Apple's new 11" MacBook Air a "much faster iPad" or "much slower MacBook Pro" - Page 2

Then why not an iPad? Because the chart above shows what a pathetic machine the iPad is for web browsing.

"Magical".....that's the term Jobs used at the iPad's unveiling, and what the ad campaign was centered around. O.K., it's a handy tool that has a smaller form factor. But it's pathetically slow, not 'magical'. That's the reason I haven't bought one. I can surf the web much faster on my 3-yr-old MBP.

I was actually curious to see if this new unveiling would reveal a dual-boot device -- a small laptop with flash memory and a regular processor that would run OSX, but also have an A4 processor and could boot up instantly with iOS. And have 3G. A true hybrid of both a Macbook and an iPad. And it could share some documents back and forth between the 2 OS's.

Agreed, if only it could...I would be very tempted to pare down my digital lifestyle to an iPad 3Gs and an iPhone 4....

I don't want to have to shelve, store, charge, update, remember to take, all these gadgets! Uggh!



I have a son-in-law...(Masters in Finance) and absolutely hates "tech."

He has an old TV that looks like the cab of the Space Shuttle and flip phone that looks like it's from the late 90's.

He says, ALL his emails will be on his desktop at work in the morning when he gets there!



I asked him to put it away, b/c it was embarrassing. He said, "I've been told that, before!"



I had the white 3Gs when it first came out....with a Mophie white battery "case." Which essentially, doubled its size. Yep, little blue flashing lights on the back-thought I was cool!

He said, "it looked like something a Star Wars Storm Trooper would carry!" And he was exactly right...It looked really stupid! so I sold it and got the iPhone 4!



Best

Yeah! Is it more portable than the MBP 17" ?

Good times!

Exactly! I questioned SJ's description of the MBA at the Keynote. He said, 'what would happen if the Macbook hooked up with the iPad'? Really Steve? This is what you get? I say hogwash! This is a mini Macbook, nothing more. The Hardware may have been inspired by the economy of how the iPad was built but that's where the comparisons end, my friend. I'd rather have an iOS/OSX hybrid machine. Well, that's probably what Steve is talking about with Lion. Now that Lion has apps and a lot more multi-touch components, the OS is what's going to make the new MBA more like the iPad. Let's hope that's what he means.

Because the iPad is much better at being a multi-touch viewer than an input device. doing heavy emailing, blogging, or anything that requires more than a single tap or multi-touch swipe, is just tedious. try using this forum on an iPad for more than a twitter-like response and get back to me when you're arm falls off.

as much as i giggle from these quotes, they are kind of missing the point. It's not that the tests are telling us anything we didn't already know...they're trying to show us HOW MUCH faster or slower they are. And I'm quite impressed at how much faster the 11" is to the iPad. Kind of convinces me that I'd rather get an 11" air over and iPad hands down on performance. And with Lion, it's going to be a pretty powerful little portable.

let's not go there, I tire to read all those argument back and forth for the next 3 pages on this forum.

agreed! 100% My mom would love this, but doesn't own a computer.

excellent point! Why not do this? I totally agree! Trackpad input on iOS just doesn't seem as unnatural as everyone else seems to think.

I don't understand that. If somebody cares about raw performance, they likely would buy the faster processor. Why wasn't that one considered?

Despite the fact that new 13" Air is more powerful than good old 11", I would prefer latter. Both have two-core processors, and the main difference is core frequency. 11" Air have 1.4GHz on each core, and I consider that as fast enough for regular work.

And yes, comparing Air and iPad is pretty stupid - that's two different devices for two different uses.

The reality is no one cares about that geeky sh** such as benchmarks. They are going to use the baby air to surf, blog, watch movies ect. Give it a rest and stop over analyzing everything!

OR a very fast PowerBook Duo 2400, which just so happens to be the computer I've been waiting for for more than 12 years!

The slowest MBA is 60% of the speed of the MBP, but more than 4x faster than an iPad. Not to mention the fact it can run full blown OS X, dual boot to Windows and for all intent and purpose, is nothing like an iPad.

Not one of the best stories of the day...

I have the first week (2/08) MBA, 1.6, 2G, 80G HDD. I don't use spreadsheets or PowerPoints or PhotoShop or even Aperture and I've switched to iWork from Word for word processing and while I'd like some additional speed I'm a happy chappy. My wife has the Summer 2009 MBA 2.13, 128 SSD and it's blazing fast and makes me jealous.

Today at my Apple Store I played with the 11" and I love it. I'm going to try the slightly faster processor with 4G and see how it fares. I'm sorry the 11" doesn't come with a SD slot, but otherwise I'm pretty excited about it. Odd that the 11" with the minimally faster processor and 4G RAM is the same price ($1400) as the 13" standard processor, 4G and 128G SSD ($1400). Paying for the smaller size perhaps?

