MacBook Air

[pompommono]

So Mr. Steve Jobs just announced the new MacBook Air
http://www.macworld.com/article/131583/ ... okair.html
http://www.apple.com/

I think this laptop is made for DJing!!!! The thing is only 3lbs!!!! Not that I'm complaining about carrying my macbookpro around... but 3lbs!!!! And battery life lasts up to 5 hours. And best of all, it's green!

I'll be going to a Apple store in 2 weeks and drooling all over it

[Mr Awesomer]

I think this laptop is made for DJing!!!!

I was looking forward to this annoucement, but was quite disappointed in the actual product.

All they did was smoosh the MacBook's edges down... and in doing so made A LOT of compromises (which is hillarious because Jobsy started the portion about the Air talking about how they didn't want to compromise anything.)

Reasons it sucks for DJing:
-Tiny, and slow 4,200 rpm parallel ATA 80 gig hard drive ensures your music will be tied to an external hard drive.
-1 usb port, which will probably be tied up with your external hard drive. This means you either throw previewing out the window, or you'll need to carry around a usb hub to connect an external sound card... which will need to be powered if you plan on running an usb powered hard drive.
-No optical drive! That means no music ripping on the road, and no ability to play folks performance music while using a CD player less sound system.

Other reason the thing sucks:
Way under powered.
Adaptors galore.
No swappable / user replaceable battery.
No ethernet port.
No firewire ports.
Mono speaker.
Onboard memory.
5 hour battery life? My MacBookPro gets 6 and it's got a lot more goin' on.
What's the point of being 0.18 inch thin when you're 0.78 inch thin elsewhere.
What's the point of being so thin when you take up the exact same footprint of a more powerful, more useful, CHEAPER MacBook.
Way to expensive for what you're getting (or NOT getting as the case may be.)

If you really want a small Mac for DJing one should stick with the MacBook. It's MUCH more cost effective, has a lot more functionality, and the 2 extra pounds (less then that when you consider all the crap you'll need to carry around to make the Air useable) and 0.32 inch extra thinkness isn't going to kill you.

And the ultimate laptop for DJing remains the 15.4 inch MacBookPro.

[Surreal]

With something that thin I start worrying about overall structural strength.

[straycat]

I started off thinking this would be a great one for DJing, but very quickly came to the same conclusion as Mr Awesomer.

My own pipe-dream that will likely never happen... would be for Apple to base a laptop around the multi-touch stuff that the iPhone has... you could lose the trackpad, no need for a mouse, even lose the keyboard for DJing gigs.... and someone would need to build a piece of DJing software to fully take advantage of the multi-touch.

I think it was Jeff Han's multi-touch demos that convinced me of this - and ever since the iPhone was announced, I've been hoping things would start moving in that kind of direction...

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
http://www.perceptivepixel.com/

Maybe a completely idle dream, but I hope not...

[Toon Town Dave]

I have to agree with Reuben, it's a really disappointing piece of kit. It's expansion options (with 1 USB port) are pretty limited. It's like the old Tandy/Radio Shack computers that required a bunch of bulky add-on hardware to do anything useful.

I like the Eee better. Some of suggested the screen is too small but that could be fixed by a DJ software optimized for small screens. The lack of hard drive could be remedied by a bus powered external drive. With that, there's still on board Ethernet, modem, etc and extra USB ports for a sound device or other things. The only downside is the external gear would suck the battery dry a lot quicker than the 3 hour spec.

There is a lot of industry attention on low cost, low power, small form factor computers. I'd wait and see what's around it the fall when there's a little more competition.

[Surreal]

There is a lot of industry attention on low cost, low power, small form factor computers. I'd wait and see what's around it the fall when there's a little more competition.

I've been reading a bit of techbuzz over new types of hard drives and batteries that are supposed to be much smaller as well. Not sure how far away those are from commercial development though.

[Toon Town Dave]

The batteries may be a way off but Hitachi (I think) announced a really big 2.5" hard drive a couple weeks ago. Those should start showing up in the channel later this quarter. I don't know if they have plans to apply that technology to smaller form factor drives.

[Cyrano de Maniac]

I have to agree with Reuben, it's a really disappointing piece of kit. It's expansion options (with 1 USB port) are pretty limited.

As I read about this single USB port, a question came to mind. If you connect a USB hub and use both an external sound device and an external hard drive, do you run into any bus contention issues that may cause audio problems. That is, say you invoked some sort of song query that hit the hard drive hard, would the resulting USB bus traffic potentially starve the audio device of data, and cause a dropout.

I know Firewire has isochronous capabilities that should in theory give it the ability to be immune from such problems. But I'm not as familiar with USB.

Thanks,
Brent

[Mr Awesomer]

As I read about this single USB port, a question came to mind. If you connect a USB hub and use both an external sound device and an external hard drive, do you run into any bus contention issues that may cause audio problems. That is, say you invoked some sort of song query that hit the hard drive hard, would the resulting USB bus traffic potentially starve the audio device of data, and cause a dropout.

You should be able to do that just fine, however you'd need either a powered hub or a powered hard drive. You wouldn't be able to run an unpowered hard drive off an unpowered hub.

[lipi]

nah, you won't starve the bus.

usb 2.0 supports up to 480 mbit/s. actual max transfer rates for real world devices will fall short of that, and streaming off a disk will fall very much short of that. i'd be surprised if you got more than 120 mbit/s off your usb drive.

sound cards are all usb 1.1. hi-speed 1.1 is 12 mbits/s.

in other words, there's plenty of throughput for both, even if you were to do continuous, sequential reads off the drive (which you never will).

another fun fact: on many desktops, the multiple usb ports you see are connected to the same bus with a splitter cable. just because you see two ports doesn't mean you get two controllers.