Monthly Archives: October 2010

A bigger hard drive for the MacBook Air

Any day now!

At the conclusion of Part V of my MBA review I wrote:

“The ingenuity of man will ensure that higher capacity flash hard drives become available in no time for far less than Apple will charge you and ifixit already has a supply of five pointed Torx screwdrivers available, for all of $4.95, which will allow you to replace the fan yourself.”

For ‘fan’ you can also read ‘flash drive’, the same tool being required.

Well, that was yesterday. Today a larger, faster flash drive was announced, claimed to be 30% faster and, at 256gB twice as large as the largest base spec sold by Apple. (You can get 256gB but on the 13″ MBA only and that at a $300 premium to the 128gB base spec for the 13″ model; the maximum you can get on the 11.6″ MBA is 128gB, at a $200 premium to the 64gB base spec.)

Click the picture for more. The vendor makes the excellent point that the flash drive removed from the MBA can be used as back-up storage using the provided USB casing; the latter is required to plug in the new drive externally to first clone everything to it from the stock MBA drive installed by Apple. The installation, based on the ifixit pictures, should be a piece of cake. 10 Torxscrews using the special screwdriver are removed to free the base and an eleventh like screw, once removed, allows replacement of the plug-and-play flash drive.

While the largest flash drive sold by PhotoFast is currently 256gB, we will be seeing terabyte drives before you can say “Well, Mr. Jobs, that ploy with those silly five headed ‘unique’ screws didn’t last long now, did it?” Duh!

There’s something very appealing about this process. Apple is trying to screw its customers by charging egregious premia for additional flash storage and is, in turn, being screwed by its own suppliers with cheaper and better aftermarket alternatives. US pricing is unknown but I would hazard a guess of $200, which gets you four times the 64gB base spec on the 11.6″ where the maximum of 128gB commands a $200 premium. If I’m right that means twice the maximum Apple offers for the same price. Prices will only fall as solid state storage gradually obsoletes spinning disks.

Update Feb 2011: Apple threatened litigation/contract cancellation of other parts if PhotoFast did not cease and desist from marketing this SSD. Jerks. Anyway, MacSales offers a like upgrade, although without the external enclosure, and you can read about it here.

A matte screen MacBook Air

Yea!

I have refrained from yet more grumbling about the glossy screen on the MBA. I reckon readers have had enough of that. But when friend of the blog Gregg L. sent me this piece the only decent thing to do with it was to share.

Click the picture for details. If only they could do this for the iPad ….

Now I just need a friendly Market God to allow me to buy another MBA while mine is out for surgery ….

The MacBook Air – Part V

Controlling fans and heat.

In Part IV I concluded that the MacBook Air was a credible tool for light, mobile use with Lightroom3. But I remained troubled by the significant rise in the heat of components during the relatively stressful tests of importing and generating 1:1 preview files for 50 RAW files from my Panasonic G1.

In this article I examine how photographers can better manage heat in the MBA and quantify the tradeoffs in terms of battery life when stock fan speed profiles are changed.

Because I have little trust in Apple’s heat management, having suffered innumerable Mac failures from overheating, I thought it might make sense to take a hard look at cooling in the new MacBook Air. Mine is the bottom-of-the-line version, meaning 11.6″ display, 1.4gHz CPU, 2gB RAM and 64gB (meaning it’s about 45gB when you have all the necessary things installed) flash hard drive.

Now from a specifications standpoint, the MBA has some obviously good and obviously bad heat issues.

The good:

  • The low powered 1.4gHz Intel U9400 Core2Duo CPU runs cooler than something faster, though that is making a virtue out of economic necessity. It’s also a mature design so cheap in bulk.
  • The absence of a spinning hard disk drive cuts heat.
  • The new generation of graphics GPU, like the Nvidia 320M used in the MBA, runs cooler than its predecessors on a separate chip.
  • The close fitting alloy case should be a far superior conductor of heat – meaning it acts as a heat sink – than the plastic ones which act as heat retainers on my many blown iBooks and MacBooks which came before.

The bad:

  • The MBA is the slimmest laptop netbook ever made, so there’s less space for heat to exit.
  • The heat exhaust slots of the earlier MBA have been deleted and the only exit for hot air is the very narrow slot at the base of the display hinge.
  • There is but one poncy little fan to cool both the CPU and GPU inside the case, as illustrated below.

The sole fan in the MBA, circled top right.

I had already noted the significant rise in measured and observed heat (my lap got hot!) in my tests where I imported 50 RAW files into Lightroom3, creating 1:1 previews. That chart is repeated below:

Component temperatures during RAW file import and processing.

As you can see, the CPU’s temperature rises from 106F to 165F during the import process. You can assume the GPU’s temperature rises a like amount as the two processors are adjacent to one another.

