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No, I would buy it because at such moment Apple would have REINVENTED a market that is full of crap right now...remember phones before the iPhone? No? What about media players before the iPod? That's exactly what's gonna happen once the iPad is launched. Besides, even the 12" G4 PB is better than any of those piss-poor plastic paperweights from Eee and Dell.

I would totally dig on a 12" PB, even older one with lower clockspeed, except for the low RAM ceiling.
 
Darwin Kernel Version 9.7.0

Thanks. Another question. Is speedstep working on your machine? (Running sysctl -a | grep kern.cputhrottle in Terminal shows results if it is.)

Kernel 9.7.0 was part of the 10.5.7 update, which is the kernel the guy on the MSI forum that saw the battery life improvement reported he was running. I was just interested to see if there's a pattern to these reports re: improved battery life.

Anyone running a different kernel see any sort of battery life change?
 
Thanks. Another question. Is speedstep working on your machine? (Running sysctl -a | grep kern.cputhrottle in Terminal shows results if it is.)

Kernel 9.7.0 was part of the 10.5.7 update, which is the kernel the guy on the MSI forum that saw the battery life improvement reported he was running. I was just interested to see if there's a pattern to these reports re: improved battery life.

Anyone running a different kernel see any sort of battery life change?

Running that command returns kern.exec: unknown type returned
 
Running that command returns kern.exec: unknown type returned

Ok, speedstep apparently isn't working then.

Do you have a AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext (probably with a April 1, 2009 date) in your /System/Library/Extensions folder that's not disabled by a "disabler" or a secondary extension?
 
Ok, speedstep apparently isn't working then.

Do you have a AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext (probably with a April 1, 2009 date) in your /System/Library/Extensions folder that's not disabled by a "disabler" or a secondary extension?

I do have that file but with a October 10, 2007 date.
 
It's clear as crystal:

Intel's shipments of Atom processors for mini-notebook PCs (which Intel calls "Netbooks") declined –33% in 1Q09 compared to 4Q08, indicating the mini-notebook OEMs held significant inventory of Atom processors coming into the new year.

However...

IDC reported in late-April that worldwide netbook shipments went up sevenfold to roughly 4.5 million during the first quarter of 2009 compared to the same quarter last year.
 
Macbook Air

Well that's great, Apple improves battery life on hackbooks, yet my Air now seems to consistently run hotter and hence shorter life. Cheers very much!

My Air seems to have added about one hour to its battery life since I upgraded to 10.5.7.........!
 
It's clear as crystal:

Intel's shipments of Atom processors for mini-notebook PCs (which Intel calls "Netbooks") declined –33% in 1Q09 compared to 4Q08, indicating the mini-notebook OEMs held significant inventory of Atom processors coming into the new year. IDC estimates that the inexpensive Atom processors for mini-notebook PC represented 21% of Intel's mobile PC processor shipments in 1Q09 and 6.5% of Intel's mobile PC processor revenues in 1Q09.

Do you have problems with reading-comprehension or something? Let me spell it out for you:

"indicating the mini-notebook OEMs held significant inventory of Atom processors coming into the new year."

In plain English: OEMs stuffed their inventories with Atoms in Q4, so they had less of a need to buy them in Q1. And if you actually checked reports about sles of netbooks, as opposed to sales of Atom-CPU's, you would see growth. IDC (the research-company you cited) says that sales of netbooks grew sevenfold in Q1, the same quarter when sales of Atoms went down.

WRONG. It's obvious that netbook sales soared with the crisis:

They were soaring even before crisis. Just about every OEM was introducing netbooks long before the crisis.

Or this, from a well-known research firm:

So the economic crisis is causing the growth in netbooks to slow down? Well duh! Fact remains that the sales-growth is still above typical notebooks.

Because once the crisis is overcome, people are gonna choose "better" or "best", instead of simply "cheap".

They were buying netbooks even before the crisis.....
 
The MB Air's 13" display is a great size and not too much of a compromise.

If Apple would shrink the width of the bezel around the MacBook Air's display to say 1/4", it would make the entire thing MUCH smaller and more appealing.

Chopping a few hundred bucks of the price and adding a FireWire 800 port would help, too.

Unless Jobs has an awakening, Apple will NEVER EVER EVER EVER release a laptop with dedicated GPU and FireWire, regardless of battery life due to Apple marketing tactics that fear the smallest user base, the pro video/audio user base, would buy the cheaper unit. Apple will always force the user to spend upward of $2000 dollars.

Heck, even on the latest MacBook with better gpu, they removed 1394 it has nothing to do with size. Some people are so naive.

A few years ago the MacBook was reported to run aperture and final cut and benchmarked at 171% openGL, yet you could still not play 3D games, regardless, apple then releases another gma which brought the benchmark down to 70%. And for what? You couldn't play games on it. It was to stop pro users from using it for pro apps. How sleezy is that. I mean, I could see if they did that to hack users but to cripple the machine for one if the most loyal and fan base that kept them afloat while AMD and intel leaped the PPC, is an insult.

End rant.
 
Apple + Atom

There are two platforms in which I can see Apple using Atom (or, more specifically, ION; it's not for nothing that ION has exactly the same chipset as the current MacBooks):

- Next iteration of AppleTV (if they do it)

- A tablet computer, positioned between the iPhone and MacBook. Hopefully they would do something more than just a "big iPhone".
 
...Cannibalization ONLY occurs because more people have less money now... Besides, even the 12" G4 PB is better than any of those piss-poor plastic paperweights from Eee and Dell.

