MacBook Air 1.6Ghz HDD vs 1.8Ghz SSD Benchmarks

[jameskohn]

It was also 12", which is what the MBA should have been. Apple could have stuck a Celeron in a 12" laptop and I wouldn't be criticizing it's performance. Instead they had to make the thinnest 13.3" notebook evah! with little thought to or total disregard for the actual functionality and performance of such of a device. 2lbs. and half an inch doesn't save it when it fits in the exact same slot in my backpack! I might as well spend half as much, get 1.5x the same computer and learn to deal with the extra weight.

A 12" would have been light, useable, insanely portable, and still very thin if they can shove even that gimpy computer into the MBA's chassis. Instead we get a metal MacBook wannabe with a crew cut, no optical disk -- and light-up keys. Brilliant.

Well, it sure works for me. My 12" PowerBook was a wonderful machine, but time marches on. The ability to gain another much needed inch of screen real estate while actually shedding a pound and a half is terrific. Whatever the MBA does not have, I have on my MacPro and never used on my laptop anyway. The external optical drive, by the way, is approximately the size of 2 cd jewel cases; perfect for loading software, etc. and easily taken along if the need arises. For me, the MBA is "brilliant", but I wouldn't attempt to force that opinion on anybody else.

 

[peterlobl]

It was also 12", which is what the MBA should have been. Apple could have stuck a Celeron in a 12" laptop and I wouldn't be criticizing it's performance.

so for a 1" diag smaller footprint and the real disaster of celeron... for THAT you wouldn't be complaining...?

Instead they had to make the thinnest 13.3" notebook evah! with little thought to or total disregard for the actual functionality and performance of such of a device.

"Total disregard" ??? I think mine works rather well and the lighter weight is really nice and appreciated. I love it. Apps I am using for page layouts, spreadsheets and writing, for example, are great. What apps did you want to run with it that you are finding sluggishness with?

2lbs. and half an inch doesn't save it when it fits in the exact same slot in my backpack! I might as well spend half as much, get 1.5x the same computer and learn to deal with the extra weight.

so, if I understand you correctly, you wanted a smaller form factor - 12" screen - so it could fit better in your backpack... or an upgraded smaller backpack or??

seems like Apple concentrated on thin - not just width but weight - svelte even - managed a larger screen with full keyboard - and i think that was really wise for travelers who prefer (and yearned) for those functions within OS X.

I think it's a great computer!

 

[winterspan]

i think most people are just upset because this product took time and development away from the Macbook Pro Update.

Maybe if I owned a MacPro or something already , I could somehow consider it but the SSD thing is too new for release and incorporation into a notebook as far as i'm concerned. Maybe a yr or 2 from now, but this timing seemed off to me. 3k? No.

"too new"... hhahaha.. solid state drives have been in use for military and aerospace applications for 5-10 years. But go ahead.. stay with 4200RPM hdds.

 

[winterspan]

Okay, the SSD is *much* faster than the HDD for most reads, that's good. But it costs maybe 5-10 times as much as the HDD. Can't we do better?

Why doesn't someone build a notebook with a big, slow, crappy HDD and maybe 16GB of RAM? You load everything you need into RAM when you boot up. Any kind of smart software can keep track of which files you access frequently and automatically load them. This part is slow.

After that, you have the fastest "disk" in the world. You can shut down the HDD right after booting, so there's no power drain use at all until you shut down.

Tigerdirect will sell you 2GB of Macbook RAM for $80 US. x8 =
$640. I'm sure you can find cheaper RAM which will work fine. Plus a big, crappy HDD for permanent storage, maybe $150. Total cost < $800 US.

The speed increase is maybe 2000x faster than an SSD. It's more expensive per GB, but you don't need 64GB of chips because the big, crappy HDD is carrying the bulk load at bootup and shutdown (and maybe a few times in-between).

Are we ready for the Revenge of the RAM Disk? Maybe someone has jammed their Mac Pro with RAM and can comment if they've tried this?

Actually, You can buy other laptops with a good solution to that. Dell is offering one. You get a 250GB 2.5" 5400RPM disk for storage and a fast 32GB SSD for your boot/cache/temp drive. Sounds pretty good, eh?

 

[winterspan]

There's an old adage among engineers: "Better, cheaper, faster-- choose two". Apple chose a performance/price/power tradeoff they felt they could live with.

