Thin is in: Ars Technica reviews the MacBook Air(arstechnica.com)
arstechnica.com
Thin is in: Ars Technica reviews the MacBook Air
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-review.ars
20 comments
My favorite quote:
"The next stop along this path of disappointment is battery life."
Anyone know if you can buy some kind of auxiliary battery for it? Because otherwise I'm not getting one after all. 2.5 hours is not enough to get stuff done on planes. What a disappointment. I was so looking forward to a laptop I could use without always in the back of my mind thinking about how much time I had left to finish what I was working on before the computer died.
Doesn't an external battery make something designed to be small kinda pointless?
I wonder what kind of ultra portable could be made that was a simple unix box with a black & white display and no graphics. It would need to have cell-network access, which is another thing lots of people are upset that the Air doesn't have.
Apple basically told everyone: we fit it in an iphone, but we couldn't fit it in something 10 times the size.
I wonder what kind of ultra portable could be made that was a simple unix box with a black & white display and no graphics. It would need to have cell-network access, which is another thing lots of people are upset that the Air doesn't have.
Apple basically told everyone: we fit it in an iphone, but we couldn't fit it in something 10 times the size.
It's already been built (http://laptop.org/), except for cell network access. They also have minimal color and a small amount of graphics. You can even power it with a hand crank.
As soon as they build one with a bigger keyboard, that's my new machine.
As soon as they build one with a bigger keyboard, that's my new machine.
Actually, the XO is nothing like what I'm talking about. The screen is too small, it has color, the keyboard is too small, mesh networking is too new to be sold as a consumer product, and it is designed for 3rd world non-hacker children. They are a demographic as close to me as hiphop hacker single moms.
The XO has a really innovative dual mode screen with a super high DPI black and white screen with no backlight.
You could probably get an even better DPI daylight readable screen if you only allow for 2 colors. No dual mode.
There are many, many cool things in the XO. Too much for what I'm talking about.
There are many, many cool things in the XO. Too much for what I'm talking about.
I'm thinking you're starting to be obsessed with the hiphop hacker single mom niche, Ivan. :-)
I'm glad you caught that
The SSD should give slightly longer battery life, though probably only 10-20 minutes. Power consumption difference is about 2 watts vs 0.5 (the battery is 37 watt hour).
I'm disappointed too - I thought that everyone was crazy for attacking it in the way they did (soldered RAM, one USB port, no optical drive, pricey etc), but this really does make it unviable. Oh well, maybe Air rev 2 will fix it.
I'm disappointed too - I thought that everyone was crazy for attacking it in the way they did (soldered RAM, one USB port, no optical drive, pricey etc), but this really does make it unviable. Oh well, maybe Air rev 2 will fix it.
Using it on a plane you'd have the wireless turned off, so hopefully it would last a bit longer.
I don't know where he got his 4.5 hours for a macbook battery life - I've never gotten anywhere near that.
I don't know where he got his 4.5 hours for a macbook battery life - I've never gotten anywhere near that.
I've had battery life of over 4 hours consistently on my MacBook Pro. Most of the time I was running around 5 hours or so. This was with wireless turned off and the backlight dimmed a bit but it wasn't unreasonable. I wasn't watching movies though, just hacking in Emacs.
I'm getting 3.5ish now on my Lenovo with a battery that's nearly two years old and it's pretty delightful on my frequent 5 hour flights.
It seems like a step back from my MacBook which, like my sadly missed PB 12", manages 4+ hours on battery.
Consider flying on American Airlines, they offer AC on nearly every flight. Or surrender the few hours to delightful idleness (I fly infrequently enough for this to be my strong preference).
My strong preference is to down enough gin and tonics to get my brain off the fact that I'm way, way, way too high up in the air, a thought that it does not relinquish easily.
reports from the blogosphere indicate that the internal battery is not too difficult to replace, if you're willing to fiddle with a dozen tiny screws. but that's not the kind of thing you want to do on a plane.
Looks like it only shines in a very limited amount of use cases.
That doesn't matter as long as it shines in the use cases that the average consumer cares about.
I'm guessing those would be battery life and a spindle.