Discussion
Leithen said:
Cyberface, did you purchase the external drive and ethernet dongle too?
No chance of buying the Apple external drive - I very rarely use optical media on my laptop (I do all that sort of thing on the workstation), and the Air has the 'Remote Disk' functionality which allows you to mount other machines' optical drives. I didn't even check the price as I automatically assumed it was typically overpriced.I did however get the ethernet dongle - that's IMO an essential - the performance is nothing to shout about (the wireless ethernet is so good that I use that wherever possible) - but if I want to connect to a client's network then it's going to have to be wired ethernet... not wishing to re-ignite the Wifi security flamewar that happened last time, but IMO wireless is fundamentally insecure and I don't tend to find any of my clients using it.
And even if they do, there's no way in hell they'd let me of all people connect to it...
GnuBee - regarding the iPhone dev platform - I haven't tried it yet but it's a dual core 1.6 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM... and Xcode is a hell of a lot lighter than MS Visual Studio 2005. The developers at my current client are using VS2005 on Pentium 4s with 1 GB of RAM, and whilst start-up is chronically slow, development and compiling are reasonably quick. I see no reason why an MBA couldn't do iPhone development easily enough - you'll need that powered hub for the iPhone though!!!!
I have installed a load of unix tools on this Air (currently posting on a train in Switzerland) using MacPorts - and compilation speed is slower than the old Macbook, but it's not 'make a cup of tea' slow. The biggest issue with compiling is the use of lots of small files, and the slow hard disk is the bottleneck with the Air. But for iPhone apps, which are never going to be like compiling OpenOffice from source, it would be ideal.
Apple made a good move by making sure that the Air has 2 GB of RAM given it's not upgradable. My app footprint when doing everything on the laptop (i.e. no client machine to do Windows stuff, meaning Parallels and Win2k plus SQL Server running in virtualisation) is really heavy, but the 3 GB of usable RAM on my old Macbook handled it all without swapping. Assuming you don't run really heavy Windows apps in virtualisation on your Air (like VS2005 and SQL Server on a copy of XP) at the same time as PPC Mac Office, the Air's 2 GB will be absolutely fine and you won't have to worry about the slow HD.
For the time being, it's ace. When 80 GB or more SSDs become available in the 1.8 inch size, I'll be hacking mine with one of those
But even the base 1.6 GHz would be fine for development of anything short of heavy OpenGL 3D stuff, or Windows development.Let's be honest here, most modern laptops are more than capable of virtually all 'normal' computing tasks these days (all the way from office documents, web, mail, and development of up to medium sized projects) with their multi-core CPUs and gigabytes of RAM. It's only games and scientific computing requiring big rigs these days, and the geek dick-waving that goes on. If I was a developer, given an average modern machine, my main concerns would be screen real estate, and keyboard and mouse ergonomics, as they make much more difference to your workflow. Having a slower CPU so your final compile takes 20 seconds longer is no big deal compared to having something like Visual Studio on a 1024x768 screen and not being able to fit all the panes comfortably on screen.
On that note, the keyboard and trackpad on the Air is excellent (I've typed this typically long post on it!) and the 1280x800 resolution is adequate for Xcode. The DVI output allows connection of a bigger screen (up to a 23 inch IIRC) which would solve all issues.
To condense all this guff (I'm bored, sitting on a train, OK) into one line - yes, the Air is a viable development machine. The install DVDs come with the dev tools so Apple aren't discouraging you from using it as one...
Cyberface, many thanks for that.
The Enterprise stuff has got various people here very excited (we're a heavy RIM user at present).
The presentation on Apple's site has got people talking with the combination of the Exchange/ActiveSync technology and the apparent power of the XCode + iPhone SDK.
The Enterprise stuff has got various people here very excited (we're a heavy RIM user at present).
The presentation on Apple's site has got people talking with the combination of the Exchange/ActiveSync technology and the apparent power of the XCode + iPhone SDK.
cyberface said:
Silent1 said:
You ripped out the internals yet and changed it for something proper?
Like....
linux?
heh heh heh - you run a Windows Mobile phone and mine runs unix.Like....
linux?
What was your point again?
It's fine apart from the memory leak in outlook on it
God damn.
I finally had the chance to pop into an Apple shop, to have a play with the Air.
God DAMN - it's so nice!
I know it's underpowered, and is mostly unupgradable, and has too large a footprint for the screen size, and too few ports which can be annoying inaccessible, and a slow slow HDD... but...
(The missus had to physically hustle me out of the shop before I impulse-bought one )
I finally had the chance to pop into an Apple shop, to have a play with the Air.
God DAMN - it's so nice!
I know it's underpowered, and is mostly unupgradable, and has too large a footprint for the screen size, and too few ports which can be annoying inaccessible, and a slow slow HDD... but...
(The missus had to physically hustle me out of the shop before I impulse-bought one
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