You sound pretty sure of yourself here. I have a few thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket mainly because I'm waiting for the Back-to-School promotion coming soon. I'd planned to get a Mac Pro and Macbook or Macbook Pro.

I'm really fascinated by the Hackintosh community and their relative successes in getting Mac OS X to work on other hardware. Instead of the Macbook, I am actually considering purchasing the Dell Mini 10v and hacking it with Leopard - since this computer was going to be my "tote around everywhere when I'm not encoding" note/net-book.

Would kinda give my forum name new purpose, wouldn't it? :cool:

:apple:
 
SMT an important feature.

+1

(posted from an Atom based Dell Mini 9 with 1Gb RAM running OS X beautifully :D)

While Atom is far from perfect I think many miss some of it's better qualities. One of those is SMT which gives the platform a bit more performance. It is not something that can be dismissed considering todays multitasking OSes and multithreaded app.

It certainly isn't as good as todays SMP platforms but is nothing to sneeze at either.

Given all of that I'd still be shocked to find this to be an indication of coming Atom based products. I'm still leaning towards ARM and an iPhone OS variant. If for no other reason than really long run times on batteries. That and it expands the iPhone platform in a positive way.


Dave
 
Very strange one, but my Intel macbook decided to die about 2 months ago and would only run on the power supply, it wouldn't run on battery. I took it to my local Apple store and they advised it needed a new logic board. As I only use the machine at home for surfing I decided against replacing the board due to the total replacement cost being huge!.

I have updated to 10.5.7 the other day and have continued to run the MB on the power supply. As It's a Sunday morning (where I am) and I'm a bit tired I booted the MB up this morning and forgot to turn the power supply on and noticed at boot the the battery icon was working again. Low and behold the MB will boot and works on battery again, very very strange and random.

The only thing I could think of was this story re the battery, I am very skeptical that this could be linked to the resolution of my issue. Who cares though, it's working again and I've save a couple of hundreed ££'s :)
 
Well that's great, Apple improves battery life on hackbooks, yet my Air now seems to consistently run hotter and hence shorter life. Cheers very much!

*grumble grumble snow leopard better not be like this grumble grumble*

Go back to 10.5.6. I did, after my MBP wouldn't sleep correctly and had shorter battery life. And ran hotter.

10.5.7 is a mess for Apple portables. But at least hackintoshes work better.

It also screwed up final cut pro, again, bringing back the permissions error that doesn't allow people to exchange a project because the disks you are using are not owned by the same administrator. had to create a user on my machine that had the same short name as my partner's machine in order to edit the project.

10.5.7 was not ready for prime time. Should have spent more time testing it. :(
 
Hackbook envy? No need to!

Ok, I've bought me a Dell mini to test the waters for a possible Mac netbook. Is it worth any amount of money?

For me: NO (I mean NO as in "useless overhyped piece of plastic"). I own a Macbook (black) and an iPhone 3G which I both use every single day. Both serve me extremely well for the purpose I need 'm for. The Dell mini tries to fill a gap where there is no gap. The screen is to tiny for its purpose; the keys are waaaay to small; the trackpad is jittery and unbalanced; the mouse buttons are unuseable; the battery holds a charge for just 2 hours, and the whole thing just looks like a Vtech toy.

Sound too negative? Well, Leopard runs like a charm, but this is of no consequence. If you want to actually use this thing as a computer, you'll need to attach a monitor; a keyboard and a mouse. And why not buy an iMac then.

Netbooks are gimmicks, and luckily Apple is aware of it!

B.T.W. Anyone interested in buying a 3 weeks old Dell mini 9 BTO (1.6GHz Atom, 16GB SSD, 1GB mem, BT, 1.3M camera, Win XP Home) with an Apple sticker on the back :)?
 
Netbooks are gimmicks, and luckily Apple is aware of it!

That's just your opinion. I would like a computer that I could take with me, that I could use as a dumbing-ground for pictures from my camera and with I could type some text with. If I went Apple-route, I would be looking at 1000e laptop. If I went netbook-route, I would be spending 300-400e. And the netbook would be a lot more mobile. And I would be hesitant to take 1000e worth of computer to me where-ever I go, as opposed to taking computer that is worth 30-40% of that. If the machine gets few bruises, I wouldn't really care. Damaging a 1000e laptop would be a whole different matter.

You complained about "small screen and cramped keyboard". Dell Mini 9 is known for those qualities. You bought a netbook that has smaller than average screen (normal size these days is 10" screen) and keyboard, and then complain that it has too small screen and keyboard, and then basically claim that all netbooks have too small keyboards and screens?

Besides, the screen and keyboard on the iPhone/touch is even more cramped. When I type with an iPhone, I can see maybe two lines of text. I fail to see why people whine about the keyboards on netbooks, while the keyboard on iPhone is even smaller. Some netbook-keyboards are good enough for touch-typing, can you do that with the iPhone?
 
Very strange one, but my Intel macbook decided to die about 2 months ago and would only run on the power supply, it wouldn't run on battery. I took it to my local Apple store and they advised it needed a new logic board. As I only use the machine at home for surfing I decided against replacing the board due to the total replacement cost being huge!.

...I booted the MB up this morning and forgot to turn the power supply on and noticed at boot the the battery icon was working again. Low and behold the MB will boot and works on battery again, very very strange and random.

Great CS there :rolleyes: A new mobo loosely translates into "we haven't a ****ing clue, but we'll take your money anyway".
 
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