I'd love the 11" with the fastest processor and I'd gladly pay an additional $100 for that, but I have no need for a 256G SSD for an extra $300 (as offered on the higher end 13").

This story is like saying: "man is much faster at running than worms."

It's meaningless that the Air is faster than the iPad, because they run two totally different OSs.

Thank you. To conclude otherwise is pure hubris.

I researched some other benchmarks yesterday.

Basically we're looking at the 11" at 1.4ghz having roughly 2/3 the performance of a MacBook/Pro.

However being purely flash-storage based, it can be responsive in a lot of tasks.

Not good enough to replace my Macbook Aluminium 2ghz (besides financial discipline I'm trying to stick to), and 13" is the smallest I can go for a laptop.

But then again I can have open at one time, Safari, Firefox Mail, CS4 Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Bridge, Flash, VMWare Fusion WinXP/ Win7.

Nonetheless for a lot of mainstream users, outside of those "geek"benchers, it's got decent performance for their needs. People are going to be pushing the limit on these MBAs, or otherwise just be getting them to follow the trends, and in Asia, as the new luxury item du jour.

MacWorld has a more useful, real-world testing, (not just one benchmark designed to stress CPU & memory), and they found that the new MacBook Airs are much faster than the old one when you factor ALL aspects of hardware into the equation: the nVidia 320m, the faster SSD, and the refined Intel Core 2 Duo, which handles heat better, so the chip doesn't get underclocked like the version used in the older Airs. That's the main take away: the new MacBook Airs are hands-down faster than the older Airs, and depending on what you're doing, even faster than disk-based MacBook Pros on I/O-bounded activities.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...?taxonomyId=12

Macbook air is designed in that way. So whats the point of this article?

+1


+2


Because people (users, journalists, whomever) are mostly too lazy to look at "custom-build" options. They take the primary-listed models as the only thing Apple offers and cares about.

My thoughts exactly. We all act like "OMG, the MacBook Air is too slow to run OS X." Uh, news flash: OS X runs very well on an iPad. And it's not like Snow Leopard = Vista. Go see one for yourself. Apple has done a great job.

I'm not quite sure a faster GPU at this stage would improve the overall performance. CPU speed probably is more important.



Indeed. The point is, nonetheless, that the SSD on the 11" MacBook Air compensates for the 1.4ghz CPU. Along with many Core Graphics/ OpenCL(?) operations that occur in OS X running on the 320M, I think the 11" MBA will surprise many, and infuriate the techboys that salivate over pure specs.

One thing that is not tested, is how the "custom SSD" in the MBA compares with standard 2.5" SSDs in a MacBook/Pro. Now *that* would be some real information. Does Apple's custom solution and selected SSD controller fare better over SATA1/SATA2 - connected standard SSDs? Remember how some Mac laptops only supported SATA1 even if you put an SSD in it you might have bottlenecks(?)

FWIW the MBA 11" destroys my MacBook Aluminium 2ghz with 7200rpm hard drive when it comes to Xbench. About 125 to my paltry 60-something score. There are lies, damned lies, and then there are benchmarks.

Ignoring the silly comparisons in the article, I am a writer currently working on a (aluminium unibody) Macbook. For a while now I've been considering getting an iPad with a separate Apple keyboard to work on in libraries and the like. This has the advantage of being able to separate the screen and keyboard and help avoid RSI and neck strain. However, it would mean having to opt for iPad's Pages over Word and working on iOS rather than Mac OS X (maybe not a problem). Or I could go with the new Macbook Air. I wouldn't have the advantage of separate screen and input but it would all be one system, more powerful and still lighter than my 13" Macbook.

That's no surprise. It's basically the definition of a netbook, only expensive as hell. Until optical-drives become an option and SSDs becomes more common on laptop, it is what it is.

Also, it would help if we start using low-voltage processors if we're gonna go this route. Since flash memory doesn't need that much power.

People may dismiss the Macbook Air 11" as an "expensive netbook" but that is just missing the point.

The reality is that the CPU is about 60-70% the CPU performance of the latest MacBook Pro 13". Depending what you're doing though certain tasks may be faster or simply not that bad because of the pure-flash storage.

The design, feel, weight, finish, responsiveness, Mac OS X, multitouch, widescreen LED-backlit, instant on. Capability to run the "big boy" software... I tried one out briefly today. This thing will not be for everyone, or fit in the casual cheapo-laptop cash-strapped consumer.

If one has trouble keeping up with the mortgage, this is *not* the laptop to get.

But, it is, yet another gadget of desire. Should do a good 500,000 to 800,000 units in the Oct-Nov 2010 holiday quarter. It's a stocking-stuffer, for sure. And any kid going to college would love to have one. Business execs, etc. etc. The only thing holding it back is Apple's production capacity but also the usual rigmarole that people are used to Windows, MS Office, etc. etc.

The widescreen is a little weird initially but web browsing ain't that bad, spreadsheets should be alright, and video and movies will be sweet, iLife should be alright too at 16:9 at that resolution. Keyboard and trackpad feels good, makes any cramped netbook keyboard and plastic trackpad just look and feel like junk.

