advantage it has.
Not sure how much this matters, but the Lenovo is also using Intel Graphics, how well does it work on external monitors? Can it power a 2560x1600 30 inch monitor?
I'll give you the 12.1 inch screen though, I'm jealous of that. I would like to see it even higher resolution.
I'm just saying on paper hardware specs are not everything. I'd much rather have usability than a faster machine with more ports and options available. That's why I buy what my friends dub as overpriced Apple hardware.
It does exactly what I want and nothing more.
Yes it does.
> Not sure how much this matters, but the Lenovo is also using Intel Graphics, how well does it work on external monitors? Can it power a 2560x1600 30 inch monitor?
Yes it can.
OS X runs on thinkpads, mine has all drivers but the wireless driver, see http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page for more details and instructions.
I regularly drive a 2560x1600 external monitor with no issues.
Core 2 Duo U7700 @ 1.33Ghz, 1366x768 11.1" WXGA LCD, 128 Gig SSD, 2 Gig RAM, 2 USB, a/b/g/n WiFi, Sprint Mobile Broadband, BlueTooth, DVD±RW DL, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Firewire, V.90 Modem, VGA out, ExpressCard, Memory Stick, and SD slots, 1.3Mp Camera, Fingerprint reader, 10+ hours actual use on medium size battery, carbon fiber body, less than 1 inch thick and 2.7 pounds. Also has 'instant on' to watch DVDs, music, or photos without booting the OS.
It may be 2 years old but is still only 0.4 pounds heavier than the Mini-Air and 0.13 inches thicker. And it offers a LOT more features wise.
In the more general market of consumers that want a ~3 pound 13" device, the ones that see Win7 vs. OS X as an important differentiating factor are a small minority. For the market served by the underpowered Air, a Win 7 laptop will "just work" every bit as well as a Macbook.
That's 18% heavier
> and 0.13 inches thicker
And 20% thicker at the Air's thickest point (640% at the Air's thinnest point)
Between the all-aluminum enclosure and the glass screen, you'll have a laptop that will always look almost as good as the day you bought it, and that means great things for resale value.
On the other hand, my original plastic MacBook looked very aged after two years of heavy use.
Thank goodness I almost never put disks in the drive the case around the opening is so bent I don't think I can anything in or out of there.
(The screen still looks pretty good even if I can't ever seem to get the brightness to where I want it).
I put mine in my messenger bag and have ridden to work every for a year with it and the only thing with any signs of wear are the feet.
My other notebooks look terrible too, but I attribute that to cheap plastic. Little pieces broken off on the corners, battery that won't stay in place, etc.
I use computers hard if you can't tell.
At this point, I doubt I'd buy another laptop without the all metal unibody construction.
It gives it character, and so far every time that I have been at the Apple Store they have looked at it, I've had to tell them that no that was there a long time before the issue I am there to fix appeared and they should replace the hardware that is failing (I've had bad luck with the Nvidia graphics card in it).
Still works perfectly and looks a hell of a lot better than the Dell laptops and HP laptops my friends have. It also has stood the test of time MUCH better than any other laptops I've owned, including various IBM ThinkPads, Toshiba's and whatnot. I love my MacBook Pro to death. People keep telling me to buy a new Windows based laptop but I refuse :P
Anyhow I always found it to be unbearably slow - particularly when browsing to a new web server in a session. As if the dns lookup was.... thrashing somehow. I figured I was too dimwitted to figure out the problem after doing a bit of research, so it's rotting on the shelf.
Also, Marco is right - it's way too big to use in coach when the person in front leans back. Thankfully.... Ipad for air travel. Be curious to see what the 11" is like.
Actually, the battery life is measured using a more real world benchmark now. Jobs mentioned it has improved quite a bit compared to the macbook pro.
I work in a medical school neuroscience lab with a bunch of grad students and postdocs. Everyone has a Mac laptop, paid for by the lab. Two postdocs have MacBooks. Everyone else has a MacBook Pro. Except the PI who runs the lab, who has an MBA. The only one in the lab. He values small size and weight more than anyone else. He also travels more than anyone else.
I don't see many MBAs around campus.
Likewise when I went to the student union to grab some dinner. Hundreds of students all with laptops open, a handful of Macs. I'd say at rates about at the same as market penetration...~10%.
It may be a geographic thing. Certain regions may make MBPs more appealing, or certain schools may subsidize the purchase more. I've noticed similar rates at other schools in the area.
I think here that Jobs was referring to pixel density.
