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Goodbye, MacBook Pro. The New MacBook Air Is That Good.
- duck 16y agoWhat exactly is that picture at the bottom of the article?
- JofArnold 16y agoRight now this device's lack of RAM is a killer (I regularly run out of 8GB on my MBP). Buuuut... when OSX 10.7 comes out with app resume functionality, opening and closing apps will be fast (thanks to the OS and the rapid drive these things carry)... so more than 4GB will not be needed for me. So I'm thinking that iOS's desktop legacy might be a bit bigger than just weird scroll bars and a cool app launcher.
- Qz 16y agoAm I crazy for still only running 2GB on my desktop?
- JofArnold 16y agoCrazy, no. Amazing, yes! :)
- cubicle67 16y agoha! I'm running Snow Leopard here on a 4.5 year old 32 bit (pre Core 2 Duo) iMac with 512Mb ram (double the original amount) I'd like to get a new machine, but this one's as good as new apart from the drive which I replaced with a 1Tb one earlier this year
- ralphc 16y agoYou should try popping in a recent Ubuntu disk. Older (circa 2008) distributions had trouble with the hardware, but I have a 2006 MacBook Pro that "just works" with 32-bit Ubuntu 10.04. I even Bootcamped the hard disk and dual boot Snow Leopard and Lucid.
- matwood 16y agoDepends on what you use it for. I have 8GB in my MBP, but that's mainly because of VMware.
- wazoox 16y agoMy laptop (macbook uni 13") has 2 GB of RAM; my desktop (slackware 13.1) 768 MB... but it's showing its age, 5 years :) I mostly use the macbook as an X terminal to the desktop, actually :)
- aphexairlines 16y agoThat's ok, you can just add some more RAM when you nee... oh.
- mironathetin 16y agoI personally want an optical drive. Am I old fashioned? I don't trust these movie and music download stuff and prefer hardware in my drawer. For my last business trip, I quickly copied my iTunes library to my business Macbook (in a hurry, the evening before). On the remote site I switched on the audio book that I recently started and got the message: this computer is not authorized ... Get my point?
- robin_reala 16y agoRight, but are you carrying the media with you all the time? If not then a small external drive is a decent compromise - if you think you’ll need it you can chuck it in the bag as well and you can at least not take it if you think you won‘t.
- mironathetin 16y agoWell, in terms of movies: you break the law, if you extract them to the harddrive. For the rest, you are right, it is possible to carry a drive. But then we are back to the clutter on the desk that we had in the 80s and 90s and just got rid of. This is progress? Without an optical drive works only properly, if you download the data or get them on non optical media. I would be fine though, if I could download movies and music to an external storage and the DRM would be on that storage, not on a computer. A storage with at least the same possibilities that we have with CDs and DVDs today (import to iTunes without DRM!). As long as that is not possible, the Macbook Air remains a pretty good second computer IMHO.
- Qz 16y agoThat's a DRM issue, not a optical drive issue. Guess who suffers from it? Not pirates...
- vdm 16y agoThe optical drive on Mac's is region locked, which means I use it even less than never. Handbrake FTW
- zackattack 16y agogod, disqus is so unreliable. are the comments not loading for anyone else?
- bradendouglass 16y agosame here, I was excited to see the extra amount of anti Apple folks drinking haterade but, Disqus is robbing me at the very moment.
- zackattack 16y agoi just wanted to comment and offer to buy the dude's laptop
- confuzatron 16y agoPT;MG (probably trolling;MG Siegler) "Thanks largely to Apple themselves, we live in a world where we have digital music, photos, movies, and TV shows that take up dozens, if not hundreds of gigabytes of storage." Ah nope. Fawning, not trolling. He forgot to add indoor plumbing, the internal combustion engine, modern medicine, etc, to the list.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bl4k 16y agoHe is so fixated and focused on Apple that off course they are responsible for everything. No other tech company exists, or is worthy, in his mind. He demonstrates ignorance in that article, by first mistaking his personal experience with technology for the experience of everybody else in the world. And second by mistaking his own ability to pay $200 more for an Air over a Macbook for the ability of everybody else in the world to afford the extra money. (It reminds me of the Reagan "If I listen to Dukakis long enough" quote - except it is "If I read MG long enough, I would be convinced that Apple..")
