MacBook Air's thinness, flash drive point to notebook future
After using the solid-state-drive version of the MacBook Air for about 10 days, the notebook's potential is what sticks with me the most. The seminal construction and the influence this will have on future designs is what sets the Air apart.
Note: This is not a CNET review. The Apple MacBook Air CNET review is here. What follows is a brief personal observation, not a review.
In day-to-day use, I am impressed by the Air's boot times (under 30 seconds), resume times (instantly from sleep mode), and lack of hard-drive "thrashing" that occurs invariably on my HP laptop when running many applications (including development environments) over a period of days. Admittedly, none of these three are mind-blowingly better than my HP (Core 2 Duo, 3GB of memory, 7200-rpm hard-disk drive) but they are a big enough improvement to make a difference.
MacBook Air
(Credit: Apple Computer)
MacBook Air solid state drive
(Credit: Apple)As to benchmarks, I would concur with the benchmarks done at Bare Feats. Their conclusion: "The MacBook Air's 64GB [SSD] excels in small random reads and writes. That explains why it boots so fast, wakes so fast, and launches apps so quickly...When it comes to sequential READS, it beats the HDD significantly in medium to large transfers...The weakness with the SSD lies in the sequential write speed." Subjective use bears out the fast read times. But, to be honest, I've never been able to notice any difference between my HP and the Air in write speed.
The main point of this post, however, is what the MacBook Air augurs. The Air is no doubt the first of many svelte SSD-based notebooks to come from a host of manufacturers. And solid-state drives will only get cheaper, bigger (in capacity), and faster in the coming years. I believe Intel when it says: "The interface sequential performance for SSDs can be designed so that the only limitation comes from the selected storage interface (SATA 1.5 or 3.0Gb, USB 2.0 400MB/s, or SAS 3.0Gb)." In other words--as Intel goes on to say--SSDs can saturate the read and write bandwidth of the interface, which hard disks cannot necessarily do.
Needless to say, the design of the Air is irresistible. Its basic concept--a relatively high-performance notebook PC in an incredibly thin and lightweight package--will be copied by all the major notebook suppliers. Even with the Air's well-publicized shortcomings (which I won't repeat here), that's a good thing.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
The feature-crippled MacBook Air doesn't cut it.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_08/b4072042350389.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_computers
The Air is about mobility.
Why do you consider hardwire connections to be a good thing for a device specifically designed to be portable?
- by nrwareham February 19, 2008 12:10 PM PST
- ive been using my macbook air everyday since it arrived last wednesday and i haven't missed the lack of optical drive; plus, the 1 usb port is all i need. The actual running of the macbook has been really good, not as slow as everyone says it is, i couldn't tell the difference in speed from a macbook and macbook air
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