MacWorld 2008 Thread of RDF and Awesome

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » 2008-01-16 02:15pm

Am i the only one that finds the connetics completely well absent, freaking heavy and What's the point of making it Thin, if it's take the same space on my desktop
and what? Unreplacable battery?

thank you very much, i'll keep my Let's Note R7 for the moment

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2008-01-16 04:00pm

Xisiqomelir wrote:
Uraniun235 wrote:
Praxis wrote:It's got a full size keyboard, a full size screen, all the specs of a MacBook in every way except slightly lower clock speed and no disc drive. And it's 0.17 inches thick.
Ah ah ah!

0.17 inches thin.
"Inches thin" is like "times less".

What, you've never read the Apple website?

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2008-01-16 11:21pm

And I'm 19 years young

loomer · Post by **loomer** » 2008-01-17 01:50am

Did anyone who went and posts here see Spore? If they did, they will post. They WILL post, or I will rip out their fucking spleen.

That's not a joke.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2008-01-19 02:15pm

Admiral Valdemar wrote:It's pure style over substance, a lot of what Apple seems to be. Yes, it looks great, but for that price and the gimmick of a solid state drive as a bonus, it's not exactly the cutting edge of technology and affordability.

How is the solid state drive a "gimmick"? It will be at least an order of magnitude faster in terms of access times, especially when compared to the 1.8" 4200 rpm HDD that is in there standard. Under heavy workloads, the SSD drive will really pay off when the machine starts paging to disk frequently. Booting from an SSD is also very fast, as is waking from sleep. As to whether those advantages are worth an extra grand, well, that's another issue.

I did get the chance to play with one at work after the keynote for a bit. I was actually surprised at how responsive it is, but I'm sure that's the 2 GB of RAM helping out. And yeah, I was worried that I'd cut myself on the thing. It makes my MacBook look downright chunky.

One thing that I don't see being talked about much is the Remote Disk feature for Windows. This means that it's possible that the MacBook Air setup disc has Windows HFS+ drivers on it, which would be a big win for BootCamp users.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2008-01-19 04:31pm

SSDs also consume less power, have no motor to wear out, and don't have to worry about head crashes.

They're still a bit too pricey for me for what I do, but they're far from a gimmick; they're definitely the future for laptops and low-power PCs. (Bulk storage will still be on spindles of platters for quite some time.)

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2008-01-19 09:03pm

Less power, no moving parts (perhaps a false assumption, but I would imagine this would make it less prone to breakdown), much faster loading times, much smaller size, much more durable...hardly a gimmick.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2008-01-19 09:43pm

Oh sorry, I forgot. Because Apple does it, it must be a gimmick.

Braedley · Post by **Braedley** » 2008-01-20 12:05am

If I could afford it, I would buy a 32G SSD and put my windows and linux boot partitions on it just to cut my startup times in half. That's how awesome SSDs are. And this would be on a desktop, none the less. For a laptop, an SSD makes perfect sense. Laptops are where you want the 5sec startup times, the lower power usage, and better response. Traditional harddrives can't give you those.

Drewcifer · Post by **Drewcifer** » 2008-01-20 06:37am

AppleInsider reports that the MacBook Air's battery is easily replaced and only takes a few minutes to do.

Due to its ultra-thin profile, Apple's new MacBook Air was designed with an integrated 37-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery that is not user-replaceable. Though this has caused some initial concern amongst potential adopters, AppleInsider has learned that the replacement process is quite trivial.

According to people familiar with the new-generation notebook, there are no special tools or knowledge required to swap out the MacBook Air's battery, which Apple has billed its "thinnest ever" in a product. Instead, the process requires a single size-0 type philips screwdriver and some diligence.

Once flipped upside down, the MacBook Air's bottom cover is easily unscrewed and removed, providing immediate access to the battery cavity. From there, the battery can be unscrewed from the chassis with the same screwdriver and unplugged from the circuit board with a simple tug -- it's not soldered to the board.

The entire process, according to those in the known, can be completed by any service technician in as little as three minutes.

For its part, Apple has announced its intent to offer a MacBook Air Out-of-Warranty Battery Replacement Program, which promises authorized replacements for US $129. The mail-in repair process normally takes 5 business days, the company says.

Given the simplicity of the upgrade, however, it's possible that Apple will in time offer the service on-demand at its retail stores. Similarly, third parties could also offer in-home do-it-yourself kits should they be able to acquire battery cells that meet Apple's standard for the MacBook Air.

