grawk Posted April 23, 2011 Report Posted April 23, 2011 Chances are good that thunderport will eventually be worth it
aardvark baguette Posted April 23, 2011 Report Posted April 23, 2011 The big improvement would probably be the reduction in heat, I'd imagine.
grawk Posted April 23, 2011 Report Posted April 23, 2011 There's not really any heat to speak of on my 11"
morphsci Posted April 23, 2011 Report Posted April 23, 2011 The only real heat I notice on the MBA is when it is charging.
The Monkey Posted April 23, 2011 Report Posted April 23, 2011 So how are these new MBAs any better in practical terms?
morphsci Posted April 23, 2011 Report Posted April 23, 2011 My guess is that thunderbolt is unlikely to be much of an advantage in this generation unless Apple gets off their duff.
grawk Posted April 23, 2011 Report Posted April 23, 2011 It'll extend the life of the new one, I think. If anyone wants a deal on my mba 11" ultimate, I'll buy the new one
Voltron Posted April 23, 2011 Report Posted April 23, 2011 (edited) As soon as the new Thunderbolt equipped displays and hard drives come out, which will be very soon, the Thunderbolt will allow an MBP or MBA user to have a desktop setup with a full sized monitor, an external hard drive or array, and eventually other peripherals to use a single cable to connect or disconnect the laptop. All that ease of use with mega fast transfer speeds. Seems pretty good to me. Also, I thought the Sandy Bridge chips were going to "bring massive CPU performance improvements to Apple's most diminutive laptops with little change in power requirements." That also seems pretty good to me. Edited April 23, 2011 by Voltron
morphsci Posted April 23, 2011 Report Posted April 23, 2011 The two real questions that need to be answered though, is how soon for those peripherals and how big a performance jump will there be for real applications, not benchmark tests. I remain both mildly hopeful and mildly skeptical.
Currawong Posted April 24, 2011 Report Posted April 24, 2011 (edited) In practical terms, for something like a regular external HD, it'll be the same improvement over Firewire 800 that eSATA is -- that is quite significantly for demanding applications still, but most so for people using SSD drives. I think the point of it is that it can scale to ridiculous levels of speed with arrays for people working on full HD video. OWC just announced even faster SSDs with 500+ MB/sec read and write speeds, so the timing could be excellent, but you'd still be easily looking at somewhere over $3k for the fastest 1TB of external storage without getting more exotic, assuming someone releases a 2-bay RAID box. Edited April 24, 2011 by Currawong
Torpedo Posted April 24, 2011 Report Posted April 24, 2011 IMHO if average read/write rates for a SSD are under 300Mb/s any transference bandwidth above 400Mb/s makes little to no sense. Perhaps when SSD or other storage technology manages to have significantly higher read/write speeds, those huge bandwidths make more sense.
Dusty Chalk Posted April 24, 2011 Report Posted April 24, 2011 The biggest advantage will be when they put it on an iPod, and syncing takes as long as thinking about it.
Salt Peanuts Posted April 24, 2011 Report Posted April 24, 2011 The biggest advantage will be when they put it on an iPod, and syncing takes as long as thinking about it. I doubt there'd be much increase in speed, assuming we're talking about regular iPod. HDD in iPod will be the bottleneck.
grawk Posted April 24, 2011 Report Posted April 24, 2011 Not if we're talking the ipod touch/iphone/ipad
n_maher Posted April 24, 2011 Report Posted April 24, 2011 The biggest advantage will be when they put it on an iPod, and syncing takes as long as thinking about it. One might argue it shouldn't take a cable to sync at all...
n_maher Posted April 24, 2011 Report Posted April 24, 2011 Sure, if one doesn't mind syncing taking a quarter million years. Initial transfer, sure, use a cable. But after that wtf?
grawk Posted April 24, 2011 Report Posted April 24, 2011 given that the ip* is backed up every time it's connected, it doesn't matter which time it's synced, wireless would take forever.
Dusty Chalk Posted April 25, 2011 Report Posted April 25, 2011 I doubt there'd be much increase in speed, assuming we're talking about regular iPod. HDD in iPod will be the bottleneck.HDD technology is so...2000's. I was actually wishing I could trick out my older iPod with one of those solid state drives, but I was told that a lot of the iPod's actually check the drive and make sure it's something they have drivers for.
n_maher Posted April 25, 2011 Report Posted April 25, 2011 i consider a real sync to be up to and including media. otherwise, it's not much different than what mobileme gives you, no? Have they made mobileme free yet? (serious question)
grawk Posted April 25, 2011 Report Posted April 25, 2011 You can do the other syncs with google or any exchange server. There's not really a need to use mobileme if you don't already have it.
grawk Posted April 25, 2011 Report Posted April 25, 2011 I wasn't suggesting you give up mobile me. Just saying that it doesn't require a pay service to wirelessly sync everything except media.
grawk Posted April 25, 2011 Report Posted April 25, 2011 I dont' want them to make mobile me free, I'm paid up for 9 more months
The Monkey Posted April 25, 2011 Report Posted April 25, 2011 I'm in the same exact situation with Mobileme. I think the service Sucksme, but I'm committed to it and don't want to change my email address.
Currawong Posted April 26, 2011 Report Posted April 26, 2011 I solved this by buying a family code off of eBay for less than the regular Apple price for a single licence, then giving the extra accounts to family and friends.
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