Phew... finally I can take a break from everything else and put a few hours on my blog =) I have been extremely busy recently; traveling and falling sick. Had stomach flu right after a bad cough, for 1 week straight... really bad =(
Anyways, good things do happen. And something nice happened when I went to Indonesia for a biz trip about 2 weeks ago. Hehe, can't reveal it yet but some close friends would know as I have shamelessly asked for praises already Muaahahaha! It's something too personal to state now but I'll post it just to keep it on the record sometime March 2009 =) Nah, I'm far from having a Gf, let alone getting married =P
Now back to the new MacBook Air:
watch the Apple - October 2008 Special Event KeyNote update
First of all, I'll like to give my opinions on the original MacBook Air because much of it still applies to the new one. I got it when it was first available early 2008. Nothing comes close to its slimness really; my previous notebook the Toshiba Protégé R200 (the thinnest before the MacBook Air) was compact but the MacBook Air is much slicker.
MacBook Air VS Lenovo X300 (Lenovo's answer to MacBook Air)
source: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4270
Exterior
The aluminium casing feels solid and looks great. U can forget about the fragile plastic feeling that u're getting with your notebook if u're using the MacBook Air. Battery life has been superb; living up the Steve Jobs' claims of 5 hours.
Display
The 13.3 wide LCD screen is the perfect size for an ultra portable (videos or emails), and the LED backlite brights up the entire screen instantly.
Missing says who?
Trust me, u're not gonna miss that DVD drive if u're a mobile worker. Ya I'll need that RJ45 Ethernet port once in a while but otherwise I'm good on 802.11n and Mac OS X hooks me up on wireless networks with ease all the time. So all the complains that Apple's competitors have been shooting at the MacBook Air, don't really apply if u put the product in its target context; mobile.
Mobile means writing code while u're at the airport. Mobile means u hop from place to place to get your work done. And in modern day context, mobile means u use ur MacBook on ur lap with no cables.
Downside
The only "grievances" I have are that the 1st Gen MacBook Air didn't have adequate storage space and isn't Nvidia equipped.
Now that Apple has solved my 2 major "grievances", I'm happy to say I'm already a potential MacBook Air (2nd Gen) customer =D It's shipping in November so I'll try to get my hands on one then.
Though it has been long that notebooks come with Nvidia GPUs, but none is as slim as the new MacBook Air.
And ok, finally to my technical opinions of the new MacBook Air.
If u look carefully at the technical specifications, u'll noticed that the CPU configurations remains at 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz but the L2 cache size is increased from 2MB to an amazing 6MB limit! That makes the CPU on the MacBook Air comparable* in performance to desktop Macs (exclude the Mac Pro) in this aspect.
CPU L2 cache size determines how much data and "program" can be loaded and made available to the 2 cores at any given moment. Which means, contrarily, having a low L2 cache size actually deprive the 2 cores from functioning in parallel; each core has to wait for the other to finish accessing the L2 cache before it can overwrite it with the data that it wants to access. In a multi-core CPU environment (eg: dual or quad), it becomes more and more important to have larger L2 cache capacity (at least for Intel CPUs).
* There are many aspects that affects overall CPU performance; these include, not exhausively, word size (32/64/128bit), no. of cores, clock speed (the GHz thingy), bus (motherboard) speed (also measured in MHz/GHz), RAM speed, RAM size and L2/L3 cache size.
Next, memory. It's still 2GB but it's now DDR3 at 1066MHz! The original MacBook Air featured a 667MHz RAM DIMM with the frontside bus at 800MHz. What this means is that the RAM speed is almost 60% faster. And it's not only that, rarely do I see consumer desktop manufacturer produce machines with equal bus and RAM speeds. This is what I have been looking forward to since the days I saw Sun Microsystems doing it with their UltraSPARC servers. Nice work Apple!
So with the above, let's just say that we can expect the new MacBook Air to possibly run faster; I rather not bore u with the lengthy CPU cache hit calculations here =P
Next, storage. During the keynote, Steve Jobs mentioned a few times about the increase in capacity but didn't touch on access speed. Nevertheless, the hard drive is now connected via SATA rather than PATA. I suspect it's SATA 150 and not SATA 300. PATA's effective transfer rate is at 133MB/s and SATA 150 is at, as it states, 150MB/s. So we're talking about a difference of 17MB/s. Maybe that's not a lot to a lot of people. Perhaps that's why Apple chooses to keep mum about it.
At this point, I'll like to talk about the differences between HDD and SSD. It's pretty much proven that there is a difference in battery life between the 2 options. However, here are the dirty secrets:
- We used to compare a 64GB SSD to a 80GB single platter HDD. In best cases, the SSD lasts 17% longer than HDD but let's not forget it comes with 20% less capacity. We know that SSD sucks more juice for larger capacity while for HDD it multiples for the number of platters. Now that we have a 120GB single platter VS 128GB SSD... it's interesting to see the statistics when it is available
- SSD still sucks juice on sleep mode, HDD don't. HDD uses more power otherwise
- HDD is faster at reading/writing large data chunks sequentially while SSD is faster at reading/writing small data chunks at random address locations
source: http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3226&p=16
One other difference includes noise emission. But frankly speaking, the MacBook Air has the quietest hard drive compared to other notebooks. Personally, I don't hear my hard drive spinning or reading/writing (the tackling sound) even in a quiet room. That I must say, is a very different experience from all the other notebooks that I have had in the past.
Graphics. Ok Steve Jobs says the Nvidia GeForce 9400M runs at 4X the Intel X3100 integrated graphics chipset's speed. But what it provides more is compatibility. Nvidia offers 3D games compatibility, which means OpenGL runs better, which means the APIs called by the games I wanna play will probably be processed rather than avoided, so I'll see more types of shades and lighting effects =) I'll only know if it's "fast" enough when I try the upcoming Diablo 3 on it. It's definitely not as fast as the GeForce 8800 GT, which is a little sad. But hey, I rather have this than thicken the MacBook Air by another inch with a GPU cooler fan. Lastly, it shares RAM with the CPU so while it doesn't come with dedicated memory, it doesn't suck extra juice outta ur battery. This approach also ensures that the VRAM doesn't run at speeds slower than the front side bus, which is crucial for gaming performance.
Hmmm, enough tech talk I guess. I sound like an Apple tech evangelist justifying all their design decisions wahaha =D
Anyways, I'll be letting my current MacBook Air go the moment I get the new one.
Any takers? =P