Here's the only data I can find on the current PATA drive in the Air:
Read: 57MBps
Write: 38MBps
Power: 0.17W active (write)

Here's what I find on the newfangled SATAII drives:
Read: 100MBps
Write: 80MBps
Power: 0.5W active

Since they don't publish datasheets, I can't see what those numbers actually mean. What I gather from this though is they're pumping more power through the system to gain performance. No magic. I'd almost wonder if they were running some sort of RAID under the hood with those numbers. If you're looking for performance, you'll be happier with the new drives, whenever you can get your hands on them, if you're juiced about the longer battery life you'd prefer the existing ones (not that half a Watt counts for much these days). SATA II wasn't chosen because it was necessary to handle the data rates.

It's not just the Samsung SATA II's... Nearly every SSD I've seen has a faster "advertised" rate than what were are seeing in the Air benchmarks. Now granted, I'm not naive enough to think that the published read/write rates are going to be the average or even attainable in regular circumstances, but I definitely think the Air drive could have done better. I was not aware that the Air SSD was a known drive that already had specs available. So I need to go look at that.

I agree that they probably had to take a good look at price/performance/power usage, and in such a small form factor laptop and with such a small battery, It becomes obvious what they choose. But that does not mean ALL SSD drives are slow and/or not worth expense. I need to go look at more benchmarks....

 

[subsonix]

Does anyone know what SSD is inside the air? From what I understand the performance difference between different models can be pretty big. AFAIK the mtron 7000 pro is among the fastest so far.

 

[MacsAttack]

Does anyone know what SSD is inside the air? From what I understand the performance difference between different models can be pretty big. AFAIK the mtron 7000 pro is among the fastest so far.

My guess is that they are using the SSD that entered mass production in June last year...

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/...b-ssd-solid-state-drive-into-mass-production/

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9025685

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/solid-st...-ssd-gets-mass+production-go+ahead-271800.php

http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/15098/samsung-64gb-ssd/

 

[MacsAttack]

Will be nice if Samsung can deliver on their promise...

http://laptoping.com/samsung-512gb-ssd-in-the-future.html

 

[MacsAttack]

And breaking news from Intel and Micron....

http://www.computerworld.com/action...articleId=9060581&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_top

An exciting future ahead...

Incidentally, Micron are introducing their own range of SSDs soon under their Crucial brand...

http://www.crucial.com/promo/index.aspx?prog=ssd

While not using the new tech, it will be interesting to see how they stack up against Samsung - and if they will also produce a 1.8 inch form factor drive...

 

[Salty Pirate]

SSD has a controller for Bad Block Management and Wear Leveling Firmware, and those functions make it much different than a hard drive. The major issue is that any SSD drive larger than 256 Megs, the Sector Size it writes to the drive is much larger than it is on a hard drive. The Smallest Unit you can write on a real hard drive is 512bytes, but on a SSD the smallest Unit you can write is 2048 bytes. That makes a Sector 2k and is called a Page. However, you cannot erase a single sector when it is freed, it has to be erased in Blocks. A block is 64 x Sector. So when you move a file, change a file, etc you have to erase 128k and that is the smallest Erase Unit. On a hard drive the smallest erase unit is still 512bytes.

Once Data is written in the sector it cannot be changed AT ALL without an erase block occurring. So every single time you modify a file it is opened and written in to a new location. You cannot change a file in its own location like you can in a hard drive.

Once you start understanding 2+2 you can see why it is slow to write, fast to read. So when you shutdown if files have to be updated or you do a hibernation where it has to write out the whole 2 gigs of ram to the drive it will be very very slow.

Also since function on NAND are serial in control, you will see if you watch a movie, play a song, and copy new files to the same drive at the same time that you will start to see studdering (at least on all SSD's I have tried so far, but the MacAir has a new Samsung SSD), but I guess only time and testing will tell on this issue.

One other thing to take in to consideration is that wear leveling's purpose is to keep the erase cycles even across the entire drive, including the FAT tables. So the drive will move non-changing files around to more active locations. The drive then changes the the LBA pointer to the PBA location (meaning that you can not view the original sector because you have no idea where it is). This process is a slow process and can affect drive performance, but it has to move the fat table around even if it is a simple change like the access times on a file.

