Skip to main content

Why I bought a MacBook Air


I've been looking around for a new laptop for a while now, and I finally decided on the MacBook Air. Specifically, the 2014 13 inch model, 128 GB SSD, 1.4 GHz Core i5, 8 GB of RAM. It's by far the best laptop I've ever owned, and I couldn't be happier with my purchase.

The decision to buy a MacBook Air was a tough one. There are a lot of great laptops available right now, and the MacBook Pro with the retina display was pretty tempting. Ultimately it was the light weight, long battery life, decent performance, stylishness, and price of the MacBook Air that influenced my decision.

Here's the list of laptops I was looking at:

  1. MacBook Pro
  2. MacBook Air
  3. Asus Zenbook
  4. Acer Aspier S7
  5. HP Envy
  6. HP Spectre
  7. Toshiba Kirabook
  8. Lenovo Yoga Pro 2
  9. Microsoft Surface Pro 3
  10. Dell XPS 
I was leaning towards something light, such as an ultrabook, but I didn't want to pay much more than $1000. For me, it's hard to justify that much money on a laptop. I've bought cars for less money :). Kids are always in need of something.

To be fair the MacBook Air was my point of reference, so my decision my have been a little biased. I thought that the Apple brand was a little over priced, and that there must be an alternative that was just as good but costs less. 

What I found was that competitors were around the same price, if not more than the MacBook Air. So I just went with the MacBook Air, and I'm satisfied with my decision. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Basic Web Performance Testing With JMeter and Gatling

Introduction In this post I'll give a quick way to get some basic web performance metrics using both JMeter and Gatling.

JMeter is a well known, open source, Java based tool for performance testing. It has a lot of features, and can be a little confusing at first. Scripts (aka Test Plans), are XML documents, edited using the JMeter GUI.  There are lots of options, supports a wide variety of protocols, and produces some OK looking graphs and reports.

Gatling is a lesser known tool, but I really like it. It's a Scala based tool, with scripts written in a nice DSL. While the scripts require some basic Scala, they are fairly easy to understand and modify. The output is a nice looking, interactive, HTML page.
Metrics Below are the basic metrics gathered by both JMeter and Gatling. If you are just starting performance testing, these might be a good starting point.

Response Time – Difference between time when request was sent and time when response has been fully received

Latency –…
192 comments
Read more

Multi Threaded NUnit Tests

Recently I needed to reproduce an Entity Framework deadlock issue. The test needed to run in NUnit, and involved firing off two separate threads. The trouble is that in NUnit, exceptions in threads terminate the parent thread without failing the test.

For example, here's a test that starts two threads: the first thread simply logs to the console, while the other thread turfs an exception. What I expected was that this test should fail. However, the test actually passes.

readonly ThreadStart[] delegates = { () => { Console.WriteLine("Nothing to see here"); }, () => { throw new InvalidOperationException("Blow up"); } }; [Test] public void SimpleMultiThreading() { var threads = delegates.Select(d => new Thread(d)).ToList(); foreach (var t in threads) { t.Start(); } foreach (var t in threads) { t.Join(); } }
Peter Provost posted an article that describes how to make this test fail. It works…
132 comments
Read more

Generating Java Mixed Mode Flame Graphs

Overview I've seen Brendan Gregg's talk on generating mixed-mode flame graphs and I wanted to reproduce those flamegraphs for myself. Setting up the tools is a little bit of work, so I wanted to capture those steps. Check out the Java in Flames post on the Netflix blog for more information.

I've created github repo (github.com/jerometerry/perf)  that contains the scripts used to get this going, including a Vagrantfile, and JMeter Test Plan.

Here's a flame graph I generated while applying load (via JMeter) to the basic arithmetic Tomcat sample application. All the green stacks are Java code, red stacks are kernel code, and yellow stacks are C++ code. The big green pile on the right is all the Tomcat Java code that's being run.


Tools Here's the technologies I used (I'm writing this on a Mac).
VirtualBox 5.1.12Vagrant 1.9.1bento/ubuntu-16.04 (kernel 4.4.0-38)Tomcat 7.0.68JMeter 3.1OpenJDK 8 1.8.111linux-tools-4.4.0-38linux-tools-commonBrendan Gregg's Fla…
79 comments
Read more