Macbook Air 11"...48 hours in

This weekend I caved in to a long term desire to splurge a lot of money on a macbook air. I made the trip out to the apple store on sunday, walked in and asked the rather surprised Apple lackey for a Macbook Air 11" with the upgraded cpu/ram/SSD. Still seeming quite confused that I knew what I wanted, he got one out of the back and I was out within 3 minutes.

I've had over 48 hours with it now, and wow am I impressed. I use both PCs and Macs, running windows and OSX..and have owned a fair share of both pc+mac laptops over the years, but none of them comes close to the air.

First the looks of it - stunning is one way to put it. Sheer disbelief that you could get a computer into a case so thin would be another. There's lots of ways to put it, but it's a lovely looking machine, that in many ways has quite an understated appearance - i'd expect it to function more like a cheap netbook than a laptop, but the reality is quite the opposite.

Im sure most people know the basis specs now, but this current model is the 1.6ghz core2duo, 4gb ram, gefore 320m, 128gb SSD, 11" LED backlit screen. On the face of it this is very underpowered..old technology that won't stand up to much. I have heard the air called a "glorified netbook" many times..all by people that have never used one.

I've had time to install a fair amount of stuff - PKR poker room software (notorious for performing badly and heating up laptops), parallels with a windows 7 ultimate install (with visual studio 2010 installed), X-Code, flash CS5, chrome, perian, vlc etc, and i've been very impressed with the performance. Running windows 7 in coherence mode I was able to load up and work on some reasonably large solutions without any performance problems, at the same time as playing a song in iTunes and copying some files to my NAS. Not that I would ever seriously code on an 11" laptop, but it was a good test. More real world, it's perfectly happy with PKR, safari, chrome, itunes and adiumx all at once, without even a hint of slowdown.

Oh I also installed World of Warcraft, which was giving me 40-50fps with medium settings. Nice.

So basically, performance wise, i'm very happy with the machine. It is just as good as my friends macbook pro 13" (aka, macbook), but weighs half as much and looks twice as good.

Aside from it's stunning looks, the casing does feel very sturdy, and it's very very portable, almost fits into your pocket. All the now standard mac features are included of course - facetime camera, glass multi touch trackpad, magsafe, and they just contribute to the very premium feel here.

OSX is still going to be a love/hate thing, but I love it personally, and with parallels there to let me run any legacy windows stuff that I still need, I can finally use it as my main portable OS again.

I see the macbook air as almost an "Ultimate" iPad. I was considering buying a tablet but i've always been put off by the lack of a real keyboard, and the lack of "real" applications. The air fills this space for me - very portable, very light, great battery life, yet still more than enough power to take over from my main machine when it needs to.

But amongst my gushings of how wonderful this machine is, there are still some niggles.

First - the price. It's expensive, there is no way around that. I do feel that the premium quality here justifies it, and there is really zero competition apart from the Sony X Series (which is in the same ballpark price wise), but it does scare me a little when I think how much I have spent. Probably as i've been used to sub £800 laptops for many years now.

Second is the bits that have been left out. No SD card reader on the 11", no backlit keyboard, no IR port. All little things but they would have been a nice addition.

Apart from that though I can't find a negative point to list..trust me I am trying ;) I never use the optical drives on a laptop so I don't miss that so much, an ethernet port would be nice but I have a USB adaptor that works with it, so its no big deal.

All in all I love my mac air, and recommend you go and get one today. More importantly, if you are thinking about the 13" macbook...give the air a serious thought - the price is about the same, the performance is about the same, but the air is just a better machine, if you can live without a CD drive.

No IR port, am I been stupid or are you complaining about the lack of IRDA, its 2010! I would never mark someone down for that, bluetooth has taken over competley. Thou I grant you it was quite a laugh watching someone try to set up a headset on skype on OSX...

I've spent only about 6 hours using an air, you have to give it to them, the form on the base is just loverly, it almost effortlessly sits balanced on any cussion or whatever whilst your lounging on the sofa.

But the keys, the 11" form factor is always a compramise, its actually quite big, but just not there, to me there was far too much spacing between the keys, i'm an experianced touch typisist so maybe "i knows what i likes".

I was considering one of these for my ultra portable, main requirement something that can log into work network, plenty of battery life, and larger screen that my VAIO p series.

But I found a couple of things quite quickly trying to put some photo's on a friends, it gets hot, I don't mean warm, I mean damned hot. Hers I think had less RAM but it struggled so badly to try and process some RAW shots from my k20d, not impressed at all.

Then there is the SSD and the cost, it is perhaps the second slowest SSD I've ever used, and with no TRIM, questionable firmware I wouldn't like to use it for anything like VS2010 (just watch the disk churns). But then again my WHS makes wipe + install easy so perhaps thats not an issue.

On the cost front its actually not too bad, compare it to say the Z series, and its cheap, but then again its kinda like saying this merc is cheap next to a maybach. Toshiba have some offerings in the space which are a lot better value, some weigh less, but are often even worse hardware except for one thing.

The screen.

The screen is really crap, its colour range is stinted and my god it shows, it shows in films, it shows in photos and really shows in aRGB stuff, it makes these old work TN panels here seem good.