Tools used to measure temperature changes:

  • I imported the same 50 RAW files from a plug-in USB hard drive and Transcend 8gB Class 6 SDHC card as used in my Panasonic G1.
  • For constant temperature display in the status bar I used smcFanControl, which discloses that the default fan speed setting is 2000 rpm (where it is silent) and the maximum is 6500 (where it all but roars). smcFanControl’s readout appears in the status bar at the top of the MBA’s display.
  • I used MacBookPro/Extended Fan Control, which installs as a preference pane in System Preferences.
  • All tests were done on battery power, replicating real world use. Battery percentage remaining was displayed in the status bar at the top of the MBA’s display by appropriately dialing in the System Preference settings. I was especially interested in seeing what additional battery consumption would result from cranking the fan up to keep the MBA cool.
  • I used Temperature Monitor, as before, to graph the results.

MacBookPro/Extended Fan Control suggests a temperature range for the CPU of 86F to 194F with default fan settings – their display is a little confused showing two fans and a 1200 minimum fan speed, when the reality is one fan and a 2000 rpm minimum. However, the actual fan speed reported is identical to that reported by smcFan Control, so it’s a useful tool, not least because, unlike smcFanControl, MacBookPro/Extended Fan Control can be set to dynamically chane the speed of the fan depending on the CPU’s temperature. As there is no way on God’s earth that I am going to allow my MBA to run up to 194F (likely a degree or two from the service limit), I set MacBookPro/Extended Fan Control to a limit of 149F, the lowest I could get. I don’t care how much anyone lectures me about Apple’s sophisticated CPU and GPU thermal throttling, there is simply no way I’m going to buy it. Let it get to 194F and how long do you think the thing is going to last? Exactly.

Here are the MacBookPro/Extended Fan Control settings:

The single fan was running at 3,295rpm as shown at the base of the screen shot. CPU/GPU at 113F (not 32F).

Results: The results could hardly be more instructive.

  • Compared with Apple’s stock fan control, where the fan is never audible, the MBP’s fan spooled up to a maximum of 5013rpm during the import/preview generation process at which speed it was audible if not obtrusive. This is still well below the 6500rpm limit.
  • Battery capacity was depleted by 5% compared to 4% stock.
  • The CPU/GPU maxed out at 138F (see chart below) compared to 165F stock.
  • Import/preview generation time was unchanged.
  • CPU temperature was back to 108F within 5 minutes of completion.
  • Fan speed was back down to 2800rpm within 5 minutes of completion.

So for the cost of 1% extra battery capacity use, maximum CPU/GPU temperature was reduced by 27F, all of this at an ambient temperature of 75F. If you don’t think that’s worth 1% of extra battery use then I have a great bridge for sale at a bargain price, just for you, located in Brooklyn, New York. I only have one, so hurry.

Conclusion: The heat conscious MBA user will install MacBookPro/Extended Fan Control and set it the way I have. There is no earthly reason to trust Apple’s heat management and default fan profile settings when you can do much better for a modest battery drain increase.

Here’s the revised temperature graph which, frankly, is a jaw dropper – the enclosure bottom temperature (the part your lap feels!) remains unchanged:

Key MBA component temperatures with MacBookPro/Extended Fan Control installed.

The five large fans and a monster CPU radiator in my HackPro do an even better job but the HackPro is not what you would call portable ….

What to do if you blow out the fan and have to replace it? Apple has sneakily used five pointed Torx screws to make it impossible for you to remove the base and access the fan. What I suspect they really do not want you doing is replacing the plug in flash drive with a larger one (it is not soldered in), and iFixit, when dismantling the MBA had to fashion their own screwdriver to access the innards. (By the way, the RAM is soldered in and cannot be user upgraded). Fear not. The ingenuity of man will ensure that higher capacity flash hard drives become available in no time for far less than Apple will charge you and ifixit already has a supply of five pointed Torx screwdrivers available, for all of $4.95, which will allow you to replace the fan yourself.

ifixit’s view of the 11.6″ MBA.

A note on use with 1Password: If you use 1Password to store all your passwords, be sure to uncheck the box shown below:

Failing to do this will mean that you have to re-input your master password every time you use 1Password after putting your MBA to sleep (meaning after you close and reopen the lid). I learned this thanks to 1Password’s superb support – a quick exchange of emails on a Sunday. That’s what it takes to succeed nowadays. An excellent product, superbly supported.

The MacBook Air – Part IV

Display calibration and remote storage.

Part III appears here.

I use an Eye-One colorimeter to profile the two Dell 2209WA displays attached to my desktop HackPro and used the same tool to calibrate the MacBook Air’s display.

Software: As the MBA has no DVD drive, I imported the software for the Eye-One from the User->Applications directory on the HackPro by networking the MBA with the HackPro. All you need is in that one directory – there are no additional files to be found in the Library->Application Support directory.

The Eye-One is attached in the usual way.

Electing the ‘Laptop’ option in the software, the whole process took maybe 5 minutes, with the profile being stored automatically as the default by Eye-One, visible in System Preferences->Displays:

How do the images compare? First it has to be noted that the MBA’s display is far more sensitive to color changes with off center viewing than the 21.5″ Dell. That’s hardly surprising, given the large screen size of the latter. Second, the Eye-One software in Laptop mode does not provide for brightness adjustment so when lining up the two in the picture below I had to turn down the MBA’s brightness a couple of notches to match things up.

