"Thanks largely to Apple themselves, we live in a world where we have digital music, photos, movies, and TV shows that take up dozens, if not hundreds of gigabytes of storage."
Ah nope. Fawning, not trolling.
He forgot to add indoor plumbing, the internal combustion engine, modern medicine, etc, to the list.
The disk has always been the bottleneck, Apple was smart enough to put a fast disk in the Air, and now this guy praises it.
This computer loads faster than the MBP because you've spent the past 6 months loading it with programs, guy. Format the MacBook Pro and it will be just as fast... Sure, the Air might be a great little computer, but for a $999 pricetag, I could get 3 netbooks instead.
"The new MacBook Air is amazing. It starts at $999 and I have been using the top-of-the-line 13" for a week! (of course not mentioning that it costs $1,599)"
I would love to see a tech person use the $999 version and see their review. The price-point, when actually comparing the usable one, is ridiculous!
EDIT: Full comment is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834157
Is this some sort of specific SSD fragmentation issue you're referring to? There are SSD issues of that type but I'd be surprised to see them in six months unless you're absolutely caning the drive.
General fragmentation wouldn't cause that sort of problem inside six months though. I've spent four years loading my MacBook with stuff (and uninstalling stuff, reinstalling stuff and so on) with no significant performance degradation. In that time I've never reinstalled the OS, never defragged or done any sort of significant maintenance other than keeping it patched and it's still basically as fast as it was on day one.
My Windows machine on the other hand...
I ask because in four years with my MacBook using it for a whole range of stuff (including development, multimedia, general admin,, and installing whole loads of software I've bought in bundle sales) I've honestly never seen this problem.
I'm not saying it can't happen but from my experience you'd really have to be going for it to build up that sort of accumulation of stuff in just six months.
My anecdotal evidence from helping friends and family is that Macs don't suffer from "Windows rot" [1] the same way that PCs do. My hypothesis: due to differences in the developer communities for each platform.
Do you have any support for that claim?
If you have a faster CPU, more (of the same speed) RAM and a faster SSD then it doesn't make any sense for it to be slower. Given that both are in a 64bit environment.
There is nothing magical happening! Get a new 900MB/s SSD and it'll be faster again, then I guess you'll move back.
He demonstrates ignorance in that article, by first mistaking his personal experience with technology for the experience of everybody else in the world.
And second by mistaking his own ability to pay $200 more for an Air over a Macbook for the ability of everybody else in the world to afford the extra money.
(It reminds me of the Reagan "If I listen to Dukakis long enough" quote - except it is "If I read MG long enough, I would be convinced that Apple..")
Didn't Apple have the first music store? Doesn't apple let you rent movies or TV shows? Didn't Apple create one of the first popular MP3 Players?
Though yes, Apple did do a huge part for boosting people's music collections. But let's not even pretend for movies and TV shows. That "honour" goes to some completely different groups... cough.
What Apple did, is they boosted the average person's music/tv/movie collection. People like my mom and sister. There's 1,000 of them, for every DCCing/Torrenting one of us.
Those "People" would actually be called teenagers, and I never met one who didn't know how to use Napster or Kazaa back when I was one of them.
Why did I buy a larger clunky gen 1 iPod from Apple when I had a Windows machine? Because I had a pile of music on my computer and the flash player I had before then (a Rio?) fit about 16 songs.
And lets be honest, people have multi-GB collections of music becasue of Napster, Kazaa, and bittorrent, not because of iTunes.