fanless 12´´ MacBook Air coming soon?

[alsterfan]

On the way trying to optimize my chain, I have come across the rumour going that Apple will release a 12´´MacBook Air with a fanless design in the second half of 2014. For me this could be a step forward in the effort to improve "electrical quietness" in my music server (which is an iMac at the moment). As less electricity will be needed the battery could provide a longer listening time, before it has to be recharged again.

As I use a sd card with Mavericks to boot from I am glad to have found a picture today showing a slot for such a card (the lack of which in the meantime would be a no-go for me):

12-inch Apple Macbook could launch soon: Rumoured to sport button-less trackpad, fanless design - Tech2

Hopefully this is not the result of altering a picture with Photoshop.

 

Best wishes,

Uwe

[Audio_ELF]

Rules for happiness and well being: #42. Disbelieve any Apple rumours till either (a) the product is listed in the Apple store or (b) Tim Cook (or one if his cohorts) stand up on stage and announce it's coming...

 

On the way trying to optimize my chain, I have come across the rumour...

[PorkChop]

Rules for happiness and well being: #42. Disbelieve any Apple rumours till either (a) the product is listed in the Apple store or (b) Tim Cook (or one if his cohorts) stand up on stage and announce it's coming...

 

Absolutely correct. Exploration projects are always in the works, but no one except top brass knows what will be released. Even amongst employees...nothing exists until it is publicly announced, and discussing / speculation is frowned upon -- kind of like Fight Club.

[alsterfan]

In the end it seems that the 1 year old rumours will come true in a few weeks. Have a look here:

https://www.apple.com/macbook/

It features a fanless design and flash storage. Both could result in an improvement in SQ.

One drawback could be that you will not be able to choose the size of RAM (8 GB).

 

Regards,

Uwe

[alsterfan]

It features a fanless design and flash storage.

 

Well, at last rumours have come true. Yesterday my McBook 12´´ arrived. Today together with an audiophile friend of mine an extended testing took place. First of all even with the slowest CPU it is quick enough to handle normal tasks (i.e. surfing the www, creating documents etc.). If a few jobs are being done simultaneously, stuttering of music being played occurs.

 

As it should serve as a music server alone, I created a 2nd partition on the PCIe based flash storage and copied my Music OS X to this place. After booting was completed (in no time at all compared to my SD card), via a USB type C to USB adapter I attached a hard drive to copy music to a RAM disk. Having detached it afterwards,

listening could begin.

Be it redbook or HD resolution (24/192) no problems occurred (with only the music playing - in my case with iTunes and a La Rosita plugin). What impressed us most at first "glance" was a growth in details. Though not lackening deeper frequencies there was an overall emphasis on the mids and highs.They seemed to be responsible for the richness in details. But the longer we listened the more we found it sounded sort of dull, a bit flat and "digital".

As it was only a matter of seconds to switch to my iMac (late 2012, 3,1 GHz Core i7 Ivy Bridge, 16GB RAM) we could easily compare SQ between the two. And here it was back again what we had missed before: Our legs began to "shake" as a sign of being involved in the flow of the musical presentation.

Summing up:

Our expectations as to SQ have been too high. Putting together a battery-powered low-power CPU with a fanless design and PCIe based flash storage on a "miniaturized" motherboard so far is no guarantee for a better sound.

However, if we had started our search for excellent SQ with this MacBook (i.e. not being able to compare it with anything else) we would have been very satisfied. So this is all about "complaining" at a very high level.

 

Regards,

Uwe