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Does Apple allow its developers to blog?

Someone should ask Steve that.

Does Apple allow anyone to blog?

(I mean, when Fake Steve Jobs was still around we at least had that)

Paul, I find the "engineering Windows 7 blog" fairly interesting. This blog however (excluding the comments, which are, frankly bonkers) certainly has taken a nosedive of late.

Almost all your posts can be summed up with the template...

"I found [someone else's story]

isn't that great/crap"

Seriously, what's with the lack of original content?

>>Seriously, what's with the lack of original content?<<

Answer(s):

A.  Apple has had a lot of successes lately, and he doesn't talk about those.

B.  MS hasn't, and he doesn't talk about that either.

C.  New book coming out.

Actually, Ocean, you intolerable moronic 'plague'. MS has plenty of cool stuff to talk about recently, such as awards for photosynth, and also touchless, second light, sidelight, silverlight 2, etc etc.

Some of these are really pretty cool.

Ocean

More likely that bunch of Apple stories lately has been because next week is the PDC and that should provide enough serious content to last for a long time so Paul may as well get the trivial stuff in now during the lag.

Second sentence:

"We shell call this blog..."

They're off to a good start.

Should be useful for those in the target audience.

>>you intolerable moronic 'plague'<<

Does Mommy know you're on the Internet again?

>>Paul may as well get the trivial stuff in now<<

Well done.

But the real question is, will DRWAM run Windows 7 on his $400 laptop?

He will, Mike.

"MS has plenty of cool stuff to talk about "

I'm waiting for SBS 2008.  EBS 2008 will be launched the same day too.

"But the real question is, will DRWAM run Windows 7 on his $400 laptop?"

I'm kinda wondering....if Windows 7 is based on Windows Vista and "it won't break compatibility" (- Ballmer), will the system requirements be the same, or will it need more RAM or CPU horsepower?  Or rather, will Microsoft be a little bit more realistic on the minimum requirements?  512MB runs *Windows Vista* ok for very basic tasks (internet, email, etc.), but once you put an antivirus software on there, it's a dog.  1GB is a more realistic minimum.  2GB obviously is better, but anything above that is overkill unless you're into higher-end multimedia and/or gaming.  Likewise, XP can run fine with 256MB, but 512MB is a more comfortable minimum with AV software.  XP has basically half the memory requirements of Vista, and obviously 2GB is the upper end of the spectrum for higher-end users on the older platform.

That's a pretty rough estimation though.  Obviously people that are demanding enough to use 4GB (or more) will be better suited to look at Vista 64-bit because the reality is that XP 64-bit was just done wrong, and XP 32-bit can't handle 4GB properly.  Even Vista 32-bit handles >2GB more efficiently than XP can due to the improved memory management and caching system.

Mike, people are running Vista on _NETBOOKS_ for Christ sake -> www.tweaktown.com/.../index.html <- and you're asking if Doc's gonna run this thing on a _REAL_ laptop with THREE GIGABYTES of RAM?

I hope they plan to address the amazingly awful battery life:

www.anandtech.com/.../showdoc.aspx

       Wireless Internet Browsing   DVD Playback   Heavy Usage

MacBook Air (OS X) 4.98 hours 3.93 hours 2.7 hours

MacBook Air (Vista) 2.55 hours 2.05 hours 1.75 hours

animositysomina

The question was whether he would, not whether he could...

johnpapola

Seems like Apple needs to work on their power management drivers since the Lenovo X300 running Vista with a much smaller battery got better usage than the Mac Book Air running Vista.

And we all know what a bang-up job Apple is know for on their Windows software...

"Does Apple allow its developers to blog?"

Yes they do.

Wow, that is truly terrible battery life from Vista. Not surprised though.

robertsjoe

Really? The only Apple developers I've heard of blogging had to do it anonymously for fear Apple firing them. Glad to know that's changing. What's the URL for the blog or the RSS feed?

"Wow, that is truly terrible battery life from Vista. Not surprised though."

Actually, let me take that post back. No need for smart-*** remarks like that.