The MBA compared with the Dell 2209WA display.

Bottom line: You might not want to use the MBA for critical color matching but this quick and easy calibration gets me very close indeed to what I see on the calibrated Dell displays attached to my desktop Mac.

Remote storage: Users of services like MobileMe or Dropbox gain access to copious amounts of ‘cloud’ storage. Is this a cheap answer to significantly expanding storage of the MBA, given this netbook’s small internal storage drive?

If you want to store lots of small files then this is certainly a workable solution. Indeed, I use it for spreadsheets with both Excel and Numbers as it allows me to access a spreadsheet from any one of a number of computers. With MobileMe’s iDisk feature the remote storage is accessed like any disk drive.

But the situation is not so good with large RAW picture files. My internet service measures at 10mb/s download and 1.4 mb/s upload; in practice, it takes me almost a minute to upload one RAW file from the Panasonic G1 to the iDisk at MobileMe, and maybe 10 seconds to download it. That’s pretty slow. You can use this in a pinch but will burn up lots of battery power and waste a lot of time. A small USB self-powered external hard drive is, at present, a far better solution. Take a look at CarBak.

In Part V I look harder at heat management, the bugaboo of most of Apple’s hardware designs.

The new AppleTV – Part II

AirPlay and more use tests.

Part I appears here.

Here I examine the working of AirPlay, Apple’s update to the use of remote sources and speakers for playing music files.

At this time AirPlay only works for routing sound files, but Steve Jobs has promised that routing of video files will be added before 2011. In Part I, I mentioned that optimal control of the infra red sensor in the AppleTV for use with remotes results from the use of an IR blaster. This small device replaces the AppleTV’s sensor with a much less directional and more sensitive one and works for all IR controlled devices. Simply stated, once you have an IR blaster installed you can pretty much point a remote in any direction and it will work the hardware it is aimed at, however imperfectly. Just ask our 8 year old. I use this one and it’s excellent.

The alternative is to load Remote (free, from the AppStore) on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and use the mobile device to control your AppleTV using wifi, provided you have a wireless network in your home. Thus approach does not require any line of sight to the device you want to control as it uses radio waves.

I downloaded the latest version of Remote and installed it on my iPhone and found that it was very quick to set up and easy to use. The screen shots which follow are from my 3G iPhone.

Fire up Remote and you are asked for the Library you want to use. Mine (“Tigger’s Library”) resides on the HackPro in my home office.

Checking that library as the source, the next two screens ask where you want the sound routed.

In the above, ‘Computer’ refers to the speakers connected to the HackPro. I simply chose ‘AppleTV’ and the music is routed to the speakers connected to our TV. Note the useful provision of a volume control in the second screen, above.

And that’s about it. It’s that simple. This approach allows centralized or distributed storage of music (and, soon, video) files which can now be output to any connected device on the network.

Cover art from your remote server is also fully displayed on the iPhone, thus:

A masterpiece of male chauvinism from Mick and the Boys.

More use tests:

I have now watched several movies using AppleTV as the streaming device. Some were from Netflix, both in SD and HD, and some were purchased from the iTunes store $4.99 or less) also in SD and HD. At no time did any of these exhibit any stuttering or distortion in either video or sound and all loaded and started playing within 30 seconds or less. The AppleTV remains only barely warm to the touch, even after a two hour HD movie transmission and even a child could use the on screen menus. In fact Winston, our 8 year old boy, has proved that to be true. The appearance of the menus using Netflix is identical to that for the iTunes store.

Conclusion:

The AppleTV is unlikely to become the sole device for consuming sound and movies in the home, primarily owing to the dunderheads who run movie studios. They prefer to have a large slice of nothing in royalties than a small slice of something, having convinced themselves that the $0.99 cent pricing of songs in the iTunes Music Store has cheated them. Meanwhile, they conveniently avoid noticing that without iTMS music would be pretty much dead as no one wants to pay $10 for a CD which gathers dust in the home, is hard to access and contains many tracks you do not want. They are now making the same error with movies, on the principle that if your competitor’s candle dims, that brightens yours. I have never known that to be true in any field of human endeavor. You try and explain it to them.

After its previous failures with the AppleTV, Apple seems reluctant to even show the device on its web site and you have to search for the related home page, which can be found here. I can’t even find it on the specifications page, but the power consumption, even when working, does not exceed a couple of watts, which explains why there is no on/off switch.

The elegant and intuitive movie rental page.

However, as a device with a superb user interface which finally avoids the heat, poor performance and price issues of its predecessor, the AppleTV is going to find itself in a lot of Christmas stockings this December at the $99 asking price. I know I will be buying a half dozen or so with just that destination in mind.

In Part III I address the use of a Digital to Analog Converter to convert the AppleTV’s digital/optical sound output to analog for usew with traditional amplifiers and external speakers.

Disclosure: Long AAPL common stock and call options.