- StavrosK 16y agoJesus, that article was ridiculous. I grew suspicious when he talked about speed being partly due to the processor, when we've all known since we got SSDs that the processor has nothing to do with UI latency (when was the last time you saw CPU usage spiking to 100% just by launching programs)? The disk has always been the bottleneck, Apple was smart enough to put a fast disk in the Air, and now this guy praises it. This computer loads faster than the MBP because you've spent the past 6 months loading it with programs, guy. Format the MacBook Pro and it will be just as fast... Sure, the Air might be a great little computer, but for a $999 pricetag, I could get 3 netbooks instead.
- joshfinnie 16y agoAdd to the fact that no one is actually buying the $999 version. Every positive review I have read goes like this: "The new MacBook Air is amazing. It starts at $999 and I have been using the top-of-the-line 13" for a week! (of course not mentioning that it costs $1,599)" I would love to see a tech person use the $999 version and see their review. The price-point, when actually comparing the usable one, is ridiculous!
- mhd 16y agoI think before I get an Air, I definitely need to improve my social life and/or my coffee intake. Right now, I don't have a personal need for an ultraportable. I switch desks (home, office, abroad), but for that scenario, my current MBP 17" is a pretty ideal solution. Considering that I have (or could have) external monitors at each desk, the Mac Mini probably sounds like a better solution than the MB Air. If I ever have to attend a lot of meetings/conferences/presentations or finally find the time and money to travel the world, this looks pretty neat. Gives the Thinkpad X Series a run for its money.
- bradendouglass 16y agoI love the new Air but fall into this spot as well. I have an original Uni 17 (replaced optical drive)...what Jan 09 and I adore the heft, and weight of it. Then again, I am young and if I don't need anything of power I tote along the iPad. I love the Air but need a better reason, than current to pick one up, which is quite difficult every time I find myself playing with them in the Apple store.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y agoI actually don't travel that much but the weight of lugging my current MacBook around on the occasions I do is what has sold the new MacBook Air to me. I'm not a frequent traveller - maybe once a month - but by the time I add a laptop to all the other stuff I tend to have in a shoulder bag (not to mention the fact that I'd possibly be carrying my 16 month old daughter) and it's pushing what's practical to carry it for any sort of extended period. When I was looking at the possibility of replacing my current 4 year old MacBook I asked myself what had irritated me about the current machine that I would change. The performance is still basically fine (I code a bit, edit a bit of video and the odd photo but nothing where the performance is really getting to me) and I came to the conclusion it was weight and start up time which means that the MacBook Air rather than a new MacBook or MacBook Pro was the logical choice.
- kamechan 16y agoi have a newer 17mbp. can't say i've used the optical, but i like having it there. i would probably move towards a 15" mba if it had their 1680x1050 screen and more battery life. the 8GB ram thing doesn't really get to me tho. i do all my dev work in vim. the thing i can't stand is how people are perceiving the dump of the optical drive as something revolutionary. a) the old macbook air didn't have one (a gripe for many) and b) neither do netbooks. a little off-topic but one thing that really kills me about apple is how they're seemingly refusing to add a blu-ray option even though the standard is well-established. i would really like to have one in my mbp17. not just because i have a res (1920x1200) on the lappy that supports it, but because i also have a 27" panel that i hook my laptop into. and this move towards "no optical drives" (likely so they can sell more HD content) is only going to solidify that among their lines in my assessment. hmmmph.
- jokull 16y agoI guess they'd like you to buy movies in the iTunes store instead.
