We've definitely been curious about the difference sticking an
SSD would make in the
MacBook Air's otherwise
average performance and battery life, and it looks like the answer is a resounding "meh." The crew at Ars Technica ran an SSD-equipped Air through a battery of tests, and found that while the increased random disk read / write speeds and slightly faster processor led to a minor overall speedup and less pinwheeling, the dramatically lower sequential read/ write speeds of the SSD made things essentially a wash. What's worse, battery life -- where the SSD should have shone -- was decidedly mediocre. Ars was able to coax the SSD model in to lasting 29 minutes longer than the HDD version they tested, but on average the SSD-equipped MBA didn't have the juice to last any longer than the HDD model, getting to about 2 hours and 31 minutes before petering out. All said, Ars says the extra $1300 for the SSD MacBook Air just isn't worth it -- but c'mon, you know that's not stopping the people who are buying Airs in the first place.
[Via
Digg]
posted Feb 6th 2008 4:16PM
Its cool and all but a macbook just fits my needs better. But hey the air does fit inside a manila envelope.(without an optical drive)
So does the MacBook, actually.
FYI guys, speed isn't the only reason you'd want SSD. You might also want it because it reduces the risk of physical problems with your hard drive.
Again, eliot, a wash. While the drive might be technically more resistant to physical damage, the user has to deal with corrupted sectors and wear on the flash cells isn't an issue with a normal flash drive.
@Joey: That was an issue with flash memory a long time ago, but modern flash memory has enough rewrite cycles to it that their MTBF is better than platter based media by a factor of years.
Of course, the $1000 difference in price buys you a lot of redundant platter-based storage, so by cost analysis, you still can't win with the SSD's yet.
$1300?
lets try $1000.
(you can "ugrade" to SSD without upgrading the processor.)
OH, Well in THAT case...
I think they also mean that even the low end 80GB HDD model is $1300 too expensive
Considering what you're getting (or more importantly, NOT getting), $500 is a much more reasonable price.
Sorry, replied to the wrong comment.
LegendZ28's reply is still killing me.
Meh. A glorified ipod with a keyboard. Meh.
Personally...
I don't like Apple, but I love an Apple.
So... you really don't know the difference between an iPod and a computer?
Zak got you there! He's questioning your intelligence look out!
Zak, the guy's got a point
iPod Touch: iPod + web browser + email, notes, maps, calender contacts,e.t.c +(soon) 3rd Party apps; using multi-touch Screen
MBA: iPod + web browser + email + notes, maps, calender contacts,e.t.c + 3rd party apps; using keyboard and multi touch trackpad
ipod: cannot replace battery
MBA : cannot replace battery
ipod: needs another computer to import CDs/DVDs
MBA : needs another computer to import CDs/DVDs
iPod: one USB port (obviously)
MBA : one USB port
Zak
Yes we know the difference between an iPod and a computer.....
A computer is glorified. He didn't make that clear enough? O.o
Okay, revelation.
I don't like Apple products, but I like eating apples, which explains my odd comment.
He don't have much of a point... point-less, one might even say.
iPod Touch: 4" 480x320 screen
MBA: 13.3" 1280x800 LED screen
iPod Touch: No physical keyboard
MBA: Full sized backlit keyboard
iPod Touch: No second display support
MBA: micro DVI, supporting second display at 1920x1200
iPod Touch: ~600 MHz ARM processor
MBA: 1.6-1.8 GHz Core2Duo
iPod Touch: NO USB port, you cannot connect a USB peripheral.
MBA: 1 USB port
iPod Touch: No possible optical media support
MBA: Optional Superdrive, or Remote Disc access.
iPod Touch: No filesystem access, or document handling.
MBA: Filesystem access, and document handling.
iPod Touch: Doesn't run Windows.
MBA: Runs Windows
iPod Touch: Needs a computer to sync content, CDs, DVDs.
MBA: Does not need a computer to sync content, CDs, DVDs
iPod Touch: Runs no Mac OS X applications, cannot use Rosetta.
