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MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

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Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#151

Post by scott_s »

achompas wrote: post #42

My MacBook Air was $1,799 and the equivalent MacBook Pro (top of the line 15″, because why would you buy the 13″?) would cost me just over $3,200 (adding 3rd party SSD, Apple 8GB RAM and the Hi-Res screen). Man, this is disingenuous. 8GB RAM? As if you can't get it cheaper (or the MBA even offered 8GB RAM as an option)? Or as if the 15" MBP doesn't blow the Air out of the water in every other aspect? I bought a 13" P…

I agree the comparison was not valid, but the MBA's value is more than just a built-in SSD. It is significantly lighter.

Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#152

Post by gamble »

phamilton wrote: post #138
dasil003 wrote: post #104

Every time I get on a plane I wish I had an Air, but it's just not justifiable. Not only do I have and use my 8GB RAM (Photoshop, Parallels, browsers, Rails + large test suite), but the peripheral ports are critical. I don't think my Time Machine backup would ever get off the ground without the initial Ethernet plugin, not to mention the times when the DSL goes out at the office I can just plug into the hardline norm…

"(although I do salivate at the thought of a top-tier 64GB SSD boot drive + 1TB data drive in optical drive bay)." SSDs are interesting in that they get faster as they grow in size. top-tier 64GB SSD drives are quite a bit slower (at least in write speeds) than their 128GB counterparts, which are slower than their 256GB counterparts. Write speeds scale almost linearly with size. I'd salivate for something a little qu…

It's more correct to say that their speed scales with the number of flash chips. The larger drives are faster because more of the controller's channels are populated. A larger drive that has fewer flash chips because it uses a new fabrication process can be slower than a smaller drive built using previous-generation chips.

Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#153

Post by wyclif »

Shorel wrote: post #97
rowaway1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

backlit keyboard aren't just for looking nice. they're for working at night in dark rooms. before touch typing you need to glance quickly at your hand's position above the keys, to make sure your hand position isn't transposed slightly up, down, left, right--which happens easily when you're blinded by a monitor in the dark, and the key bed is pitch black. yes, you can fold down your monitor till the light illuminates…

No, no, no. That's why the F and J keys have small bumps you can feel so you can position your hands for touch typing. The 5 key in the numeric keyboard also has one of these. The backlight can be useful for the function keys or whatever, but touch typing does not need any light.

As a touch typist I've never understood the fetish for backlit keyboard design, I don't need it and it only decreases battery power.

Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#154

Post by highwind81 »

rudiger wrote: post #121
matthew-wegner wrote: post #103

Not MBA-related, but for MBP machines you can use an OptiBay bracket to pull out the optical drive and replace it with an SSD or HD. Couple notes on that: - The OptiBay is $80, but includes a USB enclosure for your SuperDrive to turn it into an external drive: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/ - Cheap clone brackets are ~$20 on eBay, work just as well. - The original HD bay includes a sudden motion sensor to park the h…

New MacBook Pro models are shipping with TRIM support for bundled Apple SSDs.

Source please?

Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#155

Post by bergie »

veidr wrote: post #134

Workflows vary, of course. And yeah, for non-programmers, I think the Air is a great machine--good enough to be the primary machine for most people. But for full-time programming work, I think it is absolutely fucking batshit insane to use anything less than a modern 12-core Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM and an SSD RAID boot volume (at which point multiple 2560 x something monitors are de rigueur ). That's certainly true fo…

My experience is completely different from yours. As a programmer I need very little: a terminal, Emacs, and a browser. These run very fast on the MBA.

And unit testing... I usually only run tests relevant to what I'm working on, and the full suite only before I push code, so it never takes much time.

But then again, I work on scripting languages.

Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#156

Post by maximilian »

highwind81 wrote: post #154
rudiger wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New MacBook Pro models are shipping with TRIM support for bundled Apple SSDs.

Source please?

According to Anandtech, at least the new 13",15",17" when ordered with an SSD builtin have TRIM support. 3rd party drives are not supported. I don't know about the Airs though -- He alludes to it in another article, but I can't find definitive proof. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4205/the-macbook-pro-review-13...

Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#157

Post by pyre »

achompas wrote: post #135
pyre wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that point is that if he were buying a MBP that it would not be able to justify the purchase to himself without maxing everything out. So that price comparison is really only applicable to him.

Right, but even then that's not a clear comparison. Maxing out a 15" MBP makes no sense for him--he bought a 13" MBA, so he clearly believed that 256 GB SSD + 4GB RAM would cover his needs. Does he have to always max out his Apple equipment purchases?

In the article, he was justifying maxing out the laptop with 'future-proofing' it so that he could go longer before needing to buy a new one.

Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#158

Post by veidr »

scott_s wrote: post #149
veidr wrote: post #134

Workflows vary, of course. And yeah, for non-programmers, I think the Air is a great machine--good enough to be the primary machine for most people. But for full-time programming work, I think it is absolutely fucking batshit insane to use anything less than a modern 12-core Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM and an SSD RAID boot volume (at which point multiple 2560 x something monitors are de rigueur ). That's certainly true fo…

I suppose this is because I work in the area of high performance systems research, but I never compile locally. All of my compilation and execution happen on a remote cluster. I've used a 13" or 15" Macbook Pro for all of my work for the past three years.

That sounds pretty cool.

We don't have the infrastructure to do that, but I did recently spend a week working out of town where I had only my 17" MacBook Pro. I became frustrated on the first day, and switched to coding on my Mac Pro back in Tokyo via remote desktop.

Japan is small and fiber-wired, so there is no lag typing. There's only some flicker when dragging large windows.

It worked well, but I don't think that us grunts working in the trenches of modern consumer software have the special luxuries that you do--yet.

With the advent of cheap on-demand cloud infrastructure, though, I think those types of benefits will start percolating down soon. Huge suites of automated tests are the new bottleneck (compiling is so 2005, etc), but they are so easily parallelized that it can't be long before cool tools start to emerge... write code on your Air, but execute your tests in parallel on AWS, or whatever.

So yeah, I think the need for having fast local hardware will diminish over time... but faster for some than others.

Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#159

Post by lightoverhead »

I'm really not a fun for Mac stuff. It's just a fashion thing, not for work. For the money you spent on Mac, you can definitely buy a cheap powerful machine with free reliable Linux system.

No matter to say its monopoly of market, even an adapter to projector need its own. I have seen so many times someone using a Mac but forgot bringing that stupid adapter for projector, she/he had to change to PC to do the presentation.

Still don't understand why people like such pricey not comparably useful machine.

Re: MacBook Air is enough for a work machine

#160

Post by matthew-wegner »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #117
matthew-wegner wrote: post #103

Not MBA-related, but for MBP machines you can use an OptiBay bracket to pull out the optical drive and replace it with an SSD or HD. Couple notes on that: - The OptiBay is $80, but includes a USB enclosure for your SuperDrive to turn it into an external drive: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/ - Cheap clone brackets are ~$20 on eBay, work just as well. - The original HD bay includes a sudden motion sensor to park the h…

Awesome info, thanks! I'm looking at doing exactly this soon. A few questions: How do you have your OSX directories partitioned across the drives? Can you move, say /, to the SSD while keeping /home/media on the larger platter drive? I only know how to do this with Linux, not very familiar with OSX despite it being BSD-based.

I just go the symlink route, and move Photos/Movies/Music to the HD with symlinks left behind. I guess it isn't as robust for Time Machine backups, although I haven' tested this!
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