Chances are good that thunderport will eventually be worth it

The big improvement would probably be the reduction in heat, I'd imagine.

There's not really any heat to speak of on my 11"

The only real heat I notice on the MBA is when it is charging.

So how are these new MBAs any better in practical terms?

thunderbolt will be an advantage eventually

My guess is that thunderbolt is unlikely to be much of an advantage in this generation unless Apple gets off their duff.

It'll extend the life of the new one, I think. If anyone wants a deal on my mba 11" ultimate, I'll buy the new one

As soon as the new Thunderbolt equipped displays and hard drives come out, which will be very soon, the Thunderbolt will allow an MBP or MBA user to have a desktop setup with a full sized monitor, an external hard drive or array, and eventually other peripherals to use a single cable to connect or disconnect the laptop. All that ease of use with mega fast transfer speeds. Seems pretty good to me.

Also, I thought the Sandy Bridge chips were going to "bring massive CPU performance improvements to Apple's most diminutive laptops with little change in power requirements." That also seems pretty good to me.

Edited April 23, 201115 yr by Voltron

The two real questions that need to be answered though, is how soon for those peripherals and how big a performance jump will there be for real applications, not benchmark tests. I remain both mildly hopeful and mildly skeptical.

In practical terms, for something like a regular external HD, it'll be the same improvement over Firewire 800 that eSATA is -- that is quite significantly for demanding applications still, but most so for people using SSD drives. I think the point of it is that it can scale to ridiculous levels of speed with arrays for people working on full HD video. OWC just announced even faster SSDs with 500+ MB/sec read and write speeds, so the timing could be excellent, but you'd still be easily looking at somewhere over $3k for the fastest 1TB of external storage without getting more exotic, assuming someone releases a 2-bay RAID box.

Edited April 24, 201115 yr by Currawong

IMHO if average read/write rates for a SSD are under 300Mb/s any transference bandwidth above 400Mb/s makes little to no sense. Perhaps when SSD or other storage technology manages to have significantly higher read/write speeds, those huge bandwidths make more sense.

The biggest advantage will be when they put it on an iPod, and syncing takes as long as thinking about it.

The biggest advantage will be when they put it on an iPod, and syncing takes as long as thinking about it.

I doubt there'd be much increase in speed, assuming we're talking about regular iPod. HDD in iPod will be the bottleneck.

Not if we're talking the ipod touch/iphone/ipad

The biggest advantage will be when they put it on an iPod, and syncing takes as long as thinking about it.

One might argue it shouldn't take a cable to sync at all...

Sure, if one doesn't mind syncing taking a quarter million years.

Initial transfer, sure, use a cable. But after that wtf?

given that the ip* is backed up every time it's connected, it doesn't matter which time it's synced, wireless would take forever.

I doubt there'd be much increase in speed, assuming we're talking about regular iPod. HDD in iPod will be the bottleneck.

HDD technology is so...2000's. I was actually wishing I could trick out my older iPod with one of those solid state drives, but I was told that a lot of the iPod's actually check the drive and make sure it's something they have drivers for.

i consider a real sync to be up to and including media. otherwise, it's not much different than what mobileme gives you, no?

Have they made mobileme free yet? (serious question)

You can do the other syncs with google or any exchange server. There's not really a need to use mobileme if you don't already have it.

I wasn't suggesting you give up mobile me. Just saying that it doesn't require a pay service to wirelessly sync everything except media.

I dont' want them to make mobile me free, I'm paid up for 9 more months

I'm in the same exact situation with Mobileme. I think the service Sucksme, but I'm committed to it and don't want to change my email address.

I solved this by buying a family code off of eBay for less than the regular Apple price for a single licence, then giving the extra accounts to family and friends.