Now back to normal programming.

robertsjoe

Yeah. Apple either didn't bother updating the Boot Camp drivers to support the MBA and are using the MB power management drivers or they just decided to run Vista with more power and less battery so they could do their "Vista runs better on a Mac" ads while turning down the power to conserve battery life where nobody else could compare performance. (When you make the only hardware, it's hard to do comparison testing)

So which do you think it is? Is it Apple sacrificing performance of OS X to get better battery life or sacrificing battery life on Vista to make the performance look better?

Pingback from  &raquo; re: Microsoft starts another Windows 7 blog

@mikegalos:

Here are some. One no longer works there, but certainly blogged while he did.

ridiculousfish.com/blog

http://log.scifihifi.com/

http://outofcheese.org/

http://www.wsanchez.net/blog/

http://chuqui.typepad.com/

I'm sure there are more.

robertsjoe

Cool. Thanks.

@mikegalos:

"So which do you think it is? Is it Apple sacrificing performance of OS X to get better battery life or sacrificing battery life on Vista to make the performance look better?"

I don't think they'd sacrifice OS X performance. In fact I'd bet anything on it. Would not make any sense to sacrifice performance of their on OS on their hardware.

As for your latter suggestion, one never knows. Could be that. Could be that or could be that they are happy with just getting the drivers working and going for their hardware. No need to try and tweak them if it costs more time and money. ROI I guess. So performance is one thing. Having had used Windows with BootCamp for 12 months, I will say that it works perfectly on their hardware.

But one never knows if the company says, OK lets not push battery life (or some other factor) for a competitor's OS. God knows companies do that sort of thing.. I'm thinking back to the old secret APIs on Windows, and the emails that were released where MS management discussed their use for competitive advantage. That's just a known example, I'm sure it happens all the time.

mikegalos said: "Seems like Apple needs to work on their power management drivers since the Lenovo X300 running Vista with a much smaller battery got better usage than the Mac Book Air running Vista."

The X300 still only manages *just over half* that of the Air running OSX, and that's even considering that "the X300 uses a Core 2 Duo L7100 with a 12W TDP compared to the 1.6/1.8GHz 20W TDP processor in the MBA."

Lenovo X300 (Vista)  2.82 hours  2.18 hours  1.68 hours

So I guess they still have some way to go...

robertsjoe

Power/performance is always a trade-off on laptops. My guess is you're right that they just didn't implement some of the power saving tweaks for Vista.

As for the old "secret APIs" stuff, that's pretty much urban legend. The independant analysis at the time showed that Lotus used more undocumented APIs than Microsoft's apps and the ones that Microsoft did use were obsolete APIs that had been replaced with public APIs and the apps team hadn't been migrated to the new ones. But it made a great story.

nutts. They also have just over half the battery.

The Lenovo falls about mid-way between the MBA running OS X and the MBA running Vista when you look at consumption so it looks like they might still have a few tweaks left or it could be they decided that they wanted to tune for a little more performance than Apple did. It's certainly in the ballpark either way. We also don't know all the effects of this particular test in emulating real-world conditions so it'd be interesting to see more samples.

Also, seeing that the Lenovo X300 has an option for a double size battery and, for that matter, interchangable batteries, I'd say Lenovo would be more likely to tune for performance while Apple's Mac Book Air with its fixed battery would be more likely to prompt Apple to tune for battery life.

If I'm doing a long trip with the Lenovo I can take a spare battery and not worry too much about power management. With the MBA and a long trip, I need to count on battery life over all else or I end up with an expensive lunch tray until I find a place to plug in.

@mikegalos: I was not attacking Microsoft about the secret APIs (as difficult as that may seem), it was just a known example. The secret APIs are not an urban legend; what with emails directly from Gates himself talking about using them to gain an advantage over competitors:

From Gates:

"I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have away to do a high level of integration that will be harder for likes of Notes, WordPerfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage . . . We can't compete with Lotus and WordPerfect/Novell without this."

So what I was suggesting is that I'm sure this happens at every company. This example was just one that was made public. As for Lotus having more secret APIs, that's just what I'm saying. Companies try to get an advantage where they can.

@mikegalos: Re MBA and Vista, Apple may release updated drivers for the MBA. They take their time with the BootCamp updates.

robertsjoe

It wasn't that Lotus HAD more undocumented APIs, it was the Lotus USED more of the undocumented Windows APIs than Microsoft's app division did. Most of the "undocumented APIs" were actually put in for key ISVs who needed some specific feature in the short term to get a problem solved quickly that Microsoft didn't want to do as a long-term item but agreed to put in for a single release on the condition that they would not be supported and would go away by the next version.