Well any ways, I hope that was informing and maybe would explain some of the numbers.

Scott Moulton

BTW: There is a speech at Shmoocon in DC on Feb 16th on this very topic and how SSD works.

I went to the apple store today and tried media on both systems, the SSD & HDD. I downloaded a large movie file and played tracks from itunes. No stuttering whatsoever. In fact, the SSD utterly and completely outperforms the HDD machine in everything I tried. I was also surprised that the 1.6 model with HDD was plenty fast for everyday use.

 

[Naimfan]

For me, the MBA is "brilliant", but I wouldn't attempt to force that opinion on anybody else.

Hey, now, stop trying to derail the thread by being reasonable!

Very well said!

 

[Analog Kid]

The problem is threefold: First, you don't know what is going to be needed (although with 16 GB you could just keep reading things in the background and even if you get half of it wrong, you should still be fine). But the problem is what happens when you write. You could easily do all the writes when the computer is shut down or put to sleep, but that means you have to do a lot of writes, possibly when you run out of battery power, and if the Mac doesn't manage to finish all the writes, you are in serious trouble! And the last problem is, RAM uses power permanently. 16 GB RAM would affect your battery life. Flash doesn't use any power at all when it is not in use.

Everybody's usage patterns are different, but most people spend more time using applications than opening them, so most applications should read in the files they need at launch and keep them open. Closing files between reads wouldn't make sense.

Writes are handled in the background either by the application in a separate thread or by the system's drive controller or cache.

Flash retains storage without power, but it does use power when it's idle-- I posted links to what specs I could find at Samsung. Samsung also makes DRAM, so you can compare idle specs if you want to. I don't know off hand which pulls more.

Several others in the various threads have expressed this intention. In theory, sounds like a savvy plan. But has anyone confirmed that it's actually possible to replace the HD with SSD? Would Apple offer that option thru their stores? I suppose that if you did it yourself you could kiss your AppleCare goodbye, right?

Another hitch is that the MBA SSD is PATA. Looks like the newer ones are SATA. This might also help explain Apple's choice in drives-- they needed one electrically compatible with the 1.8" spinner.

Another interesting test would be to have a lot going on and the machine being out of memory so the swap area gets used a lot. If the memory pressure is enough, a disk based system would be thrashing. I wonder if the SSD would survive better and as a result you could have less memory and still have acceptable performance.

The real interesting thing here is not what we pay today, it is the fact that this is where disk technology is going and HD will not be part of computing for that much longer. No introduction of new technology has ever been done at budget prices. However, the cost of SSD will eventually be lower than HD and the speed higher. This is clearly the future of high speed I/O, especially when you have multiple accesses in parallel for the same device.

The SSD would perform worse under "thrashing". Memory page outs are long sequential writes-- check the benchmarks on that one. If I'm running parallel accesses, I'd prefer to be writing to the buffer on a spinning disk than direct to flash. If you're writing enough that the buffer gets swamped, then you're doing long sequential writes and the SSD loses.

I've been working with Flash drives since SanDisk was SunDisk. We used them then because they were lower power and could survive getting bounced out of a truck. They were also lower capacity and much more expensive, but they were worth it to our customers. Here we are after all that time and the tradeoffs are the same. Who would have thought that mechanical technologies would still be used as our highest capacity storage? I'm amazed that spinning disks haven't hit the wall yet, but they're still the best price/performance choice for mass storage and there's still at least a couple generations in the pipe.

I won't say never, because I have to believe that mechanical disks have to have a limit somewhere, but I'm not holding my breath. As long as they're cheaper per bit, can hold more bits as a whole, and aren't the most fragile component in the system, they'll be the consumer choice. If I had to bet, I'd say it'll be yet another technology that unseats hard drives. Flash has physical limits too.

What I find amusing is still to this day, the OS and applications I ran on my old Macintosh Plus in ram disc (saving to a SCSI drive externally) were practically much faster than the bloatware running on todays much faster computers.

Mac Plus vs 2007 dual Athlon

I think it is aimed at people with more money then sense.
There is just no point to it. Benchmarks all over the internet
are proving what we all know that the computer just sucks. But what is amazing is how people try to justify the purchase by saying "if you dont like it it was not meant to be for you" but some of those people are quick to bash windows vista wouldn't the same rule apply?