MBA: Runs 10,000s of Mac OS X applications, many through Rosetta.
iPod Touch: No iSight.
MBA: Built in iSight.
iPod Touch: iPod dock connector.
MBA: No iPod dock connector.
Way to spin a bad review Engadget. Also, why link to Digg rather than Ars Technica?
Because they got the tip form Digg. So skipping your first source is just wrong. It's called giving credit.
JAmerican
Also, if you click the read link or even the picture, it takes you straight to Ars. And that so-called "spin" is an editorial observation, and a good one at that. They aren't trying to convince you that it isn't bad news.
If you click the "image" it brings you to Ars
"medicore?" thank you come again!
Weak performance. Expensive. Incompatible. (Refers to Superdrive)
*yawn* For the price I would get a big laptop instead. I don't like ultraportables and I can bear the weight of a big laptop everyday, anyway. Plus, the big 'tops don't carry the Apple sign.
I don't like Apple, but I love an Apple.
So what you're saying is that you want a more fully featured laptop. So why do you even care how it performs? As has been pointed out thousands of times now, the Air is aimed at a pretty small niche, people who want a 13" ultraportable (which is basically what it is). That doesn't mean the Air sucks, it means that you'd rather get something else. See the difference?
It's ALMOST like the word "sucks" is subjective.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm....................
It's ALMOST like he said he doesn't want an ultraportable at all, and dislikes the Air because it doesn't have all the features of a big laptop, which is stupid and completely misses the point.
Oh wait no, it's EXACTLY like that.
'13" ultraportable'
Oxymoron?
I don't know, has there ever been a 13" computer as light and thin as the Air? No, there hasn't been. So it embodies all the qualities of an ultraportable except the width. Right? So why wouldn't 13" Ultraportable be an accurate description?
@ Zak
It's called the Sony TZ. It's got these crazy things called "Features". Still trying to figure out what to do with them... :-)
@ skullfighter - Good LORD you fanboys are bad at reading. Hey which model TZ has a 13" screen? Oh right - none of them. That was really my point in its entirety. Oh and they're also $400 more than an Air, so you pay more AND you get a smaller screen! Awesome! Oh but that's only if you get the absolute cheapest one you can buy. You can also pay upwards of $3500 for one. And did I mention that the TZs are much, MUCH slower? It's also thicker than the Air, despite the fact that Sony calls it an "ultraportable".
So the TZ is thicker than an Air, and yet it's an ultraportable and the Air isn't. Sure, that makes perfect sense. Really.
its pretty funny seeing Zak calling someone a fanboy, he seems to be one of the bigger apple fanboys on here
@Zak
Lol. You're right. It's not as thin. It's .1 inches thicker. Oh god forgive the lies that comes from my mouth.
**Wicked Grin**
@Zak, Sony X505 released four years ago, as thin as MBA with removable battery to boot.
While Apple's stuff is on the expensive side, and I do love my MBP (refurb) and iPhone, that thing is absurdly expensive, especially with a SDD, unless you've got tons of money to burn. As of late the two biggest failures I see was Apple's Mighty Mouse, which I find to be a horrid input device and now this Macbook Air. I know Apple charges higher prices and many people like the "exclusivity" of owning a mac I suppose but anyone who buys this thing IMO need their head examined.
'McFunky'
"anyone who buys this thing IMO need their head examined."
I guess you're not in the target market for this then. There are plenty of sub-notebooks out there without optical drives. The Air is just another one of them. What's more, price-wise, it's comparable. Why exactly would someone need their head examined?
CLEARLY THE LAPTOP IS NOT FOR YOU. Somehow I doubt the people that purchased a MacBook Air on release are clinically insane. They probably:
1) Are fanboys or fangirls
2) Have other computers and feel the MBA fills some gap in their collection.
2) Have enough money to afford it. (I just ordered a $600 RAID card for my workstation at home rather than using on-board RAID. My mom would probably think I'm crazy if she knew. Am I actually crazy?)
