Tag Archives: Apple

MacBook Air 13″: More wireless than wired

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As with the first generation MacBook Air, both the current 11″ and 13″ variants of the MacBook Air come with a form of 802.11 wireless networking integrated. If you want to connect it to a wired network, you would need to purchase a USB Ethernet adapter from Apple or a compatible third-party. At first, this might sound like another nickel-and-dime attempt by Apple or form triumphing over function.

Well, the latter may be true as Apple wanted to nip and tuck the MacBook Air even more and there is no easy way to put in an Ethernet port into something that slim. It was kind of bad enough with the first-gen MacBook Air when Apple decided to use a pop-down door to provide USB, micro-DVI and headphone ports.

When I was looking at purchasing a MacBook Air, I was at a crossroads when it came to use the device on my (then) relatively slow wireless network or use up a precious USB port and use it wired. I took the safe route and included a USB Ethernet adapter with the order. Once the laptop arrived, I decided to wire up so that I could download updates and applications. Since then, I have only wired up three or four more times due to poor or no wireless access.

With 802.11g and getting decent signal strength, doing larger file transfers was rather painful but I slogged through it. After adding a 802.11n access point on the 5GHz band, it was faster and more convenient to go wireless than wired. Not to mention, one less wire to deal with when on the recliner, couch or at work is a very good thing.

Now, if only Apple would have done a little bit better with the SD slot. I dislike having an SD card that sticks out along the edge of the laptop when inserted. I’m fine with that on an SD reader, but not when I’m jostling the laptop around and making sure I don’t end up breaking the SD card in half. Not sure if this is also the case with other MacBook products.

BTW, Incase continues to make great cases, covers and sleeves for various Apple products; and, they haven’t disappointed me with their Neoprene Sleeve for the MacBook Air. It fits snugly and I really like the lining used. If you want one, you’ll probably have to head down to an Apple store as trying to find one available online is a bit… difficult.

MacBook Air 13″: Why not a MacBook Pro 13″?

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While I was doing my due diligence on getting a netbook-like device that would complement my primary laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad W510, I did consider a MacBook Pro 13″ with Thunderbolt. The price of the MacBook Pro 13″ with the base 2.3GHz Core i5, 4GB of RAM, 128GB SSD, iWork and AppleCare. The price for such a configuration would be nearly the same price as the MacBook Air 13″ that I purchased.

So, why did I choose to go with a slower and non-upgradeable device (the SSD can be upgraded with a 256GB version, but that’s about it)? Simple, the MacBook Air is roughly 1.5 pounds lighter and roughly one-third of an inch thinner at its thickest part (a good 0.84 inch difference at the thinnest point, but that not a true apples-to-apples comparison, and that pun was intended). Let’s not forget that MacBook Air 13″ display has a native resolution of 1440×900 while the MacBook Pro 13″ display has a native resolution of 1280×800. That difference is noticeable and the extra pixels are very useful when working through a stack of photos in Lightroom 3. Another thing that I haven’t missed in my MacBook Air is the lack of an optical drive. If I’m on the go and need to pop in a CD or DVD, I’ll probably pick up a portable drive (probably not the one from Apple); while at home, I can use the remote disc feature and use the optical drive in my ThinkPad or another computer.

If I had to give up my ThinkPad W510, which I wouldn’t, and needed to downsize, then I would have opted for another ThinkPad, this time a T-series with a 14″ display rather than go with a MacBook Pro. Yes, there is still some overlap between the new MacBook Air and my ThinkPad W510 for some tasks, like browsing or reading e-mail; both of those tasks are nicer on the MacBook Air due to its feather-weight and form factor. For heavy duty tasks, like virtualization, large batches of photo editing or workflows, the W510 wins hands down.

First impressions: Apple MacBook Air 13″

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In my last couple of posts, I kind of hinted that I got a new device and did not want to spoil the fun until I had a chance to get settled with the new device. Well, as you can see in the title of this post, the new device in fact an Apple MacBook Air 13″.