Microsoft has always (at least back to 1988 when I started there) has a VERY strict policy of never using anything that isn't public and it's been years since you could even get a product shipped out the door without first running an internal tool that checked each OS API call made in your app's code against a list of public APIs to validate that you didn't sneak some trick in there.

I was talking about the lawsuit around 1989 that turned out to be nothing (and was the famous Undocumented APIs case). It was that case that both got Microsoft paranoid about enforcing the "Chinese Wall" and that showed just how little of an issue it had ever been.

As for the quotes, I'd love to see the source for them since I've never seen them and I'd like the context.

The only case I remember back in that Undocumented API flap where an Office product did use APIs that weren't supported was a case where (and I'm making the specifics up but it shows the result correctly) there were two functions A and B that each took about 30ms to execute. The Windows team learned before release that everbody who used A immediately used B right afterwards. Because nobody called A or B without calling them as a pair, they released a function, AB, that did the equivalent of calling A and then B but that took only 50ms rather than the two individual calls that took 60ms total since it didn't have to restore state of the stack between the calls. They dropped A and B from the supported list but since the Office app still had "Call A, Call B" in the code, they didn't remove the code for A and B individually until the next release. Effectively, the Office app was slightly slower but didn't have to rewrite until the next version. That's about the worst case.

And, as I said, this was also done for competitors on a regular basis so the worst that can be said is that the Windows team didn't treat Office much worse than Lotus or WordPerfect or Ashton Tate.

@mikegalos: Here's the original email thread: edge-op.org/.../PLEX0_5673.pdf

robertsjoe

That isn't about an undocumented API.

It's about whether to add the iShellBrowser function to Windows 95 at the last minute or to hold off on it until Windows 98. The decision to hold off apparently would cost the Capone and Marvel teams (Microsoft projects - I think this was Outlook 95 and MSN respectively but it's been 13 years so I'm not sure) some benefits for their program.

If it had been use of undocumented APIs then Capone and Marvel would have been able to use iShellBrowser when nobody else did. That didn't happen.

BillG said, we've got to decide to include them or not and he decided to not include them.

Tom Evslin asked if there was any way to still let Marvel and Capone use them.

Brad Silverberg said no. Either everybody gets them or nobody does.

That's exactly how APIs are supposed to work. If anybody gets them, everybody gets them. If anybody can't get them then nobody can. A level playing field.

Now, compare that to the API access Apple gives their internal iPhone developers compared with the semi-public published API with legal restrictions on what they can and can't use. Not even close to level.

@Mike

"Seems like Apple needs to work on their power management drivers since the Lenovo X300 running Vista with a much smaller battery got better usage than the Mac Book Air running Vista.

And we all know what a bang-up job Apple is know for on their Windows software..."

That may be true, but it still doesn't explain the massive superiority of OSX over Vista.

OSX on the air gets 77%, 80% & 58% more power battery life  vs. Vista on the Lenovo despite the battery having only 37% more capacity.

PS - my god are you busy in these threads.

John

"That may be true, but it still doesn't explain the massive superiority of OSX over Vista."

Actually, that's exactly what it does. Power management is a part of the low level drivers that are done by the hardware vendor. For the same hardware to use more power with one OS than the other means that the drivers were set up differently for power management on the two OSes.

What? You thought it was magic?

@Mike

Um... what?

I realize that the significantly worse battery life in Vista on an Air may be driver related.  But, if you assume that the lenovo drivers for Vista are good, and you normalize the battery life for the added capacity in the Air, OSX is still MUCH more efficient than Vista.  That's the point.  Anand says as much.

Let me walk through this.

The X300 has a 27WHr battery.  The Air has a 37WHr battery.

That's makes the Air 37% more capacity than the X300.

Now, here are the stats from anand:

Wireless Internet Browsing DVD Playback Heavy Usage

MacBook Air (OS X) 4.98 hours 3.93 hours 2.7 hours

MacBook Air (Vista) 2.55 hours 2.05 hours 1.75 hours

Lenovo X300 (Vista) 2.82 hours 2.18 hours 1.68 hours

So that translates into a battery life advantage for the Air in OSX over the X300 in Vista of 77%, 80% & 58% respectively.