3) Consider the style of the MBA to add value to the device
4) Consider the low weight of the MBA to add value to the device
5) Don't spend hours of days on the internets debating about Apple producs, or researching what competition is out there.
6) Watch commercials.
In summary: You != Everyone Else.
Oops I used (2) twice!
While Apple's stuff is on the expensive side, and I do love my MBP (refurb) and iPhone, that thing is absurdly expensive, especially with a SDD, unless you've got tons of money to burn. As of late the two biggest failures I see was Apple's Mighty Mouse, which I find to be a horrid input device and now this Macbook Air. I know Apple charges higher prices and many people like the "exclusivity" of owning a mac I suppose but anyone who buys this thing IMO need their head examined.
right on man.... right on
well the read link takes you to Ars Technica.
After first clicking on the Digg link, and then on their Ars Technica link, I saw the comparo chart between the two MB Airs.
On the hard drive version, 4200 rpm is to be expected..but PATA?
I figured everything in new computers nowadays would be SATA. Does this make a difference in the read/write speeds of such a slow-spinning hdd?
I did some research on this when SSDs became available (in Sony notebooks), to see if it'd be worth buying one for my Fujitsu which has a slow 4200rpm hard drive.
Basically, if you do the math on power consumption, the hard drive accounts for a minority of a notebook's power use, and thus no matter how efficient you make it, it wasn't using all that much to begin with.
The slight advantages of marginally better power consumption and faster random access speeds did not seem worth the cost and loss of storage capacity to me. But to each their own. For some people the random speeds may be important, and that extra battery life worth the difference. Or perhaps you could be using it in an adverse environment and need the shock resistance. But for most of us, I suspect we'll stick with the cheaper and higher capacity HDD option for a while longer.
There's also shock resistance to consider
Knowing Apple, and considering the compromises already taken to make this thing so thin, something tells me the MBA won't withstand much of a shock - solid state drive or not.
Amdahl's Law ftw!
The air doesn't have to withstand impact. Apple have carefully designed the Air to be aerodynamically protected. When it falls off it's velvet cushion, it gently floats down to the carpet and comes to rest in a nonchalant position.
The other thing to consider about battery life is that we're comparing a flash drive to a 1.8" 4200 rpm drive - the same kind of drive that's used in iPods. The 1.8" drives are already very energy efficient.
For the price, I'd rather get a Panasonic Let's Note R6. Better Batt life, smaller size.
I'm a huge Apple fan (not quite a fanboy), but Apple *always* over-exaggerates, embellishes, and flat-out lies about their battery life.
I remember when I bought my 1.67 Powerbook. Claimed 5 hours battery life, but in actuality I've never had it live for more than 3.
Annoying.
I actually do get around 5 hours of batterylife on my Macbook Pro if I use it on the lowest brightness settings, with wifi off and reading pdf documents + typing in iWork.
So, it is possible, but I use my laptop to watch movies when I'm on battery power, which makes it around 3 hours tops.
"getting to about 2 hours and 31 minutes before petering out."
Wasn't it supposed to have a 5 hour battery life?
thats with the screen turned off and no programs running :P
I never believed the 5 hour claim that Apple was making. And 2.5 hour or 50% from your advertised battery length is what most people call "False Advertising"
Why is wanting to see the performance gains with SSD over HDD exclusive to a macbook air??
'We've definitely been curious about the difference sticking an SSD would make in the MacBook Air's otherwise average performance and battery life'
There are other laptops that can, do and will use and offer SSD as an option, or is the macbook somehow all of a sudden the holy grail of laptops, despite lacking so many critical components and sporting a slow processor?
It probably has to do with the fact that the machine isn't really a heavy lifter and people were hoping that the SSD would make up for a lack of speed elsewhere.
Except that to test a particular component you maximize all the other components so that none of them are the bottleneck......................................
Generally speaking, I'm all for SSD technology because, well... it's solid state. Much less chance of an HD failure and losing my data. SSD is expensive right now, but the technology will only get better (larger capacity and faster) and the costs will certainly come down.
