MacRumors

Anandtech provides more standardized battery results for their 1.8GHz MacBook Air (HDD).

They setup 3 tasks of varying intensity with the MacBook Air's display set at just above 50% brightness, and not to go to sleep, though the hard drive was allowed to spin down if able. The tasks and battery life times are listed as follows:

1) Use Wifi to browse 20 pages in a loop, spending 20 seconds on each page, while playing MP3s in iTunes. 4hr 16min
2) Play a DVD image (off the internal hard drive) in a loop. 3hr 25min
3) Download 10GB of files, Web browsing loop from #1, play two 480p Xvid videos in a loop. 2hr 25min

As expected, the battery time varies greatly with use, and helps explain the discrepant battery life times seen by various users. Andantech summaries:

Apple's 5 hour claim is laughable but not as much as I expected. If I wanted to I suspect I could hit 5 hours by making the web browsing test less stressful, but my focus was on real world usage scenarios, not proving Apple correct. Regardless, 4 hours and 16 minutes doing what I consider to be the intended usage model of the Air is respectable. It's not great, but it's not terrible either.

Walt Mossberg weighs in on the Solid State Drive (SSD) vs Hard Disk Drive (HDD) debate. The issue has become relevant now that Apple offers a SSD option on the MacBook Air, and this feature will certainly trickle down to future Apple laptops.

An earlier comparison from Arstechnica was difficult to interpret due to differences in machines (1.6GHz vs 1.8GHz) and non-standardized testing.

Mossberg offers at least one piece of standardized data on the SSD vs HDD comparison in the MacBook Air. He compared two 1.6GHz processor MacBook Airs which only differed in the type of hard drive (SSD vs HDD) and ran a standardized test case: "turn off all power-saving software, set screen brightness to maximum, turn on the Wi-Fi and play an endless loop of music."

As always these tests come with some considerations. After some investigation, it appears that iTunes explicitly turns off Mac OS X's file caching, so the drives are being accessed with regularity in this test. This drive access, however, is small and sequential which does not take advantage of SSD's strengths (random non-sequential). With these notes in mind, the results of the test revealed almost no difference (5 minutes in favor of SSD).

Not all SSDs, HDDs and laptops are made equally, however. Mossberg also compared a Toshiba Portege R500 with a 1.8" HDD and a 1.8" SSD drive. In the same test, Mossberg found the Portege R500 ran 1 hour and 21 minutes (36%) longer with the SSD. Now, the reason for this large difference is unclear. Update/Correction: the Toshiba also uses the 1.8" drive, not the 2.5" drive previously reported here.

Similarly, MacLife found that the 32GB DVNation SSD drive installed in a MacBook Pro saw 55% increased write speeds and 88% increased read speeds compared to the stock HDD. They also saw similarly dramatic speed increases in "real world" tasks as well as a 14% battery life gain with the SSD drive.

As a result of these discrepant findings, the SSD vs HDD debate will likely be reintroduced with every new laptop introduced, as findings seem to vary by individual model and task. At this point, however, it seems the accepted advantages for the SSD drive in the MacBook Air is a more responsive user experience, and less vulnerability to data loss.

The wait for Leopard 10.5.2 continues, with a 1 digit build increment (9C31) seeded today. The latest developer build offers fixes to a networking connectivity issue, and reportedly has no known issues. Apple seeded build 9C30 just two days ago.

Meanwhile, in non-10.5.2 news, Apple has seeded a new build of Safari 3.1 to developers today. The new release seems to incorporate much of what has been implemented in the Webkit builds since the last major release.

New features include (links to Webkit.org descriptions):

- HTML5 audio and video tags: "The new HTML5 'video' and 'audio' elements add native support for embedding video and audio content in web pages. They also provide a rich scripting API for controlling playback."
- HTML5 SQL storage API: "The client-side database storage API allows web applications to store structured data locally using a medium many web developers are already familiar with - SQL."

