Life with MacBook Air (SSD has changed my life.)

I originally started this as a comment on Chris Ullrich's article on The Unofficial Apple Weblog about Life with the MacBook Air, but as I wrote, it got longer so I decided to put it on my Blog.

To summarize Chris' article, he says that the MacBook Air has some really great stuff being small, sleek and cool, but it isn't fast enough and he gets "beachballs" too often and occasionally has some wireless trouble.

My comment was that I can offer a little perspective on the difference that can be made from having the expensive (read about $1000 more) Solid State Drive. I ordered the Air on the first day it came out, 1.8 GHz SSD. My other laptop is a top of the line 17" MacBook Pro, high resolution glossy screen, 2.5 GHz Processor, 4 GB Ram. I have been frustrated for years with performance of my laptops and the frequent beach balls. I generally run Activity Monitor and watch the processors and it seems clear to me that the processor is almost never the bottleneck. In fact, unless I'm doing some sort of encoding or rendering (which I almost never do on the laptop) the processors are less than 50% almost all the time.

So I was really interested to see what difference the Solid State Drive would make. The first difference it made was that I was short about 250 GB of hard drive space. That is still really frustrating as I don't have any of my music or photos on my laptop. Oh well. Also, I spend almost all my time on the laptop with web browsing, email or running FileMaker and most of that in email.

Once moving to the MacBook Air with SSD and getting all my email downloaded from the server, I noticed the difference right away. Keep in mind, my email usage isn't likely typical. I managed to strip my mail down to 22 GB worth in order to fit on the smaller Air SSD and that is spread over a couple hundred folders. On my "fast" 17" MacBook Pro, I had gotten used to clicking a folder and waiting a few seconds for mail to catch up. On the Air with SSD, almost all of my clicks in mail receive nearly instantaneous response, even ones with 10,000 messages or more. Sure there are times when it takes the usual amount of time to check in with the server to display new messages, but anything that is local on the hard drive is instantaneous.

I noticed last week when working on year end trying to track down a couple purchases. I'd put the amount of the purchase in the search field and have it look through the entire message for every email on my drive. The results were amazing, occasionally the wait was as long as 2 seconds, but usually it was a second or less.

I was in a meeting last week where we were trying to track down some data from old emails and there was actually a discussion about how I was coming up with the answer before anyone else was getting anything at all on their screen. All of them had current MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

So not really believing what I was seeing, last week I pulled out the 17" and tried using it for a day. I was amazed how quickly it was clear that for how I work, it was slower than the little MacBook Air. I saw beachballs that I almost never see on the Air, I noticed the lag when launching or switching applications, and there was a few times when the machine seemed to get all bound up and everything beachballed evidently waiting for some essential piece of information that was required from some remote corner of the hard drive.

Now if you read articles about the SSD, you won’t find (at least I haven’t) people raving about the stellar performance. What you’ll find is that when they test it, writing large chunks of information is a little slower than a standard hard drive and that writing small chunks of information is about the same, and the reading large chunks of informaiton is moderately faster. Then there will be one bar on the chart that is way different. Reading small chunks of information from many different places on the drive is wicked fast.

So it seems that it might depend on how you use your computer. If you are methodical, work with large pieces of data, a SSD might not make a huge difference in how you work. If you are like me and your computer use has more of an ADD flair to it, then you might see the results I am where SSD effectivley elimincates beachballs and makes functions you do every day increadibly less frustrating and faster.

The advantages of the MacBook Air’s size seem to be clear to everyone. I’ve always been a huge fan of small computers all the way back to my Apple Duo 210, 230, 280c, 2400, PowerBook 12” iBook 12”, etc. but had strayed since the performance of the compact machines had lagged behind the more professional machines. The Air has really changed how I think about bringing my computer along with me. The 17” mostly traveled between the office and home, the Air comes with me anytime I think it might come in handy.

So to try to sum it up, I’ve not handed my 17” back to our friends in the IT department to deploy to someone else yet because I still not sure I won’t be going back. One big adjustment has been the loss of a high resolution display. My 17” is the high resolution model with 1920x1200, the same as a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display. I really wish Apple offered high resolution options for all their professional machines including the MacBook Air with a 1680 by 1050 option.

The other signifcant adjustment is the loss of about 230 GB of hard drive space compared to the 300 GB drive in the 17”. For me, I’ve always kept all my music and videos on my Laptop and that accounts for about 120 GB, I’ve also kept my entire photo history there too going back about 10 years now and that is about 30 GB. No chance of those fitting on my MacBook Air SSD with only about 56 GB of usable space. I do carry a Western Digital Passport 320 GB external drive which is wonderful, but I rarely want to have it hanging off the side of the machine so in reality I use it very rarely.

So at this point I’m not compeltely sure what has me so enamored with the MacBook Air. You have to know that a big part of it is that is it so light and easy to bring along. I do wonder if more of it isn’t the SSD drive which for me has revolutionized how enjoyable it is to use a Laptop.

For the last week I’ve been playing with some ideas about a dual hard drive situation like those offered from MCE. If I had a 128 GB SSD drive as my primary drive but replaced the internal optical drive with a 300 GB for iTunes, iPhoto and my documents, that could provide the best of both worlds giving me the performance I need in launching applications, reading mail, etc. but still providing access to all the data I want to carry with me.

I hadn't seen anyone writing articles about their experience with MacBook Air that seemed to fit with mine, so I thought I'd get it all written down. I'd be really curious about what others with the SSD are seeing and if your experience is anything like mine.

Comments

[james braselton]

HI THERE WOW YOU HAVING PROBLES WITH ONLY 56 GB SSD MACBOOK AIR YOU CAN UPGRADE TOO THE NEW MACBOOK AIR WICH WILL INCREASE YOUR CAPACITY UP TOO 93 GB OR A 128 GB SSD AT LEAST THAT WILL GIVE YOU MORE ROOM

[james braselton]

HI THERE THIS YEAR MACBOOK AIR HAS A 128 GB SSD IF YOU WANT FOR $1799