All of which are much higher than the 37% great capacity of the Air's battery.

Allow me to quote Anand since you clearly didn't read it on the link:

"Figuring out why OS X seems to be better for battery life is nearly impossible, at least without the aid of both Apple and Microsoft. I've brought up this topic with a handful of PC OEMs in the past and they haven't been able to shed any more light on things, other than to confirm that Vista is a strange beast. It's quite possible that Vista's constant performance optimizations are preventing CPU and platform power management techniques from being effective, but that seems a little too simplistic of a view.

All I can do for now is report the numbers as is. An unexpected benefit of OS X appears to be better battery life. Go figure."

Actually, on a power consumption (time used per WattHour) the Lenovo falls midway between the two MBA values.

Since the MBA probably had its OS X drivers tuned for power conservation since it has no ability to change out a dead battery (got to keep the bottom pretty even if it hurts the user).

The Lenovo being tuned for general use coming in between an untuned computer and one tuned for power management is exactly what I'd expect to see, And, assuming Apple didn't do power optimized drivers for the MBA running Vista that's exactly what the results show.

Again, the question is why Apple didn't do a better job on the MBA's drivers in Boot Camp. Whether that's to hurt its power management and make OS X look better or to help Vista's performance so they can brag about being a good Vista platform or just plain lack of effort is up for debate.

@mikelagos: "Again, the question is why Apple didn't do a better job on the MBA's drivers in Boot Camp. "

I think it could just be because they don't have to. It's not a pressing issue for them to improve performance to the n-th degree for Vista. Sure, you can run Vista on their hardware, but they don't have to kill themselves to do it.

robertsjoe

I agree that's the most likely case.

Putting running competitive platform apps on your system as a feature is, at best, a very risky thing to do in the first place. It sold a lot of Apple ][ computers but hurt acceptance of Apple's DOS 3.3 when users bought Microsoft SoftCards to run CP/M. It killed OS/2 Warp when the developer community realized they could hit both platforms with one binary and stopped developing for OS/2 specific features.

@Mike,

I find this a perfect example of your bias.  Anand, hardly an Apple booster, has arrived at an objective conclusion from these facts:  A mac running OSX is more battery efficient that a directly comparable Lenovo running Vista.  But you somehow delve into a whole world of impossible to determine theories in the total absence of evidence about vague "performance tuning" rather than admit the very likely possibility that Vista's battery consumption sucks.  You really will say anything to avoid admitting that Apple's stuff is superior in any category.

Of course, I believe it's been pretty widely established that Vista's laptop battery drain is an issue.  The OS is a resource hog.  Steve Ballmer himself has admitted as much:

seattlepi.nwsource.com/.../359541_msftmvp18.html

So spare me the theories and apologies.  It appears that OSX is, in fact, substantially more efficient with batteries on macs than Vista is on comparable and competitive PCs. It won't take away from your vast knowledge and intellect to simply admit the truth on this one thing.

The REAL question is how someone interested in mobility could tolerate paying for a Lenovo X300 only to get dramatically worse battery life.  I guess you could always bring two batteries, but that would really cut down on the mobility.

I'll take 60% to 80% longer battery life with the Air over that Lenovo for on-the-go computing any day.

"It killed OS/2 Warp when the developer community realized they could hit both platforms with one binary and stopped developing for OS/2 specific features."

Here we go again.  Oh Mike, OSX development isn't going the way of OS/2 Warp.  That you continue to promote that despite all trends going in the opposite direction is pretty ridiculous.

Anandtechs final analysis:

>>Figuring out why OS X seems to be better for battery life is nearly impossible, at least without the aid of both Apple and Microsoft. I've brought up this topic with a handful of PC OEMs in the past and they haven't been able to shed any more light on things, other than to confirm that Vista is a strange beast. It's quite possible that Vista's constant performance optimizations are preventing CPU and platform power management techniques from being effective, but that seems a little too simplistic of a view.

All I can do for now is report the numbers as is. An unexpected benefit of OS X appears to be better battery life. Go figure.<<

www.anandtech.com/.../showdoc.aspx

So John and Ocean

Let me get this straight...

