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Comment by eddanger | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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