

The MacBook Air has no clothes - edw519
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1467

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mattculbreth
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.

~~~
martey
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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Yes. It's the same with every portable device: Customers complain if the thing
weighs too much, they complain if the thing runs too slowly, and they complain
if the battery life is too short. Unfortunately, since it is nigh-impossible
to improve all three of these factors at once without fundamentally improving
battery technology [1] -- a glacially slow process compared to Moore's Law --
to build a portable device is to sign up for a torrent of customer complaints.

I'm sure that various aspects of the Air's performance have been deliberately
throttled to ensure that its cute little credit-card-thin battery doesn't crap
out after half an hour. One thing to try is simply plugging it in. There's no
mention here of whether that made a difference.

And _Parallels_? Geez. How many computers worth of computer does this guy
_expect_ to fit in a manila envelope?

[1] You would think that each generation of improved processor designs would
improve performance. And it does. But every time processors speed up, our
desktop-wielding developers dream up an _incredibly fun_ , _more-processor-
intensive_ thing to do with all those new cycles, like render more polygons or
playback multiple Flash videos or use IMAP or do real-time JOINs between your
friends' friends' Facebooks, and these two factors roughly cancel out.

~~~
trevelyan
One word: Fujitsu.

Just bought one of their S6410s. 13-inch screen ultralight with good
performance and great battery life. Don't know if the machines are available
in the US yet, but the laptop rocks. Small enough you can use it on a plane
with the screen fully open, or throw it in a knapsack. Large enough to be my
main computer, although I like to browse the web with F11.

My gripe with the Mac is that it's too expensive for what you get. I've never
been inclined to put a laptop in a manilla envelope though, so I'd guess I'm
not their market. Only problem with Fujitsu is that the company seems actively
disinterested in selling their products (took ages to find a local reseller)
and the company has literally nothing in the way of Linux support, not even
"unofficial" drivers. They also do that awful "backup as a partition" that
screws up when you repartition the hard drive to do things like install useful
software.

Ubuntu is up and running now though, and it's great.

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demallien
Yeah, talk about an inflammatory title...

Now, if he had said that "The MacBook Air Is Wearing Those Awful Low Slung
Jeans That I Hate", rather than claiming that it is actually naked, maybe he
would have a point.

Jason, maaaate, let me explain something to you: with your needs, the MacBook
Air is not a good choice. Apple makes a machine for you, it's called a MacBook
Pro. Three types of spaghetti sauce and all that good stuff...

~~~
lanaer
An MBA with the SSD drive also seems like it would perform well for him. But
then, the MBP should be cheaper.

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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.)

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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.

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inovica
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 twice (I purchased the external). After
using this machine I've gone back to my MacBook Pro (15") a couple of times
and I know that I made the right choice now for a PORTABLE machine.

~~~
wanorris
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.

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_sean_
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.

~~~
tl
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.