The Lenovo running Vista is less energy efficient than the MBA running OS X.

BUT

The Lenovo running Vista is more energy efficient than the MBA running Vista

So, when running the same OS and thus minimizing the differences the Lenovo is more energy efficient than the Mac Book Air.

And then you're saying that the reason the Lenovo running Vista is so much better at power management than the Mac running Vista:

Is NOT driver tuning (since you deny that option as bias on my part)

Is not Vista (it IS, after all, the same on both)

So then it must be that the Mac is much worse hardware than the Lenovo since that's all that's left as a difference between the two Vista configurations.

And then you speculate that OS X is just so magically wonderful that even on inefficient hardware it manages to more than make up the difference.

And you say that I'm the one basing my analysis on my biases? Even when I bend over backward to find explanations that DON'T criticize Apple hardware...

Wow...

Seriously. Wow...

I have to agree that Vista does need work with respect to battery life as we've seen this power management issue crop up on many notebooks. I've seen many former XP to Vista notebooks losing some of their battery performance. There have been quite a few articles on this.

However, I've seen a few articles suggesting that Leopard tends to be just as much of a power hog as Vista is on older Mac hardware.

However, I'm coming to the conclusion that both Microsoft and Apple need really take their time on the next versions of their OS. I'm hoping for at least 3 consumer betas on the Microsoft side and that Apple actually starts a beta program for Snow Leopard.

@Mike,

Real quick.

I agree that clearly the MBA running Vista is less efficient than the Lenovo.  Given that the OS is the same in that case, the difference is most likely in the drivers. It's very unlikely that it's the hardware given the HUGE superiority of the same MBA when running OSX over the Lenovo.

Now, let's look at those runtimes normalizing for the battery capacity (dividing by the capacity).  So these numbers are hours in runtime/Whr of capacity:

                              WEB      DVD     HEAVY

MBA (Leopard):  .135       .106      .072

X300 (Vista):       .104       .080      .062

--------------------------------------------------------

MBA %> X300=   29.8%  32.5%   16.1%

I see only one reasonable set of conclusions:

#1. Apple's Vista drivers lack power management features or optimization for the MBA. (almost 100%)

#2. Lenovo's Vista drives deliver much better battery life per Whr of capacity on the X300 than Apple's do on the MBA

#3. Apple's MBA battery performance on the MBA running OSX is much better than the Lenovo's under Vista normalizing for battery capacity (ranging from 16% to 32.5%).  

Now, either Apple has some crazy tech in the MBA power system that their Vista drivers don't enable and that the X300 just totally lacks... or (more likely) Vista is an energy pig and OSX is 16 to 32% more efficient.

Given that Vista is widely reported to be an energy pig, I think it's pretty hard to come away with ANY negative conclusions about the MBA + OSX system on the battery life issue.  MBA + Vista may be worse than standard Vista... but Vista notebook battery life still sucks.

I think that's a pretty big selling point.  In real terms, the MBA lasts MUCH longer than the X300 on a single charge running it's native OS (60 to 80% longer).  If OSX works for what you need, that kind of battery life could be a deal breaker for many road warriors.

I imagine that the superfetch precaching is partially responsible for reducing Vista's running time on battery power. After all, it's constantly trying to fill as much unused RAM as possibble to speed up application launches and the like.

RAM uses a surprisingly large amount of electrical power, especialyl high-speed DDR2 modules. If they are continuously fully utilised, maybe that's the source of the problem?

Take a look at the Lenovo X301, since they seem to have done a little bit of optimization with the standard 6-cell battery.  Kevin Tofel over at jkOnTheRun has been able to get 4.5 hours during normal use, and nearly six hours with BatteryStrech enabled.  If you need more juice, of course you can carry extra batteries, or pop in another 3-cell battery in to the DVD slot.  Does Apple offer a battery you can put in to the Air's DVD slot? ;) <-- All forgiving wink

www.jkontherun.com/.../5-things-i-like.html

"If OSX works for what you need, that kind of battery life could be a deal breaker for many road warriors."

And conversely, if you have any Vista laptop, you can keep a hot battery spare on the ready for more computing.

