Review of the 11" MacBook Air • Hacker News Board

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#21

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:37 PM UTC

steve19 wrote: post #16

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 :)

I was going to go this route, but I found it better to just move all the movies and install DMG onto an external drive. For one thing, I like how quiet my Macbook can be when the only spinning thing is the fan. (The MP3 collection needs to be on the internal drive, though.)

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#22

Post by cageyjames » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:41 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…

re: backlit keyboard

Once you live with it, you can't live without it. I've become so spoiled in my years....

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#23

Post by danilocampos » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:51 PM UTC

I killed my MacBook Air envy by buying a Core i5 MBP, replacing the optical drive with a 128 GB SSD, installing the system and applications to the SSD and symlinking everything big and rarely accessed (iPhoto library, movies, iTunes U, etc) to the HDD. I have AppleScripts that mount/unmount the rotational drive when needed, and my machine now screams. It's heavier, sure, but I don't travel much and I love having all the additional internal storage. I still get over 8 hours of battery and the machine is silent as long as I'm not accessing anything on the rotational drive.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#24

Post by yesimahuman » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:57 PM UTC

I chose the 13" over the 11". The 11" had too small of a screen for my tastes and felt like a netbook. The 13" has a really nice resolution and feels amazing for typing (as the laptop is so thin your palms rest perfectly on it).

My 13" is not a netbook. It is a powerful laptop that I now absolutely love and do so much on. It's also my first mac, but I prefer the feel over my friends 13" macbook pro so I think I made the right choice.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#25

Post by coffeedrinker » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 8:59 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…

I always run Tinkertools and set the font antialiasing to 18pt or so. Makes the fonts clean like back on an apple II.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#26

Post by masklinn » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 9:01 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…

> 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.

It has nothing to do with fonts being "optimized for the pixel grid", it has to do with decisions taken on the antialiasing optimizations: OSX's is setup for rendering correctness (displayed fonts are to be as close to the original typeface as possible), whereas Windows's aims at clarity at the expense of rendering correctness.

I can only say that I have no issue with it (quite the opposite, you can disable AA for fonts up to 12px built in and some more with third-party applications and I find it dreadful)

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#27

Post by masklinn » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 9:02 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #5

I bought the entry level 11" MacBook Air 4 weeks ago and now it is the system I use for over 90% of my work, writing,and web browsing. Caveat: most of my work is straight-up Ruby development, Rails development (both using RubyMine 3.01), and Clojure with Emacs. All three of these development scenarios take up little in the way of CPU or memory. I use TexShop for writing. I do sit at my desk with a large external moni…

> I am going to start next week helping a friend's company do some back end Java EE 6 development and I'll either use my MacBook Pro or my beefy Ubuntu laptop for that.

Why not use your Air? Expecting insufficient screen space?

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#28

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 9:04 PM UTC

Another good satchel for the 11" Macbook Air:

http://amzn.com/B001F7FMUA

I have one of these for my old tc1100 Windows stylus tablet. It should fit the 11" Air quite handily as well as the iPad.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#29

Post by mnutt » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 9:27 PM UTC

steve19 wrote: post #16

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 :)

I have done this as well, but I'm a little concerned that the 500gb drive no longer has the sudden motion sensor. I'm thinking about swapping the two drives, but don't know if I'll end up running into hibernate issues or not.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#30

Post by jjcm » Sat, Jan 01, 2011, 9:30 PM UTC

d_r wrote: post #11

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, t…

Same specs here. Still having issues with it even after the firmware patch though. If it sleeps after idle, it almost never wakes up. Have to do a forced reboot. I do all of my development work over ssh, so it's never really a problem - I haven't lost work it yet. Nevertheless it is kind of annoying (though the quick boot time helps mitigate that somewhat).