- getElementsByClassName: "getElementsByClassName is one of the more common functions requested by JavaScript programmers (and added by JavaScript libraries); it works along the same lines as getElementsByTagName and getElementById in looking up elements of a web page by their properties."
- Downloadable fonts: "With font face rules you can specify downloadable custom fonts on your Web pages or alias one font to another." More details.
- CSS Transforms and CSS Animations

The latest beta builds of Safari also address a number of significant fixes. Safari is currently at version 3.0.4. For those interested in the cutting edge Webkit releases, you can download nightly builds -- though these may not be entirely stable.

Apple has posted an update to Quicktime bringing it to version 7.4.1 today. Updates are available for Leopard, Tiger, Panther, and Windows.

Apple reports the new Quicktime addresses security issues and improves compatibility with third-party applications. Specifically, the update addresses a possible vulnerability that could result in arbitrary code execution. This release is recommended for all QuickTime 7 users, and requires a restart.

Apple has released a number of small software updates over this past week.

AT&T announced today that they will be deploying third generation (3G) wireless broadband service to more than 80 additional cities as part of its 2008 wireless network expansion plans.

This will bring 3G services to nearly 350 U.S. markets by the end of 2008, including the top 100 U.S. cities.

This news is relevant, in that Apple users AT&T as their exclusive iPhone carrier in the U.S. and has a multi-year commitment with them. One of the main criticisms of the iPhone when it was launched was a lack of 3G networking, which is typically much faster than the EGDE network that is presently offered with the iPhone.

AT&T's CEO confirmed that the 3G iPhone would become available in 2008, confirming comments by Steve Jobs at the original iPhone launch that Apple planned on making "3g phones and all sorts of other amazing things in the future". The reason that 3G was not included in the original iPhone was due to concerns about excessive battery usage:

When we looked at 3G, the chipsets were not low-enough power for what we were looking for. They were not integrated enough, so they took up too much physical space. We cared a lot about battery life and we cared a lot about physical size. Down the road, I'm sure some of those tradeoffs will become more favorable towards 3G but as of now we think we made a pretty good doggone decision.

ArsTechnica compares the Solid State Drive (SSD) and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) versions of the MacBook Air to see if the SSD upgrade is worth the additional cost.

Their benchmark results are consistent with earlier benchmarks revealing that the SSD drive is slower at writing and sequential reads than the HDD. The SSD, however, is faster than the HDD at random (non-sequential) disk access.

This difference shows itself in "real world" tests such as Exporting a 60MB Quicktime, Compiling an Application or Unzipping an archive. As expected, the large file export, which performs a large sequential write to disk favored the HDD model. Meanwhile, building Webkit and Unzipping an archive showed off the speed advantage of the SSD.

Ars also looked at battery life of the MacBook Air and in their HDD review found that their Air averaged a paltry 2.5 hour battery life in their "real world tests". Questions of the validity of these results have been raised, with other anecdotal claims of battery life as long as 4-5 hours on the same configuration. Indeed, reports are varied:

Forums: 56% left after 2:15, 5+ hours?; Engadget: 2:25 watching movie, 3:35 light usage

Ars, however, is pretty confident in their battery life tests for their machine and felt it was consistent with some other reports. They found that the SSD didn't seem to offer a significant longer battery life (on average), however, their battery tests were not standardized and the SSD model had a faster processor. (Of note, MacLife found an SSD drive in a MacBook Pro brought a 14% battery life improvement.)

In the end, they felt the SSD upgrade was not worth the additional cost ($999), but noted the biggest advantage of the SSD was a lack of disk-access related slowdowns that they experienced on the HDD model.

Update: Several readers note that the SSD model had a 1.8GHz processor, rather than a 1.6GHz processor, so even equivalent battery life is likely an improvement. Also, another big advantage to SSD is durability -- with no chance of a hard drive "crash".

Apple released three updates via Mac OS X's Software Update today.

iPhoto 7.1.2
This update addresses issues when publishing photos to a .Mac Web Gallery, improves overall stability, and fixes a number of other minor issues.

ProKit 4.5
This update improves reliability for Apple's professional applications and is recommended for all users of Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Express, Aperture, Logic Studio and Logic Express.

Braille Display Update 1.0
Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard includes a powerful screen reading technology for the blind called VoiceOver that supports a variety of refreshable Braille displays. When you have a supported Braille display connected to your computer, VoiceOver automatically detects it and sends it information about what is displayed on the screen. This installer adds support in Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard for additional refreshable Braille displays.

