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Fortuitous Bumble posted:I have some hardware questions about a 2009 Macbook Pro (one of the unibody aluminum ones): I can't help with the screen. That hasn't happened on mine and I hope it never does. Re: the RAM, I upgraded to 4Gb of DDR3-1333 three years ago, and it worked fine. OS X recognised it as 1333, and all was well. However, from about a month ago my computer started refusing to boot up, and the jury's still out on whether my (also three-year-old) SSD wasn't set up properly, or if it was dodgy RAM. I don't know if the faster RAM could have caused an issue with corruption three years after installation, but I've played it safe and upgraded to 8Gb of 1066 RAM anyway. At least in my situation, I didn't have to pay much more: 8Gb of 1066 RAM ran me AU$72, whereas the cheapest 8Gb 1333 kit is AU$69. You'll probably be okay to run the faster RAM. I was fine for three years, and I'm not even convinced it was dodgy RAM in the end that did me in. I'm still playing it safe from now on, but if the price difference for you is much more than $3, there are worse gambles you could take.
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Jun 19, 2013 00:10
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As far as upgrades go, upgrading a MBA from i5 to i7 netting just a minor clock speed bump is probably the worst value for the money compared to anything else. Remember that normal stuff like mail and web browsing never max out modern CPUs and games are going to max out the graphics card way before the CPU breaks a sweat. As far as future-proofing goes, RAM or disk space are the potential issues. Either of these is likely to be the future issue way before clock speed becomes a relevant bottleneck. That only leaves an i7 upgrade potentially useful for heavy computational software. If you're looking to run that kind of stuff then you should be buying a beefier computer than a MBA in the first place. (OTOH for the 15" MBP the i7 upgrade nets you a quad core so in this case it may be worth it for some use cases)
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Jun 19, 2013 01:44
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Kenny Logins posted:As far as RAM/processor goes, when I started playing Binding of Isaac and Dungeons of Dredmor which I thought were fairly non-hardware-intensive games, only to have the fans spin up most of the time, it was then that I thought more RAM might have been wise. I'm not sure if a better processor would have helped as well, in that case. Probably neither. Lots of simple games are poorly coded and eat 100% CPU even though they don't need to. (And will do so regardless of how fast the CPU is.) You can use Activity Monitor to figure out what's up. Page outs increasing while running the game means more memory would help.
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Jun 19, 2013 01:57
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Dixie Cretin Seaman posted:As far as upgrades go, upgrading a MBA from i5 to i7 netting just a minor clock speed bump is probably the worst value for the money compared to anything else. Remember that normal stuff like mail and web browsing never max out modern CPUs and games are going to max out the graphics card way before the CPU breaks a sweat. As far as future-proofing goes, RAM or disk space are the potential issues. Either of these is likely to be the future issue way before clock speed becomes a relevant bottleneck. That only leaves an i7 upgrade potentially useful for heavy computational software. If you're looking to run that kind of stuff then you should be buying a beefier computer than a MBA in the first place. 1.3 to 1.7 is >30% for CPU constrained tasks, minor clock speed bump chief. And again, people need to determine their usage profiles because that's what their needs depend on. If they can't do that, too bad. I love your judgment of people having CPU-oriented tasks. If I'm in a situation where I only have the Air with me, I'll still be glad that I have that kind of power instead of saving $150 or how much the difference is. Yes, I should have brought the rMBP, but I simply didn't. I'll probably take the Air on a foreign trip later this year, and maybe I'll edit some things in FCPX for fun. According to you, this makes me a buffoon.
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Jun 19, 2013 02:27
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flavor posted:1.3 to 1.7 is >30% for CPU constrained tasks, minor clock speed bump chief. And again, people need to determine their usage profiles because that's what their needs depend on. If they can't do that, too bad. That's just the base clock though. With a similar thermal profile turbo boost probably can throttle up to max just as before.