The macbook topped it and is way cheaper with more features. The MBair is the razr of laptops. style over function.

If you don't like it, it wasn't meant for you. It's a great machine for certain usage models, and you appear to use yours differently. There is an equally valid argument that says "for most tasks, wouldn't people get more use out of their computer if it was more portable rather than more powerful?" Fortunately, Apple has more than one product, and you might find one that fits your needs too.

Aiden, two simple facts for pretty much EVERY professional meeting out there:

1 - People use notebooks CONNECTED TO power outlets in meetings, not the opposite;
2 - There is NO need at all for Ethernet or any other physical connection; it's all about Wi-Fi.

You probably don't attend that many meetings, otherwise you would know that. Battery time is useful for airplanes or in transit...nothing else.

And no, nobody carries spare batteries, this has been a bogus argument from the outset.

It's a little self centered to assume that everyone's life is just like yours... I don't use my computer connected to power in most of my meetings, and I attend many. I try to use WiFi when I can, but like to have a fall back, fortunately Apple provides one. I carry a spare battery with me every where I go. That makes at least two of us...

It's not just the Samsung SATA II's... Nearly every SSD I've seen has a faster "advertised" rate than what were are seeing in the Air benchmarks. Now granted, I'm not naive enough to think that the published read/write rates are going to be the average or even attainable in regular circumstances, but I definitely think the Air drive could have done better. I was not aware that the Air SSD was a known drive that already had specs available. So I need to go look at that.

I agree that they probably had to take a good look at price/performance/power usage, and in such a small form factor laptop and with such a small battery, It becomes obvious what they choose. But that does not mean ALL SSD drives are slow and/or not worth expense. I need to go look at more benchmarks....

Nope, they're not all slow. They are different though and will behave differently in the system. Like you, I haven't seen enough benchmarks to make a call. My gut feeling though is that there are cheaper ways to boost performance.

 

[John.B]

Flash stands tall in the random read test because there is no "seeking" of a moving drive head.

Seeking is the slowest operation in the slowest critical component in your computer. Anything that can be done to reduce or eliminate seek operations, even if only for "disk" reads, is going to feel faster to the user.

So, yes, an SSD may not make all I/O operations faster, but the parts that will be sped up (booting, program loading, opening files, "disk" reads from a database) will make the computer seem noticeably faster for most users.

Its not just smoke and mirrors. There is a real performance edge to SSD, regardless of whether many of the standard performance benchmarks are designed to pick up on it.

 

[AidenShaw]

While I prefer to ignore your fanboi rants, this time you are so far off the mark that I'll respond....

1 - People use notebooks CONNECTED TO power outlets in meetings, not the opposite;

As I've said repeatedly, if you have ten people in a small conference room - no problem with putting your tacky white plastic power brick into a socket.

If there are a hundred people in the room, maybe ten of them can find tables that are close to a power outlet.

If there are 500 to 1000 people in a big hotel ballroom, only a few people have a chance of connecting.

You make yourself look stupid if you claim that every conference has a power outlet at every seat.

2 - There is NO need at all for Ethernet or any other physical connection; it's all about Wi-Fi.

I'm not sure where this rant comes from, since I don't think that I've mentioned the Ethernet connection that much, certainly not in the context of meetings. I'm happy, however, that the docking stations on my Dell are connected to the Gigabit Ethernet networks at home and work.

I have mentioned the lack of 3G connectivity - I don't use WiFi that much on the road, since my Dell laptops have EVDO radios built in. Between the various "pay per byte" WiFi hotspots and the horrible performance of the "free" WiFi at conferences, it's nice to have another option.

And no, nobody carries spare batteries, this has been a bogus argument from the outset.

My friend with the MacBook Pro and his four spare batteries for international flights laughs at you.

You probably don't attend that many meetings, otherwise you would know that. Battery time is useful for airplanes or in transit...nothing else.

This statement is simply ignorant, no rebuttal is needed.

Or perhaps, the situation on your home planet isn't the same as it is on Earth...

 

[MacBuzz]

It's a great media browser. Not for media editing.

Spent about two hours playing with the MBA at the NY 5th Ave store. Plenty (16?) of display models there, but no more to sell. Anyway, here is my list of "will use MBA for if I get one" and "better to leave to my 2.16GHZ C2D iMac".

