Mac book Air, anyone used one?

Santilli

Hairy Aussie
Joined
Jan 27, 2002
Messages
5,278
SSD on the motherboard?

Relatively cheap, track pad looks to big, but, it seems just fine for most things...
Except it's an Apple...
 

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,728
Location
Horsens, Denmark
They are sexy hardware, and I've read of people managing to get Windows 7 running on them. But yes, very expensive for the speed you get.
 

Sol

Storage is cool
Joined
Feb 10, 2002
Messages
960
Location
Cardiff (Wales)
Apple are definitely evil, but I'll give them the large track pad (Much nicer to use than a little one), there isn't really anything much wrong with MacOS and Macs all have very nice displays.

The SSD is in a slot, kind of like a laptop PCI-E slot (but not quite) so it is replaceable and the form factor is actually a standard (albeit one no-one else uses yet) so you can get replacement SSDs from sources other than Apple.

The Air form factor in general I don't get though... Light? Great. Thin... Remind me why I care?
I don't dislike thin but I'm unwilling to trade it for a device which is; expensive (or at least not cheap), slow (relative to what it could be), can only take 4GB of RAM (2GB on the base model), and it's soldered in (No second guessing if you don't pony up for it up front), has a really shitty GPU, and needs an adapter (And often an expensive one) for anything you want to plug in after the first 2 USB devices (And maybe an SD card if you bought the more expensive model).

As you say, fine for most things, but so is a Thinkpad that costs half the price.
 

Santilli

Hairy Aussie
Joined
Jan 27, 2002
Messages
5,278
I had fun looking this one up. It's about the same as my Cf-51Dual core(uses pretty much the same processor), and is about the same ram wise, 1.25 Gigs to 2 gigs. The weird thing is the first release used a PATA interface, and, a slower SSD then the Kingspec that I have in mine. IIRC the Kingspec reads around 70 MB per second, and the one they used was about 50 MBps. Overall, the general impression I got was it was pretty snappy for general use, as I find my CF-51, everytime I think about buying a new laptop.

The second generation they finally went to SATA interface, and that 4X's data transfer speeds. I'm finding that the AMD dual core 3800+, and Intel dual core Core 2, when combined with SATA SSD's for boot drives, and XP make for systems that will run pretty much everything I need out of a laptop, and HTPC.

I have found the HTPC working at max processor, that's an AMD 3800+, running this webpage:http://www.surfline.com/surfdata/report_quadcam.cfm
The BEAST runs it at 3% of processor speed.

I decided this was an upgrade I couldn't pass up, going from the 3800+ to a dual core 3800+ essentially doubles the processor speed for 33 dollars.
 
Top