- qjz 16y agoI thoroughly dislike optical drives, regardless of the platform, and see their demise as a good thing. In laptops, they add weight and draw excessive power. Elsewhere, only commercial manufacturing provides reliable storage, but even this is extremely vulnerable to wear and tear from heavy use. At the consumer level, I've had better luck archiving data on floppy disks than any optical media (I've yet to see a CD-RW allow reuse without data corruption). As far as I'm concerned, USB ports make built-in optical drives obsolete.
- kamechan 16y agothe problem is that some movies can't be easily [legally] downloaded/distributed. take "tears of the black tiger" for example. one of the best films ever made, but nearly impossible to get from blockbuster, netflix (only recently could one watch online), or apple movie store in any other medium than DVD. how many more movies are there like this? my wife and i pick up japanese films from tokyo all the time that we can't get elsewhere. i would wager there are plenty more films available on DVD than on downloadable format. sure the reasons for this may be stupid ... but they're reasons nonetheless [for now].
- jacquesm 16y agoDoes this mean the price of getting an article on TC just went up ;) ? Joking aside, it's a very nice little machine, but I could not imagine developing software on it without hooking it up to a full sized keyboard and screen which would defeat most of the purpose of owning one in the first place. The mac Air series is so thin that when I saw one the first time I couldn't believe it was a real functional computer until they turned it on for me!
- newman314 16y agoI believe the Air is supposed to have a full sized keyboard and trackpad.
- jacquesm 16y agoFull size to me means separate cursor block, numpad and a key travel of more than a few mm. I am probably more partial to the keyboard I'm using than to any other aspect of my computer.
- icegreentea 16y agoThen you're not going to get fullsized on anything smaller than a 17". And not even the 17" MBP. Though there was this great deal going on a while back. Back when you got the free iPod Touch with the MBP, you could just get the numpad app for the iPod and use the most expensive external numpad ever!
- gt384u 16y agoI have always taken "full-size" in this context to mean that the area of the landing surface on the top of the keys to be the same as on the desktop offerings. That said, there is a bit of cheating in that the height of the top row of keys on the 11" Macbook air is definitely much smaller. Not sure if that's a big deal. The horizontal and vertical distance between key centers seemed comparable to my iMac's keyboard, though. I remember a number of times being attracted to the ultra-portable Fujitsus and Sonys of the world a few years ago and being totally unable to type effectively on them because the keys were so close together that my fingers kept getting in the way of each other when typing.
- etherael 16y agoI hate my cynicism, I wanted to be impressed and yet when I opened the article it forced me to look at the author and the rest was history.
- weego 16y agoI got a bit further to be fair. Infact to here: "My i7 iMac with 8 GB of RAM takes something like 2 minutes. My i7 MacBook Pro takes at least 30-45 seconds, and it has an SSD drive." and then realised that anything further on was a waste of my time. Summary: man who spends more on upgrading to latest macs than I can afford to spend on IT equipment in 10 years think the Air is awesome.
- modoc 16y agoA guy who's clearly into the latest and greatest hardware, and can give a good comparison against the fastest other machines out there is a waste of your time when reading a laptop review? That makes no sense. Hopefully this isn't a "he's rich so I don't care what he says" thing?
- etherael 16y agoNot at all, let's just say if you have read any of his prior articles it isn't difficult to see a pronounced bias on everything apple.
- steilpass 16y agoBe sure to check this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1824563 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1824563 (Ask HN: anyone using the new MacBook Air as your main development machine?)
- drats 16y agoI will refer to my earlier comment on these machines, they are only worth it if you have to be, or want to be, in OS X land. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1812730 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1812730 Outside of Apple PCs you can get a far better quality machine, and for my purposes a far better operating system in the form of Ubuntu. Quicksilver/Gnome-do, Safari/Chrome, Flash/Flash, nice fonts/nice fonts it's all even or Ubuntu with a slight edge until you get to apt-get which just slaughters OS X. Then there is freedom to tinker, the price difference and matching deployment/server OS. The reason apt-get is so far ahead of OS X is that OS X only has a tiny community, and for good reason considering how they have often treated it and that many of them are more focused on "striking gold" with an iPhone app. Nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it's a sub-standard system with loads of tinkering instead of the "just works" experience of Linux. Good luck finding blogs/documentation/help when something goes wrong with OS X too. Perhaps Textmate/Ruby-on-Rails has first class support as a stack, but in so many other areas it's a wasteland. I suppose I am saying that yes fair enough it's a good machine, but just because you haven't used an SSD before and/or are attached to OS X for money don't try to imply, as is usually done, that Apple is lightyears ahead. It's behind in many areas and hardly worth the hype that is attached to the release.