I don't doubt that Vista could use some better power usage, and looking at the Windows 7 blog reveals that they are very well aware of this problem.  However, the OEM's also need to spend some time optimizing the hardware and drivers, which we are seeing the fruits of that labor in the market with Lenovo, HP and others.

Oh, and I also reckon Mike may be right, that the Lenovo is optimised more for performance than energy savings. The fact that they have removable batteries, and also offer larger capacity batteries, I imagine, back that up.

All such optimisations are a balancing act, and I think he's right as to which way the Lenovo is tipped.

Either way, I'm not too bothered. I have an 18-month old Dell laptop, and I recently managed to watch over 3 hours of recorded TV on a long train journey. I probably could have watched more, but I had to get off the train to get a cab.

Well, it's understandable that optimizing battery life under Vista is not at the top of Apple's to do list.

In much the same way that making a decent version of Office for the Mac is not at the top of Microsoft's.

This looks like another case of John using inconclusive data to jump to conclusions. I'm not saying John is wrong, but for someone who talks about data, there's just not enough to support his claim.

Remember, Apple makes both the hardware and the software so their hardware might be more optimized for their software. On the other hand, Lenovo is just one of many PC manufacturer and again, their drivers might not have been fully optimized for battery life, like Mike and Gorath indicated.

Vista was called an energy pig, initially, after it was released. Since then, drivers have improved and Microsoft has been working on it too.

Also, no - the $300 mn spent on advertising does not mean Microsoft's Windows team is not working on making Windows better. That's probably another myth that most of you believe is true.  

Both johnpapola and Ocean somehow missed very important fact that delivers final blow to Mike's made up theories of Vista being tuned/detuned on Lenovo and such... the "final blow" fact is: Lenovo uses 1.2 GHz 12W TDP CPU while MBA uses 1.6-1.8 GHz 20W TDP CPU. _THIS_ is the reason why Lenovo under Vista is _slightly_ better w.r.t. battery life than MBA under Vista. I'm surprised Mike missed this crucial point, and even more surprised johnpapola and even Ocean missed that too. That's one lousy Apple defense we saw today :) Hope Ocean and Co will do better next time.

I bet Steve Jobs minions are already hard at work on another Mac vs PC commercial, now w.r.t. poor Vista's battery life. They won't pass on this opportunity to kick Vista's corpse one more time :)

I'm just quoting the researcher.  The Winjihadists are the ones spinning it:

>>Vista is a strange beast. It's quite possible that Vista's constant performance optimizations are preventing CPU and platform power management techniques from being effective, but that seems a little too simplistic of a view.

All I can do for now is report the numbers as is. An unexpected benefit of OS X appears to be better battery life. Go figure.<<

www.anandtech.com/.../showdoc.aspx

"Wow...

Seriously. Wow..."

I could say the same. The discussion at hand is (and has been all along) whether or not Vista sucks at power management. The answer should be very clear to everyone.

"Since the MBA probably had its OS X drivers tuned for power conservation since it has no ability to change out a dead battery (got to keep the bottom pretty even if it hurts the user)."

MBA battery replacement takes mere minutes. The design decision where you need a screwdriver to exchange the battery undoubtedly has to do with keeping the machine thin. And thin it is. Which doesn't hurt the users much.

"And you say that I'm the one basing my analysis on my biases? Even when I bend over backward to find explanations that DON'T criticize Apple hardware..."

See your previous quote and try to connect it with this last one. You bend less than a crowbar, and it really has nothing to do with how wrong you happen to be in a given discussion.

Seriously, I've never seen anyone as stubborn. There's no Mac fan on these blogs who won't admit that Microsoft does some good, even excellent stuff. But there's a few who never in their wildest dreams would admit that Apple also does produce good stuff. Curiously, they're the same people who also talk despisingly about those "religious Mac fans" who like everything Apple produce and "their leader" says and aren't afraid to say so.

And somehow I just find liking some company's products much less sick than hating an entire group of people.

I just find it amusing that carrying a screwdriver around to disassemble your laptop so that you can swap out the non-removable battery is considered a perfectly acceptable design choice for the users.

That pretty much says it all.

"The design decision where you need a screwdriver to exchange the battery undoubtedly has to do with keeping the machine thin. And thin it is. Which doesn't hurt the users much"

"I just find it amusing that carrying a screwdriver around to disassemble your laptop so that you can swap out the non-removable battery is considered a perfectly acceptable design choice for the users."