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Jun 19, 2013 02:38
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MrBond posted:That's just the base clock though. With a similar thermal profile turbo boost probably can throttle up to max just as before. Right, that's 3.3 vs 2.6, a similar gain, which is why I didn't mention it. I was just explaining why I didn't like the reasoning about how people should basically never go for the higher end CPU and instead get a different type of machine. According to that kind of reasoning, people who use iMovie on the iPhone are just idiots.
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Jun 19, 2013 03:00
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flavor posted:1.3 to 1.7 is >30% for CPU constrained tasks, minor clock speed bump chief. And again, people need to determine their usage profiles because that's what their needs depend on. If they can't do that, too bad. Someone asked for an opinion and I gave one. Of course the i7 will help for number-crunching tasks here and there. But I bet you didn't buy your Air as your primary number-crunching platform; you just had the spare cash and decided it would be nice to have a little extra power for the odd job when you're on the road. If you have enough money that it's no big deal to buy the i7, then good for you, by all means buy the best computer you can afford. Presumably someone coming here to ask whether the i7 upgrade is worth it is at least somewhat more cash-constrained than that, and for that situation I stand by my opinion. Actually the only choice I can think of that I would call buffoonish would be upgrading to i7 while keeping the 4GB of RAM. SSDs are upgradable and bound to come down in price, so that's less of an issue w/r/t future-proofing, and cloud storage has been mentioned already...
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Jun 19, 2013 03:26
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Dixie Cretin Seaman posted:Someone asked for an opinion and I gave one. Of course the i7 will help for number-crunching tasks here and there. But I bet you didn't buy your Air as your primary number-crunching platform; you just had the spare cash and decided it would be nice to have a little extra power for the odd job when you're on the road. If you have enough money that it's no big deal to buy the i7, then good for you, by all means buy the best computer you can afford. Presumably someone coming here to ask whether the i7 upgrade is worth it is at least somewhat more cash-constrained than that, and for that situation I stand by my opinion. Actually the only choice I can think of that I would call buffoonish would be upgrading to i7 while keeping the 4GB of RAM. SSDs are upgradable and bound to come down in price, so that's less of an issue w/r/t future-proofing, and cloud storage has been mentioned already... There are just a lot of assumptions in there. I've seen people with lots of spare money haggle about the smallest differences in pricing. You're right about this not being my primary number-crunching computer, but then who would use an Air for that if they can help it? The focus of the Air is portability. It's also not my primary memory and disk space platform.
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Jun 19, 2013 04:09
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Dixie Cretin Seaman posted:(OTOH for the 15" MBP the i7 upgrade nets you a quad core so in this case it may be worth it for some use cases) 
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Jun 19, 2013 04:34
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So looks like the Haswell Retina models got delayed?
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Jun 19, 2013 04:43
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etalian posted:So looks like the Haswell Retina models got delayed? No, you just didn't notice them coming out. Well duh... they're probably waiting for TB2.
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Jun 19, 2013 05:02
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Oceanlife posted:I understand what you mean but he is probably looking for general opinions from various people since most of us can't describe our own usage patterns. Which is why I'm lurking this thread instead of reading a few benchmarks before ordering. I have a mid-2010 13" MBP that I threw a Samsung 830 SSD into and as of yet I've only used like 40GB of storage. I also only have 4GB of RAM. Both are sufficient..But, having said that I do have a dedicated desktop, so all I really use my MBP for is when I'm at uni and need to type poo poo out during lectures. If it's going to be your main/only computer, I'd definitely go for 8GB/256, but if you have a desktop where you can store other poo poo (like photo's, videos etc) then 128GB should be sufficient.
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Jun 19, 2013 05:07
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Goddamn. This little 11" is lightning fast running REDACTED. I haven't installed too many third party apps yet, but it's pretty fantastic.
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Jun 19, 2013 05:31
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pipebomb posted:Goddamn. This little 11" is lightning fast running REDACTED. I haven't installed too many third party apps yet, but it's pretty fantastic. REDACTED is quite stable, but this is a production system...
