Yes, I know it’s old, but it’s been soldiering along quite nicely.
Very recently, it’s taken to shutting down unexpectedly while I’m not using it. When I turn it back on, it has a message in several languages telling me that I need to restart it. After I restart it, it gives me a message that OSX shut down unexpectedly and gives me the option to report the issue.
I’d really like to avoid getting a new laptop for a couple of months, but I’m thinking it probably doesn’t have long to live. Everything is as updated as possible (I just double-checked).
Is there anything I could do to try to diagnose the problem?
Huh. I bought it in late 2004 and it’s been great. It’s a bit slower than I’d like at this point, but it’s been used lots - I watch lots online - and it hasn’t really complained until now.
That sounds like a kernel panic. It certainly could be a serious hardware problem like the logic board dying, but it might also be something simple like the RAM has become unseated, so check that out.
It also couldn’t hurt to dun Disk Utility.
Yup. Reseat the RAM. After that it gets a bit sad. I used a 1GHz 17" Powerbook for seven years, and it finally died three months ago. I stripped it down, cleaned it, replaced the RAM with a spare set I had, all to no avail. So I got a 15" Macbook Pro, and it is night and day. It is sooooo much faster you won’t believe it. The new Air was announced last night, and it is looking very very nice. It has Thunderbolt, which suddenly makes it a long term proposition.
This year. Look at what it is. All the advantages of Firewire encapsulating two PCI express lanes. It changes the model of how you use laptops, and indeed many peripherals.
Look at the new Apple 27" monitor. It is designed to plug into an Air with Thunderbolt. Inside the monitor are USB 2.0 ports, Firewire 800, Ethernet, a video camera, and Thunderbolt extension. These are not connected by a set of extender cables - they are PCI devices inside the monitor. Thunderbolt is the (currently) ultimate peripheral interface. You can add your external disk drives to the monitor over Thunderbolt. The entire system connects to your Air by one thin cable. (What is arguably missing from the monitor is a DVD drive and a SD card slot - but the capability to add them over Thunderbolt is there.)
Like with Firewire, Macs support target mode over Thurderbolt - so a Mac can look like an external disk drive to another Mac. You can also network over Thunderbolt. It is peer to peer, unlike USB.
The only reason it is a bit quiet is that Apple are six months into a 1 year deal with Intel for exclusive rights. Once third party peripherals start to come on stream expect to see the eco-system of peripherals change.
it’s a glorified docking station. I’ve been told for years that docking stations weren’t all that useful and consumers didn’t need them ('cos Apple didn’t have them) but now that Thunderbolt is here it’s going to skyrocket.
Firewire actually went a lot of places, especially if you owned a Mac. I have a number of Firewire devices, and still use them. What relegated it was a number of issues. One - it needed expensive controllers. All that really neat functionality needed a lot of stuff to drive it. USB hardly needed any logic at all. Apple got greedy, and started to ask more than other chip makers were prepared to pay on a per chip basis for a license - which was one of the prime reasons Intel got behind USB 2.0. Eventually of course technology moved past even Firewire 800. Whilst it soundly beats USB 2.0, USB 3 is much faster. Everything is so much faster. Another hidden problem with Firewire was the power spec. You were allowed 25 watts. Which to USB’s puny 5 was a big win. Until you tried to run it off a a laptop. Suddenly the cost of power converters and significant battery life issues made it look unhappy. Now all current Macbook Pros still have Firewire, and users like it. But there is a clear issue with long term support.
Really neat features like proper isocronous transport, proper quality of service, hot connection and dynamic reconfigurability made Firewire very useful in a number of professional areas.
Whilst what I described was a docking station scenario, that is mostly to address the question of why it is useful for a Macbook Air. The simple answer is - an Air needs a docking station for many use cases. Once you have a docking station system that really works well an Air starts to make more sense than a high powered laptop.
What makes Thunderbold/LightPeak different to Firewire?
It isn’t Apple proprietory.
Intel are backing it, not competing against it.
The cost of logic to drive it is an order of magnitude cheaper than it was for Firewire a decade ago.
It has much more sensible power specifications.
Thunderbolt subsumes eSATA, ExpressSlot, various docking stations, and Firewire.
The opposition is USB 3, and just how far has that got in two years?
The idea of providing a lane of PCI express as a peripheral connection has been around for a while. There are a number pro level sound recording systems that do just that for instance. An Express Slot connector did the same (although the presence of a USB 2.0 connection in the slot made it easy for some vendors to cheat here.) Bringing a lane of PCI out is a really neat thing. It makes a lot of device driver coding easier, and potentially makes for a very easy eco-system into which new peripherals can be launched. By providing all the nice advantages (hot plug, dynamic reconfig etc etc) as an encapsulation over PCI, Thunderbolt/LightPeak makes all these neat possibilities available in a very user friendly package. USB 3 is about all there is in opposition, and it is a horrid kludge in comparison.
Yeah, that is pretty horrid. On the other hand, the new Macbook Air doesn’t use it - it uses a new PCH chip that simply comes with Thunderbolt, along with all the other I/O functions. Much closer to what I would expect. Doesn’t need a special heatsink either (although it does use the case.) I wonder if the chip in the Macbook Pro isn’t a bit of a throwaway design, it is clearly far to big and nasty for the work it does. The PCH in the Air does vastly more and is smaller.