Now, some of you might be ready to pelt me with rotten tomatoes or are wondering why in the world would I buy a new Apple product after lambasting Apple on their treatment of iPhone users. Well, my reasons and rationalizations may not be enough to cover all of the concerns and questions.

For the past year, I have been wanting to pick up a netbook, so that I could have a lighter-weight alternative to my 6-odd pound Lenovo ThinkPad W510 mobile workstation. The idea is that I could carry a netbook around with me so that I can download photos that I’ve taken with my Nikon D300, then preview them and delete the ones that I didn’t want.

I looked the various 11″ netbooks from Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Dell and HP, both products targeted at consumers and business users. I even considered a couple of netbooks in tablet/slate form, but none of them really had the same robust feel on a proper Lenovo ThinkPad T or X series or HP EliteBook series of laptops. The screens were pretty cruddy for inspecting photos, the mostly plastic shells and not-so-impressive screen hinges, the 2GB memory limit (some business-class netbooks could take 4GB, but would also come with Windows 7 Professional), meh-tastic stock SSD, and other niggles all did not exude confidence as something I would spend my money on.

Ever since the current generation of MacBook Air laptops came out, I have been interested in what it could potentially offer. I really liked the 13″ screen (the lower resolution of the 11″ model was befitting for a premium netbook, but was not good enough), lightweight yet sturdy industrial design, and actually has a good, non-clicky keyboard. The two things that had kept me from seriously considering the MacBook Air was the cost and it is an Apple product.

So back I went to look at what Dell, Lenovo or HP could offer with their ultra-portable laptops and even considered a convertible table from Lenovo or Dell. The problem that I ran into was the base cost of the ultra-portable laptop or tablet, without 4GB of RAM or an SSD. Considering that whatever I wanted to buy would have to be able to take a little bit abuse now and then, the chassis had to be made from metal and/or alloy and had a decent SSD. Even with a Dell Premier discount from work, an E4310 with the base Core i5-560M, 4GB of RAM, 128GB mobility SSD, 3-year warranty and Intel 802.11n wireless, the cost would still be a bit more than the MacBook Air 13″ that I wanted (more on that in a bit). Also, the E4310 would end up about 1 pound heavier than the MacBook Air 13″, including the AC adapter. I’m also still not sold with the overall build quality or the performance of the Dell SSD. Of course, I could order it with a based hard drive and buy and slap in a mid-range OCZ Vertex 2 SSD and would end up costing about the same (+/- $50).

Two Sundays ago, I stopped by a local Apple Store, again, to take a look at and play with a MacBook Air 13″. I was sold on the form factor, the unibody aluminum case, the (glossy) screen and the overall performance. I was still skittish about the price, but remembered that I had an Apple iPhone gift card that could be used on an iPhone or any other product at an Apple Store or Apple’s online store. That helped lessen the hit to the wallet.

By the time I went home, I decided to go with the MacBook Air 13″ base model (which has a Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz/6MB cache, 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD), but wanted to upgrade the RAM to 4GB and add a USB Ethernet adapter, iWork suite and requisite AppleCare. The total ended up just under $1800 with 2-3 day shipping and before applying the gift card.

The laptop arrived Friday morning, at which I immediately and carefully opened the box, plugged it in to charge up the battery and plugged in the USB Ethernet adapter and into the guest network at work. I powered it on and the Apple startup sound boomed a bit too loud (I feel dirty each time I hear it), then proceeded to walk me through the initial setup. Once that was all done with, I opted to start pulling down the latest updates, which totaled to around 230MB and took about 45 minutes to download and install. I rebooted it and was back at the desktop in under a minute. That’s faster than the time it takes for my ThinkPad to accept my fingerprint, power up and get to the Windows is starting animation. Granted, my ThinkPad has to spin up a hard drive and do a quick scan of the four 4GB memory modules :D

I have been using the MacBook Air 13″ as my primary laptop over the past couple of days, making sure that I downloaded and installed Firefox 4 RC, Google Chrome, Sequel Pro, Cyberduck and went through all of the System Preferences to get everything set up the way that I wanted. I also caved in and configured the default Mail client to access my personal and GMail mailboxes, as well as using iChat as the IM client of choice. I had to install and trust the self-signed CA certificate that I use on my personal servers so that the various browsers and applications would be happy. I have run into a couple of glitches with the iChat application and the Google Talk tunnel I have set up on my personal Jabber server. I also set up the Address Book and iCal applications to sync up with my calendar and contacts hosted by Google.

