
2014 MacBook Air: Performance benchmarks - ytch
http://www.macworld.com/article/2150841/lab-tested-new-2014-macbook-air-benchmarks.html
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duskwuff
Really, really sloppy benchmarking work here -- only four machines were
tested, and every one of them had a drive from a different manufacturer. They
weren't even all the same size! It's already well-known that Apple sources
SSDs (as well as other parts) from a variety of suppliers, and not all of them
perform identically. Concluding that the 2014 model is "slower" than the 2013
models from a sample this small is totally inappropriate, though.

~~~
yeukhon
> already well-known that Apple sources SSDs (as well as other parts) from a
> variety of suppliers

Ah. Why would they do that? Someone could spend $3000 on MacBook Pro 16GB +
SSD highest spec and risk the chance of getting bad parts? I never knew this
was a practice. Is this even common in the industry otherwise Apple?

~~~
derefr
It's risk-aversion. Think of it this way: if drive-models are assigned to Macs
in a round-robin fashion, then if there are three drive manufacturers and one
has shipped a buggy drive, at most 1/3 of customers would be sending their
laptops back for repairs. On the other hand, if their _only_ supplier gave
them buggy drives, then _everyone_ would be sending their laptops back.

It also lets them have a stronger negotiating position to drop a crap
supplier. They can only maintain that negotiating position, though, if they
buy drives from all of them; if they only used drives from whoever was the at-
the-time "best" supplier, then if that supplier started to suck, all the
others would demand a king's ransom for the "privilege" of switching to them.

~~~
elangoc
Interesting. I could also imagine that the inverse of that point is also true:
if one of the suppliers is really good and reliably so, if Apple depends on
them more than the others, the cash inflow will help that one supplier more
than the others, which that company could put back into R&D to widen that
quality gap. And if one supplier is far superior to the others, then the
comparability == competition between suppliers lessens, and so does Apple's
bargaining power.

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rm445
Could anyone offer any tips for evaluating processors in this post-megahertz
age? My 2012 Macbook Air (base 11" model) has a 1.7 GHz Core i5 processor, yet
I understand the 1.4 GHz (Haswell) Core i5 in the latest machines performs
significantly better.

Is the generation of the processor always the dominant factor nowadays? Is
there a convenient way to estimate performance without poring over benchmarks?
What are people's favourite sites for finding out about these things?

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> Is the generation of the processor always the dominant factor nowadays?

No.

> Is there a convenient way to estimate performance without poring over
> benchmarks?

Unless you are willing to quite a lot of time learning, not really. And unless
you've been willing to do that, you haven't been able to conveniently estimate
performance for about 14 years now.

> What are people's favourite sites for finding out about these things?

[http://www.anandtech.com/bench/](http://www.anandtech.com/bench/) is pretty
good, as they standardize all results into a convenient database with easy
head-to-head comparisons.

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moloch
...and still only 4Gb of memory.

~~~
beedogs
I think a non-anemic amount of memory is the most important feature lacking in
the Air. I often find my 4GB 2011 Air chugging and breaking a sweat swapping
to "disk" simply because I've had Firefox open for too long. Would it be that
difficult for them to finally double the amount of memory in the next base
model to 8GB and make 16GB an available option?

~~~
jpalomaki
I think this could have something do with 16GB dimms being a new thing and not
supported by Intel on the laptop chipsets.

Lenovo has a similar problem in their new models. X240 has only one dimm slot
and currently supports max 8GB of memory. While investigating the issue I
found a discussion[1] where somebody mentioned that Intel would need to add
support for these new dimms in the "memory reference code"[2].

[1] [http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-
Laptops/16GB-m...](http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/16GB-
memory-for-X240-available-does-it-work/td-p/1476774) [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Reference_Code](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Reference_Code)

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arielweisberg
I will admit I did not read the article.

Flash is trending towards fewer higher capacity chips. In some cases this is
resulting in less parallelism and slower response times for individual reads
and writes.

Not saying anything about this article and set of hardware, just in general
that this has been my observation with new models of SSDs as they are
released.

Unfortunately the way most applications are written the response time of SSDs
is the primary benefit because they present low concurrency and don't
parallelize the procesing of data as it comes off of disk. Still way better
than seek times on spinning disk, but far from what could be.

