PB145 vs MBA 11, originally uploaded by kjhealy.

I bought an 11" MacBook Air last month, and I really like it. Thanks to the solid-state drive it’s quicker than it has any right to be. The only thing I missed from my MBP was the infra-red receiver — I bought an old Keyspan Keynote Remote instead, which works perfectly with RemoteBuddy. (The dedicated remote is more convenient than using a phone, and RemoteBuddy lets you do useful things like flip through slides without showing them on the projector screen, which is handy during lectures and the Q&A after talks.)

I wanted, though, to see how the Air would fare in a simple test against one of its ancestors. I bought a PowerBook 145B in March of 1994 and it served me through much of graduate school. It’s got a 25Mhz 68030 processor, four megabytes of RAM and a 40MB harddrive. (Those are all “ems” and not “gees” there, kids.) It runs System 7.1. But despite being such a seemingly underpowered dinosaur, it nevertheless cold-booted faster than any computer I’ve owned since.. The two go head-to-head in the video.