The low weight and thin form factor almost makes my geeky want of any tablet disappear. Sure, it is larger and weighs more than a Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab or the Apple iPad/iPad 2 and takes a bit longer to “boot up”, but it is so much more usable for personal and work purposes.

It has been several years since I used Mac OS X on a regular basis, so I had to re-learn the OS X nuances and differences compared to Windows 7 and the GNOME desktop that comes with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I also have not had a chance to install Nikon Transfer and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3, but that’ll have to wait for another day or two.

I have yet to use the new Apple App Store for OS X, as I have found all of the applications that I care for off of the project’s websites. The only application equivalent that I haven’t really found yet is something akin to Foobar 2000 on Windows. I tried Clementine, but it kept on throwing errors when trying to play FLAC files off of my file server or ones that I’ve copied to the local disk. I would prefer not have to deal with iTunes or QuickTime, so I may have to switch over to VLC as my music player.

I am also still getting used to the multi-touch gestures and the two-finger “right-click”. The trackpad itself is quite nice and is a step up from either of my ThinkPad laptops (sorry IBM/Lenovo). It almost negates the need for a trackball for most tasks, but may not be ideal for working with digital photography workflow applications.

All in all, I am impressed with the MacBook Air 13″ and I feel that it is almost worth the cost. The only cost that I really have to complain about is the AppleCare for the laptop. $249 isn’t a bad price, but I’m kind of spoiled on the Dell or HP business support contracts and the fact that AppleCare does not really provide an on-site option.

Is it a perfect device for my needs? I can’t really say right now, but ask me again in about six months. Am I feeling buyer’s remorse yet? No, not yet. Can I recommend it to everyone? Not really, as it is not the best bang for the buck for a device that is only used for e-mail, web browsing and watching the occasional movie or TV show. If you want something that feels like a professional-class laptop and weighs just about 3 pounds, the MacBook Air in either form should at last be considered.

…and yes, I am still looking forward to replace my iPhone 3G with an HTC Evo Shift 4G.

ARM servers do not have to face software issues

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In a recent report posted on PC World, one of Dell’s VPs states that porting software from x86 to ARM can be the biggest hurdles for ARM servers. I will have to agree with his statement, if and only if, some, most or all of the software that needs to be ported are provided in closed-source, pre-compiled form.

The problem does not really exist in the world of Open Source software; and, even if popular operating systems, distributions and software packages are not currently available pre-compiled for ARM, it would not take long for the community and its sponsors to turn around and provided tested binary packages. For those that want to squeeze out as much efficiency and already roll their own compiled packages to servers, it isn’t too difficult to do the same for ARM servers.

For me, the biggest hurdle I see for Open Source software and ARM servers is the availability of developer and production hardware, along with the cost to acquire the needed hardware for testing. In terms of operating systems and distributions, the three main BSD projects (FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD) have one or more ARM ports available with the Ports and Packages repositories providing many of the required software packages used in scale-out hosting and compute environments.

On the Linux side of the world, Debian has had a small variety of ARM ports and Ubuntu has dabbled in the ARM space for a little while now. Fedora, CentOS and Gentoo are also viable foundations for building up Linux for ARM servers. There have been several Open Source and commercial Linux distributions that target ARM devices for real-time and embedded applications and can also be used to build up lean and mean distributions for the two server workloads that would excel on ARM. I do not know where Red Hat or SUSE stand in terms of ARM preparedness, but SUSE (by way of Novell and the partnership with Microsoft) may not want to stir the waters.

If the applications were written on top of various Open Source software foundations, such as Apache Tomcat, the various Python, PHP, Perl or Ruby frameworks, or other forms of interpreted languages and bytecode available from the Open Source community… porting and testing should not be difficult. Granted, the level of difficulty depends on the complexity and size of the application.