In all its an odd format, and the lack of integrated 3G makes me think its quite useless overall for my needs of a ultra portable device with work connectivity. Combined with a turd of a screen, the price is just to high.

But the case is the prettiest on the market by a wide margin, however its not durable so your going to always have to keep it padded, which makes it bulkier.

fair enough, each to their own :)

The IR port is important for a mac because of the mac remote - I have a bunch of them now from previous macs, but I miss it on this model. It's not a critical point as I don't plan on using this as a media station, but it would be nice.

I agree on the screen as it is a TN panel, but then for what it's used for it's not a big deal. Never going to be used for serious design work or anything that relies on proper colour matching, so whilst it's annoying that a premium product has a standard screen, again it's not the end of the world.

TRIM support should be coming with OSX Lion, although it's generally accepted that it's not really important with OSX due to how disk writes occur (must admit thats a case of me repeating what i've heard - no evidence for this!).

Mine doesn't get hot either - I know this is an issue on the older airs, and on the 13", but the 11" stays nice and cool :)

Thanks for the great review, I must confess that it would be on my fantasy wish list, but couldnt realistically justify at present.
On the other hand, I have harped on for ages about my HP DM1 which I obtained back in August 2010, and recently upgraded with an SSD and more RAM.

Of course in many ways it's not really a competitor since a) it cost £400 (including the SSD upgrade) b) completely different design aims c) inferior build quality (i guess, not having touched an air) d) Windows not mac and e) integrated graphics.
Against that however (and the reason that I mention it) is that it's an 11.6" laptop, portable with great battery life, fast enough (although only really since the upgrades, and YMMV).

A poor-man's Air? I certainly think that one can do worse, and easily helps you decide if the form-factor works for you or not.

Oh indeedily, and 6 hours isn't enough to really judge something like that espesually as it wasn't in one go.

But the thing is, I think I posted on Hexus too, that I quite wanted one when they were announced, then I read the spec sheet.

The screen is unforgivable for me, how come my vaio P series has so many more pixels, dispite been smaller, cheaper, thinner, lighter. I can get over having to have a usb cable to get at my photos, but in all as a camera accompanyment it just can't cut it compared to a P series vaio. That bloody thing can't even run photoshop remotely well. Adjust a slider, chug chug chug, battery life drops! So it amazes me no one has filled this nieche.

It also happens it would be my perfect remote working machine if it had a good screen and 3g built in.

The problem is, given the price premium its unacceptable. I ended up spending the better part of 2.1k on a Z series which was reduced from 3k, so maybe I'm comparing it to something even more pricey, which makes it wrong for me to be rude about its specs, but what the hey, I have. I just found too much missing, does nothing better than competition, expensive and well classic apple.

If they sort the screen, bring in a battery refresh program (or some way of getting a new battery without been arse raped), put in SD, improve the keyboard I'd be very tempted, even if they charged a wee bit more.

Had a play with them and I am impressed myself, pretty much what I want in a notebook, No optical drive, not really needed on a notebook these days for me, happy to have rid for a thinner machine / something else / more battery life ect.
The higher res screen and more powerful GPU though were the main draws for me, I have been moaning about screens in general a lot lately and to see Apple take there screens up a step does impress me.
That said though I do currently have a Macbook 13" unibody (not the pro), Core 2 Duo and a 9400m GPU so cant justify it as it would be a very small upgrade, however when they refresh them with Sandy Bridge chips then ill be getting one :)

Fab little machines.

In terms of useability it's much better than my 2.53 macbook pro.

Yes the processor is slower, but 99% of the time, that makes no difference. When the SSD make working much faster.

Yes I could stick a ssd in my mbp, but this just goes to show you the difference between an SSD and mechanical hd based computer.

Buy one.

Heh. My I just bought one for the other half. Should be here by the weekend.
Thanks for the review, makes me feel a little better about the splurge.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheAnimus

If they sort the screen, bring in a battery refresh program (or some way of getting a new battery without been arse raped), put in SD, improve the keyboard I'd be very tempted, even if they charged a wee bit more.

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Never know, you may get your wish in August when the new ones are expected..I would guess that since it can't get much thinner without sacrificing battery or usability, they will squeeze more into them..an SD slot on the 11", maybe get the keyboard backlight back..although not sure they will change the layout that much, they have pretty much stuck with this one on their laptops since the switch to Intel CPUs.

I guess the battery is where you will be out of luck - they cost about £50 for a 3rd party replacement, and are not too difficult to fit according to iFixIt, or Apple will do it for £99. I only just looked that up..but im actually surprised, I figured Apple would charge more like £200, thats much more them..

Animus: You looked at an HP Elitebook 2540P?
12.1" Screen
I7
4GB Ram
SSD
DVDRW
6 Cell Battery.
Nice keyboard.
3G is an option iirc.

Intel HD graphics and a 1280 x 800 screen, meh.

A worse screen than the macbook air!

Tbh I'm happy with the Z series, whilst its 13" having a screen with so many pixels is damned nice.

Spud, don't suppose you play COH do you? Just curious how it would run.

The Dell Vostro V130 looks interesting:

http://www.dmxdimension.com/dell-uk/...al-comparison/

It also does not have a glossy screen.

The Toshiba Satellite R630 has a reinforced magnesium alloy frame and also has a matt screen too:

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Toshi...EN/version.asp