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Jun 19, 2013 05:42
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pipebomb posted:Goddamn. This little 11" is lightning fast running REDACTED. I haven't installed too many third party apps yet, but it's pretty fantastic. Not sure what we're being coy about, but I laughed at myself for spending north of $1000 for a 1.3Ghz laptop. This thing is a monster, and has chewed up everything I've thrown at it. For those talking about TB2 delays, I believe you won't see it in anything until the end of 2013. That's a long time to wait if you need a laptop.
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Jun 19, 2013 05:55
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Quick poll for you MacBook Pro users with ridiculously high-speed Internet: What's your fastest transfer rate you've gotten? I want to bump my cable package up to 150/10 and pick up one of the new Time Capsules but... if 150mbit is pushing the bounds of 802.11n....
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Jun 19, 2013 06:21
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Pivo posted:Quick poll for you MacBook Pro users with ridiculously high-speed Internet: What's your fastest transfer rate you've gotten? Which MBP that's in any way recent does just 150 Mbit? At least if the router is above door stop quality, it'll bundle at least two connections, so it's at least 300 MBit. Considering you're going to buy a Time Capsule... Mr. Smile Face Hat fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 06:45
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flavor posted:Which MBP that's in any way recent does just 150 Mbit? At least if the router is above door stop quality, it'll bundle at least two connections, so it's at least 300 MBit. Even with multiple streams, 80mbit of actual real IP bandwidth is on the high end for N, once you subtract the half duplex stuff, and encryption overhead. 802.11ac is only inching toward equivalence to a wired 100mbit ethernet line in ideal conditions. eddiewalker fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 07:17
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eddiewalker posted:Even with multiple streams, 80mbit of actual real IP bandwidth is on the high end for N, once you subtract the half duplex stuff, and encryption overhead. You got any sources for that? I guess this article (just one example I found) is pure conjecture: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2028227/asus-rt-n66u-router-review-the-best-802-11n-router-for-the-home-or-home-office.html Of course connection quality is a factor, but that's not something we can determine in this thread. Plus if we're splitting hairs, a 150 MBit internet connection is also not going to fill that out 24/7.
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Jun 19, 2013 07:36
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Full strength wireless N on my iMac to my dualband WNDR3700 router downstairs wanted approx 5hrs to transfer 8GB to my RAID5 NAS with 4 drives. Ethernet via Ethernet over power did it in a few minutes. Hits about 50mbit on speed test, Ethernet tops it out at 90mbit. Wireless is always going to be a backup for me.
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Jun 19, 2013 12:04
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Civil posted:Not sure what we're being coy about, but I laughed at myself for spending north of $1000 for a 1.3Ghz laptop. This thing is a monster, and has chewed up everything I've thrown at it. They're being coy about surfing big waves. I have a 2011 Sandy Bridge Air and it's a monster too. The base clock rates on these Sandy/Ivy/Haswell ultrabook CPUs can be deceptive. They often manage to run at max turbo instead. In your case, that's 2.3 GHz with 2 cores active, or 2.6 Ghz with one. The reason for the low base clocks is competition for that limited 15W/17W power budget from the on-chip graphics. The chip has an intelligent power controller which adjusts the power split between CPU and GPU on the fly, based on demand. The minimum CPU clock rate should only come into play when the split is as far in favor of the GPU as it can go. (Bigger GPUs are why Haswell ULT base clocks dropped compared to Ivy. The GPU can consume more power than before, so the CPU's minimum frequency had to suffer a bit. You can even see this in Haswell vs. Haswell: the HD 4400 version of your i5 has a base clock of 1.6 GHz and the same 2.3 / 2.6 turbo speeds. HD 5000 graphics are costing you 300 MHz of "base" clock rate.)
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Jun 19, 2013 12:35
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From a wireless N router on the N strength I was getting around 15-18 MBps transfer from a 13" MBA (2012) to a media center hackintosh (hardlined). Thats about 120 Mbps and I was basically sitting next to the router.
