Samsung updates 11" and 13" 9 Series. Specs probably similar to MBA update

[Philflow]

Samsung updates its 9 series. Specs of the new MBA might be very similar.

11-inch Samsung Series 9 Specs (2 models):

NP900X1B-A02US: $1,049 MSRP (Windows 7 Home Premium, Intel® Core™ i3 Processor 2357M, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 64GB SSD) - Available: August

NP900X1B-A01US: $1,249 MSRP (Windows 7 Home Premium, Intel® Core™ i3 Processor 2357M, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 128GB SSD) - Available: August

13.3-inch Samsung Series 9 Specs (3 models):

NP900X3A-B01US: $1,349 MSRP (Windows 7 Home Premium, Intel® Core™ i5 Processor 2467M; 4GB DDR3 RAM, 128GB SSD) - Available: Now

NP900X3A-B02US: $1,649 MSRP (Windows 7 Home Premium, Intel® Core™ i5 Processor 2467M; 4GB DDR3 RAM, 256GB SSD) - Available: Now

NP900X3A-A05US: $2,049 MSRP (Windows 7 Home Premium, Intel® Core™ i7 Processor 2617M; 6GB DDR3 RAM, 256GB SSD) - Available: Now

 

[HelloPanda]

With all the "he said, she said" that's going on between the two companies, maybe we can look at the products one company is releasing to predict what the rival company will be releasing.

 

[fuzzy077]

Anyone seen benchmarks for the Samsung 9 yet? That's probably a good predictor to what the refresh will be able to do.

 

[Jaro65]

A 6 GB RAM (or even 8 GB) option on a 13.3" MBA would be nice!

 

[Duke15]

Surprising they used i3 processors

 

[Young Spade]

A 6 GB RAM (or even 8 GB) option on a 13.3" MBA would be nice!

What programs would you run on an Air that would utilize all of that data? Parallels and VMWare?

 

[KillerTree]

What programs would you run on an Air that would utilize all of that data? Parallels and VMWare?

Using many programs at once could.

 

[Young Spade]

Using many programs at once could.

Lol I know that; i was implying that I haven't found that to be the case. Running iTunes, Excel, Word, Firefox with over 12 tabs, an HD movie along with numerous side apps that increase production I never exceed 3 gigs of RAM.

Only when I use parallels and have multiple browser windows open do I ever fall below a gig left. I have 4. Of course, not everyone uses their machine as I do however I can't see many people doing more than that on a MBA.

 

[CrazyMBalla]

Only i3's in the 11... That would be a major disappointment.

How does it compare to the C2D in the current 11'?

 

[Faux Carnival]

Samsung really nailed it this time. The first 9 Series was good enough, this is killer!

Backlit keyboard, 400-nit display, new generation Sandy Bridge processors, USB 3.0, HDMI out, thinner, lighter.

i5-2537M was used in the original 13" 9 Series. It was 1.5 times faster as it was than the Core 2 Duo MBA. The only downside to it was the lack of 256GB SSD support. Now that they have it, plus with the 6GB RAM and even better i7 processors, MBA might get some serious damage.

 

[Young Spade]

Have you guys seen the Asus UX21 that's coming out soon?
Here's an early look

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/30/asus-outs-ux21-ultrathin-laptop-with-up-to-core-i7-cpu-video-ha/

Now that's a MBA competitor

But I'm excited, hopefully this will push Apple to start improving the specs of their updated machines.

 

[bob99]

Interesting post, hopefully these specs (or higher) are carried over onto the MBA. I'd gladly buy the 6GB or 8GB RAM version. Here's hoping that a 512 SSD option is also made available.

To those who say "Why get 8GB RAM?" I always buy the top / highest end model available. I make my living with my mac, so over the time I'll be using it, the speed increase is definitely worth it.

 

[hilarystone]

Lol I know that; i was implying that I haven't found that to be the case. Running iTunes, Excel, Word, Firefox with over 12 tabs, an HD movie along with numerous side apps that increase production I never exceed 3 gigs of RAM.

Only when I use parallels and have multiple browser windows open do I ever fall below a gig left. I have 4. Of course, not everyone uses their machine as I do however I can't see many people doing more than that on a MBA.

I have a 13in Ultimate and frequently get to as little as 180mb left. This is normally when I am using it continuously over a period of several hours with Photoshop 4 and Dreamweaver; it continues to work fine apart from Adobe Bridge which has a tendency to crash. Nothing slows up to any extent when the free space gets so small... If its left sleeping overnight it then gets lots of memory free space back...

