Re: [NTLK] No New Newt

On Jan 16, 2008, at 8:37 AM, Aaron Brigati wrote:
>
> Erm. Lenovo has more than 30 models under 6 pounds. They have 4
> models under 3 pounds.
> Toshiba has a 1.88 pound laptop.
> Panasonic's W7 is 2.4 pounds.
> Dell sells machines under 4 pounds.
> Asus laptops start at two pounds.
> Fujitsu has models that are smaller than the Newton.
> Acers start at 4.3 pounds.
>
> Subnotebooks haven't gone away.

Maybe it's just my ignorance then. Or maybe all that's gone away is
advertisements for subnotebooks. And at least a couple of models you
list don't have standard sized keyboards (though several do). It's
been a few months since I looked, but I bet I couldn't find an single
sub-5 lb notebook at any retail outlet in my city. And you could
easily find several ten years ago. That's certainly not progress.

>> Also, I'm just guessing, but that solid state drive has got to make
>> the Air outperform every other machine on the planet even with that
>> underpowered processor. Boot time and application load time is gonna
>> drop by what? A factor of twenty? Good riddance to spinning disks.
>> They've been computing's biggest bottleneck for at least two decades.
>>
>
> Actually, solid state disks aren't /that/ much of a performance boost
> over normal drives. The main benefit from a solid state drive in a
> laptop is the lack of moving parts, and therefore much less heat.

Eh... OK, they only have roughly 4x the throughput, but access and
seek times are faster by a factor of at least 1,000, and there's no
spin-up delay whatsoever. My ignorant guess is that that would be
significant even if you're just talking about the difference in data
throughput. But especially when so many applications constantly spool
data out to the drive, and OSes all not only have but regularly use
virtual memory.... That's got to be significant in the moment-by-
moment operation of a computer.

Steve

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Received on Wed Jan 16 12:09:12 2008