FlashBangBob fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 14:45
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BobHoward posted:They're being coy about surfing big waves. Yeah plus the whole clock rate argument really overlooks a pile of other factors in real-world performance. The older 1.8 GHz MBA does turn out to be slightly faster in CPU benchmarks but really loses out in battery life performance. It's a really impressive performance when you look at people getting 9-12 hours now in a single charge depending the use scenario. 
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Jun 19, 2013 15:44
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Do we have any actual test results about the 2013 MacBook Air battery life when it comes to i5 vs i7?
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Jun 19, 2013 20:34
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Is anyone else with the new mid-2013 MacBook Air having display problems with certain applications? For some reason using the spot healing brush tool in Photoshop CS6 makes the display flicker like crazy; similarly VMware Fusion 5 (and the new Tech Preview that was just recently released to specifically support these new MacBooks) is basically completely unusable after installing VMware Tools. I wasn't really sure which thread to put this in since I'm not sure if it's a hardware issue because only certain programs (and certain actions in them) will trigger it, but I could be wrong. I did try to get a recording of it with QuickTime X's screen recording thing, but strangely enough the problem goes away if I try to do that, so maybe it is a hardware issue after all  e: etalian posted:Yeah plus the whole clock rate argument really overlooks a pile of other factors in real-world performance. This is totally anecdotal (and I'm not about to go looking through Geekbench results because gently caress that horrible graph thing they have), but I have the i7 and got just over 8000 on Geekbench before (8060 or something?), so if this chart is right then the i7 is significantly faster than the i5. Beeftweeter fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 20:51
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So I got the new 11" Air. I just hooked up it up to an external monitor and it is suddenly capable of doing 2560x1600 on the built-in screen (16:10 - looks like poo poo but it works with no overscan or static). Messing around with it, I got it to 1600x900, which it is exactly how I would love for it to be all the time. But when the monitor is disconnected (tb->hdmi) it simply reverts back to the default 1366x768, with no options to change it. Any thoughts on being able to keep it at 1600? Or is this probably just some stupid Mavericks weirdness? pic: http://db.tt/Gvrowrfu VV Real estate VV pipebomb fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 21:58
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I'm, uh, not sure why you'd really want that, considering the screen only has enough pixels for a native 1366x768 resolution.
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Jun 19, 2013 22:07
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Fortuitous Bumble posted:My screen started having this issue where it will begin graying out while the image stays in place (stops refreshing) until I hit it or wiggle the screen around. Could this just be a connector that got loose, or is the display itself dying? If it's a connector it seems like something that might be worth taking apart the laptop and fixing myself but I don't know. Obviously it's way out of warranty. It's most likely the cable and the connection into the display (the socket in the OEM display.) I've seen that, the only way to fix it is to get a new display AND an LVDS cable. There's lots of people selling replacement screens for $50 and up if you Google real hard, and MacFixit may have the cable. The lovely part will be cooking the glass for half an hour with a heat gun to get the glue tacky enough to peel off the display glass; then you just remove some screws, take out old display and cable, attach cable, thread it through the hinge, then screw the new display in and reheat the glue and put the glass back on, assuming you didn't shatter it while peeling it off. The glass is available on Amazon too. Edit: gently caress off Xbench and any of its results forever, company hasn't updated it in seven years, they used to have their own forum but when too many people questioned their methodologies / benching strategies they refused to reveal any source, deleted their forums, and left their website untouched ever since. It's literally a zombie app. Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Jun 20, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 23:56
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Quine Connoisseur posted:Is anyone else with the new mid-2013 MacBook Air having display problems with certain applications? For some reason using the spot healing brush tool in Photoshop CS6 makes the display flicker like crazy; similarly VMware Fusion 5 (and the new Tech Preview that was just recently released to specifically support these new MacBooks) is basically completely unusable after installing VMware Tools. Turning off graphics acceleration in fusion fixed it for me with Win8.
