Gadgets

As a note to future self and to anyone else coming home with AT&T’s QuickSilver USB HSPDA modem I’ve just jotted down my notes about it here.

The official name for this is the Option Icon 322. The helpful AT&T staff says to go the option web site to download the drivers for the Mac.

Going to the Icon 322 Download Page you get this helpful screen:

After some experimenting I discovered that the Icon 225 Download Page looked promissing. I downloaded the Mac version of their GlobeTrotter software.

Once you start installing it you will see this screen:

Make sure to ignore the instructions and insert the modem before you go any further.

Once this is installed run the application “GlobeTrotter Connect”. Before you connect you need to go to the Preferences and click on the “3G/EDGE/GPRS” tab and enter “ISP.CINGULAR” in the APN field so it looks like mine below:

Now you should be able to connect. It took way to much fiddling to get to these steps.

Warning if you have installed the tools following their instructions without the device inserted, you need to uninstall it completely and try again.

After much deliberation I finally bought the top of the line Penryn MacBook Pro (affiliate link).

I very nearly bought the SSD MacBook Air, but I guess sense entered my head when they released new MacBook Pro’s last week and I ordered it that same morning.

So far I’ve been very happy with it. My unscientific tests say that it’s about 7 times faster than my old 1.5GHz PowerBook in running RSpec, which is where most of my CPU is used normally. It also does it without my CPU meter going crazy.

Other nice things is the updated keyboard layout. It is now the same as my beloved Apple USB Keyboard. I would have liked it to use the new style keyboard though like the MacBook Air. But it’s still a very nice keyboard.

The new multitouch pad is nice. I’m not too convinced I will be using Zoom and Rotate a lot, but the 3 finger swipe is great. I’m using MultiClutch in TextMate to swipe between tabs thanks to Alex Payne.

Most importantly I feel kind of free and unburdened with it. During Rails development autotest tells growl pops up almost immediately to tell me about an error within a few seconds of hitting Command S on a source file.

NewsFire is finally usable again with my millions of feeds. Seesmic seems to work rather than bring my computer to a halt.

Basically I’m a happy guy. My conclusion is, if you are still on a PowerBook or maybe even on a first generation MacBook Pro, now is the time to upgrade. If you have a year old model, wait a bit.

Yes it expensive, but the first early benchmarks and user reports are trickling in now and it looks very impressive indeed. This adds even more fuel into the internal MacBook controversy I’m facing.

MacRumors user bjdraw posted XBench marks for the MacBook Air 1.8GHz SSD

Was just at the Apple store playing with the 1.8 SSD. I downloaded xBench and ran the test. The overall disk score was 48, which is faster than any Apple laptop benched recently by Engadget .

Salty Pirate also tried it out:

The SSD is wicked fast. Programs load almost instantly. Faster than on my MBP 2.4 with a 200GB 7200 disk. I have changed my mind and I am gonna get the SSD link

Viper says:

I think you would notice a performance difference….what i have read is that opening itunes with the SSD takes <1 bounce of the dock icon, while with the 1.6/80 it takes 2-3 bounces….since this action is mostly reading from the HDD and not processor intense, you can infer that the SSD is much faster. link

Suitability for development

Assuming that you can weed your stuff down to fit on the 64GB model, what about development speed.

SSD drives are fast at anything except random access writes, which I think is what goes on when you compile code and run lots of inserts and updates in a database. Can anyone provide an opinion on this? It’s not that I’m going to be hosting on it, but it would be nice if autotest speeds aren’t adversely affected by it as I talked about in my previous MacBook Air Post.

For easy reading here are the XBench Bench marks:

Results	59.23	
	System Info		
		Xbench Version		1.3
		System Version		10.5.1 (9B2324)
		Physical RAM		2048 MB
		Model		MacBookAir1,1
		Drive Type		MCCOE64GEMPP MCCOE64GEMPP
	CPU Test	99.61	
		GCD Loop	198.48	10.46 Mops/sec
		Floating Point Basic	91.95	2.18 Gflop/sec
		vecLib FFT	82.14	2.71 Gflop/sec
		Floating Point Library	82.87	14.43 Mops/sec
	Thread Test	134.99	
		Computation	132.25	2.68 Mops/sec, 4 threads
		Lock Contention	137.85	5.93 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
	Memory Test	148.00	
		System	147.16	
			Allocate	196.92	723.16 Kalloc/sec
			Fill	121.83	5923.81 MB/sec
			Copy	140.85	2909.18 MB/sec
		Stream	148.84	
			Copy	139.04	2871.77 MB/sec
			Scale	138.74	2866.37 MB/sec
			Add	160.25	3413.70 MB/sec
			Triad	160.42	3431.74 MB/sec
	Quartz Graphics Test	107.74	
		Line	111.96	7.45 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
		Rectangle	120.42	35.95 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
		Circle	97.44	7.94 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
		Bezier	109.91	2.77 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
		Text	101.95	6.38 Kchars/sec
	OpenGL Graphics Test	18.27	
		Spinning Squares	18.27	23.18 frames/sec
	User Interface Test	113.53	
		Elements	113.53	521.06 refresh/sec
	Disk Test	47.26	
		Sequential	40.82	
			Uncached Write	33.92	20.83 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	46.51	26.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	27.24	7.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	97.00	48.75 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Random	56.13	
			Uncached Write	21.06	2.23 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	52.85	16.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	990.68	7.02 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	259.96	48.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Much has been said about the pros and cons of the MacBook Air. Lot of strong opinions are out there. I just thought I’d add my 2 cents to this as I’m starting to consider this be the replacement for my 3 year old 15" Powerbook G4.

My plan was to get one of the next generation MacBook Pro’s when they become available. But now I’m really becoming really tempted at the MBA instead.

Now, my 5 main activities on my computer is coding, browsing, email, music and IM (which includes twitter). I rarely do any kind of 3d graphics and never play any games, so I’m not too worried about 3D performance.

Looking at various benchmarks the MBA is already way faster than my PowerBook on almost everything except disk and opengl. Which sounds good to me.

The two areas that give me trouble performance wise right now is ruby performance both when doing local mongrel requests as well as rspec. Running a single pass of all our specs for Agree2 on my PB gives me:

Finished in 991.699454 seconds

My partners 2GHz Core MacBook Pro gives runs the same set of specs like this:

Finished in 105.491531 seconds

If I can get my rspec speed down to somewhere under 2 minutes I would be happy.

My biggest problem is the drive size. My iTunes library is about 100GB, so I would have to cut that well down. Maybe even down to around 20GB. My guess this should be doable. I wish iTunes would allow you to partition your music library.

I love the size of the MBA. I travel a lot and carry my PB out with me on client meetings all the time. The keyboard is nice and the screen perfectly adequate on the MBA.

All of this said if Apple releases a new MBP in the next month I’ll probably change my mind and go with the safe choice. My guess is I will have made a decision and ordered a MB by early March.

It is probably the most beautiful keyboard I have ever seen. It also seems very sturdy is cheap and is something I might actually pack in a suitcase. I have more photos of the keyboard here.