That said, my guess is that it's a major battery-suck, and that's why they took it out. White LEDs require non-trivial amounts of power.
This also introduces a new class of touch-input aware Mac apps, which Apple can channel through its new App store.
I've walked into the Houston Galleria Apple Store with a hand truck. Sure, some smarmy guy made some comment like, "What is, this, Walmart?" but who cares? I have a bad back, FFS. Anyone who'd make a comment like that is most assuredly lamer than an empiricist who does whatever it takes.
Kind of like the tablet laptops Toshiba was shipping about 7 years ago. You open the laptop and it's a Macbook with touchscreen display and keyboard. You swivel the screen flat onto the keyboard and it's an iPad. Maybe some apps work in only one mode or the other, but your files will be available to both kinds of apps, X and iOS.
Now, you can get the Air and an ipad for a lot cheaper than any of those tablets.
If I had a device that worked like a MacBook and an iPad, so I could use it like a laptop at a cafe and like a pad on the train, that would be a pretty damn neat device to have. And eventually, I probably will.
People make a big deal about tablets. Personally, I don't see them as the next big thing. Do you think Apple is straying away from them, given their somewhat underwhelming sales?
The hardware configuration inside of an iPad is destined to become commodity. Eventually, those things will be like displays and mice. The value for Apple will be in the software and software-ecosystem running on the iDevices of the future. (Also in the cloud.)
More comfortable and natural input and display naturally sell. Such tablets are both!
I think MPAirs are the slowest selling laptop. They compete with other Apple products more directly than Ipads. On the the hand, Ipads, are outselling all macs (in units) already and it's still very early days. Even if sales stay put (seems unlikely), they have an incredible new product line. They are a big thing in that sense, at least.
These might be a replacement for macbooks. At the moment 13' macbook is just a cheap alternative to the superior 13' macbook pro, it isn't best for anything but your wallet. That seems to make it unique among Apple products. A 13' MBAir is more lighter, quicker and looks different. You can imagine people preferring it regardless of price.
Steve specifically said he saw these as the future Macbook. They have higher resolution screens than the 13 inch Macbook Pro and have flash drives standard. Also, mentioning the no optical drive as the future if I remember correctly. It makes me super excited about the next Macbook Pro, especially the 13 inch (the 15 inch and 17 inch are way to big in my opinion).
That's one more than they had in the past. ;-)
I mean really, didn't Jobs explicitly say that they would not release a device in this form factor? If this isn't Apple's take on a netbook I don't know what is.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358514,00.asp
At least do something cool with it like let me flip the screen around and use it as a tablet or put a micro projector on it or something for that money.
Jobs said they couldn't make something in that price class without it being crap.
(burn baby burn!)
In other words, it's because of the apple fanboys that are willing to write blank checks just to get their newest white gizmo =) And those fanboys are the same that downvoted both you and elblanco.
PS: Maybe it's just me, but this fanboyism seems more proper over reddit than here.
I'm not an Apple fanboy, quite indifferent to the supposed merits of OS X and haven't owned a Mac in years. However I am in the market for a small, lightweight laptop and the 11" mba is very competitively priced compared to similar laptops from people like Lenovo, Sony and Toshiba. I'm going to reserve judgement until some more reviews come out and I get chance to see it in the flesh, but as it stands the new mba is probably going to be my first new Mac in years.
But if I had said, "an 11in. MBA has about the same user experience as a netbook", somebody would bring out a point for point feature comparison, and tout the processor or something.
Let's face it, despite unrelenting FUD from Apple regarding this exact type of ultra-portable form factor since netbooks first hit the market, there is fantastic utility in having something in your bag about the size of a hard-cover book that you can do general purpose computing on even if it doesn't offer the "full" experience that the larger products do. It's light, it fits pretty much anywhere, you can do real work on it, the battery life tends to be pretty good.
In typical fashion, Apple's taken a look at the segment, and consumer demand (don't kid yourself that people haven't been pining away for a Mac in this form factor since netbooks first came out), taken their own spin on it (let's make it small and thin, with a better screen, only SSD drives, and a beefier processor!) and put out a credible, nice looking product with the typical Apple tax associated with it -- nothing terribly surprising. But now, because of the relentless slamming of the form factor called "netbooks" (they've poisoned that well), so they call it a "notebook", but it's not just a notebook, it's a special line of notebooks designed to be super-thin with a subset of the normal ports you'd find on their larger cousins.
But seriously, the 11" MBA is Apple's spin on making a nice netbook.
