MacBook Air

[granodemostasa]

As a person who moves round I thought this would be a new... well you know.. revolution. but 5 hours of battery life, non expandable/none replaceable battery.... and that shitty apple keyboard... no thanks. (now back to my thinkpad!)

[luvdunhill]

Well wireless encryption no matter wep, wpa, wpa2, etc, etc is all breakable to some extent. WEP takes about 2 minutes at most WPA takes a while longer. But yes a usb ethernet adapter is a pretty good idea. Unless you need that 1 USB port for something else .

pretty much... not to mention MD5 collisions using a PS3 is trivial these days I cannot complain, as stuff like this puts bread on my table...

[Iron_Dreamer]

Typical Apple in my view, fewer features being sold as "modern," a more frail, proprietary, and damage-prone device being sold as "cool." I'm sure Apple will continue to clean up by inevitably charging people out the nose to install new batteries, among their many other typical post-purchase windfalls which have sent their stock price soaring lately. Just because a computer can be built that so thin, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so (practically speaking), though it likely makes more than enough sense to the bottom line.

[mirumu]

I kind of like the Macbook Air but I'm sticking with my Macbook Pro for now even if it is too damn big. 12", with a better graphics chip and I'd be more interested in one (definitely with a solid state drive).

I'm hoping to keep my existing computers at least another year. In 2009 I'm thinking to upgrade my G5 to a triple boot (Mac, Linux, Windows) Mac Pro and throw a writable Blu-ray drive in there. These new Pioneer BD-ROM drives are tempting though.

[grawk]

Except wireless isn't exactly what I'd call secure, so yeah Ethernet still has a place in computers

Ethernet isn't exactly secure either. If security is that important to you, you need to do more than trust the network you're connected to. WPA2 is at least as secure as a physical network.

[kpeezy]

Ethernet isn't exactly secure either. If security is that important to you, you need to do more than trust the network you're connected to. WPA2 is at least as secure as a physical network.

Righto. I would have guessed they were talking about broadcasting wireless which would make sense but that doesn't apply to anything here.

[saint.panda]

The time capsule is actually the much cooler device. I needed another external HD and I just left my Airport with my old apartment, so the time capsule came at the right time!

[aardvark baguette]

I have an eye on the Drobo unit myself. I need multiple drives. Plus the ability to use different brands and sizes is awesome. Not looking forward to paying for it though. I have little interest in the NAS companion set either. I just need pure music backup.

[tyrion]

The time capsule is actually the much cooler device. I needed another external HD and I just left my Airport with my old apartment, so the time capsule came at the right time!

I ordered a Time Capsule. I've wanted to move to a 1tb drive since I am at 460gb on my 500gb drive. Apple describes the drives as server grade which I am guessing makes them better quality than the drives in my Seagate Freeagent. This will give me another place to back up our digital pics in addition to my music. All of this without wires.

[aardvark baguette]

I have no idea what they mean by server grade. Maybe a 32 mb cache?

[tkam]

The server grade thing is total BS. Just Apple marketing at it's finest.

[tyrion]

I don't know if it is or isn't bs. grawk, where are you? I'm guessing you have an opinion.

[grawk]

Server grade means drives with 5 year warranty, basically.

I talked to the storage QA manager at apple a few years ago. They're REALLY unhappy with most storage vendors and their consumer grade gear. It breaks too often for apple's customer sat needs.

[mirumu]

In my experience server grade usually means it's capable of 24/7 operation and the warranty supports this. If you read the spec sheets most consumer drives either don't mention this or list lower supported operation times.

[tyrion]

you don't need grawk, it's BS.

Are you kidding. grawk is my tech brain and Nate is me DIY brain. I couldn't survive without my two extra brains.

[tyrion]

Bingo! I'm a handsome devil, aren't I.

[tkam]

Server grade means drives with 5 year warranty, basically.

Ehh I dunno thats way too generic IMO. When I think server grade I think SAS 15,000 RPM drives .