I don't think the MacBook Air 11" will propel Macs to the stratosphere, but it will bulk up Apple's Oct-Nov 2010 results to be best revenue, best profit, best number of Macs sold, ever. To be followed up with iPad 2 in the Jan-Mar 2011 quarter to make everyone that bought the original iPad feel like a total schmuck...

In any case, the MacBook Air 11" and the iPad 2 will be the computing revolution of 2011. Netbook? Yeah, Apple showed them how to do it right with the MBA 11" and iPad/2.

AnandTech posted a thorough review last night with plenty of benhmarks. It's worth the read.

PS: I'm not a fan of calling these machines "netbooks". Netbooks were born around Intel's cheap, low-power and low-performance Atom CPUs. From those we got cheap, low-performance machines. A couple vendors made some very nice ad expensive netbooks, most still hbe cramped keyboards and all have Atom CPUs. These MBAs have none of those things. The C2Ds might be slow compared to 35W C2D chips and 35W Core-iX chips, but they are in a class well above Atom, cost (by themselves) as much as their full-size and full-power brothers which is more than most netbooks cost in total. These are true ultra-portables, not some netbook that is only decent at doing light 'net' activities.

Cool. Will look through the article. Got a good play of the 11" and 13" MBA today at the Apple Reseller shop where I sometimes help out. Lots of piccies to come...!

Initial impressions. Very nice feel. Doesn't feel as light as you imagine, but feels slick and smooth, just right. Here's the thing: after you fiddle with it, you pick up a Macbook Pro 13", and it feels like a darn rock! Boot time is 30 seconds from press of the power button on a 11" and 26 seconds on the 13". This is not fresh out of the box, it's once a user account is set up, etc. The 11" is snappy enough, though you will notice some lags during some CPU intensive stuff.

The 11" feels BIG! Like a real laptop. You forget it's 11". The widescreen is kinda weird, but interesting after a while.

The 13" just feels, well, like really how a 13" MacBook/Pro should be. After using it, you won't want anything else, you just wish it would have a Core i5, 4GB of RAM, 320GB SSD and a nice GPU... in that new MacBook Air form factor. It's definitely a new benchmark in design that Apple and every other PC manufacturer will strive towards over the next few years. And possibly mark the final design of laptops as we know them at the moment, before things go tablet/hybrid/whatever over the next 5 years.

Only thing, BACKLIT KEYBOARDS. This will be a huge demand from users, I think Apple will incorporate it as an option either over the next several months or in the next revision. I think they simply could not afford the engineering capacity to squeeze that in, or maybe there were some last minute production issues and they needed the MacBook Airs out by end of October latest.

Anyway I won't belabour the points too much, a lot of reviews and benches coming through now. I'll just post the pics! We had some fun taking them just now after the shop closed. Just got back home.

Ouch! Something is wrong with those machines. They should around 15 seconds. Even Mac with a HDD is academy over 30 seconds. I've been using a 3rd-party SSD in my MBP for many months now and I'm still at 15 seconds, ad Anand has these booting up faster due to a more optimized SSD*.


* They are SSDs even though not in the shape of a 2.5" HDD.

Nice article, just one niggle... AnandTech got it wrong on "Instant On":

"Apple advertises the new MacBook Air as being instant on as a result of the internal SSD. That’s mostly untrue........Clearly the new Air isn't instant on from a boot standpoint, but it's pretty much there from a recover-from-sleep standpoint. The new Airs both go to sleep and wake up from sleep quicker than any of the other Macs, including my upgraded 15-inch Core i7 MacBook Pro. Again, nothing can trump Apple's tight integration between hardware and software."

....................

I posted this comment:

....................

Great article, just one niggle, Instant On does not refer to Boot, nor Wake From Sleep.

From the Apple website:

"And when you put MacBook Air to sleep for more than an hour, it enters what’s called standby mode. So you can come back to MacBook Air a day, a week - even up to an entire month later - and it wakes in an instant."

http://www.apple.com/macbookair/design.html

Instant On refers to a Standby Mode (basically hibernate) that is not Boot nor Wake From Sleep.

IMG_0094 by nvidia2008, on Flickr

MBA 11", MBA 13", iPad by nvidia2008, on Flickr

MBA 11", MBA 13", iPad by nvidia2008, on Flickr

iPad, MBA 11", MBA 13", MBP 17" by nvidia2008, on Flickr

OMG iPhoto just nuked my Flickr album when I tried to delete the pictures from iPhoto. Please hold, restoring... Restored. Trimmed down number of pictures posted on this thread.

Last few:


IMG_0130 by nvidia2008, on Flickr


IMG_0152 by nvidia2008, on Flickr


IMG_0158 by nvidia2008, on Flickr


MBA 11", iPad by nvidia2008, on Flickr