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The MacBook Air has no clothes

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Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#11

Post by wanorris »

inovica wrote: post #6

I was one of the first people to buy a MBA and I love it for what I use it for. If I was doing video editing or intensive photoshop work it would definitely not be my choice, but its absolutely perfect for what I need - a truly portable machine that is powerful enough to let me do my job. Indeed, I have been pleasantly surprised with how I've not missed the multiple ports and have only needed to use the DVD drive twi…

That's why I thought this was an interesting post. If I were doing live video switching or something it would have been obvious that an Air might not get the job done.

But I would have expected the kinds of things he describes doing -- some tabs in a browser, mail, Parallels -- to be fine.

Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#12

Post by tl »

_sean_ wrote: post #5

The MacBook Air is wonderful for some people. If you travel a lot, you care about size and weight more than normal people. If you're like me and 95% of your time is spent in vim and Firefox, you probably don't care about speed all that much. Every product does not have to be all things to all people and the MacBook Air is a niche product.

On the travel aspect, I wish Apple had made a "MacBook Mini" (something with a form factor closer to the Asus EEE) instead of the MacBook Air.

Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#13

Post by BrandonM »

I have a laptop with similar specs that I use for Linux, and I have no real problems at all. I have a 1.6 GHz Athlon 64 X2 with 1 GB ram. The only major difference (other than memory) is that I have 2 better hard drives, with the root directory on an 80 GB 7200 RPM drive, and a 100 GB 5400 RPM drive for music and backups. Moreover, I use cpufreq to scale my frequency down to 800 MHz during low usage.

With all that said, I can kill and restore Firefox (with 20 plugins) with 16 tabs open (including a YouTube video) in about 10 seconds, at the same time that I am running Pidgin (IM client), 4 terminal sessions, compiling a kernel, and copying /dev/random to another machine over SSH (through fuse). In my opinion, that is quite acceptable, considering that such extreme usage is completely atypical.

To call a dual-core, 1.6 GHz processor with 2 GB ram "pokey" seems to me to be a bit absurd. This coming from someone who's never owned a Mac and who would never buy an Air. (I tend to use my DVDRW drive a lot, and occasionally use Gigabit Ethernet.)

Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#14

Post by nilobject »

inovica wrote: post #7
nilobject wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add the Solid State disk though, and from what I hear, compiling code is extremely fast. Of course, I could never justify the cost of the SSD today.

I didn't go for the SSD and the performance is fine for me.

I should have qualified extremely fast: From what I hear, it can make compiling go faster than the MBP, despite the slower processor, solely because disk reading is so much faster. With a large project and lots of small files, disk access adds up.

Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#15

Post by pg »

martey wrote: post #3
mattculbreth wrote: post #2

A couple people I know and whose opinions on such matters I trust say that the MBA does just fine performance-wise. Obviously this guy has a different feel, but honestly--an Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB is quite a bit of computing horsepower. About what my MacBook Pro has and I've never seen it get sluggish. A bit puzzled by this.

The processor is the MacBook Air is different (lower voltage, lower clock speed, lower performance). Add in a slower hard drive (only 4200 RPM) and the difference in performance between it and your MacBook Pro is no surprise.

How would the CPU and disk performance of the MBA compare to a Powerbook G4? That's what I use now.

Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#16

Post by ketralnis »

pg wrote: post #15
martey wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The processor is the MacBook Air is different (lower voltage, lower clock speed, lower performance). Add in a slower hard drive (only 4200 RPM) and the difference in performance between it and your MacBook Pro is no surprise.

How would the CPU and disk performance of the MBA compare to a Powerbook G4? That's what I use now.

The CPU will be faster, and the disk will be faster if your PB also has a 48k RPM drive (higher data-density at the same RPM == more bytes read per rotation). Otherwise you'd actually have to look at the transfer and seek rates of the drive

Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#17

Post by BrandonM »

nilobject wrote: post #14
inovica wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't go for the SSD and the performance is fine for me.

I should have qualified extremely fast: From what I hear, it can make compiling go faster than the MBP, despite the slower processor, solely because disk reading is so much faster. With a large project and lots of small files, disk access adds up.

On Gentoo, where compiling occurs nearly every time a program is installed, one common method used to speed up compiling is to use the -pipe option to gcc as well as to mount memory onto /var/tmp/portate (the location where files are written before actually being installed). These two measures alone can speed up compile times dramatically, as the disk is never touched in the middle of compiles. Instead, the only time reads occur is as the source is read in, and writes only occur when the final binaries, libraries, and configuration files are installed to their homes on the file system.

If your source files are located contiguously on the hard drive [1] and writes are cached to occur in big blocks, while also using some compile-in-memory techniques like those outlined above, I imagine compile times would not vary much on flash-disk MBAs as compared to those with conventional laptop drives.

[1] This could be accomplished by keeping your project in a compressed file and loopback-mounting it to your project's working directory.

Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#18

Post by Sam_Odio »

ketralnis wrote: post #16
pg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the CPU and disk performance of the MBA compare to a Powerbook G4? That's what I use now.

The CPU will be faster, and the disk will be faster if your PB also has a 48k RPM drive (higher data-density at the same RPM == more bytes read per rotation). Otherwise you'd actually have to look at the transfer and seek rates of the drive

Yah - except you can easily (and cheaply) upgrade the PB to a 72K RPM drive, something not possible with the MBA - given it's 1.8" form factor.

I would suspect, with an upgraded drive, a 1.5Ghz PB would be more responsive opening applications & starting, while the MBA might be able to handle more simultaneous apps running, due to the 2GB ram and faster processor.

Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#19

Post by stcredzero »

This review irks me. The reviewer seems to have no idea about what contributes or detracts from the performance of different kinds of apps. The most likely culprit for the slow performance is the 4200 RPM drive. The processor and 2GB of RAM should do fine for most purposes.

Re: The MacBook Air has no clothes

#20

Post by [deleted] »

BrandonM wrote: post #13

I have a laptop with similar specs that I use for Linux, and I have no real problems at all. I have a 1.6 GHz Athlon 64 X2 with 1 GB ram. The only major difference (other than memory) is that I have 2 better hard drives, with the root directory on an 80 GB 7200 RPM drive, and a 100 GB 5400 RPM drive for music and backups. Moreover, I use cpufreq to scale my frequency down to 800 MHz during low usage. With all that sa…

[deleted]
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