- greyman 16y ago> the "just works" experience of Linux I am sorry to say that, but I never had such an experience (and i had to use Linux quite a lot in the past).
- jgrahamc 16y agoI've been carrying around laptop machines since just after the Osborne 1 and in more modern times I've had a succession of Thinkpads running DOS/Windows etc., other laptops running Linux (starting with SuSE and later using Ubuntu) and now I have a variety of MacBooks. The overall experience on laptops with Linux was horrid. Constant problems with drivers, upgrades and miscellaneous crap. The only truly good experience has been on the Mac with OS X. I have no trouble using all my familiar unixy tools and installing packages, but I do not spend my time with time wasting activities (oh, why doesn't the network driver work right now?(1)) and spend more on development. Overall, the Macs have been the most efficient machines I've used. Here's the thing: I'm not an Apple fan boy, I'm an effectiveness fan boy. The Macs win. Just last night I was programming a GSM/GPS module connected to my MacBook Pro via USB emulating a serial port. Module had to be programmed in Python and communicated with using AT commands. No problem at all using EMACS, Python, Tcl/Expect, make, etc. to get things working. (1) The usual response to that criticism is that its the hardware manufacturer's fault if there aren't open drivers for their device. As a user who needs to get stuff done, I simply don't care. The machine needs to work. Macs do.
- Humblecoder 16y agoThe article is either extreme fanboyism or trolling taken to a new level. Either way why, oh why, do we keep giving this guy clicks?
- bl4k 16y ago"But for pretty much everything I’ve done this past week — basically, my regular work and play habits" browsing Twitter and writing blog posts?
- grammaton 16y agoAs opposed to what, rotating particle accelerator dumps through N-space to correlate them against standard model predictions? What, exactly, do you think people use laptops for? If you're doing something remarkably intensive like encoding video or writing massively scalable ETL code, and you're doing it on a laptop, you have failed at computers.
- hkuo 16y agoI actually do video and After Effects on my Macbook Pro, as well as all of my Photoshop work with huge multi-layered files, and it flies. I have a more powerful Quad-Core tower at work, but it's only a slight improvement in speed, and being mobile with my Macbook far outweights that. In fact, there are tons of people that do video editing on the fly with Macbooks. I wouldn't dare try it with a Macbook Air.
- pclark 16y agowhats your point? browsing social networking sites is how most people spend their day and spare time
- bl4k 16y agoit is not a fair review of the performance diff between a pro and an air for somebody who runs a traditional dev stack (eclipse/netbeans + 2+ browsers + compiler/vm + httpd + photoshop + database +++), or a gamer, or a student, a 10 or even 5% performance delta makes a big diff.
- marknutter 16y agoI briefly considered selling my 13" MBP for an air, but quickly realized I could upgrade my machine to 8GB of RAM and swap in an SSD for cheap, on top of the processor being much faster than any of the Airs'. Also, I have an iPad and an 11" Air would be a bit redundant for me.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- listic 16y agoI hate the fact that tech companies and observers gloss over the technical details of products. On Apple's site, even in the sections labeled "Tech Specs" you cannot find the model of CPU, chipset or hard drive that goes into any of their product (except for Mac Pro, and there you don't have much choice even though I guess it should be expected with the desktop computer of such class). And the reviewers often times make no effort to find that out too! What kind of "technical" is this? It seems to me they use Core 2 Duo SL9400 (1.87 GHz, 1066 FSB)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_2_microprocessors#.22Penryn.22_.28low-voltage.2C_45_nm.2C_Small_Form_Factor.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_2_microproce...). Not exactly record-setting for low power, judging by 17W TDP, but when everyone is measuring battery life at mostly idle CPU, and with process enhancements over the years (I heard that later Core 2's of the same model consume less power than rated) I think they might show close to their rated battery life. I think Apple must have worked hard squeezing the unnecessary volume and weight with the new design to give place for more battery too.
