Review of the 11" MacBook Air • Hacker News Board

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#11

Post by d_r » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 7:49 PM UTC

I got the 13" Air (highest specs: 2.13Ghz+4GB) about a month ago and am completely loving it. I usually have Xcode, Photoshop, (occasional) Eclipse, and a slew of other tools open and it performs like a charm.

Most useful "feature": the battery really lasts around 6+ hours, esp. if you're not using wi-fi. This made some long airplane flights bearable.

I used to dread taking my previous Macbook Pro to a coffee shop, travel, etc. because it was bulky, required always plugging in the charger, etc. No more. Since it's so accessible on the go, my productivity has increased and I can quickly code up ideas anywhere.

It did take a week to get used to the smaller pixel size on the 13" screen-that-fits-a-15" resolution.

Sorry for the fanboy post, but seriously, this machine made my life as a developer that much better.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#12

Post by nasht » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 7:59 PM UTC

there wrote: post #4

i've been using an 11" air as my only development machine for a month or two. a few minor things worth mentioning: - no backlit keyboard - no IR interface, so no ability to use a non-bluetooth remote control - the LCD screen is glossy, but it's just a film over the screen, not a glass/plastic sheet over the entire display. as a result, the glare isn't as bad as the macbook pro. - because the display is very thin, the…

I have been using the 11" for a couple of months now. I also love it but I am more productive at a real desktop with large screen and large keyboard. I have never seen the apple logo shine through the screen. Take that unit back for a replacement.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#13

Post by jjg » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:03 PM UTC

"I haven’t felt so thrilled by a new piece of hardware since I bought our first iPad..."

That long, eh?

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#14

Post by there » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:08 PM UTC

nasht wrote: post #12

there wrote: post #4

i've been using an 11" air as my only development machine for a month or two. a few minor things worth mentioning: - no backlit keyboard - no IR interface, so no ability to use a non-bluetooth remote control - the LCD screen is glossy, but it's just a film over the screen, not a glass/plastic sheet over the entire display. as a result, the glare isn't as bad as the macbook pro. - because the display is very thin, the…

I have been using the 11" for a couple of months now. I also love it but I am more productive at a real desktop with large screen and large keyboard. I have never seen the apple logo shine through the screen. Take that unit back for a replacement.

i have two of them, and one had its entire display replaced. all three displays show the logo through under certain lighting conditions.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#15

Post by dedward » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:19 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #7

My alternative: Put a 256GB Crucial RealSSD 300 in a 13" Macbook and max-out the RAM. It will be bigger and heavier, with less battery life, but if you already have a Macbook, this is a much cheaper move. The RealSSD has background garbage collection, so you don't have to worry about TRIM. You only need to do two things: 1) noatime and 2) make sure you're using less than 220GB. I did this, and the performance is fant…

Curious - how does background GC eliminate the need for TRIM?

I know it can use a set of unallocated blocks and clean them and swap them in and out where necessary - but without knowledge of the filesystem structure itself (TRIM) - it's always going to be sub-optimal. You'll have some fast write-space available, but not necessarily the full amount you could.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#16

Post by steve19 » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:22 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #7

My alternative: Put a 256GB Crucial RealSSD 300 in a 13" Macbook and max-out the RAM. It will be bigger and heavier, with less battery life, but if you already have a Macbook, this is a much cheaper move. The RealSSD has background garbage collection, so you don't have to worry about TRIM. You only need to do two things: 1) noatime and 2) make sure you're using less than 220GB. I did this, and the performance is fant…

My Macbook 13" alternative was to put a 128gb sandforce SSD into the hard drive bay and move my 500gb into the DVD Drive slot (For iTunes and Movies mainly). I also upped the RAM to 8gb.

It FLIES! And the battery life good.

SSD was my best new (to me) technology of 2010 :)

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#17

Post by frou_dh » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:27 PM UTC

srgseg wrote: post #6

Two things that really bug me: 1. No cleartype. I.e. although there is subpixel antialiasing, fonts aren't optimized for the pixel grid. Thus, the fonts are much clearer when I boot to Windows and so I feel like everything is fuzzy when I boot back to Mac OS. This isn't a problem for the web, but for coding and SSH it's terrible. I can't use Windows full time though because Spaces is so outstanding and I don't get tr…

My font-rendering beefs seem quite transient, I've been a detractor and appreciator of plain aliased, ClearType and Mac style at various times. The only consistency has been Linux distro defaults looking gash ;)

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#18

Post by chc » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:31 PM UTC

srgseg wrote: post #6

Two things that really bug me: 1. No cleartype. I.e. although there is subpixel antialiasing, fonts aren't optimized for the pixel grid. Thus, the fonts are much clearer when I boot to Windows and so I feel like everything is fuzzy when I boot back to Mac OS. This isn't a problem for the web, but for coding and SSH it's terrible. I can't use Windows full time though because Spaces is so outstanding and I don't get tr…

The first point is a longstanding difference of opinion between different users. The thing is, fonts on Windows in general are sharper but mangle the letterforms, while fonts on the Mac look just how they were designed but have to sacrifice sharpness to do so with current display resolutions.

So, basically, the question is: Is readability more a function of the font's design or contrast of the luminance?

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#19

Post by inovica » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:33 PM UTC

I bought the top 11" that I could and I love it. It has become my main machine. Not since the 12" PowerBook have I loved a machine - sad as that sounds. The form factor fits me and I've been much more productive with it

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#20

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:34 PM UTC

dedward wrote: post #15

stcredzero wrote: post #7

My alternative: Put a 256GB Crucial RealSSD 300 in a 13" Macbook and max-out the RAM. It will be bigger and heavier, with less battery life, but if you already have a Macbook, this is a much cheaper move. The RealSSD has background garbage collection, so you don't have to worry about TRIM. You only need to do two things: 1) noatime and 2) make sure you're using less than 220GB. I did this, and the performance is fant…

Curious - how does background GC eliminate the need for TRIM? I know it can use a set of unallocated blocks and clean them and swap them in and out where necessary - but without knowledge of the filesystem structure itself (TRIM) - it's always going to be sub-optimal. You'll have some fast write-space available, but not necessarily the full amount you could.

My understanding is that OS X/HFS+ already optimizes for reusing already allocated blocks. This means that fast write-space is conserved as much as possible at the expense of larger commit-loads from the OS's RAM cache when writing to already allocated blocks.

Also, what I've read seems to indicate that OS X behaves sub-optimally, but this is still good enough to support snappy behavior under normal workloads.