The future of notebooks: Ars reviews the 11" MacBook Air | Hacker News Reader

The future of notebooks: Ars reviews the 11" MacBook Air

arstechnica.com

57 pointsabraham67 comments

I just got an 11" yesterday (1.6GHz, 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM)

First impressions: it feels faster than my ~2 year old 2.x GHz MacBook (with a hard drive and 2GB of RAM). I imagine bumping up the RAM and installing a SSD would change that, but the point is it's not too slow. I certainly don't feel crippled by it.

The screen is great, I don't feel too constrained compared to my MacBook. I could see myself using this as my main dev machine, especially with an external monitor/mouse/keyboard.

The only thing I kind of miss so far is the backlit keyboard, but as I get used to the key locations that will fade.

We'll see how it holds up once I install a bunch of crap. Usually my machines start getting sluggish after a few months for some reason... (I wish there were an app or something that would tell me why. Looking at CPU/RAM usage doesn't seem to help. I want automated tracking of newly installed software + performance metrics correlated)

"Usually my machines start getting sluggish after a few months for some reason..."

The Windows effect. Doesn't seem to happen in Linux...

I assumes he use mac os x on his macs :)

Exactly my point: OS X seems to suffer from the Windows Effect as well.

yes. HFS+ suffering from fragmentation. plus bloatware.

> The Windows effect

Perhaps better phrased as "The UI effect"?

edit: Btw, noticed the same thing on a Powerbook that I owned a couple of years back. Wasn't doing all that much with it, aside from browsing the internet, but I had to nuke 'n pave it every six months because things slowed down to a crawl.

PCs haven't been CPU constrained (for mundane tasks) for quite some time. The long-pole has been hard drive I/O, switching to an SSD will boost perceived (and actual) performance substantially.

Agreed. I suspect that Apple have also correctly identified that most of the CPU intensive tasks that people do carry out aren't going to be the sort of things people are using an 11" MBA for.

I've heard that, especially with a traditional hard drive in OSX, you should make sure you have a decent part of the drive free to it can keep itself defraged.

> Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably—as much as 20 percent in our testing.

Enough said. I've zillion of Safari windows running on multiple Spaces, and when on the road/rail with MacBook, I always disable the Flash plugin altogether. Despite my use of click2flash, HTML5-enabled video on YouTube & Vimeo, I still see "idling" Flash-plugin process continuously taking few percents of CPU, no matter what.

I wonder if these are "invisible" Flash apps. I've heard that Click2Flash lets through something like any 1x1 Flash apps because those are almost always just used for Flash cookies and the like. Would be disappointing (though not shocking!) to hear that some of them are poorly written and use CPU even when idle.

If Apple's Click2Flash is really letting 1x1 apps through, that kind of kill Safari as a reasonable Firefox alternative in my book.

Click2Flash is a 3rd party extension. I just realized the "allow small Flash objects" thing is in the preferences:

[ ] Allow Flash if size is at most _______

On my machine which hasn't been changed from defaults, it says "1x1" but is not checked. So, unless Yaggo has changed their settings, my hypothesis of why they're still seeing Flash is incorrect.

Weird. I'm using version 1.6b9 which claims to be most recent but it does not have such an option.

I'm on 1.8. It's now a Safari extension - if you're running Safari 5 you can go to the Safari menu then click Safari Extensions Gallery, it's on there. The Click2Flash project page doesn't do a good job of pointing this out!

It seems like replacing the ads with poorly coded Javascript/HTML5 versions will do the same. The only reason the Air benefits at the moment is because everyone else has Flash installed.

I have a 13" in the mail right now. Been an IBM guy all my life but decided to give this guy a try. I really needed a good comp to use as a ssh client while I'm on the go, and the portability of it all seemed nice. Only thing I'm hesitant about is the proprietary parts that are in the machine. If the RAM goes bad somewhere down the road, I can't simply grab a new stick off of newegg and take a screwdriver to the machine. Somewhat annoyed about that, but I can understand the need to do so in a machine that's trying to cut size as much as this.

A Macbook as ssh client? There are cheaper and smaller options out there. I use an Asus eee 901 (and a MiFi router to use one 3g plan for all devices I carry around), it was very cheap and it's been working very well. My macbook has not left my desk since then.

The warranty is really convenient. If the RAM goes bad just take it to the nearest authorized Apple dealer. Every town has one, and you won't need a receipt or any other documentation.

I bought a 13" Macbook Air on the weekend for basically the same purpose. I do the majority my development on remote servers, so when I decided to replace my aging Macbook Pro it didn't seem very important to have a powerful machine.

I've had great experiences in the past with AppleCare. Combined with the unservicability of this machine, I didn't hesitate to get the 3-year AppleCare coverage. That makes me feel a bit better about the fact that I can't easily take it apart and repair it myself.

One question which is never answered in these reviews: How long does it take to charge the battery?

My two generation old MBA takes 8 hours to fully charge -- and this is apparently normal. For my use it's not a problem, but it does require some planning to make sure it's got a full battery when taking it out for the day.

My 11" Air takes about 90 minutes to charge, but the last 45 of that is going from 90% to full charge. The 13" has a larger battery, so it should take about 30% longer.

