Are you pretty much always at high CPU utilization, or is Ubuntu's power management of Mac hardware that poor?

I think a large part of the difference on my machine is that you are forced to use the 9600GT for video as opposed to the more efficient 9600M that is available in OS X.

[1]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-1...

Here is the high level Puppet code to configure everything to my liking: http://paste.pocoo.org/show/379663/

    XKBMODEL="apple"
    XKBLAYOUT="us"
    XKBVARIANT="mac"
    XKBOPTIONS="lv3:ralt_switch,compose:rwin,altwin:swap_lalt_lwin"

I also hate the display adapters Apple forces us to buy and carry around. I give a lot of presentations, and this is another piece of equipment to accidentally leave home. Why not just go VGA or HDMI?

That wouldn't really go together :)

Luckily I realized this before my first conference presentation with the new computer ;-)

Not it's not. HDMI is almost the same size as full DisplayPort (and nowhere near as good a format for computers).

An HDMI Type A connector is 13.9mm x 4.45mm, a mini-DP connector is 7.4mm x 4.5mm. The mini-DP connector is half as wide.

> Apple just loves their own connectors, unfortunately.

You are aware mini-DP is now under VESA and has been integrated by a number of laptop manufacturers right? (and again, that DP in general is a much better A/V interface than HDMI for computers)

It is a lot easier to find screens and beamers with HDMI input than mini-DP. Before that changes it is practically "Apple's own connector"

* It's backwards compatible with DVI-I (and HDMI for that matter): you can carry DVI-I or HDMI signals on a DP cable and only need a passive adapter (although that is limited to single-link on both DVI and HDMI, there aren't enough pins in the DP connector to handle dual-link DVI and HDMI via passive adapters)

* It's packet-based and includes arbitrary pure data transfers (ignoring Thunderbolt) so you don't need a separate data cable to have your screen act as a HUB (USB or 5-in-one for instance), HDMI is TDMS and has no data stream (it comes from TV analog cables)

* It includes a Direct Drive Monitor spec (allows for controller-less monitors which are directly driven off of the displayport signals, although this puts limits on the panel's resolution and color depth)

* DP 1.2 includes independent video streams (to daisy-chain multiple monitors without the need for multiple connectors or a hub), though AFAIK no monitor handles daisy-chaining so far.

* DP includes a mini-connector (mini-displayport) with roughly half the footprint of the full-size one, a boon for ultra-portables (it was developed for Apple, and Apple gifted it to VESA) available under the same royalty-free license-free terms as DP itself (mini-DP was folded into the DisplayPort 1.2 spec)

HDMI is a good A/V standard for TVs, but DP is far superior for computers (and it's driven by computer manufacturers). There is probably a future for both (that's VESA's own party line), but I'd much rather find all my computer video output available as DP first and foremost (with HDMI as an option if they want to).

Edit: They have "mini-HDMI" out, which is an entirely different beast than the mini-HDMI adapters included on many Android smartphones. A mini-HDMI port would require similar adapters to connect to anything useful.

A normal "type-A" HDMI port is a sizeable connector, larger than a USB port.

A normal "type-A" HDMI port is a sizeable connector, larger than a USB port.

Or they knew where they were headed with Thunderbolt...

This could turn into an advantage if the next MBA revision adopts Thunderbolt as its display connector — then you'll have incredibly high-speed access to external storage, which would make the MBA much more practical as a single machine.