- cobralibre 16y agoI hate the fact that tech companies and observers gloss over the technical details of products. It's hard to expect much of tech journalism when so little of it is actually journalism. We've collectively ceded the territory formerly occupied by professional journalists to fanboys and bloggers, many of us celebrating the fact along the way. Having said that, it's only right that Apple's marketing downplays specs, part numbers, and benchmarks (with some notable exceptions). Macs are great computers for the people who like them because of a combination of clever industrial design, polished software, and good hardware. Specs and benchmarks don't begin to tell you what it's like to use a Mac. Think qualia, not quantity.
- aphexairlines 16y ago> What kind of "technical" is this? It's not technical. It's an industry gossip blog article about a lifestyle consumer electronics company's latest product.
- Kilimanjaro 16y agoThe next move in Jobs' chess board is to bring the plastic macbook down to $699, in five delicious colors, as thin as the macbook air. The perfect netbook for the masses.
- Kilimanjaro 16y agoOh, and the mac mini 'soapbar', a 3x2x1" computer as powerful as any pc desktop, for just $199. Total world domination.
- topherjaynes 16y agoI'd like to know what application he is running. Yes, I'd imagine that Chrome would be faster on a fresh out of the box mac, but let's see him try to process RAW photos.
- thomasfl 16y agoThey should measure temperature and noise when testing new laptops. In addition to disk speed and processing power, it's the most important features for me. My 2 year old MacBookPro gets boiling hot after an hour.
- glhaynes 16y agoI agree. These things have become the most important thing about a computer for most people... C2D vs i5 = I couldn't care less. Happily, the reviews I've read of the Air have universally said that fan noise and heat are both minimal.
- Encosia 16y agoI went to the local Apple store to investigate that for myself. They had an older MBA sitting in a corner, which was hot enough on the bottom that I nearly dropped it. The newer ones, which people had been using all day, were no warmer than my iPad gets (and significantly cooler than the iPhone tends to get). Hard to tell about the noise. The store was too loud.
- Encosia 16y agoJust to follow up on the noise, if anyone's interested (or happen to notice this followup comment at all), noise is not an issue. I received my 13" about 24 hours ago, and only heard the fan briefly while it was syncing my entire Dropbox. Otherwise, it has been absolutely silent (and not even warm).
- jeebusroxors 16y agoI'm not particularly an Apple guy (if anything a bit against them), but these Airs are exactly what I think a laptop should be. I want my laptop to be small, lightweight and have a long (3-4 hour) battery life, with performance as a low priority. Netbooks are a good compromise but their limited screen size/smaller keyboard are a bit of a hassle. They're still too pricey for my blood though. The previous Air I saw was listed at ~$1800 (USD), and even though $999 is significantly better, I can't see myself spending that much on (what would be for me) a secondary machine. That being said - tax season is coming up. =) Is it a pain to get linux running on these things?
- achompas 16y agoI've spent a bit of time with the 11" Air and, lemme tell you guys: this thing runs simple apps really well. Safari's icon bounces once, then Safari is open. iPhoto is pretty quick. Even bloated iTunes doesn't take a million years to back up an iPhone or scroll through iTMS. Here's the problem, though: Siegler and I can't talk about intense applications. I don't know if it can't handle RAW file editing in Lightroom/PS, Starcraft II on high settings, or developing in Xcode. The benchmarks Siegler quotes show the Air is worse than the 13" Pro at handling these intense apps (Handbrake, PS, VM software). [1] Someone cracked about how Siegler's activities consist of "blogging and scrolling through Twitter." For anyone who does that (i.e. your average college student), this thing will be great for years. For more intense apps? I have my doubts. And the Air might be fine right now, but what about upgrading two years from now? What if system or available memory become an issue? [1] http://www.macworld.com/article/154596/2010/10/macbookair_benchmarks.html http://www.macworld.com/article/154596/2010/10/macbookair_be...
