Monthly Archives: July 2012

MacBook Air 2012 – Part I

Macintosh

Much enhanced.

The 2012 MacBook Air.

My two year old MacBook Air has moved to a happy new home and its replacement arrives tomorrow in the guise of the 2012 model. It has proved trouble free, reliable and a joy to use and rarely gets so hot on your lap that you notice.

I wrote about the 2010 model here concluding that it was a decent, ultra light portable with a fine keyboard and decent Lightroom and Photoshop capabilities.

Once again I have opted for the 11″ model owing to its low weight and handy size, but a little more than related statistics for an iPad. However, this time I opted for 128Gb of SSD rather than the minimum of 64Gb, for an outrageous premium of $100 (market price for 64Gb of RAM is $25) and a total cost of $1,100 delivered from Amazon.

The jump in specifications is non-trivial and confirms again that a two year upgrade cycle on MacBooks and iPads is appropriate. For desktops only a Hackintosh makes sense for my heavy use purposes, and you can read all about the one I use by clicking the Sitemap link at the top of this page. Here are the more obvious changes comparing the 2012 model to the 2010:

  • Model MD224LL/A; 2010 is MC505LL/A.
  • 4Gb RAM vs. 2Gb
  • Low power consumption IvyBridge i5 CPU vs. slower and hungrier Core2Duo
  • 1.7GHz CPUclock speed with 2.6GHz boost, compared with 1.4Ghz, no boost
  • Backlit keyboard
  • Intel HD4000 integrated GPU vs. Nvidia GeForce 320M with 256Mb memory
  • HDMI output via adapter vs. none
  • 720p HD Facetime camera vs. SD Facetime camera
  • Sata3 SSD vs. Sata2 SSD

As before only the 13″ model comes with an SD card slot, so an external USB reader will be needed. Either model requires an external reader if you use CF cards.

Options are very costly and include an i7 CPU for a little more speed (2.0/3.2GHz), 8Gb RAM and a 512Gb SSD. None solve economically for this user.

With an anticipated Geekbench CPU speed score of 6,000 (4Gb RAM) the 2012 model should be some three times as fast on CPU intensive tasks like Lightroom and Photoshop as the 2010 model. That’s a huge increase. Cinebench GPU frame rates should be almost doubled at 18 vs. 10. Another large jump. Disk read/write access should be almost 60% faster, as I noted when upgrading my HackPro’s SSD from SATA2 to SATA3.

In the two years since the 11″ MBA was introduced, it has become the entry level for students everywhere, (at least for those who prefer studying to rebooting their Windows machine) with the white plastic MacBook being discontinued. This is a significant market for Apple both on volume and for first time sales, as many users’ first serious introduction to the Mac ecosystem. Thus it’s no wonder that Apple has not rested on its laurels when improving the model. Last year’s Sandy Bridge model offered a big speed increase and this year’s Ivy Bridge builds on that.

Resale value of the 2010 after two years use is some 65 cents on the dollar, not at all bad for a used computer.

Some first impressions and test data soon when I have unpacked mine.

Five years of the iPhone

Computing

Sea change.

I bought mine on day 2, June 30, 2007, in the San Luis Obispo Apple Store for some $500. Ouch! But I consoled myself that, as a money manager it was both deductible, constituting research, and might actually be useful.

Today I use an iPhone 4S for all calls and have no landline at home.

That first iPhone was obvious; you know, like shorting builders’ stocks in 2007 or going long corporate debt when IBM’s was yielding 7% in 2008. There were lots of things it could not do. No camera, 2G only, no App Store, web apps only plus the few it came with. But look at the businesses it obsoleted over these past five years and others which will not be around five years hence:

  • RIMM
  • Nokia
  • Palm
  • Nintendo
  • Landline telephony
  • Hewlett Packard
  • Dell
  • DVDs and CDs
  • Garmin and TomTom GPS
  • Printed books and bookstores
  • Print manuals, flight maps, etc.
  • Point and shoot camera makers
  • Print news media
  • Print magazines
  • Apple’s own OS X, now very much in its last innings

Another in huge trouble is Microsoft, cursed with no credible offering, no attention span and no leadership.

At the same time, iOS created a huge raft of new businesses which did not exist before:

  • Independent software designers
  • Mobile games
  • Interactive advertising
  • Facebook – OK, not all change is good
  • Specialty medical and forensic tools
  • Hand held intelligent industrial inventory tools
  • Interactive video telephony
  • Broadband expansion
  • Mobile investing
  • GPS/war/traffic/weather systems
  • New CPU designs from the likes of ARM
  • 2 billion+ prospective new computer users who will go from abacus to iPhone overnight
  • 10 million making a poor living in China where before they made none

Sure, many of these were around earlier, but they scarcely moved the needle of any metric.

Because the iPhone not only changed how we communicate, while creating a new mobile computer, it gave Apple a five-year lead in touchscreen design with the iPad 1 three years ago. This is what poorly run businesses like HP and Microsoft fail to understand. Nothing about that iPad was rushed to market. By the time you could buy one in April 2009, the user interface had thousands of man years labour invested in it. It did not just happen, and iPad 1 must rank right up there with the Leica M3 (1954) as one of the most perfectly developed ‘Version 1’ models of any machine man has yet made. That iOS has worthy competition from a company which had never made a computer – Google – in the Android OS, is no surprise. By definition, GOOG’s thinking was out of the box. They had no blinkers to discard.

It’s common to see the iPhone and its OS referred to as ‘disruptive’. Wrong. A disruption is when you put down your tea to answer the door for the UPS man. The iPhone was both intensely destructive and creative at the same time. It is a tsunami device, not a storm in a teacup, and it created the world’s largest corporation, Apple, Inc.

The Leica M3, 1954. The previous occasion on which Version 1 was perfect.