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Review of the 11" MacBook Air

mattgemmell.com

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Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#61

Post by sil3ntmac »

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…

You may want to download TinkerTool (http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html) and set font smoothing to "light". Here's a before and after screenshot I just made: http://imgur.com/gOffi

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#62

Post by lstoll »

MikeW wrote: post #51
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…

Are you sure the Unibody Aluminum Macbook (Macbook 5,1) supports 6GB of RAM? I have this laptop and both the apple specs and crucial say it can only support 2x 2GB.

I put 8GB in my 5,1 (Late 2008 Unibody 13") a few months ago, and it worked great. It's running 10.6 with the default 32bit kernel and was definitely using the full 8GB, so something has definitely changed at some point. For the record, I got the 8GB from OWC.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#63

Post by elithrar »

harold wrote: post #10

I recently purchased the 11 with the same config. Xcode runs happily enough on my iOS and Mac OS projects. It runs my web dev stack just fine (Textmate, Python, Django, Nginx, Apache, Postgres) It reminds me of how much I appreciated the form factor of my old 12" Powerbook back in the day. I got a lot of mileage out of that little machine. The speakers sound tinny (under the keyboard) and I wish it had a proper ether…

Same here — I have the 1.6/4GB/128SSD version of the 11", and it's been fantastic since day one. I use it for Rails development, general web stuff & some light Lightroom work (when pressed), and as a second machine to a MBP that lives at home with a 23" external, but I vastly prefer the Air whenever I have the choice. The MBP really only gets used for when I'm editing clients' work in Lightroom & PS, where the CPU power makes the difference.

Thing is, the Air makes my 13" MBP seem fat — and the 13" is actually a pretty slim machine as far as laptops go these days.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#64

Post by vibhavs »

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…

So I had to go look up noatime. Here's what I found:

"Linux [and presumably Mac OS X] has a special mount option for file systems called noatime that can be added to each line that addresses one file system in the /etc/fstab file. If a file system has been mounted with this option, reading accesses to the file system will no longer result in an update to the atime information associated with the file like we have explained above. The importance of the noatime setting is that it eliminates the need by the system to make writes to the file system for files which are simply being read. Since writes can be somewhat expensive, this can result in measurable performance gains. Note that the write time information to a file will continue to be updated anytime the file is written to."

(http://tldp.org/LDP/solrhe/Securing-Optimizing-Linux-RH-Edit...).

stcredzero, I'm curious to see how you set up your partitions to take advantage of noatime.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#65

Post by statictype »

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…

How do you keep 2 separate notebooks to work with? How do you access your mail, code libraries, music, important files etc... on both? Do you sync them with dropbox or something?

I have 2 laptops - a Vaio for Windows related work and a Macbook for mac/iphone related work and I'm always struggling about which one to take when I go on a trip (when I don't have any specific work but like to keep a laptop handy anyway). The Macbook is lighter and more convenient but the Vaio has most of my mail and personal files.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#66

Post by verisimilitude »

MikeW wrote: post #51
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…

Are you sure the Unibody Aluminum Macbook (Macbook 5,1) supports 6GB of RAM? I have this laptop and both the apple specs and crucial say it can only support 2x 2GB.

Macbook 5,1 absolutely supports 6GB, NOT 8GB.

The best summary I've found: http://blog.macsales.com/3291-putting-a-rumor-to-rest-owc-su...

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#67

Post by bnewton »

I've checked out the Macbook Air at the Apple Store a few times and I'm so close to just selling my i5 MBP for a fully spec out 13" Air. I like the idea of having such a light and still powerful system for web and ios development. From the sounds of it I wouldn't be giving up to much going with the Air over the MBP.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#68

Post by d_r »

jjcm wrote: post #30
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).

Ah, that sounds lousy. :( I wonder if it's a defective batch or something in my usage pattern that avoids this issue. Have you tried getting a replacement from a Genius bar? They are usually pretty helpful.

Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air

#70

Post by cma »

PStamatiou wrote: post #57
zhyder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a much more expensive system. If we configure them as: Macbook Pro 15: $1800 + $250 for 128GB SSD Macbook Air 13: $1300 + $100 for 4GB RAM Both machines will have the same size SSD, RAM, and same number of pixels, but the MBP will be $650 more. (I know there are other ways of configuring the two, like adding a $100 hi-res option to the MBP, or adding the $100 MCE OptiBay like you did. I ignored them for simpli…

Sigh, makes me regret my setup even more, price-wise. I have a big early adopter problem. First SSD was $680 for 80GB, it died, Intel sent me a second generation replacement. Then I purchased a second for $400, put them in my 17-inch MBP (older core 2 duo) in RAID 0 via an optibay. Then upgraded to 8GB of RAM when I started using redis locally. System screams but the SSDs are showing their age. I almost always run th…

RAID-0 after having one die? RAID-1 would still get you double read speeds in the cases that tend to matter (small scattered reads), right? And is there a use-case for double write speeds on a non-server machine?
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