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Jun 20, 2013 00:05
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mayodreams posted:Turning off graphics acceleration in fusion fixed it for me with Win8. That probably should have been the first thing to try, I guess – odd that it seemed to work fine with the VMware SVGA drivers that ship with Windows. I'm glad it's not a hardware issue or something though, thanks.
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Jun 20, 2013 01:52
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pipebomb posted:VV Real estate VV This is also possible with AirPlay. It's just totally pointless to do on the MBA display, because everything is tiny and is missing pixels because duh. It actually makes way more sense to run the rMBP at the full resolution. Everything's tiny too, but it's at least usable if you're close enough.
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Jun 20, 2013 02:21
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FlashBangBob posted:From a wireless N router on the N strength I was getting around 15-18 MBps transfer from a 13" MBA (2012) to a media center hackintosh (hardlined). Thats about 120 Mbps and I was basically sitting next to the router. Yeah, 802.11n is definitely faster than 100mbit wired. I constantly see 12-15MB/sec speeds to my iMac from my gigabit wired NAS via my Time Capsule. This is from around 30ft away through 2 walls. Guessing it would be closer to 20MB/sec if I was sitting right next to the router. If you're getting significantly under 100mbit with 802.11n and aren't super far from your router, I'd double check you are actually connected at 5Ghz. Sample rsync: Alien.1979.Theatrical.Cut.1080p.BluRay.DTS.x264.mkv 13182544622 100% 14.72MB/s 0:14:13 (xfer#19, to-check=2198/2921) tonic fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Jun 20, 2013 |
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Jun 20, 2013 02:23
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pipebomb posted:So I got the new 11" Air. I just hooked up it up to an external monitor and it is suddenly capable of doing 2560x1600 on the built-in screen (16:10 - looks like poo poo but it works with no overscan or static). Messing around with it, I got it to 1600x900, which it is exactly how I would love for it to be all the time. But when the monitor is disconnected (tb->hdmi) it simply reverts back to the default 1366x768, with no options to change it. Quickres or something? Might work in HiDPI
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Jun 20, 2013 02:45
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Hurry up TNT, my shipment has been stuck in Nederland for two days now! I want my computer! 
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Jun 20, 2013 11:23
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Welp, here's another reason to avoid third party batteries... http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Recalls/Recall-Alerts/2013/Best-Buy-Recalls-ATG-Replacement-Batteries-for-the-MacBook-Pro/ quote:Description: They also got the model wrong, looks like it's for the regular Macbook..
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Jun 20, 2013 15:45
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Bob Morales posted:Quickres or something? Might work in HiDPI No go. Oh well. I thought you guys might find this fun and amusing. I am setting up Mail and its grabbing...I guess a decades worth of Gmail from the server, been going all night. I unplugged power and checked Activity Monitor to see this massive battery reserve left:
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Jun 20, 2013 16:04
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Binary Badger posted:Welp, here's another reason to avoid third party batteries... Yeah plus the Apple $129 replacement fee includes disposing of the old battery in a safe manner. Battery from a good 3rd party vendor tend to be around $80-$100 so it's not a big saving. pipebomb posted:No go. Oh well. Off-topic but how did you get a battery tab for the Activity monitor? etalian fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jun 20, 2013 |
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Jun 20, 2013 16:38
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etalian posted:Off-topic but how did you get a battery tab for the Activity monitor?
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Jun 20, 2013 16:56
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Alright so consensus is I should be able to get > 100Mbps with 802.11n over 5ghz with MPB. Luckily I got a huge tax return so I can easily afford the new Time Capsule, yay. Anyone else in Southern Ontario, you can get 150/10Mbit cable now too through TekSavvy.  $85 300gb with 1am-6am free.
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Jun 20, 2013 17:07
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:Mavericks. Nice! So do you guys see improved battery life on Mavericks on Sandy and Ivy machines?
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