I didn't bother reading the full article, but did they mention anything about the heat output?
When a hard drive fails you can usually still get at some of the data on the disk. When an SSD fails you're pretty boned.
This does not look good... for Homestar Runner.
"and that's the end of our show... DONK!"
this computerbox needs more typewriter and less computer
SSD has many advantages but it's a shame that many of the "affordable" drives on the market have rubbish read/write speeds. IMO the technology has yet to mature and it will likely take 1-2 years until we are able to buy the monstrously fast SSD drives we are all dreaming of.
interesting. when i did side-by-side comparisons of both at an apple store, the macbook air with the SSD was almost twice as fast in opening/running apps. i tried stuff like opening garageband (i call it the adobe photoshop of Apple applications) and imovie video editing. they weren't official benchmarks though, just usage tests, so who knows.
It's ALMOST like the word "sucks" is subjective.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
These benchmarks make the Santa Rosa Macbook look like a real bargain. The Macbook is the true sweet spot in Apple's laptop line-up. Optical drive, full of ports, great performance, prices starting around $1000. How can you beat that?
I bought my MacBook Air yesterday and so far so good. It replaced, mercifully, a Dell D830. I am finding it fast enough for my uses and you simply cannot understand how great the form factor is until you use it for a bit.
I also purchased the ethernet connector and SuperDrive. Very happy, and glad I didn't drop an additional $1k for the SSD. However, the store sold out on the SSDs, so somebody's buying them.
I don't get it, is this because of something to do with MBA itself? 'Cause I mean, isn't SSD suppose to significantly improve battery life, and speed as well (although not by as much)? What happened to all the great things we've been hearing about SSD? One could argue that slower sequential access speeds are enough to negate any random access speed boosts, but the fact that it has fewer mechanical parts than HDD should definitely boost battery life, so what happened here?
What I don't understand is how this cannot have any diggs while a lame upgrade of 16->32gb for the ipod touch gets 1500 diggs.... fanboy overload is probably why i stopped visiting digg.
me too. if you're an apple story, or some blog post saying why microsoft is evil, you get a million diggs.
I purchased a Solid State Mac on Monday and it lasts over 5 hours on battery with semi-persistent use .. not sure what y'all are using it for but all I see here is a bunch of people who no absolutlely nothing about marketing and trying to make a great product sound bad. Yes its expensive but its enviro-friendly, thinest in the world, and I even got Mac Quake 4 running on it, even the ssd lasts over 50 years. Basically this will be an iTunes/Web machine for me .. I certainly wouldn't want this as my only computer. This is my first mac in almost 20 years (since high school) and everything just works with no complete system failures .. yes an app can crash but on a mac it doesn't take the rest of the running OS with it. The Air has a target market .. if you are under 30 years old than you are not in it. Unless you own one of these all the comments are a huge waste of time for 99% of the bloggers.
"yes an app can crash but on a mac it doesn't take the rest of the running OS with it."
Trying to flaunt the system stability of a computer with static hardware and no upgradeability strikes me as a pretty weak argument. I'll start being impressed with the stability of OSX when Apple starts letting me put it on whatever computer I like.
As for the rest of your post, it's pretty much true. This isn't a useful computing device as much as a status symbol: if you can afford to blow ~$3k on what amounts to a word processor that also happens to play media files and browse the web then good for you.
so you spent around $3000 to surf the web, play 5 year old games, and buy music one song at a time?
BRILLIANT!
"yes an app can crash but on a mac it doesn't take the rest of the running OS with it."
The same is true with Vista and Linux...
reading from the brochure, huh?
Well a SSD is a lot more stable... no moving parts... which means you can bang it around and your hard drive wont stop spinning, and you won't lose your entire music library. Any laptop owner knows the hard drive eventually dies.
when Ars reviews things, it typically gives them a score from one to ten. it's funny how the macbook air reviewed poorly and ars somehow neglected to give it a poor score.
