Mac Hardware - 5k Supremacy - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Mac Hardware - 5k Supremacy

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

Bob Morales posted:

I don't have anything against it, I use FF on Windows/Linux so I figure why switch browsers?

Especially since you can sync extensions/bookmarks across computers if you use the same browser.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2011 14:57

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 19:27

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

Boris the Blade posted:

AnandTech MacBook Air review is up.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4528/the-2011-macbook-air-11-13inch-review

Would you look at the difference between Toshiba and Samsung SSDs, wow. That would explain why one model was slow to respond after closing and opening it while the other wasn't when I was playing around with two of them in the store.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2011 15:12

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

DEUCE SLUICE posted:

2011 Mini and iPad 2 over here

Just think about how much room for battery you could have in a Macbook Pro if you got rid of the optical drive and left some room for an SSD stick.

That's what I was hoping the 2011 MBP update would be. 2012: Ivy Bridge/HD4000 and 16 hours battery life? Please let it be so.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2012 23:46

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

That will probably work best.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2012 22:58

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

Since someone asked in a PM what I was using for NAS/DAS stuff, here's what I currently own. Their roles are currently being shuffled around as I figure out what each is best suited for.

A low power linux or windows server can act as a NAS for shared media to OS X and with netatalk it can handle all your time machine backups. It's a tradeoff between deciding whether setting up the server and netatalk is more of a hassle or if having multiple external drives for file access and backup is more of a hassle. It's also a matter of whether the power savings from having a little server on 24/7 instead of the iMac makes up for the power loss of having the iMac on at the same time as it. Not that I mean to veer off from Mac Hardware, it's just that is the type of setup I have at home for backing up a MBP and a Windows desktop while running some other stuff like rtorrent, sabnzbd, and sharing files on the network.

I think this little guy can take up to 12tb of storage with its four drive bays.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2012 23:18

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

Any SSD will make it feel a lot faster, but at that price you might want to go with the Crucial M4 http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-I...ords=crucial+m4

I've got the 128 Gig Crucial in my 2010 13" MBP and it wakes up fast enough that by the time I finish opening the lid the touchpad is immediately responsive. It's also nice that the only noise is now from the fans, no more whirring sounds as the HDD spins up to access something.

zeroprime fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Aug 27, 2012

# ¿ Aug 27, 2012 22:39

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

It's the difference between 768 vertical pixels and 900 vertical pixels.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2013 20:39

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

Electric Bugaloo posted:

How does the BTO i7 compare to the i5 on the Haswell Airs in terms of performance and battery life? Its clock speed is notably similar to last year's model, compared to the big power cut in the i5. Is it safe to assume that the hyped up "12 hour" battery life will be much less fantabulous in a fully kitted-out Air?

The 2012 model saw a 10-20 minute drop in battery life depending on 11" or 13" and depending on low or high stress use scenarios, but the clock speeds between the i5 and i7 weren't quite as large as they are between the 2013 options.
http://ark.intel.com/compare/75114,75028,64903,64898

There's also been a teardown which shows that the increased battery life isn't just from more efficient parts, it's also due to a larger battery, so the higher end cpu might be the difference between 10:30 hours of light usage and 10:10 hours of light usage. http://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/11/teardown-of-new-mid-2013-macbook-air-reveals-smaller-ssd-increased-battery-capacity/

# ¿ Jun 12, 2013 16:16

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

I said come in! posted:

Also, this is probably not a big deal to anyone else in this thread, but the trackpad on the MBP is the best thing ever in the world to me. I've never touched a trackpad before that was this great to use.

No, it is a big deal and it totally is the best thing ever. It's just too bad the company they bought up for the IP had to stop making their multi-touch/multi-gesture keyboards.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2013 16:42

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

The 13" MBA I was looking at was running about the same as a refurb rMBP (same amount of RAM and SSD size) and I was seriously waffling, but I'm less of a power user and travel a fair bit, so battery life and weight won out. As a side note, is it even worth looking at the 13" rMBP? It's basically a larger/heavier air, with much worse battery life, and only slightly better performance, in exchange for a high res screen. Isn't the RAM soldered on too, so you can't even save some money upgrading that yourself?

I have a hard time believing the 15" will actually drop discrete graphics, and while the 13" performance will definitely benefit from Iris Pro, it shouldn't do much for battery life. Iris may help keep the 15" from switching to discrete for a little longer when in use, and Apple will probably manage to get a slightly larger battery into the retina Pros and Haswell will help a little bit too, so with Mavericks their stated life might go up from 7 to 8 or 9, but under use it will still run down fast.