1. Will use MBA for
Safari, Mail, iTunes(including movies).
Browsing photos on iPhoto.
Office (Word/Excel/Powerpoint).
Garageband (as a MIDI sequencer): Surprisingly, there was no lag playing the instruments on the MBA keyboard.

Apart from the load up times, no noticeable (read "intolerable") difference between the 1.6GHZ HDD model and the 1.8GHZ SSD model with these apps.

2. Leave to my iMac
Photo editing via iPhoto:Sliding the edit sliders was so clunky on both the HDD and SSD models, as are the MacBooks. I didn't realize how much the iMac's dedicated graphic board was contributing to such basic uses.
iMovie, iDVD: Didn't try these, but given the iPhoto experience, outcome is obvious.
Painting with Corel Painter X
Music creation, sampling and hardware recording.

- After thoughts -
The 1.6GHZ MBA is more than enough for me. But will I get it to replace my 4 year-old Panasonic R3? The R3 Toughbook is 2.1lbs, has nearly 9 hours of battery and its rugged enough to withstand falls. For what I would use the MBA for, i.e. basically its a browser and word processor, it could have been better - much lighter with more battery life. Panasonic had it right 4 years ago.
http://www.kemplar.com/panasonic_r3.php
But just for the sake of not feeling obsolete at Starbucks, might get the 1.8GHZ HDD model, (for my wife).

 

[John.B]

You can't compare the .5" difference in width between the MB and MBA with the difference in volume and weight between a desktop tower and a laptop. The MB and MBA literally compete in the same space. The MBP and Mac Pro do not.

You are kidding, right?

There are plenty of people who are making do with a MBP as a sort of combination desktop + portable, where a Mac Pro would be the superior choice for most of the work they are doing. We record sessions using FW-based A/D converters with Logic and a MBP (strictly for portability reasons), where clearly the new eight core MBP would be the better solution. The same applies for digital photography, video, etc.

But you don't see post after post in forum after forum of people complaining about the lack of eight cores in a MBP as some sort a personal affront...

Sooner or later, people need to realize that not every Apple product is going to suit every person. :shrug:

 

[tba03]

Digital recording is linear. You certainly don't want a fragmented audiofile. Besides, even if recording, say, four tracks at 24bit/192kHz, you're writing to the disk at 2,11 (2.11 for you americans) MB/s. That's not exactly much.
The disk-speed on that butt-slow iPod-drive doesn't matter when recording. It does matter in other circumstances, but not the recording in itself.

How many tracks do you record ("record"=real time audio-gathering), at what bitrate etc? And what do you use it for? Which programmes do you use?

[Okay, this might actually be better in another thread, but it's all related to whether that iPod drive will live up to his(?) needs]

usually records between 24 and 36 tracks at 24/44.1 or 96 (if project requires it) in Logic 8 with 2 Motu soundcards

I was more asking about the SSD drive because of the real fast non sequential reads and writes (as the sequentials are even slower than the ipod drive)

i used to use a soft on windows that refragmented all my 24 tracks so sample 1 of every file was contiguous and so on, easing the read head movements (not having to skip to 24 different points to get the 1st sample and so on (it was used when using backups as the original recordings were made fragmented together (ie when you record 24 tracks they are all interleaved (for the lack of a better word) together)))

i'm really looking at SSD performances for audio recordings and soft samlers as the load from dis ktime will be so short

 

[mig]

American Toy

I love the MBA for its looks and its mobility, but it is a mere american toy. Free Wi-Fi no CD/DVD hardly any secure connections (no ethernet) makes it sth. for a few only. The majority of business nowadays is done in countries, which have none of this.

Unfortunately the world ticks different from the US and its last allies more and more every day (you might like it or not).

The latest releases of Apple indicate (software as well as hardware), that their favorite tune is "California ueber alles" and that is how they do business. And I always thought, that Steve had gained a broader picture, when he travelled to India, to know better...

 

[OS X Dude]

It really is laptop designed for those with desktop-bound Macs - MB users (like me) and MBP users (like me one day lol) just don't need it.

It's for Mr.Mac who needs to work with Mac files on the go and not break his back in the process.

But, the macbook isn't even heavy - 2 pounds heaver (1kg) is nowt. I go to school with a bag that must weigh about 3 times my macbook. If you have a quality backpack (i'm a satchel man) you shouldn't be knackered after carrying a Macbook around for a bit.

