On Jan 8, 2009, at 2:54 PM, Mark Smith wrote: > Been down that line of thinking already. The answer is a mixed bag > that doesn't point directly to a decision about the disk, but rather > to the requirement for as much processing power and RAM as I can get > hold of. My other is that I'm torn between minimising weight > and desiring more screen resolution than one has on the MacBook, or > Air. There are no easy answers, but I thought the jury might come down > heavily on one side of the disk argument. If one, or more people had > said "I took the SSD and it flies", I'd be sold. > I used an SSD-based Air over the holidays. It's a wonderful machine, and much nippier than I might have expected -- as others have reported, apps launch snappily. I didn't notice any particular heistation when saving files locally, but installing the OS and copying across large data sets (GBs+, such as my music...) did take "a long time".
My normal usage patterns, though, are perhaps somewhat different from many others'. I "need" several boot partitions, and typically carry tens of gigabytes of data around with me. More importantly, I found the screen surprisingly "cramped" (and to think that 1024x768 used to be luxury...). I could probably live without the ethernet connection (although I did get a USB "dongle"), and having the external CD-drive would have been fine, but the combination of space and screen real estate was a killer for me. So "with some reluctance" I got a Mac Book Pro a few days ago. My first though was how amazingly heavy it was. But it has what I "need". (One of the advantages I of the Air that I was going to note was its silence -- my previous Pro could be comparatively loud. The new Pro, however, (perhaps because of its solid enclosure) is just about as quiet [modulo an occasional muffled "chink" when the hard drive cuts off when sleeping"].) If I weren't working on large documents and projets that "require" a big screen -- or perhaps if I hadn't already been used to the luxury of the Pro I had before -- then I'd probably have been happy with the Air. For me as a "power" user, though, it didn't quite cut it. At least with the Pro I hope to have the opportunity to swap in a 256GB SSD within the next year. I'm really grateful for having had the opportunity to try out the Air, and can certainly understand there being a non-trivial segment of the population for which it's a great solution, but I'm not part of it. (If this hasn't put you off, I have a lightly-used SSD-based Air for sale... ;-) mmalc _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