Though in the case of the Time Capsule if we go with that 5-yr warranty idea and the 500 or 1000 gig options the drives are most likely the WD Caviar RE2 or the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 series. Both solid drive lines but ironically have shown to have equal or worse failure rate than the "lowly consumer" level grade drives. Honestly these days when your talking about SATA drives their are so few differences across brands and manufacturers it hardly matters .

Mike, I think a good analogy here is to compare apple's use of "server grade" to ray's use of "military spec". Equally meaningless, useless and total utter BS.

[tyrion]

Ehh I dunno thats way too generic IMO. When I think server grade I think SAS 15,000 RPM drives .

Though in the case of the Time Capsule if we go with that 5-yr warranty idea and the 500 or 1000 gig options the drives are most likely the WD Caviar RE2 or the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 series. Both solid drive lines but ironically have shown to have equal or worse failure rate than the "lowly consumer" level grade drives. Honestly these days when your talking about SATA drives their are so few differences across brands and manufacturers it hardly matters .

Mike, I think a good analogy here is to compare apple's use of "server grade" to ray's use of "military spec". Equally meaningless, useless and total utter BS.

Now you've gone too far. In the end, I'm not getting it because of that, although I thought it could be a plus.

[mirumu]

Honestly these days when your talking about SATA drives their are so few differences across brands and manufacturers it hardly matters .

That's my experience too. I choose what brand to buy or not to buy based on other factors.

Mike, I think a good analogy here is to compare apple's use of "server grade" to ray's use of "military spec". Equally meaningless, useless and total utter BS.

I remember when military spec meant that a device could handle temperatures and radiation conditions encountered by space probes. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

[grawk]

I remember when military spec meant that a device could handle temperatures and radiation conditions encountered by space probes. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

I'm sure that's true of ray's amps. They'd work fine in space.

[justin]

tyrion,

I have one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822336002 which I connect to my wireless router

It's worked very well so far. Advantage over the Time Capsule is you can put 2 HDs in it. I have it setup to mirror the data over both drives, so there is some protection against drive failure. Data transfer is not very fast, but it's good enough to stream video. I don't know if this is because i'm using RAID, and obviously this would be a very cheap RAID device, or if the network is to blame. I don't know what the Time Capsule's real-world transfer rate is. And this can be used with Time Machine by enabling network storage devices with the terminal

[mirumu]

I'm sure that's true of ray's amps. They'd work fine in space.

Reminds me of a conversation I had once on Head-fi. Someone was talking about how electrostatic drivers are similar to capacitors and mentioned that air was a less than ideal dielectric. They then advocated using a perfect vacuum instead.

[grawk]

802.11n is a big advantage. 54mb/sec is REALLY slow for drive access. Even 802.11N is slow for drive access tho. I have trouble explaining to people at work why their writes over 4gb/sec links are slow

tyrion,

I have one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822336002 which I connect to my wireless router

It's worked very well so far. Advantage over the Time Capsule is you can put 2 HDs in it. I have it setup to mirror the data over both drives, so there is some protection against drive failure. Data transfer is not very fast, but it's good enough to stream video. I don't know if this is because i'm using RAID, and obviously this would be a very cheap RAID device, or if the network is to blame. I don't know what the Time Capsule's real-world transfer rate is. And this can be used with Time Machine by enabling network storage devices with the terminal

[spritzer]

A normal raid NAS would probably be cheaper then the Apple stuff and work better. The problem with the cheap controllers is that they are cheap and break down all the time. I do prefer to run a full time server though as it is bigger and has 2 PSU's which required soldering and a bit of metalworking to fit.

Reminds me of a conversation I had once on Head-fi. Someone was talking about how electrostatic drivers are similar to capacitors and mentioned that air was a less than ideal dielectric. They then advocated using a perfect vacuum instead.

That's beyond being funny... Dayton-Wright did do some crazy things with airtight dust covers and filling the drivers with some gas to lower the arc threshold.

[philodox]

I like those new WD Raptor X drives... if I were to build another fast computer and couldn't pony up the cash for a solid state drive, that is probably the way I would go for my system/game drive.