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Ivy Bridge to Offer Faster Graphics and OpenCL Support in MacBook Airs

Matte Screen please!

Apple: Please include a BTO matte screen option on the Ivy Bridge Air!
 
I just wish Apple were more open with upcoming specs...Looking forward to March-ish for Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro, but what has always annoyed me is the (relatively) under powered graphics.

I just have this foreboding feeling some "genius" at Apple will decide that integrated graphics are sufficient now and remove the discrete graphics card altogether.

I'd just love the option to use a high end mac pro for gaming when I'm not developing.... sigh.
 
twilson said:
Technically USB3 is crap, when compared to Thunderbolt. Most Macs have 4 Thunderbolt (2 full duplex) channels on the 1 port, which gives 40Gbps (10Gbps per channel) throughput!

Besides any port you like can be surfaced through a single Thunderbolt port, and WITH none of this "burst mode" for the quoted maximum bandwidth. USB2 can't guarantee 480Mbps all the time and USB relies heavily on the CPU for most of its transfer functionality, that's why it's cheap (because it's pretty dumb). Thunderbolt on the other hand, like Firewire before it, has quite sophisticated hardware controller chips that include error-correction/QoS (another overhead that USB has to deal with). All of this guarantees that quoted 10Gpbs per-channel (as long as the device can push/pull the data that fast).

Will one USB3 port be able to provide ALL of these at the same:
  • 2560x1440 Video using the native GPU (USB doesn't)
  • Audio Output
  • 3x POWERED USB2 ports
  • 1x Firewire 800 port
  • 1x Gigabit Ethernet Port
  • 1x FaceTime HD Camera (a USB 2.0 device, independent of the 3 USB2 ports).

I'm sure 1 Thunderbolt port could do a hell of a lot more too, it's just that's all the I/O the Apple Thunderbolt display exposes down ONE connection.

The only thing USB ever had going for it was that it was cheap (and underpowered), just like most Windows PCs really.
Click to expand...

I am so sick of hearing this crap about this wonderport. You aren't going to have a Tbolt mouse. You aren't going to have an affordable Tbolt external drive bay. So what, you don't want to have USB around so that every time you want to plug something in, you need a $50 dongle from Apple? Especially when the USB3 functionality is built into the chips and it's crazy cheap to add the port?

Tbolt may be a great port. Right now, it's very expensive and does very little. I'm not interested in promises about how fast it will be in the future, or what will be available. I've heard all those promises before. What can it do that I couldn't do before? At the moment, the answer is "very, very little". In the future it may do more, but hoping to not have USB3 because you have Tbolt is very... odd.
 
I've never been a laptop user before I got my air, and now I'm completely sold. My last laptop I had for school was about 6 years ago, when they were still ~7 pounds and ran like a piece of *****.
I honestly cannot believe this machine. Its absolutely incredible in terms of feel and usability. The keyboard is nice, but the big cheese is the trackpad. I've played with/used a lot of laptops since then, borrowing my friends' laptops and whatnot, and the one thing I hated and missed was the mouse. God I love the mouse, and these trackpads weren't cutting it. But now, the trackpads on these Apple laptops are more than adequate. Not saying they'll ever replace the mouse (and I'm talking about most mouses that are not the magic mouse; those are a nightmarish POS), but for travelling and doing some work it feels very nice not having to whip out a mouse. Honestly if the Thinkpads ever had these types of trackpads (I'm not a huge fan of the trackball on them) then those would be the perfect laptop. Then again, it works so well because the OS, so that's rather moot.
Speaking of the OS; its not as bad as everyone says. I still miss Windows 7 sometimes, and Windows XP even more, but OS X Lion is perfectly fine for most people who aren't too computer literate.
I'm glad I bought this machine. For those who love it, thats great, and for those who tried it and hated it, thats fine too, its not for everyone. But for those who don't buy it because of the price and never tried it, yet still hate it? Wtf. Unless you're a kid or just really poor, you can afford the extra dollars for a much nicer experience, especially the people that come to these sites.
 
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