Just try and get a screwdriver onto a long plane flight with your carry-on.  Someone'll think you're a terrorist building a bomb out of your MBA.

Here's a question for you:  does taking an MBA apart yourself void the warranty?

"does taking an MBA apart yourself void the warranty?"

Yup, it does!

From the MBA manual, page 35:

"Important: The battery is replaceable only by an Apple Authorized Service Provider."

So you're just screwing yourself with that screwdriver, Mum.

"MBA battery replacement takes mere minutes."

Once again, the Apple fans are always talking about how easy a Mac is to use, etc.  Well, carrying a screwdriver and taking minutes to do a process that takes seconds on nearly any Windows laptop and Apple's other laptops isn't really all that easy or convenient.  I'm willing to concede that it makes a slicker looking package, but one could easily say that the MBA is designed as second or third computer and that Apple treats it like the iPod.  Wouldn't it be nice for a user needing a battery replacement to go in to the Apple store and thinking, man, I gotta get me some new MBA.  Methinks that is more the reason than anything else.

"There's no Mac fan on these blogs who won't admit that Microsoft does some good, even excellent stuff."

You've apparently never read a comment by bonch, fivepoint or drylight, among others.

"Well, carrying a screwdriver and taking minutes to do a process that takes seconds on nearly any Windows laptop and Apple's other laptops isn't really all that easy or convenient."

I'd like to see exactly where on Apple's website it actually says that you can take the battery out with a screwdriver.... (I'm waiting Mum!)

The fact that it's NOT user-replaceable would suggest that they may have special connectors or the battery could even be soldered in.  It's also possible that you can't open the MBA without a special tool to avoid snapping off tabs on the interior of the casing to hold it together.  

Without Apple saying how to do it, how would Mum presume to know how easy it is or what tools to use???

The $400 Acer laptop got almost 3 hours of battery life while playing a DVD. there are 3 power management settings and I chose the middle one. I was also playing an online Webkinz game for a while and had to restart the DVD of course.

I bought two 2 GB sticks of RAM that was $23 after Crucial rebate. I think I see some difference, but I'm not sure.

The family seems to like the glossy screen. Since we won't be using it outside, sunlight doesn't matter, even if it does actually make viewing more difficult than the matte finish.Is glossy less expensive to make, as I see a lot of glossy glass in the low end screens?

I just re-read the specs on the MBA, and I don't care what side of the fence you're on, nearly 4 hours of DVD playback on a single charge is impressive in such a small device.

Really impressive.

My Dell can do that, but (by choice), it's a rather big, clunky thing compared to a macbook air.

Anyone and I mean ANYONE that has used Vista on a notebook knows battery life SUCKS compared to XP and OS X.  

My HP notebook (2.0ghz core 2, 2gigs of RAM) lost over 30min of battery time going from XP to Vista.  This was a clean install of Vista, with the latest HP drivers.  My Macbook with OS X gets at least 50% more battery life than the HP on Vista.

Poor Vista battery life and slow file copies have been covered over and over and over for the last year and a half.  Everyone should know it SUCKs on Vista.  It sucks less with SP1, but still lags behind XP and OS X.

"There's no Mac fan on these blogs who won't admit that Microsoft does some good, even excellent stuff."

I think server 2003, server 2008, Exchange 5.5-2007, LCS, SQL, MOM, Office 2003 and MOM, KICK @$$!!!!!!!!!!

SMS, Vista, Zune, 360...SUCK @$$!!!!!

All other MS products, Office 2007/08, Hyper V...etc are just....meh, dont like em, dont hate em.

You can quote me on that:)

The cool thing about cheap laptop is that you have more money to buy a second battery. I bought a car for my mom with the cash savings.

DRWAM, you crack me up!

I've not witnessed the file copy problem anywhere for quite sometime now. i thought SP1 eradicated it?

If you think WS2008 is so great, I hope you realise that it's the same file system and kernel as Vista. Doh!

LOL @ DRWAM's comment!

Fine then guys! I admit that I could not afford the metallic paint upgrade, but at least she got the V6 and I got more RAM!