How can Engadget possibly diss an Apple product, after all they are such Apple fanboys, right?
I've said it before on here, but SDD will only come down when more people buy it and a fashion item like this is probably the only way to get the mainstream interested, like Apple did with MP3 players.
quick release 12GB iphone and 32GB ipod to distract them...oh wait?
Ahem.. 16GB
*Checks URL*
...Engadget is actually posting bad reviews of an overpriced Apple product?
WHAT KIND OF EFF'D UP UNIVERSE AM I IN RIGHT NOW!!?!
ars technica loves apple products. this is probably the only single bad review of an apple product they have ever written...
You guys need to get your facts straight.
First- The one with the SSD does get better battery life, it just doesn't shine because it is using a 1.8 GHz processor, as opposed to the version with the HDD, which uses a 1.6GHz processor.
Second- It was probably even set up so that they would get the same approximate battery life on purpose by Apple, so that all of this type of their computer would get the same battery life,just like all the versions of their other laptops.
Third- What were you expecting? A computer that is thin enough that it might end up being the murder weapon in a future decapitation CSI case to still perform better in every aspect than others? Good luck with that buddy ;)
I love how people take bad reviews on computers (MS and Apple alike) so personally.
The boy genius report is refuting this whole thing based on personal use. The author claims he got 4 hours of battery life with constant use and that the SSD (he has both MBA's) operates noticebly faster for common tasks.
I can understand the missing performance boost and it doesn't boot any faster, but shouldn't battery life be increased. Well for an extra $999, at least you can say your disk won't crash.
I have to say, after spending some time with the MacBook AIr, I find the speed at which programs load is not screaming fast, but enough to not begin to get impatient. This MBA is for my wife, as she wanted something light and can do everything she wants it to do. I have am MBP as I would need more function than I can get out of the MBA.
So, most people commenting on technology blogs probably won't find this to suit there needs, but the MBA is a like an expensive Wii. It isn't the most powerful out there, but it probably fits the needs of casual computer users (albeit users with the ability to spend the kind of money for the MBA).
We actually sold our 6 month old Mac and so only paid $1000 for the Mac, and we are definitely happy with the way things played out.
"I have to say, after spending some time with the MacBook AIr, I find the speed at which programs load is not screaming fast"
Wow... I'd expect "12th man screaming" fast if I paid THAT much money on a laptop.
Really... it seems like a LOT of people are trying to justify the price they paid, but aren't succeeding.
Well.. most Apple products aren't justifiable anyway. I surely paid too much for my iPhone.
True, it can't copy and paste... BUT........................
(heh heh)
@ bill g
I am not justifying my purchase. I am telling my experience with it. Just like for you, you'd expect X, X, X because you paid X. For some people, those Xs are not needs as well. My wife likes it, and that's all that matters. And trust me, she has never woken up or said to herself, "Boy, I've got to see what Engadget or Gizmodo are saying about technology or my purchases".
a thin laptop that costs well over three times what it should. Good ol Apple.
"cool factor." that's all it is. Its what Apple Computer Inc. now is. Oops, I mean Apple Inc.
-posted from my iPhone (LOL)
YES!!! I can now finally walk around with my manila envelope in public, and people will think "He just might have a cool thin laptop in there!"
PSHH! And they called me crazy! Me and my manila envelope... yeah.... I knew it would pay off
Why did anyone expected a large difference in battery life with the SSD? A 1.8" HDD consume roughly 1W while active (look at spec sheets from Samsung, Hitachi etc). The MBA have a 3h battery life. So even if the SSD had zero watt consumption in the three hours the computer run only 3Wh (8%) would be saved of the 37Wh the battery is rated at. Or in other words, eight percent of 3 hours is 15 minutes. We could therefore expect 15 minutes longer battery life or less, depending on how much energy the SSD consume.
Wow. I am not trying to start anything, but bill g, we get you don't like the MBA and find it more "cool" than anything else. That's ok, but do you have to go on about it, unless it is YOUR opinion that matters most. Thanks.