Hilary Stone, Bristol, British Isles

 

[AAPLaday]

What programs would you run on an Air that would utilize all of that data? Parallels and VMWare?

Safari, iTunes and IPhoto

 

[Hellhammer]

Lol I know that; i was implying that I haven't found that to be the case. Running iTunes, Excel, Word, Firefox with over 12 tabs, an HD movie along with numerous side apps that increase production I never exceed 3 gigs of RAM.

Only when I use parallels and have multiple browser windows open do I ever fall below a gig left. I have 4. Of course, not everyone uses their machine as I do however I can't see many people doing more than that on a MBA.

Your OS and apps will use more RAM when there is more of it available. If you bought 8GB, it wouldn't mean that you have 5GB of free RAM sitting around. Your OS would take the best out of it by putting more data in the RAM to improve the performance. Now the OS cannot put that much data in the RAM because there is less of it and filling all RAM means a significant performance loss.

You don't have to be a power user to benefit from the extra RAM. It may not be as noticeable as it would be if 4GB was always full but it's not useless by any means. Software is becoming more RAM hungry all the time so spending a hundred or two more for 8GB doesn't sound that bad.

 

[Ice Dragon]

Interesting post, hopefully these specs (or higher) are carried over onto the MBA. I'd gladly buy the 6GB or 8GB RAM version. Here's hoping that a 512 SSD option is also made available.

To those who say "Why get 8GB RAM?" I always buy the top / highest end model available. I make my living with my mac, so over the time I'll be using it, the speed increase is definitely worth it.

A quick Google search showed me that apparently Toshiba makes an mSATA 512 GB SSD.

 

[alexandero]

Only when I use parallels and have multiple browser windows open do I ever fall below a gig left. I have 4. Of course, not everyone uses their machine as I do however I can't see many people doing more than that on a MBA.

The MBA is perfect for coding, and a coding environment plus e.g. a SQL database with large caches can easily leave you hungry for more than 4GB RAM.

 

[striker33]

i3, with a terrible IGP.

If the 11" Air gets that, then I hope some retailers keep stock of the C2D/320M model. Not a chance in hell I'd buy into that garbage.

 

[Young Spade]

The MBA is perfect for coding, and a coding environment plus e.g. a SQL database with large caches can easily leave you hungry for more than 4GB RAM.

Interesting; has anyone here actually had this experience?

 

[trims]

Competition indeed!

http://tinyurl.com/3dj82bp

I suspect (hope) that Apple will go for the higher end processors.

Let's hope Apple can match the RAM / SSD upgrades too. I'd hope for 4GB RAM base, and bigger SSDs.

I note that the Samsung also has a backlit keyboard.

 

[KnightWRX]

Your OS and apps will use more RAM when there is more of it available. If you bought 8GB, it wouldn't mean that you have 5GB of free RAM sitting around. Your OS would take the best out of it by putting more data in the RAM to improve the performance. Now the OS cannot put that much data in the RAM because there is less of it and filling all RAM means a significant performance loss.

Apps can't use more RAM just because it is there. There are certain malloc'ed areas of RAM and this doesn't change based on the amount in the machine, unless the developer is overly relying on garbage collection. Then again, more RAM doesn't help in this case, it only makes the problem worse as the garbage collector doesn't free up unused but unfree'd segments.

What you're talking about is the OS file caching mecanism, whereas a file is memory mapped on first open and kept mmap'ed until aging rules decide to release it or the user flushes the file cache.

Yes, in-memory caching of files helps performance, but only if you're reading in the same file. The performance gains for this are negligible in real-world scenarios for consumers. This is mostly practical for things like static web pages/images on a webserver, whereas the httpd process will be reading in and serving the same files over and over again.

You don't have to be a power user to benefit from the extra RAM. It may not be as noticeable as it would be if 4GB was always full but it's not useless by any means. Software is becoming more RAM hungry all the time so spending a hundred or two more for 8GB doesn't sound that bad.

Sure, in the future it might be good to be able to have more RAM, but frankly, without VMs, even with Photoshop and Xcode open and browser, I'm struggling to fill the 4GBs of RAM I have. A lot of people over-estimate their computing needs (Sandy Bridge this! 8 GB of RAM that!). It's become more of a race of specs than actual needs.

 

[seepel]

Apps can't use more RAM just because it is there. There are certain malloc'ed areas of RAM and this doesn't change based on the amount in the machine, unless the developer is overly relying on garbage collection. Then again, more RAM doesn't help in this case, it only makes the problem worse as the garbage collector doesn't free up unused but unfree'd segments.