If you have run Vista and Windows 2008 you will know they are quite different.  Its like taking Vista, and turning off every thing, and setting it to classic mode.

Sure they have the same kernel.  If fact MS thanks everyone that bought Vista in the first year for flushing out the bugs for Windows 2008 launch.

Windows 2008 is the best server product they have release hands down. The event logs/performance monitoring is 1000X better than 2003.  TS Gateway, SSTP VPN, DFS supports delta copies, and much more make it great.

I won't deny having problems with Vista. Battery life used to be an issue. Not anymore. There are other issues like file copying, which have been fixed to some extent. Overall, though, there is no way XP is better than Vista now. Vista is a lot more stable except for iTunes, which is horribly slow, and Media Center, which is a little slow, most of my applications run well even with just 1 Gig or RAM. The problem is that there is no fact check organization when it comes to ads. Apple's ads spread FUD about Vista and the media, instead of correcting the perception, joins in it. Hey, Jobs doesn't lie, after all. Now, the ads have gone to another extreme, where they're spreading FUD about the company itself. I think they're in dangerous territory at this point. No other company can get away with this kind of behavior.  Microsoft can continue to make ads, but as long as the media does not paint the correct picture, Apple will own the story about Vista and now about Microsoft itself. Joe the plumber does not know about patch Tuesday because he's got Automatic Updates enabled. He doesn't know about Windows Vista SP2 or about Windows 7. Microsoft probably needs to tell its side of the story directly to Joe, because it sure ain't getting any help from the media.

People have talked about MS indulging in similar behavior in the past. Yes, but did MS get away with any of this? The answer is: No.

shark47, MS did not get away with that because it was a monopoly, and Apple is not (yet)

Mike and Waethorn, your picking on non-replaceable MBA battery doesn't make any sense, because you can buy an external MBA battery like this one: www.quickertek.com/.../macbook_air_charger.php

animosity, Apple does have a monopoly, especially in the portable media player market. Whether they're illegally leveraging it is a matter of discussion and obviously your opinions will depend on which side of the fence you are.  If the company is ever convicted, it will be in Europe first. The Democrats here will be busy going after the oil companies. I think that will only enhance the company's reputation in the media. If this were ever to happen, the media will portray Apple as the victim of bad European laws and the same people who want the US to be more like Europe (oh, France is so cool with its wine and fine dining!) will finally detest Europe.

Source of amusement 2 for the day.

People will actually vigorously defend the brain dead idea of sealing a Lithium Polymer battery inside the case of a $2,500 laptop so that the company founder's fetish against case seams doesn't look quite so insane. <snicker>

And will do so in the context of being able to use that computer on a trip <snort> in comparison with a laptop that has not just interchangable batteries but the option for extra power batteries and an optional second battery slot.

And they think that opening the sealed case with a screwdriver and voiding their warrantee is a perfectly fine solution that doesn't bother users <guffaw>

Or that carrying around a 3rd party external battery pack is such a good solution that the sealed battery is a good idea

Thanks guys. I needed a good laugh.

Next time I need a good laugh I'll ask you guys to tell me how the MBA's lack of ports is really a user benefit, too or how a two button mouse is too confusing for the users but 1 vs 2 vs 3 vs 4 finger gestures are simple. I'm sure you won't disappoint and I'll be rolling on the floor by the end of it.

shark

Actually Apple likely has multiple monopolies. And there's nothing wrong with having a monopoly on a market. It just means you have to comply with extra rules to make sure that you don't abuse that monopoly.

Like, say, putting code into OS X that did nothing but keep it from being used on non-Apple hardware. Or restricting 3rd party businesses from developing applications that compete with those you make.

Oh. Wait...

shark47, Apple has the majority of MP3 player market, but it's lions share of the market is concentrated mostly in the US, and nowhere close to the total monopoly MS used to have in personal computers just about 10 yers ago. And with major sources of  DRM-free music such as Amazon and Walmart I'd say good luck to European antitrust watchdogs trying to prove that iTunes somehow hurts consumers.

Mike, what's the difference between carrying a spare battery for your Windows notebook and carrying an external battery for your MBA? In any case you haul one extra battery together with the notebook. So there seem to be no difference at all. Right? Or am I missing something?

I still can't believe their so ontime for the RC release, Gone are the Vista days i guess.