This is a weird thread....
Why do people care to criticize Apple for launching an SSD airmac. I mean... whats the big deal. Be happy that some people pay the extra for it.
It means that volume goes up. Competition increases. Prices goes down and performance improves.
I am really happy for every person buying that stuff as it means I will be able to own a laptop like an SSD which performs much better than current technology sooner.
While cheap SSDs todays only outcompetes hard drives on certain tasks, there should be little if any doubt that SSDs a few years down will outcompete harddrives on all benchmarks and should have the potential to provide even higher capacities.
As for the benchmarks, I have criticized similar benchmarks of ssd/flash based memory with regards to battery life on many occasions in the PC world. I think they forget something very important when they benchmark.
After a few months of use with lots of extra tools installed, people usually get all these programs running that does a little bit of background I/O.
Could be an IM client which downloads an advertisment every few minutes or a browser refreshing a page or maybe some application that writes to a log file or in the PC world, one of these stupid little toolbar thingies that checks new software versions.
You never notice this on performance normally because the amount of I/O is so small, but it prevents any laptop drive from falling asleep or maybe even idle properly.
Macs probably have less of a problem here than Windows laptops as there are so many ad infected utilities there and people generally install less utility programs (and apps are less bloated in general vs. the windows world), but I am pretty sure that its a problem in the mac world as well, and all it takes is a small write every minute or so and your disk will never sleep.
This seriously drains battery life but differently from what benchmarks does.
Benchmarks that does I/O also tend to use heavy processing, while most people does light weight stuff most of the time.
People usually does notice as the battery drain increases gradually over time as they install more programs.
In any case, I would bet that a frequently used SSD laptop has a more noticeably better battery life 1 year down the line.
I also agree to those that think the SSD unit is snappier. If you play with the HDD vs SSD versions in the shop, you will not notice the difference much normally as both will have frequently tested apps in cache.
Reboot at load without the cache and things are much more different. Word 2008 loaded in 1/3 of the time when I tested.
I would love to get that extra snappyness, but I will probably wait until the early adopters has bought enough units that SSD prices is down to at least half
Thank you to everybody buying the SSD units. I love you all!
Why do people care to criticize Apple for launching an SSD airmac. I mean... whats the big deal. Be happy that some people pay the extra for it.
It means that volume goes up. Competition increases. Prices goes down and performance improves.
I am really happy for every person buying that stuff as it means I will be able to own a laptop like an SSD which performs much better than current technology sooner.
While cheap SSDs todays only outcompetes hard drives on certain tasks, there should be little if any doubt that SSDs a few years down will outcompete harddrives on all benchmarks and should have the potential to provide even higher capacities.
As for the benchmarks, I have criticized similar benchmarks of ssd/flash based memory with regards to battery life on many occasions in the PC world. I think they forget something very important when they benchmark.
After a few months of use with lots of extra tools installed, people usually get all these programs running that does a little bit of background I/O.
Could be an IM client which downloads an advertisment every few minutes or a browser refreshing a page or maybe some application that writes to a log file or in the PC world, one of these stupid little toolbar thingies that checks new software versions.
You never notice this on performance normally because the amount of I/O is so small, but it prevents any laptop drive from falling asleep or maybe even idle properly.
Macs probably have less of a problem here than Windows laptops as there are so many ad infected utilities there and people generally install less utility programs (and apps are less bloated in general vs. the windows world), but I am pretty sure that its a problem in the mac world as well, and all it takes is a small write every minute or so and your disk will never sleep.
This seriously drains battery life but differently from what benchmarks does.
Benchmarks that does I/O also tend to use heavy processing, while most people does light weight stuff most of the time.
People usually does notice as the battery drain increases gradually over time as they install more programs.
In any case, I would bet that a frequently used SSD laptop has a more noticeably better battery life 1 year down the line.
I also agree to those that think the SSD unit is snappier. If you play with the HDD vs SSD versions in the shop, you will not notice the difference much normally as both will have frequently tested apps in cache.
Reboot at load without the cache and things are much more different. Word 2008 loaded in 1/3 of the time when I tested.
I would love to get that extra snappyness, but I will probably wait until the early adopters has bought enough units that SSD prices is down to at least half
Thank you to everybody buying the SSD units. I love you all!