There's no word, however, whether the latter process would void the notebook's warranty in Apple's eyes. In the meantime, the company recommends MacBook Air users follow these instructions for optimizing life span and battery life.

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2008-01-22 02:25am

Durandal wrote:Oh sorry, I forgot. Because Apple does it, it must be a gimmick.

It's not a gimmick, but the benefits really aren't there for desktop use. SSDs real benefit (leaving aside power consumption) is as you said, lower access time which are ridiculously low. An average SSD has access times < 0.1ms as opposed to 12ms for an average SATA drive.

However, thanks to intelligent prefetching of data as well as numerous other techniques designed to mask the access latency, this doesn't provide a great deal of real world benefit in most applications. About the only place this kind of access time would be worth it is in transaction processing, so it's no surprise to me that Enterprise SSDs seem to be the next big thing in the Enterprise space.

As to Apple using them in the Macbook Air? Hardly innovative (lots of OEMs have had SSD options for the last year), not of great benefit to most people, but there are worse ways to blow your money and it can potentially provide a few benefits. Still, it's not really that big of a deal.

What WOULD have been innovative is if Apple had finally made them affordable, much as they did with the Superdrive back in the day. Alas, I guess the prices are still much too high.

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2008-01-22 02:27am

Drewcifer wrote:AppleInsider reports that the MacBook Air's battery is easily replaced and only takes a few minutes to do

Cute, but battery fatigue is not the reason you really want a user replaceable battery. Sure that's a good thing, but the real reason you want it is to increase the life of the notebook with more/bigger batteries. This is especially true in an ultraportable.

Drewcifer · Post by **Drewcifer** » 2008-01-26 04:35pm

The Kernel wrote:Cute,

I don't understand.

...but battery fatigue is not the reason you really want a user replaceable battery. Sure that's a good thing, but the real reason you want it is to increase the life of the notebook with more/bigger batteries. This is especially true in an ultraportable.

A larger/heavier battery goes against the whole idea of an ultra-thin and ultra-lightweight portable, does it not?

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » 2008-01-27 01:56pm

A larger/heavier battery goes against the whole idea of an ultra-thin and ultra-lightweight portable, does it not?

well; the MBA is already bigass for a ultra-lighweight laptop compared to a Panasonic Let's Note or a thnkpad X; the 200gr for a 9cells battery doesn't matter that much...

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2008-01-27 05:14pm

The Kernel wrote:
Drewcifer wrote:AppleInsider reports that the MacBook Air's battery is easily replaced and only takes a few minutes to do
Cute, but battery fatigue is not the reason you really want a user replaceable battery. Sure that's a good thing, but the real reason you want it is to increase the life of the notebook with more/bigger batteries. This is especially true in an ultraportable.

Since the TSA has banned travelers from carrying spare laptop batteries on planes, not having a user-replaceable battery has become less of a big deal. But there are still situations where you'd want to be able to swap batteries.

Though at this point, planes should just have fucking power outlets anyway. I've been on a lot of trains that do.

Post by **Beowulf** » 2008-01-27 05:26pm

Durandal wrote:
The Kernel wrote:
Drewcifer wrote:AppleInsider reports that the MacBook Air's battery is easily replaced and only takes a few minutes to do
Cute, but battery fatigue is not the reason you really want a user replaceable battery. Sure that's a good thing, but the real reason you want it is to increase the life of the notebook with more/bigger batteries. This is especially true in an ultraportable.
Since the TSA has banned travelers from carrying spare laptop batteries on planes, not having a user-replaceable battery has become less of a big deal. But there are still situations where you'd want to be able to swap batteries.

Though at this point, planes should just have fucking power outlets anyway. I've been on a lot of trains that do.

They didn't ban spare batteries. They banned loose lithium batteries, and batteries with more than 25 grams of lithium (approximately 300 WHr of energy). Most laptop batteries have far less than 25 grams of lithium. In fact, most have less than 8 grams, of which fliers are permitted to have an unlimited amount.

And planes do have power outlets. You need to fly first or business class though.

Lisa · Post by **Lisa** » 2008-01-29 02:08pm

I forsee third party external batteries like you see for cell phones and mp3 players, connecting via the magsafe connector.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » 2008-01-29 03:00pm

that's unsexy as hell; we are buying a laptop, not Voltron.

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MacWorld 2008 Thread of RDF and Awesome

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