Canalys reported on both U.S. and Q4 2007 mobile phone marketshare numbers today and listed Apple's iPhone as #3 (6.5%) in smart phone marketshare worldwide despite being only available in a few countries. Apple trailed Nokia (52.9%) and RIM (11.4%) who were #1 and #2, respectively, in the worldwide market.

Meanwhile, Canalys estimates that Apple is #2 in U.S. marketshare with 28%, behind RIM (41%). This put the iPhone ahead of both Palm (9%) and all Windows Mobile device vendors combined (21%).

During the Macworld Expo keynote speech, Jobs reported that the Apple iPhone won 19.5% of the smart phone market during the 3rd quarter of 2007, so this 28% marketshare in Q4 represents signficant growth in the second full quarter the iPhone has been on sale.

Today, Apple introduced a 16GB version of the iPhone.

Apple today added new models of the iPhone and iPod touch which have double the memory. The new 16GB iPhone is available for $499, while the 8GB model remains at $399. The 32GB iPod touch comes in at $499 while 16GB and 8GB models are priced at $399 and $299, respectively.

"For some users, there's never enough memory," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of Worldwide iPod and iPhone Product Marketing. "Now people can enjoy even more of their music, photos and videos on the most revolutionary mobile phone and best Wi-Fi mobile device in the world."

The new iPhone and iPod touch models are available immediately.

Apple has fixed some issues with Time Machine and AFP X Client and bumped Mac OS X 10.5.2 to build 9C30. The latest Mac OS X seed was released to developer's today, only four days behind 9C27. There are "no known issues" in this latest seed.

It seems clear that Apple is putting the finishing touches on Mac OS X, with accelerated developer releases in the hopes of reaching the final build. Due to the continuous bug fixing process, it impossible to predict the release date of the next update to Mac OS X. Historically, however, Apple has released the final build as quickly as one day following the last developer seed (9B18 seeded, 9B18 released).

At this year's International Solid State Circuits Conference, Intel is giving additional details regarding its upcoming Silverthorne ultra-mobile processor (via News.com and AppleInsider).

According to the reports, Silverthorne will include dual in-order pipelines in order to keep power consumption at a minimal .5-2 Watts. Most modern chips use out of order pipelines for performance benefits, but at the cost of power. Nevertheless, AppleInsider says that the chip is expected to be as powerful as early Pentium M processors. Additionally, the processor will support hyperthreading and be fully compatible with the Core 2 Duo which powers current Macs.

Apple has been rumored to be adopting Silverthorne for their next generation iPhone or PDA platforms. Silverthorne is expected to ship in the first half of 2008.

One report lists Apple amongst possible companies that are considering rival offers for Yahoo after Microsoft issued a public bid of $44.6 billion for the company last week. Part of the hesitation is reportedly Yahoo CEO, Jerry Yang, being reluctant to join Microsoft.

It is believed [Yang] would be particularly open to a rescue bid from Steve Jobs' Apple Corp, having openly expressed his admiration for the firm in the past. Yang last year invited Jobs to Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale to give a motivational talk to staff.

While Apple does have $16 billion in the bank, representatives from other companies have already expressed reluctance to place a bid for Yahoo against Microsoft, who could easily top their bids. Meanwhile, it appears Google has been playing an active role in trying to hinder this move. Google CEO Eric Schmidt personally phoned Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to offer assistance in fending off a Microsoft acquisision.

Banc of America sources (via iLounge) in Asia claim that Apples desktop and notebook production numbers have been increased by 20% from Apple's early January estimates, suggesting stronger than expected demand for Apple's computers.

Firm believes production numbers should continue to move up throughout the quarter. MacBook Air orders also increased slightly for March, contributing to the upside. They continue to believe that desktops and notebooks are the key driver of the story.

Meanwhile, iPod production numbers are said to be significantly reduced by 10-20% from early January's estimates, suggesting slower demand than expected for the popular music player.

Recent outlooks have suggested growth in Apple's Mac marketshare, and the latest Net Applications numbers (methodology) from January 2008 reveal that the Mac had a 7.57% browser marketshare. This is up from 7.31% in December 2007.

A few news items about MacRumors itself:

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