2011 MacBook Airs

[Subhadip Sen]

It's amazing how every other laptop feels like a 10 ton brick after using an Air for a couple days...and it is faster than some 2010 models. Kinda reminds me of a certain absurdly small/powerful camera you might have heard of.

The Vaio Z is pretty amazing. It's as (or more) powerful as the Macbook Pro yet thinner and lighter than the Macbook Air. Yes, it's as expensive as it sounds!

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Vaio Z does look pretty good. It's a different animal for sure. I'd be interested in running some real benchmarks on it... Best CPU available is the i7-2620, which is actually the same i7 option available for the new Mac Mini non-server edition. It's a 2.7GHz dual-core. The Macbook Pro still has the option for a faster quad-core i7. By comparison, the Macbook Air uses a different, smaller process, i7 CPU that consumes less power, but also is only 1.8GHz. Vaio Z is a bit larger overall than a 13" MB Air, it's .66" thick the whole way through, whereas the Air is .69" thick on the back, but tapers to .11" at the front. No optical drive in the Air, of course. Just different design philosophies at work. The Air is actually a bit heavier, and I think it has to do with the screen treatment, Apple is using glass, Sony is using a paper-thin polycarbonate. Sony is using HDMI ports for driving additional monitors and output seems to be limited to 1920x1080 as a maximum from those. You get one on the system and a second one on the separate "media dock" expander. You have to buy the media dock expander to get a gigabit ethernet port and USB3.0 port. No firewire or SATA ports. Many of the [hardware] reasons people prefer a Windows PC over a Mac are just not here on this one. The screens, especially the 1080p option, are amazing. Best battery life comes from an additional battery "slice" that makes the system quite a bit thicker. Battery performance is still better than a Macbook Pro without the slice, but not as good as a Macbook Air. With the slice they claim 16 hours -- I'm seeing 10 to 12 hours for casual use being reported by actual users.

I'm curious how they handle the heat dissipation. If you open up a Macbook Pro, it's easy to see what Apple could do to make it a bit thinner like this... The 13" Macbook Pro could do all this, with a few tweaks. Looks like they would be expensive tweaks. The Vaio Z has its price tag for a reason.

If any of you haven't seen the Vaio Z in person, you should go check it out. The 13.1" 1920x1080 screen option has to be seen to be truly appreciated! The price tag keeps pushing me away though... Maybe next time around when I actually need a new PC notebook I'll look at them again.

Personally, I've had nothing but bad luck with Vaio notebooks. Very high failure rate on all the ones I've bought over the years. But they usually have some of the best designs. I shouldn't complain about reliability, I've already had my newest Dell replaced right out of the gate and it's flaking out again, so probably going back. My 18 month old HP 8740W is still kicking ass... It's massive, but it still has the 17" DreamColor screen, I just wish it had a better GPU, particularly an nVidia one for CUDA. Oh well... Not many are using nVidia mobile chips these days anyway.

 

[Uli Plank]

There are more and more rumors that the next round of MBPs will be just larger MBAirs…

 

[Tom.Wong]

anybody here think the macbook airs will be fast enough to do 444 pro res capture, with thunderbolt ultrastudio coming out? capturing doesn't require a terrible amount of processing power correct? it's more about the disk speed since the capture card does all the processing?