What you're talking about is the OS file caching mecanism, whereas a file is memory mapped on first open and kept mmap'ed until aging rules decide to release it or the user flushes the file cache.

Yes, in-memory caching of files helps performance, but only if you're reading in the same file. The performance gains for this are negligible in real-world scenarios for consumers. This is mostly practical for things like static web pages/images on a webserver, whereas the httpd process will be reading in and serving the same files over and over again.



Sure, in the future it might be good to be able to have more RAM, but frankly, without VMs, even with Photoshop and Xcode open and browser, I'm struggling to fill the 4GBs of RAM I have. A lot of people over-estimate their computing needs (Sandy Bridge this! 8 GB of RAM that!). It's become more of a race of specs than actual needs.

I believe we've had this argument before but I didn't have any numbers, but right now I've got XCode gobbling up about 700MB, Chrome is gobbling up another few hundred (usually have more tabs so that could certainly be higher) if I had photoshop running that would be a bunch more, add up all the other little processes and... I've got 1.22 GB Wired and 3 GB Active used. I don't find it to be all that difficult to get up to 4 GB and of course your mileage may vary but now you have my two cents, I'm hoping for an 8GB option because I've pretty much convinced myself that I MUST buy one of the new 11" Airs.

 

[Young Spade]

I believe we've had this argument before but I didn't have any numbers, but right now I've got XCode gobbling up about 700MB, Chrome is gobbling up another few hundred (usually have more tabs so that could certainly be higher) if I had photoshop running that would be a bunch more, add up all the other little processes and... I've got 1.22 GB Wired and 3 GB Active used. I don't find it to be all that difficult to get up to 4 GB and of course your mileage may vary but now you have my two cents, I'm hoping for an 8GB option because I've pretty much convinced myself that I MUST buy one of the new 11" Airs.

What I don't think a lot of people are realizing is that the MBAs are different, in the way that the RAM has to be soldiered onto the machine. That means that instead of just making them with X gigs by default like all of their other MBs, they have to make X amount with X RAM; this means that they have to really decide on what they want to sell and how much of that they will sell.

How many people do you think will go for an Air with 8 gigs of RAM? Seeing that they're generally on the same price level as the Pros (which more people are going to go for if they want power), not many people would go for that model.

I don't know for certain but I highly doubt they would go that route, at least with something THAT much higher than 4. Six is a stretch and if they did up the RAM, they would probably do 6. If you need 8 gigs, chances are you'd be better of using a Pro. Not you specifically but customers in general.

Now they might switch it up and have an option to literally build your own but that's highly unlikely.

 

[KnightWRX]

I believe we've had this argument before but I didn't have any numbers, but right now I've got XCode gobbling up about 700MB, Chrome is gobbling up another few hundred (usually have more tabs so that could certainly be higher) if I had photoshop running that would be a bunch more, add up all the other little processes and... I've got 1.22 GB Wired and 3 GB Active used. I don't find it to be all that difficult to get up to 4 GB and of course your mileage may vary but now you have my two cents, I'm hoping for an 8GB option because I've pretty much convinced myself that I MUST buy one of the new 11" Airs.

Well, I've got Xcode open, X11, terminal, Chrome, all my IM clients and I left Mplayer open with no file loaded, and I'm just under 1 Gig of used memory. Yes, 1 Gig :

PhysMem: 568M wired, 355M active, 105M inactive, 1027M used, 3068M free.

So I don't know what you're doing in Xcode to have it take 700M by itself...

I could still open both Illustrator and Photoshop and run my Windows VM for work and still have plenty of RAM to throw around...

 

[astrofaes]

Well, I've got Xcode open, X11, terminal, Chrome, all my IM clients and I left Mplayer open with no file loaded, and I'm just under 1 Gig of used memory. Yes, 1 Gig :

PhysMem: 568M wired, 355M active, 105M inactive, 1027M used, 3068M free.

So I don't know what you're doing in Xcode to have it take 700M by itself...

I could still open both Illustrator and Photoshop and run my Windows VM for work and still have plenty of RAM to throw around...

I'm with the others here - I would definitely love to have an option to get 6GB or 8GB of RAM. As an ASP.NET developer, I have a Windows 7 VM which has Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008, Firefox/Chrome/IE (browser testing) and IIS7 running. Then in OSX I often have Firefox/Chrome running again along with Photoshop and Illustrator. From first hand experience I eat through 4GB regularly and find myself occasionally having to close programs down to avoid slowdowns.

Apple please give us a 6GB/8GB option