Consequently, the text needs to be corrected, too: SSD do not seem to be 18 times "faster", but 18 times as fast.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stonefree
You REEAALLLY need to get out more.
Weighing in on the side of the nit-pickers, it's also "have eaten" not "have ate," one "in" should have been ' in" ' and "pretty impossibly difficult to" is a pretty stretched example of English syntax as long as we're being picayune (and there were other such opportunities).
One minor technical caveat: in addressing SSD reliability the topic of the smaller number of rewrites that SSD's are supposed to have or may have before failing was not addressed at all.
But overall, a really solid review.and another example of why Apple Insider's becoming my first Mac site visit of the day.
Especially since another leading site converted to a new look that's as cluttered as a bad MySpace page (as if there any other kind) and seems to be relying on the personalities of its long time pundits, while AI is publishing solid in-depth news, reviews, predictions and digging into the history of how we've gotten from there to here -- e.g., the recent series on the genesis of each of the Office suite components and their Apple counterparts. I really haven't seen its like anywhere. Oh, and that site views itself as too professional to engage in "rumor mongering," leaving out many juicy tidbits, and for some reason (why they would leave this out is curious to me) you also seem recently to have more press coverage of business, market analyst and general publication news of Apple, Inc.
You also have the best forum software of any Macophilic site. Love the multi-quote option in particular, having three options, numbering of the posts and a clean stark layout that emphasizes the content while eschewing distracting eye candy.
Otherwise, keep up the good work, but do devote a few more resources to proofreading and editing!!
i had really wanted to love the SSD model, but honestly in real world computing, there isn't much between the two models beyond the $1000.
Yes, for heavily disk intensive reads, the SSD shines, but this isn't a computer that you are going to be loading multi-GB datasets from and the idea of loading 17 applications at once is just cockamamy. Loading an app at a time or a file at a time, the HDD is great and very very close to the SSD.
Equally, you could have designed write-intensive tests that would have made the HDD appear much faster. In fact, your claims that the SSD shuts down much faster is not really true in a real world situation. When there is a lot to write going into shutdown, the SSD crawls (I have made this happen on a demo machine) and takes as long to turn off as the MBA can to load from a cold boot.
The fact is that the SSD is still flawed technology. Once they get the writes down pat, it should be better, but people expecting a big bump in performance when word processing, surfing, working with spreadsheets and doing emails won't really find any difference subjectively.
Believe me, if there had been anything to pick between them, I would have bought an SSD. The fact is that in two hours of restarting, shutting down, cold booting, loading apps, loading and saving data, and generally doing the sorts of things that most of us do on a laptop, neither the .2Ghz nor the SSD gave me any reason to buy this new tech (and I love new tech). I honestly wish that it had. I'll pop in an SSD when their performance improves (the problems isn't the PATA), and they will no doubt continue to improve very rapidly.
I can understand that some people might want to get bogged down in numbers and comparing the MBA to other laptops but in all honesty, this laptop is amazing for it was designed to do. I have had it for a week now and it is very fast even with many applications open. It is just very snappy and I have the base model. If you think you would benefit from having a light laptop then you should definetely get it. It is definetely worth the $$$ in my opinion. Ok that's my opinion and I'm stickin with it
You mention in the battery tests that the SSD model has a more powerful processor than the hard disk version.
Why didn't you mention this in the first part when you're talking about hard drive performance.
Of course having a faster processor will contribute to faster load times, which makes your results, for all intents and purposes, a load of crap.
I understand you're trying to make SSD look better than it is because it's AppleInsider's modus operandi to make everything Apple does seem even better than it already is, but it would be nice if you'd be honest when you're doing benchmark tests that may influence somebody to spend $1000 more than they should....
Maybe that 40 seconds saved by the SSD with the faster processor would only be 20 or 10 seconds with the same processor, but I guess we won't know until a real news source comes out with some tests.
Comments
What I want to know is why Apple chose the out-of-date PATA interface over the more modern SATA. AppleInsider Crew, any ideas?
It doesn't look like the 1.8" size drives are available in SATA yet.
Originally Posted by davidswelt
Consequently, the text needs to be corrected, too: SSD do not seem to be 18 times "faster", but 18 times as fast.
You REEAALLLY need to get out more.
Weighing in on the side of the nit-pickers, it's also "have eaten" not "have ate," one "in" should have been ' in" ' and "pretty impossibly difficult to" is a pretty stretched example of English syntax as long as we're being picayune (and there were other such opportunities).
One minor technical caveat: in addressing SSD reliability the topic of the smaller number of rewrites that SSD's are supposed to have or may have before failing was not addressed at all.
But overall, a really solid review.and another example of why Apple Insider's becoming my first Mac site visit of the day.
Especially since another leading site converted to a new look that's as cluttered as a bad MySpace page (as if there any other kind) and seems to be relying on the personalities of its long time pundits, while AI is publishing solid in-depth news, reviews, predictions and digging into the history of how we've gotten from there to here -- e.g., the recent series on the genesis of each of the Office suite components and their Apple counterparts. I really haven't seen its like anywhere. Oh, and that site views itself as too professional to engage in "rumor mongering," leaving out many juicy tidbits, and for some reason (why they would leave this out is curious to me) you also seem recently to have more press coverage of business, market analyst and general publication news of Apple, Inc.
You also have the best forum software of any Macophilic site. Love the multi-quote option in particular, having three options, numbering of the posts and a clean stark layout that emphasizes the content while eschewing distracting eye candy.
Otherwise, keep up the good work, but do devote a few more resources to proofreading and editing!!
The video of 17 apps launching at one time was very impressive. Wonder how a Windows ultraportable would fare on this test using Vista?
Well, probably sooooooo much faster because a lot of Windows ultraportables have optical drives in them, which adds more power.
Yes, for heavily disk intensive reads, the SSD shines, but this isn't a computer that you are going to be loading multi-GB datasets from and the idea of loading 17 applications at once is just cockamamy. Loading an app at a time or a file at a time, the HDD is great and very very close to the SSD.
Equally, you could have designed write-intensive tests that would have made the HDD appear much faster. In fact, your claims that the SSD shuts down much faster is not really true in a real world situation. When there is a lot to write going into shutdown, the SSD crawls (I have made this happen on a demo machine) and takes as long to turn off as the MBA can to load from a cold boot.
The fact is that the SSD is still flawed technology. Once they get the writes down pat, it should be better, but people expecting a big bump in performance when word processing, surfing, working with spreadsheets and doing emails won't really find any difference subjectively.
Believe me, if there had been anything to pick between them, I would have bought an SSD. The fact is that in two hours of restarting, shutting down, cold booting, loading apps, loading and saving data, and generally doing the sorts of things that most of us do on a laptop, neither the .2Ghz nor the SSD gave me any reason to buy this new tech (and I love new tech). I honestly wish that it had. I'll pop in an SSD when their performance improves (the problems isn't the PATA), and they will no doubt continue to improve very rapidly.
I think it also depends on the speed grade of the flash chips themselves.
The same is true for disks, but even low-end flash can yield very fast performance when 8+ chips are addressed in parallel.
Why didn't you mention this in the first part when you're talking about hard drive performance.
Of course having a faster processor will contribute to faster load times, which makes your results, for all intents and purposes, a load of crap.
I understand you're trying to make SSD look better than it is because it's AppleInsider's modus operandi to make everything Apple does seem even better than it already is, but it would be nice if you'd be honest when you're doing benchmark tests that may influence somebody to spend $1000 more than they should....
Maybe that 40 seconds saved by the SSD with the faster processor would only be 20 or 10 seconds with the same processor, but I guess we won't know until a real news source comes out with some tests.