Nelson Wong Life Blog

Sony’s Thoughts On the MacBook Air

During the Keynote, Jobs compared the Macbook Air to Sony’s TZ ultraportable, implying it had a small keyboard and screen, was too thick, and was not that good. Here’s what Sony thinks of the Apple MacBook Air:

Mike Abary, senior vice president of VAIO product marketing, thought the engineering to get a laptop that thin was extremely impressive. But Sony had a carbon fiber notebook in 2004 called the X505 that eschewed the optical and was 0.3 inches thick (compared to 0.16 of the Air) at its thinnest segment. It wasn’t that well received, and research later pointed out that “Thinness is not the holy grail”. Making something that thin and sexy cost it too much usability. (Many of you agree in the comments on Giz.)

To be fair, dropping an optical in 2004 made no sense, but it makes more sense in 2008, especially with broader internet connections, bittorrent, greater storage capacity, thumbdrives, and Apple’s Remote optical drive tech which works over wireless N. But since the X505, ultra portables from Sony have evolved into the TZ. So it is possible that Sony believes they are in many ways 4 years ahead of Apple in their understanding of what consumers want.

When the NYTimes pushed Jobs on the issues of limited storage, he responded, “Maybe this isn’t the computer for you.” I asked Mike who they thought the computer was for. “Beats me” was the initial reply, but came up with an answer: The extremely design conscious. I asked what feature he’d bring back to the Air, and without hesitating, he thought it should have for 3G.

I wish I could dismiss all of this as competitive trash talk, but too many of you feel the same conflicting feelings about where the Air fits into your collection of machines. At Giz, we’re only tormented inside because we still want to buy it, despite it being not all that practical.

MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo Benchmarks

The Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros really 39% faster than their Core Duo predecessors? MacWorld takes a look to see how much the speed boost and additional L2 cache really helped.

Scoring times in photoshop a full 24 seconds faster in Photoshop, and 45 seconds faster in Compressor, the Core 2 Duo models quite speedy, but not 39% faster. In fact, in some tests they were only marginally faster (a time of 1:06 down to 1:01, time of 0:58 to 0:54, and frame rate of 59 to 63.9). In tasks that were more processor oriented, the Core 2 Duo’s speed improvements were “substantial”. In disk or graphics intensive tasks, were quite a bit smaller. Just be aware what kind of performance gains you’re getting when you upgrade to a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.

Macworld Benchmarks: MacBook Pro gets its Core 2 Duo boost

Canon Speedlite 430EX Flash Review

An external flash such as the Canon Speedlite 430EX Flash are one of the most popular accessories among Digital SLR (and film SLR for that matter) owners.

Why? Why use an external flash? The answer may be obvious to owners of camera bodies without a built-in flash, but not so clear to those using bodies with a built-in flash. The built-in flash is great for fill flash to light the shaded areas (such as people’s eyes) in a pictures. To use fill flash, set your exposure for the ambient light, then dial in -1 to -2 EV FEC (Flash Exposure Compensation). The built-in flash is also useful to add catchlights (sparkles) in a subject’s eyes.

Because the light source is very small and is located very close to the imaging axis, using the built-in flash as a main light often results in a harshly-lit picture (often with red-eyed subjects). Items close to the flash are often overexposed, the background often becomes black, harsh shadows typically abound and subjects tend to become flat looking. I use direct-flash-as-main-light (typically in “M” mode) only as a last resort, much preferring to use a higher ISO, wider aperture, slower shutter speed, image stabilization, tripod … But, sometimes there is no choice – it is simply too dark, the subjects are in action … In this case, you simply must use the flash for the main light. But, this does not mean the flash must be fired directly toward the subject.
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30″ Display war: HP LP3065 vs. Dell and Apple

When we wrote about HP’s new 30-inch monitor, you all wrote in asking how it stacks up next to Dell’s Ultrasharp 3000WFP (Wide F’n Panel) and Apple’s Cinema Display. On paper, here’s how they match up, stat for stat…

Resolution: The same for all three, at 2,560 x 1,600 pixels.
Contrast: The HP wins with a 1000:1 ratio, vs the 700:1 found in the Dell and Apple
Brightness: It’s dimmer at 300 nits, vs 400 for the Dell and Apple
Viewing Angle: 178-ish degrees for all
Response: The HP is fast, at 8ms vs 14ms for Apple and 11ms for Dell

Of course, we’ll have to wait for a showdown before we can pass fair judgement on the HP. But it looks like we have a decent catfight coming up.

Mac Pro vs. PowerMac

Anandtech took the Mac Pro through their exhaustive hardware review process, then compared it to the old PowerMac to see just how much added improvement the switch to Intel made. The results? It’s definitely faster as long as you’re not using Rosetta to run non-universal binary applications.

On the inside, assembly-wise, the Mac Pro has many advantages over the PowerMac. There are four very easily accessible SATA hard drive sliders to add more storage. The RAM and PCI-E cards are both also very easy to get to when you have to make upgrades. Definitely an improvement over the PowerMac. There’s also plenty more USB 2.0 and Firewire ports on the outside for external connectivity—again, one of the complaints about the PowerMac.

So how does it perform?
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Mac Pro Unboxing, Benchmarks

It’s been a few days since the unveiling of the Mac Pro and the people have gotten their hands on the units. We are suckers for unboxing, especially with combined with benchmarks. Laso Panaflex over at the MacRumors forums was one of the first to get his hands on the Mac Pro and took pictures of the unpacking for the entire world to see. Also he ran some benchmarks versus his old Quad G5 Mac. The results: edge goes to the Mac Pro.
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