11.6" MacBook Air Review
Why I Sold my MacBook Pro & iPad
I loved my 12” PowerBook G4. It was an awesome form factor, and weighed only 4.6 pounds. I bought it only six years ago, and now I have a machine that’s exactly half the weight, is exponentially faster, is more durable, has more pixels (better resolution), and allows me to do everythingI need it to.
When I purchased my 11.6” MacBook Air (1.6ghz, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD), I simultaneously sold my 13” MacBook Pro and iPad. I don’t regret it for a second. All in all, I saved about $300 and arguably simplified two devices into one. I used the iPad mostly to consume media, and it was great at that, but so is my iPhone. I found it much more convenient to read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and assorted blogs from my phone than on the iPad. The iPad doesn’t travel around in your pocket, and is very awkward if not impossible to hold while multi-tasking (ok…or eating your Lucky Charms). The iPad has a similar footprint to the MacBook Air, and still weighs 1.5 pounds. For an extra .8 pounds, I now have a fully functional machine that boots in under ten seconds and has a full keyboard. To me, it’s a no brainer.
Performance
I’m coming from a 2.53Ghz MacBook Pro that has much better specs than the MacBook Air. Surprisingly, for most of what I do the MacBook Air is actually faster. This can be attributed to the ultra quick solid-state drive. There are some applications that lag (opening 1MB+ Excel files), but this simply means waiting five seconds instead of two. I was worried that the processor-intensive task of importing a movie into an M4V file with HandBrake via the external SuperDrive would take a long time. Fortunately, it managed to import a 1 hour 45 minute film in roughly 50 minutes.
The first day that I had the Air, I got a pretty ugly pattern of colors on the screen. Once restarted, it appeared normal again and since installing the firmware upgrade (that makes the machine more reliable after waking from sleep), I haven’t seen it since. The only other incident that I’ve had occurred when unplugging an external monitor, the machine froze at the intermittent blue screen and (ironically) froze completely.
The Only Machine?
I am completely comfortable using the Air as my only machine. In fact, thanks to the 1366×768 resolution, I can fit more on the screen traveling than I could with my 13” MacBook Pro. I do, however, find it much more comfortable to use my external monitor, keyboard, and mouse when docked at home. I am currently storing all of my music on the drive permanently, and have all of the major applications installed with a spare 65GBs. Thanks to an external hard drive, I can dump 10+ movies for a long trip onto the internal drive. Much of my work is done in the cloud (SalesForce!), and thus isn’t particularly taxing. Office 2011 for the Mac is a great improvement on Office 2008. Data seems to flow much more fluidly between Mac Excel and Windows Excel. Why does this matter? Well, I am much more hesitant to install Windows on the Air with only 128GB to work with. Fortunately, I haven’t needed to yet.