For the person with the 2009 MBP, get the SSD first and wait to see if you even need the RAM upgrade until after you've used it some. SSDs make a big usability difference, especially waking from sleep and loading up documents. Don't shortchange yourself on size (as in, don't get a 40 gig SSD [most anything below 60 gigs isn't worth it for the price/gb anyway]), but you should be able to make 80-128 work well if you don't keep all your music on it, and 256 is just palatial.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2013 17:58

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

Oceanlife posted:

Do people with the 128 drives end up wishing they went for the 256?

I went with 256 because I don't want to worry about storage space/overhead from photos/music/the occasional movie/tv show. I have a 2010 MBP with a 128 gig SSD that I added to it, and have managed very well, but there were points that I had only 4 gigs of space left after importing photos/videos from a trip. About 60 gigs gets eaten up by music/podcasts/apps for my 32gb phone and by two or three steam games. Some apps/MS Office take up maybe 20 gigs. The sleep image is going to be as big as the amount of RAM you have, so if you upgrade the RAM then that's 8 gigs of SSD space dedicated to not shutting off your laptop when you close the lid. I would occasionally get pageouts (reading/writing memory to the SSD since RAM is fully in use) when using 4gb of RAM but can't remembering seeing any after upgrading to 8gb of RAM .

I wanted to have a bootcamp partition on my new laptop and didn't want to have to manage files to keep the drive from filling up, so 256 was worth the upgrade cost. It should be more than enough for me even with a modest 50gb Windows partition set aside.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2013 16:51

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

dexter6 posted:

OK, I'll jump in.

I want to get an air. I'm, sold on the 512GB/8GB combo, but I, too, am debating between i5 or i7. I will mostly use it for watching Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, traveling with it, etc. Occasionally I will want to encode some stuff, etc.

But, it just *feels* shortsighted for me to buy the older processor - I was always of the school of thought to max out a computer when you buy it and then never look back.

The CPU upgrade is arguably the least overpriced upgrade when you look at the pricing for the processors from Intel. It should be both faster than the top IVB Air and have better battery life. The Haswell i5 has a lower base and turbo clock than the IVB i5 and performed almost dead even in most CPU benchmarks. The Haswell i7 has both a lower base clock and a higher turbo clock than the IVB i7.

code:

                    IVB vs Haswell
i5 Clock Speed	1.8 GHz	vs 1.3 GHz	
i5 Max Turbo	2.8 GHz	vs 2.6 GHz

i7 Clock Speed	2.0 GHz	vs 1.7 GHz
i7 Max Turbo 	3.2 GHz	vs 3.3 GHz

What I'm saying is :getin:

zeroprime fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jun 18, 2013

# ¿ Jun 18, 2013 17:23

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

Buy an SSD to replace the HDD.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2013 03:14

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

flavor posted:

Like I said, I have the very first rMBP model and that had a 16 GB option, so the statement was wrong.

They were talking about the 13" model and you're talking about the 15" model.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2013 14:44

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

The conversation was in the context of benisntfunny not liking that you could only get 8 gigs of RAM in the 13" MBPr and not wanting to buy a 15" MBPr just to get 16 gigs of RAM, so it just seemed kinda weird for you to jump in telling them you have 16 gigs in your 15".

So I had a weird glitch that looks like it cleared itself up with a restart. Every time I closed out an application, the top menubar would disappear until I clicked on the screen. Not even using command spacebar would bring it back up. I hope it doesn't start doing it again.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2013 18:02

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

I bought the new MBA to replace a 2010 MBP. The MBP used to get really hot and go into jet engine mode when I ran Rosetta Stone, the MBA doesn't spin up the fan and doesn't get hot when running the exact same copy of RS.

I haven't run it down more than 20% this afternoon, but while running a windows 7 VM connected to my work VPN with some word/excel files open, and several chrome tabs open on the Mac, it looks like the system thinks I can get roughly 1 hour per 10% of charge. This is with the i7 processor.

I haven't run into the wifi problem on the MBA yet, but I used to run into it on my MBP. Sometimes just turning wifi off and on would work, sometimes I'd have to restart the whole drat system. This was primarily on a Buffalo wireless router, but sometimes netgear too.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2013 04:16

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

There's really not much "sluggish" about the integrated graphics anymore. Yeah, you can't play your games on high settings, but the integrated graphics shouldn't be any kind of bottleneck like it used to be.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2013 19:48

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 19:27

zeroprime: Mar 25, 2006; Words go here.; Fun Shoe

I think some of that has been resolved through updates, but I'm kind of surprised reading back through that to see it was the CPU that was the bottleneck and not the integrated graphics. I guess I had thought it was the graphics since it was something related to display problems.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2013 20:01

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Mac Hardware - 5k Supremacy