That is good news!

I thought the 8 hours charge was a fault at first, and so did AppleCare, but eventually it was confirmed as "working as designed."

I've tried an 11" Macbook Air and love it. I never felt the iPad was for me, but given my space restrictions when travelling the new MBA seems ideal for me. I'm waiting for Lion to come out to see what that brings to the MBA, but so far the 11" is going to be my next personal laptop, and I'm finally going to retire my 10 year old Sony Vaio SRX-51 (with it's might 128mb of RAM and PIII-850). I somehow doubt my MBA will last as long though.

I was dead set on getting one of these, but 2 things stopped me:

1. Steve mentioned this is the future of the Macbook. Which lead me to think...

2. Can you imagine what they have in store for the next iteration of the Macbook Pro? Especially the 13 inch?

So, I have decided to hang on to my 13 inch Macbook Pro and wait for the next iteration of the Pro's. I really wish the Air had an ethernet for when at the office and I really enjoyed the backlit keyboard. Otherwise, it seems nearly perfect.

That's the thing about the minimalist approach - Apple cuts features like ethernet, usb, firewire ports, etc, and it may upset 1% of their customer base (the hardware geeks) but most people will never notice it and adjust accordingly.

They're somewhat better about that on the "pro" products. Although I'm still annoyed about removing the ExpressCard slot on the 15" MBPs, and that's why I'm still on my 2006 version. It will be able to support USB3 and Light Peak, unlike the top of the line model today.

I tend to think in a similar way, but I also recognise that since something better is always around the corner I might never buy anything!

Given the fact that my 6 year old desktop I never use would serve me just as adequately as "the future of notebooks" for things I need to do, I've always found that attitude to be a useful hedge against needless spending.

I get what your saying, but the Pro's are supposed to be better than the Air and Macbook in just about every feature.

The big deal change to me is the higher resolution screen, standard SSD, and giving a slight implication optical drives is no more. So, if a 13 inch Air has 1440x900 would a 13 inch Pro have more? If they remove the optical, how much more battery or less weight will it be?

I know this has been asked before, but now some of you would have been using your MBAs for a week.

1. How is the 13" (which is 1440x900) as a primary dev machine?

2. If you moved from a 15" MBP, do you miss the screen real estate? Was the MBP a 1440x900 one or the higher-res 1680x1050 one?

Well, I bought a 13" MBP a month ago (waited two months in case of an Air update, which came two weeks later) after having a 15" as my primary machine for 3 years.

The screen size is fine and I didn't notice the difference going from 15" -> 13". I used my 15" later on though and it was kind of surprising, but I don't feel like the 13" is lacking.

I'm in geeklove with the MB(P) 13" line. I recommend it heartily to anyone willing to listen.

I moved away from a (dated) 15" Dell laptop to a 13" MBP for my primary work machine about half a year ago, and these are my experiences:

* I miss my dock and 2 monitors, but not as much as I thought I would.

* The real estate is fine for working with Eclipse/YourFavoriteIDE as long as you're willing to remove panels. (But I prefer hooking up an external 24" for major editing sessions.) The major gain is that MacOSX has way more keybindings for swapping between windows and applications than plain GNOME (or Windows) did, which makes it easier to live with less real estate.

* The A4ish form factor makes it easy to find alternative laptop bags. I've been carrying my MB(P)s around in a freebie a friend of mine got for volunteering at a music festival for the last 3-4 years.

* RAM and SSD are more important to performance than CPU, but I do occasionally max out my both cores and have to wait for some job to complete, but it doesn't really bug me (they were always going to be longrunning jobs). I'm more interested in shortrunning operations being instant than getting longrunning jobs to be faster.

One caveat is that I've never owned or used a 15+" MBP for any significant period of time, so I can't really compare against that, just the 15" Dell running Ubuntu and Windows.

Also, do they get hot ?

I had my 13" Macbook Air pegged at 100% CPU usage for a couple hours yesterday. It gets a bit warm, and the single fan spins up noticeably (eventually), but I wouldn't call it hot. I think it'd be comfortable on my lap still.

I have a 12.1" Asus UL20A that I bought last December. It isn't as thin as the new Air, of course, but it is a great alternative if you want to spend less and aren't set on a Mac.

Acer 1810TZ here. Its 11.6", 5 hours battery life, built-in 3G modem, and I popped in an Intel 80GB SSD. 4GB RAM, and it still cost less in total than the base model Air. It ran Ubuntu perfectly out of the box, including 3G modem, making it better than any other OS in terms of ease of setup..

Yours isn't a dual core. The GP's Asus is dual core, but it's about $800 = 1k with a $200 SSD.

FWIW I'm not entirely certain the Air is a good value, & would appreciate a real comparison.

I paid $510 for the Asus UL20A-A1 last December, on an Amazon promo priced at $585 with $75 Amazon gift card included. It looks like Newegg has it NIB for $575 or open box at $452 right now. I upgraded the memory to 4GB for ~$40, but haven't bothered with a SSD. I chose the UL20A-A1 over other makes/models specifically for the SU7300 processor. The SU7300 supports virtualization and has an extra 1MB of L2 cache compared to the SU4100.