Is there something wrong with that? I'm tempted to buy one because that's precisely what it is. I almost couldn't imagine running around without my netbook these days. Having a credible Apple made option is fantastic.
So here's my computing needs in this form factor. I'm an amateur travel photographer and a musician, I take lots and lots of photos and write lots and lots of music. Having something small that's a real computer with decent storage is very important to me. I don't want to drag along a bunch of external peripherals like hard drives or the like because I'm already dragging around a camera bag full of a heavy camera body and some lenses. This form factor works for me because I can actually open and use the machine in incredibly tight spaces, like coach seating on a plane and I pretty much don't even notice it in my bag when I'm running around. Plus I offload my day's shots to the computer every day and review and do some light editing back in my hotel room or on the plane (or ship or whatever). After a week or two of shooting, I easy take 50-80 GB of photos. Plus software and other junk (I like to play back a collection of old jazz 45s I have on the machine as mp3s while I edit my photos), I pretty regularly fill out the 160GB drive on my current machine.
I'm pretty happy with the form factor of my 9" 2 and a half year old netbook. But I wish I had a bit more ram, a bit more resolution on the screen and a 250GB drive.
So to answer your question, here's something for 2x less http://www.amazon.com/Seashell-1201PN-PU17-BK-12-1-Inch-Netb...
Here's something better for 2x less http://www.amazon.com/T101MT-EU17-BK-10-1-Inch-Convertible-T...
Actually, considering I'd have to get a 120GB MBA to even realistically use it with my use-case, these are 3x less.
If you really think that those things you pointed to are not so different, we have nothing to discuss.
Glad I typed that up front so you wouldn't miss it.
This review http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/apple-macbook-air/4505-3121_...
Directly compares it to these devices http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/sony-vaio-tz150n-black/4505-...
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/toshiba-portege-r500-s5002/4...
Is that better?
Or are you purely down to just pure fundamentalism, "I'll ignore the stuff that's better about everything you've shown me and call it immaterial and nitpick on the lack of some other feature that's only important in the marketing blurbs put out by Apple (type of screen, SSD, trackpad, material selection of the hinge)".
Tell you what, why don't you go do some research on your own. It's not like it's hard to find better spec'd devices for cheaper than pretty much anything in Apple's lineup. That's a silly debate to have.
The question is, does what Apple offer suit the needs of its users? I'm describing my own personal needs. But I'm not doing anything particularly weird. Just shooting photos. I've also since notice it doesn't even have an SD card slot so I have to rely on the slower USB connection from my camera (and carry around yet another cable). And yet the 11" completely doesn't fulfill my rather modest requirements, even at 3x as much as something that minimally does.
So taking pictures is right out.
What can I do with it? Apple's own marketing copy pretty much describes hauling it around for writing stuff (blogs, slides, etc.). I suppose one can use a web browser with it. So there you go...the description of a netbook. That's Apple's expected use case for the 11" MBA. Welcome to $1200 netbook land.
But at least it's thin! Because it was always so hard to find space in my backpack for my 1.14" thick netbook. Man, the number of times I've lamented, "if only I could get half of that thickness back! I could jam another dozen sheets of paper in there!"
Seriously, this isn't religion, it's a computer. Come off it and drop the fundamentalism.
(I have a policy of always downvoting whines about being downvoted and "I know I'll be downvoted for this ..." comments and so forth, because (1) they're boring and (2) I have a nasty suspicion that they produce net-positive results for their authors and want to make them not do so.)
The new MBA falls into the class of devices known as ultraportables. It's a full powered machine in a very small form factor/weight factor.
I've used it in a pinch to replace my desktop when my 5 year old power supply bit the dust. It did "ok".
If you compare it to other ultra-portables, the MBA seems to be competitively priced compared some of the ultra high end stuff.
But you can still get ultraportables for about 1/2 of the MBA with competitive specs.
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/dell-inspiron-m101z/4505-312...
The fundamentalism of the Apple fanboyism here on HN is quite intense and rabid compared to most places. At least that's my observation. It's pretty much impossible to have a constructively critical discussion about pretty much anything Apple does on HN. If you also notice, there's very rarely any dissenting comments either. No engagement in discussion, no debate, no back-and-forth like we'd have here on pretty much any topic.
I personally think it's a disservice (and disrespectful) to Apple and to HN considering what kind of site this is. If you can't critically comment on things that a company does right and wrong, and learn from that discussion and analysis, you may as well not even participate here.
It's just the worst kind of fundamentalism in action.