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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Apple has an amusingly-worded bit about their CPU on their features page:

> MacBook Air weighs less than three pounds, but it’s a heavyweight where it counts. Intel Core 2 Duo processors get the work done fast. So you can be every bit as productive on MacBook Air — but in more places. Live-blog the event of the year straight from the convention floor. Perfect your sales-winning presentation from the airport terminal. Cite references down to a T from the library stacks. MacBook Air lets you do everything you need to do whenever and wherever it needs to be done.

Everything you need to do, such as writing, writing, and writing. Those examples seem like they would be more appropriate if Apple had chosen an Atom processor. They don't exactly instill me with 'heavyweight where it counts' confidence.

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I used to do image deconvolution of the original (flawed) Hubble images on a Sun Sparc5. Exactly what are you people using your Macbook Air for while sitting in starbucks ?

Is there a big underground CFD or N-Body scene among the trendy teens that I'm not aware of? Or is everybody into computational chem and protein folding to develop the next party drug?

Right. Folks nowadays carry around an embarrassment of riches in terms of CPU power. People feel poor if they can only sit with a phenomenal amount of computing power in their local cafe, as opposed to phenomenal times 3.

While we do have a phenomenal amount of power in our hands, the fact is that the rest of the industry has grown in step with the hardware in a lot of ways. Browsing the web (admittedly as a power user) is one of the most intensive things I do aside from compiling software.

the fact is that the rest of the industry has grown in step with the hardware in a lot of ways

This tells me that there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of huge inefficiencies in our computing infrastructure. I think Steve Jobs and others at Apple went down this mental path when formulating the iPhone/iPad. Actually, Opera Mini is a powerful demonstration of this idea!

>This tells me that there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of huge inefficiencies in our computing infrastructure.

VMware has benefited from the CPU race. ESX is an easy sell for fotune 1000 datacenters that have huge amount of idle cpu horsepower.

heh. I did an internship at NASA that basically involved image alignment of IUE starfields compared to another dataset. All done on a Sun 4. I would surf with Netscape while the conversions were running, which took anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes each.

Well it is a bit of a bummer when I have to repeat my voice commands and dictation to my phone because it lost its connection to the big server farm that does the speech recognition.

You know, with all the talk of portability and 'mac meets iPad,' why isn't the air available with built-in 3G and iPad-like data plans?

I've been wondering that for years. Many netbooks and ultra-portable laptops have this at least as an option these days. I'm going to have to get one of those battery powered 3G->Wifi routers, my USB modem sticking out the side scares me (people walking past it are a liability). Annoying - another device to drag around - but I guess it'll probably come in handy in other ways.

But reading, browsing, and writing is probably what most people spend their time doing on a computer.

"Transcode video formats while sitting in a cafe" doesn't exactly have the same ring.

And browsing can be a pretty CPU heavy thing, these days. Not on the scale of video encoding, but enough to bring an ARM or Atom processor to its knees.

Not when you stop shipping flash with the OS.

MBAs have OSX, which I can't imagine is going to be losing Flash any time soon.

shipping with flash... http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/21/new-macbook-air-shipping-with...

There may be a surprise coming your way.

See the link[1] and thread[2] about Flash-less MBAs.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/20/macbook-air-all-substance...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814713

Well it doesn't come with Windows 7 by default either. It's just one of those things that everyone has to install whenever they reinstall windows. I also don't believe it comes with snow leopard either -- maybe the only change was remove the option of installing 3rd party plugins in Safari.

Did they also disable JavaScript?

Pages with heavy Javascript can cause issues too. For example, open up a large reddit thread on a netbook and wait. However, I don't know whether the MBA's processor will be better enough to handle that.

And not shipping with Flash doesn't mean Flash is now useless. Plenty of video sites out there haven't switched to HTML5, not to mention product sites or Flash game sites.

Oh who cares, really. It just forces the user to go out and download the latest version if they really want Flash, which means Apple won't take the blame for buyers getting machines with outdated security-compromised versions of Flash.

Sure, but video chatting is getting to be pretty popular as well (which, at least on the previous Air, tended to bring the processor to its knees).

I'm using a 13" MBP (with Core 2 Duo processor) for doing music recording / production. I only record a couple tracks at a time (but mix and playback more), so this may not count as uber-power-usage, but it's more than text editing, and it works fine.

You're probably not using a low-voltage version of the processor though. This could make a difference (I'm assuming that Apple is using the lv or ulv version of the Core2Duo in the MBA).

> I'm assuming that Apple is using the lv or ulv version of the Core2Duo in the MBA

They do already (the low-profile LV and ULV), and I'm pretty sure they'll keep on doing just that. I'm not even sure there's a non-ULV C2D at such low frequencies.

There is no performance difference for Core2Duo generation CPUs with identical clock speeds and cache size but different TDP ratings. The LV/ULV ones are the same chips as "regular" mobile (or even desktop) dice but hand-picked for their low consumption. It gets murkier with the Core iX generation due to the automatic overclocking mechanism.

I make electronic music. And I basically stop making a track and render when I literally cannot do anything more to it. I don't like bouncing thing down but by the end of my productions I literally have every single track frozen (so that I can still mess around with the MIDI/automation and such.)

I put a ton of stuff on my aux busses that I can't freeze so that's where the CPU goes but man, I would LOVE LOVE LOVE if I have something faster (4 GB MPB 15" 2.53 GHZ Core 2 Duo.)

And really why settle for what we have anyway -- don't get me wrong I'm very happy with the way things are now and humbly understand what it was like back in the day...but this is how we advance things by questioning and being unsatisfied with what we have now and making the future.

[For those curious: http://soundcloud.com/gau5/spotlight -- to listen and download here, any other music people on here send me some links! :)]

Nice tracks. I had never heard of soundcloud before.

I did not mean to imply that we should settle for current technology, nor that the Core 2 Duo processor was the most totally awesomest thing ever. I just meant to posit that it was perfectly adequate for more than the most trivial of computing tasks, and, implicitly, many MBA users will probably be fine with it.

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