The 1810TZ has an SU4100 CPU, which is dual core.

Confirmed, its a dual core 1.3ghz

I have an acer aspire 1410 11.6' runs ubuntu well, 1.2ghz SU2300 (dual core celeron) good alternative as well. and it was only $400

As awesome as these are, I'm waiting for the 2nd generation. I simply like to play it safe and have them work out the kinks before making the plunge... most times.

I'm tempted to buy the 13" version, but apparently some people are experiencing problems.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/11/02/some_of_apples...

That's probably a wise decision. I've been using a maxed-out 11" Air as my main development machine for the past week. I haven't had any issues so far. But I bet Apple will eventually release a version with a smaller bezel and a backlit keyboard.

I definitely think Apple is "cheating" somehow, because this thing boots up in 20 seconds, while my 2Ghz MacBook with the same amount of memory and an Intel X25-M takes 45 seconds to boot. I doubt it takes 25 seconds to check the state of the superdrive.

Waiting for device initialization is actually usually a large part of boot-up. It could be the Air just has better-optimized devices or drivers (I know it shares it's driver pool with the MacBook, but it may have different devices from the MacBook that have better drivers)

  > I definitely think Apple is "cheating" somehow

Not necessarily, as the X-25 is on a SATA-2 bus (maxes out at 300MB/s) and the special built-in SSD may be connected to a faster bus (maybe PCIe?).

System Profiler says the SSD is on a SATAII bus. The model is APPLE SSD TS128C, which doesn't help me pin down the real manufacturer. If I had to put money on it, I'd say it's a rebranded Samsung SSD, since Apple seems to do that pretty often.

Edit: Apparently I would lose money if I bet on that. :)

The macbook air that ifixit took apart had "Toshiba" written both on the assembly and on the individual memory chips. But it's not impossible that they have more than one source of SSDs.

According to the arstechnica article, the new Air SSD is way faster than the SSD included in the previous generation. I'd like to see meaningful numbers (like throughput and IOPS) but my bet is that it's not on a real SATA bus. Edit: well it's still SATA after all :

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-1...

If customizing the boot process and EFI for your very specific make of SSD is cheating, then yes they are cheating.

Also, from Anandtech's test a 15" MBP with an SF-1200 SSD has almost the same bootup performances (19.1s vs 15.5s for the 11" MBA and 14.4 for the 13").

The new Airs are the second generation.

But they're the first version of a new design.

Every new version is the first version of whatever makes it a new version.

First Intel Macbook Pro came out with an ATI Radeon X1600 or other. I figured I'd wait a generation or so Apple could iron out the kinks. I finally picked up the Macbook Pro with NVIDIA 8600M graphics, that worked out well...

Moral of the story, it's a crapshoot, buy if you need it.

It is the first time I have seen a picture of computer taken with soft-focus filter. Mac worship has reached the new heights.

Not uncommon with objects of desire. The truly remarkable part is why in 2010 still nobody else is making computers that actually look desirable?

Has anyone tried running VirtualBox (or other virtualization software) on the 11" Air? If so what was the experience like?

I'd like to get one, but that question has stayed my hand so far.

I'd like to be able to run a virtualized Ubuntu instance and am wondering what effect the processor speed would have.

I'd spring for the 4GB Ram but there's nothing I can do about the processor speed.

It's funny that Apple released a 11" MacBook Air because it seemed to compete directly against it's own iPad. Now it's a tough choice between the two for the average consumer.

There's a fairly large price difference still, about $500.

I was chatting to the owner of one of the mac reseller stores in Vienna a while back, and the best selling iPad for him was far and away the top-of-the-range 64GB 3G version. The (EU) price difference between that and the 64GB Air is only €200 (€799 vs €999).

Of course they are extremely different machines in practice.

Just got a 13" Air (128gb SSD, 2gb RAM) and in my limited anecdotal experience it's noticeably peppier in everyday use than my Mini, which has a much faster CPU clock and twice the RAM. Cold startup is much faster, shutdowns are much faster, starting apps that used to be real pigs on my Mini (particularly Firefox and Gimp) is now much faster as well. Oh and file copies, of course. I haven't compared build performance, nor have I done apples-to-apples benchmarks. But overall, roughly speaking, it's a big step up in performance for many common scenarios.

Yeah, that's the SSD

Yeah, despite losing over 1 GHz of processor power compared to my old machine, my 11" MBA is easily the fastest feeling computer I've ever owned, no comparison. Most things that most people do are seriously I/O constrained. And if the Photoshop filter takes 6 seconds to apply instead of 4, it's not a big deal. Serious games and video rendering, of course, are some big exceptions.

Call me an idealogue, but I am not willing to buy any Apple product. I am surprised that so many people who label themselves as open-source activists, or something along those lines, buy Apple's products. As far from "open" as possible.

By what measure is Acer, Asus, HP, Toshiba, Sony or Lenovo more "open" than Apple?

Well, I am referring more to the Apple's mobile products. On which you cannot get an application (including your's) without Apple's consent, or without paying.

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