Why did Apple and Intel opt for a hotter than necessary chip for use in the MacBook Air? Here’s where our trail goes cold but we suspect that in order to bring the smaller CPU/chipset packaging to market earlier, some tradeoffs had to be made. Remember that CPU packaging controls far more than how big the chip is, but also governs FSB frequency, power delivery and getting data in and out of the chip itself.

The shiny die connects to hundreds of pins on the bottom of the package. The more pins that need to be connected, the higher the FSB frequency and the smaller the chip the more strain this puts on the packaging technology itself. It’s quite possible that one side effect of the small form factor CPU package is worse power delivery, requiring that the chip be given a higher than normal operating voltage.

The bigger concern however has nothing to do with packaging technology or operating voltages, but overall thermals. The MacBook Pro runs very hot and while the 20W TDP of the MacBook Air is significantly lower than the 35W TDP of the Pro, it’s high for such a small chassis. We won’t know for sure how hot the Air will get until it’s in our hands but the SSD route seems like an even better bet now that we know a little more about what we’re dealing with. Cutting down heat in that thin chassis will be very important, and moving to solid state storage is the only real option you have there

Via Planet g33k Aotearoa.

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Turns out, working together or only working together, was the main issue I keep hitting into. OSX is just not flexible. Mac keyboard and mouse, just don’t work well in any form with X11, Linux consoles or much else other than OSX. After about three weeks of progressively moving applications from the thin client desktop back to the fat OSX client, dealing with Fink, struggling with being forced to copying files back and forth over the network and not wanting to face figuring out how to change all the local OSX uids to match my Linux uids for decent NFS without reinstalling OSX and setting up NIS, I gave up.

So I started using the spare R40 WinXP laptop I had which was in-between jobs. Within days I was back up to speed. OpenOffice 2, firefox and mutt. No problems. Everything just worked again. Plus with Ubuntu install the desktop and applications became a breeze, apt-get just works. This month at least. With the advent of klik on ubuntu, sanding boxing bleeding edge software just became easier.

The MiniMac is sitting there somewhat lonely now. Mainly being used for playing iTunes and doing the odd Photoshop job. As much as I want to like OSX, it is just not flexible enough for a good business desktop. Too much under the hood that is not quite Unix and requires an Apple degree. Now my desktop focus is firmly on thin client technology. I’ll planning to have move primary work environment into a colo. Then combined with openvpn I’ll be able to securely access it transparently. The network truly does become my machine.

That said, I still like OSX very much. Its the perfect companion for the non-tech family member. Web, mail and iTunes. That pretty much covers 90% of primary usage. There are many SIP softphone clients and Skype works very well. I’ll probably continue to evolve usage patterns for myself on the MiniMac. Mostly these will be play things, and not works.

So the short term plan is a new T52 Thinkpad. 2.0GHz P-M with up to 9 hours of battery life and a 15″ screen. For the same price as a iBook.

Of course next year, when Apple release a x86 based Powerbook, I’ll probably rethink the above. Dual booting OSX, WinXP and Ubuntu will allow me to have the best of all worlds any time. Plus the P-M based tech will improve the Powerbook battery life sufficiently and making it into a decent mobile workstation and some not glorified portable desktop.

X11 Extension is a background application that makes it easy to X11 apps, X11 documents, Window Managers and Desktops.

Now by next is to figure out how to manage remote filesystems and map uids from my NFS mounts to my OSX uids. It would be nice if I could do this without having to change (find -uid #uid -exec chmod #nuid {} \;) all the uids associated with my current OSX user.