This leaves the two other major stalwarts in the operating systems market: Oracle and Microsoft. While Oracle Linux is Oracle’s own spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or CentOS) and could benefit from either organization’s development for the ARM platform, the bigger concern would be the Solaris clan. ARM servers would compete against Oracle’s UltraSPARC T family of processors, not in terms of cores per server, but rather watts per core/thread.

On Microsoft’s side of the world, they have announced a form of Windows that can run on ARM netbooks, notebooks, tablets and desktops and would be part of the Windows 8 family. Unfortunately, there the lack of further details on whether that will trickle over to the next release of Windows Server and how serious Microsoft is on ARM development in general (outside of their current struggles with Windows Phone 7 on ARM). A half-arsed effort from Microsoft will hurt the prospects of ARM and could be seen as yet another form of “embrace, extend, extinguish”.

At this point, I don’t see the other major player in the ARM market taking the ARM server movement seriously… Apple. The ARM processor has been at the backbone of Apple’s transformation from being a computer and software company, to being a player in consumer electronics. Apple’s first venture in the world of ARM processors didn’t end up being a commercial success (at least compared to their later products with ARM processors), which was the Apple Newton. It wasn’t until the release of the Apple iPod did the combination of Apple and ARM make any kind of splash. This continued until Apple really broke ground with the iPhone, and later, the iPad.

Even with Apple’s success with the ARM architecture and processors, Apple’s recent exit from the server hardware market and integration of key server features into the base release of OS X Lion may not bode well for the hopes for a new Apple Mac server with ARM processors. I could be wrong on this, but all signs seem to point elsewhere.

So, at the end of the day, do ARM servers actually have software issues that need to be addressed? Yes and no. If your infrastructure is already based on Open Source software as a foundation, the source code and compilers are there and waiting to be used, particularly if you already roll your own code. If you are stuck on a closed-source and commercial platform with no access to foundation source code, well… that’s kind of what you get for depending on such platforms and foundations. Sorry for the bluntness, but that’s the core issue of non-Open Source software.

iPhone 3G + iOS 4.2 = Sluggy is back!

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Well, after two days of using iOS 4.2 on my iPhone 3G, I felt that I was experiencing deja vu all over again. Well, that feeling turned into reality when I went to compose an e-mail and noticed that it wasn’t keeping up with my typing. The same thing happened during the iOS 4.0.x days and was pretty much resolved with the iOS 4.1 release.

The sluggishness and lag is quite apparent when I go to unlock my phone and try to enter in my passcode. It seems to take about 1-2 seconds for the first tap to register (or not register at all) and the animation back to the home screen is pretty jerky. Compared to iOS 4.0.x, it is a bid faster, but quite noticeable compared to iOS 4.1. The sluggishness persists even after a reboot or two of the phone, which seems to take a little bit longer than before the upgrade.

I doubt if there will be any performance improvements with the reported, soon to be released, iOS 4.3 update. In summary, I’m still less than happy with the latest iOS release.

Update (2010-11-26): After being forced to “reboot” the phone (as in, the phone’ s battery was depleted because I forgot to charge it), it doesn’t seem to be quite as sluggish as it was two days ago. Speaking of battery depletion, I haven’t noticed any significant improvements or degradation in battery life in normal use. Using WiFiFoFum to scan for access points at work does tax the battery a bit, but that’s to be expected.

iPhone 3G + iOS 4.2 = Side-Grade?

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Today, Apple released iOS 4.2 for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and the latest Apple TV and, as usual, a lot of the new features included in the new version is not available on the iPhone 3G. One of the new features is the ability to search for text on a page through the search field, in which an item would appear at the bottom of the search list. Well, that is if you don’t have an iPhone 3G.

Another feature that Apple is touting is that the “Find My iPhone” is now included at no cost with iOS… well, that is if you have an iPhone 4, install an app that Apple provides on another iOS device (cute, huh?) or from an computer. Those that don’t have the latest iPhone, you still need to sign up for a MobileMe subscription. Well, isn’t that dandy considering that I’m planning on ditching MobileMe when it expires in December. Continue reading →