- grammaton 16y agoPhoto-editing machine? For low end photo editing it's probably fine. For high end - why would you be doing that on a laptop? Gaming? Why would you be doing that on a laptop? Development machine? What are you developing? I think it could handle the average web developer's work load just fine. If you're writing something intensive enough that hardware is a real issue - why are you doing that on a laptop?
- achompas 16y agoBecause, if you're like me, you can only afford one machine? And you don't want to be chained to one desk when using it? EDIT: sorry, you didn't downvote me.
- grammaton 16y agoIf you can only afford one machine, what makes you think you can afford a laptop with the specs to handle something like high end photo editing? For the same money you could buy a low end laptop for portability, and a decent mid-end PC for more intensive applications. This objection doesn't make much sense. Laptops have never been intended for high end intensive applications.
- hackermom 16y agoApple have a damned good track record on their portable strategy; very few boneheaded moves have been made. If the new Air is THAT good, you can bet your b-hind that the new MB Pro incarnation will be THAT THAT good.
- djacobs 16y agoOnce again, MG is blinded by his fanaticism. My favorite line: "This thing boots up in less than 15 seconds, ready to go. My i7 iMac with 8 GB of RAM takes something like 2 minutes." As if RAM had anything to do with boot time. And my Core 2 Duo boots up in less than 2 minutes, so I'm not really sure what his problem is. (If he wants fast, maybe he should try Linux.)
- wazoox 16y agoMy 2 years old unibody macbook 13" boots (rarely) in about 1 minute, with its old 160 GB hard drive. Maybe he shouldn't have bought a shitty SSD :)
- sanj 16y agoI'm surprised he cares about startup and shutdown times. One of the lovely things about the Mac laptops is that you never have to turn them off. Close them and they go to sleep in a few seconds. Open them up and you're ready to work immediately. The uptime on my laptops tends to be a few months.
- albemuth 16y agojust checked mine amesen-mac:~ alfredomesen$ uptime 9:06 up 34 days, 10:38, 6 users, load averages: 1.27 1.08 1.17
- calloc 16y agoI agree with the poster that my laptop has uptimes that reach into the months generally. I can't say the same about my Windows machines. 10:11 up 36 days, 1:16, 2 users, load averages: 1.07 1.19 1.22
- tjogin 16y agoMaybe it's more of an easily measured performance indicator than something he cares about.
- grammaton 16y agoBusiness frequent flyers would tend to care about this metric - imagine yourself going through multiple iterations of "please turn off all electronics at this time" could easily get annoyed in a hurry by an overly long boot sequence.
- dasil003 16y agoThere is not one time during an air trip when I shut my laptop down completely.
- seanalltogether 16y agoWait, do you all actually shut your machine off for flights? I just close the lid.
- adamsmith 16y agoMG might or might not run into trouble once his SSD drive burns in / fills up, as it no doubt has on the other laptops he talks about. His comparison might be somewhat apples to oranges..
- steilpass 16y agoSo I've read a couple of comments the Air would be a good secondary computer. So how do you guys hook it up to lets say your iMac at home?
- jbarham 16y agoFor all this talk of SSDs, it's worth pointing out that you can pick up the 2.5" 500GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid SSD/platter drive for $130 on Amazon. Best upgrade I made to my Thinkpad, and one that is not available for the Air...
- colomon 16y agoI am (as I type this on a different system) in the midst of upgrading my MBP with one of these babies. :)
- billjings 16y agoWhat sort of performance do people see on the macbook air solid state storage? What sort of hardware interface does it use? I'm not seeing any non-puff reviews of this thing anywhere.