~~~
userbinator
The situation with NAND flash has been pretty disappointing, I think; in the
quest for more capacity, manufacturers have been sacrificing other desirable
aspects of storage, like write endurance and data retention. In particular,
3-bit and 4-bit MLC are becoming the norm, and they are both slower and less
reliable than older 2-bit MLC or SLC, while requiring more complex error
correction and bad block management. The relatively increasing fragility of
flash storage is never mentioned, and many people don't find out until it's
too late --- because the typical consumer only focuses on capacity.

I still miss the days when SLC was the norm, and you didn't need complex
error-correcting-codes and bad block management. Now SLC is considered "high-
end", even in enterprise applications, and becoming rarer to find, while 2-bit
MLC, which used to be considered the inferior, consumer-level grade, has also
become more difficult to find and a "professional" feature. Considering that
endurance and retention decrease exponentially with each additional bit-per-
cell while capacity only increases multiplicatively, the tradeoffs don't seem
quite so great.

~~~
wmf
I'm glad TLC exists; the 840 Evo is fast enough and reliable enough and it's
much cheaper than a 2-bit MLC SSD.

~~~
userbinator
I'm not saying it is a bad thing if you understand the tradeoffs and can work
within them, but what I'm getting at is that a lot of consumers unfortunately
_don 't_.

The extreme endurance torture tests that get reported often don't tell the
whole story either - the more flash cells are cycled, the "leakier" they
become and retention goes down significantly. Figures I've seen for SLC are 10
years retention after 100K P/E cycles, earlier-generation MLC 5 years after
10K P/E cycles, newer MLC is 5 years @1.5~3K, TLC is _1 year_ @ <1K. Of course
retention tests don't make for as interesting news articles as endurance ones
since they're almost like watching paint dry, but IMHO they are just as if not
more important, and manufacturers should provide warnings that flash-based
devices are intrinsically unstable and their retention ability is measured in
_years_. "Bit rot" is a reality with NAND flash. I only hope that people who
think they've "backed up" data onto used SSDs, memory cards, and other forms
of high-capacity flash don't find that much of it has literally self-erased
and disappeared after only a few years.

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will_lam
Crap - I just bought a new Macbook Air the first day it was available. Oh
well, I guess I'll never really notice...

~~~
aleem
Hopefully you'll benefit from a better build. My 2013 MacBook Air has a nasty
issue where trackpad doesn't work properly if the machine is tilted even 15
degrees. The adapter has failed once already and the second one stopped
charging last week.

Whatever you do, get the 3 year care is all I can say.

~~~
mverwijs
In the Netherlands, there are several shops that are offering 3 year
guarantees on all laptops sold. Including Macbooks.

Considering the terrible customersupport that I've received multiple times
from Apple, I bought my latest Macs at one of those stores.

~~~
benihana
I'm in America and I've never had anything but incredibly good customer
support from Apple. Interesting.

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zobzu
mixing up machines order and what is in bold for sensationalism much?

The 2014 drives were faster than the 2013 in many of the test cases, specially
2nd page.

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celebril
And it's still faster than PCs. :)

~~~
Viper007Bond
Apple makes some nice hardware but they are not alone in making good stuff.
They have some stiff competition.

For example my Sony Vaio Pro is significantly faster than any of the numbers
mentioned in the article. It gets nearly 1GB/sec in read speeds:
[http://i.imgur.com/24GdPiz.png](http://i.imgur.com/24GdPiz.png)

The drive is partitioned so ignore the odd size.

~~~
SG-
The thing is, you don't need 1GB/sec for an 11-13" laptop.

~~~
sergiosgc
Why would someone in this day and age say something like ”X is enough” when
talking about tech? Is that a wish to be featured alongside Bill Gates?

(yes, I know Gates' quote is apocryphal)

~~~
seunosewa
You can do much worse than being featured alongside Bill gates!