GET SOME EXERCISE!! NO PAIN NO GAIN!!

 

[Manic Mouse]

I don't come to that conclusion at all. Of course CPU speed of a 2.2GHz vs a 1.8GHz is going to be faster in the MacBook, but the key benchmark here is of disk access, and the MBA was faster by a large margin for the key metric that it's supposed to be faster in. non-sequential reads.

The MacBook beat the MBA in five out of the six benchmarks. Even in disk speed the MBA only beats the MB in some tests like the ones you mentioned and, as has been mentioned by others, gets trounced in others.

Don't forget that this computer cost TWICE as much as the MB. I don't care how much .5" and two pounds means to you, that kind of price/performance ratio is piss-poor in comparison to the MB. Not to mention the lack of an optical drive.

Only if you value processing power over all else. And place no value in added portability.

What added portability? The MBA has a bigger footprint than the MB. It has the same battery life (in the real world), but you can't replace the battery so the MB is actually better for taking on the road for a long journey or conference.

I love all the MBA fans trying to make the MacBook out to be some hulking behemoth and that the MBA is just so much more portable. Let's face facts, the MB is small and isn't all that heavy. The MBA is slightly thinner and is lighter. Spend the extra $1,000 on the gym if carrying a MB is too much for you.

The difference (in terms of size and portability) between the MB and MBA is nothing like the difference between a MP and MBP. Such a comparison is complete tosh.

@John B - way to miss the point. Entirely. Maybe think about what's being said again. The MB and MBA are both laptops, they both have the same footprint.

Now is this true of the MP and MBP? No, not at all. And this was the comparison being made. The MP is immobile, the MBP is portable. Both the MB and MBA are portable, with the MBA being slightly thinner and lighter. Can you spot the problem with the comparison now?

 

[j26]

Aiden, two simple facts for pretty much EVERY professional meeting out there:

1 - People use notebooks CONNECTED TO power outlets in meetings, not the opposite;

2 - There is NO need at all for Ethernet or any other physical connection; it's all about Wi-Fi.

I've had to give several presentations in a room with no available sockets, as the Windows machine and projector were taking up all the available sockets, with a long phone cable run from a room upstairs for dial-up speeds (out the window of the room upstairs, and in the window of my room).

Unfortunately when giving a presentation, you have to work with what you have.

 

[netdog]

This thread is to discuss performance differences between the 1.6/80 and the 1.8/SSD, not to discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of the MBA.

Thanks.

 

[50548]

You feel comfortable with having a wifi connection during an important presentation?

Wi-Fi works perfectly in any good corporate environment. Besides, presentations would be saved on my HD or on a USB stick, simple as that.

 

[50548]

While I prefer to ignore your fanboi rants, this time you are so far off the mark that I'll respond....

As I've said repeatedly, if you have ten people in a small conference room - no problem with putting your tacky white plastic power brick into a socket.

If there are a hundred people in the room, maybe ten of them can find tables that are close to a power outlet.

If there are 500 to 1000 people in a big hotel ballroom, only a few people have a chance of connecting.

You make yourself look stupid if you claim that every conference has a power outlet at every seat.

And honestly, you look stupid with such a glib reply. Most meetings are in small rooms, and those where you are supposed to present to 1000 people will absolutely have an outlet dedicated for YOUR presentation. Obviously it's not about giving an outlet to all attendants...

Such a childish answer is unnecessary, Aiden; admit when you're wrong.

My friend with the MacBook Pro and his four spare batteries for international flights laughs at you.

The 80% answering on MR that they never had a spare battery are surely laughing at you guys, then. Not to mention ALL the meetings that I've attended, where NO ONE uses spare batteries.

And your ignorant reply surely forgets my OWN remark that long-haul flights ARE among the FEW exceptions. So pay better attention to what you read before answering in such a stupid way.

Or perhaps, the situation on your home planet isn't the same as it is on Earth...

Unless you live in Africa or a remote island, my situation is the same as yours...Europe, U.S. and Latin America included.

 

[Music_Producer]

My friend with the MacBook Pro and his four spare batteries for international flights laughs at you.

The rules have changed now though.. you can't lug extra batteries anymore (packed separately) for flights. How come your friend can't plug in his laptop in the power port? 4 batteries.. that's crazy!