Written by on Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Review- The MacBook Air- 20 Days Later

I have been using my MacBook Air for more than two and a half weeks now and that is more than enough time for me to be able to share a few thoughts.

The Air is far from perfect but overall I am incredibly happy with it. The best comparison to my initial and on-going experience with the Air is, not surprisingly, the experience I had when I first began using an iPhone back in August.

Now before you go attacking me as a mindless fanboy (which I am but you don’t need to be nasty about it…) let me explain.

Just as the iPhone significantly changed my overall experience of using a smartphone the MacBook Air has definitely changed how I feel about carrying and using a notebook. And just as the iPhone changed the way I use my smartphone the Air is causing me to change how I use my notebook. (More on that later) While I have experienced far fewer "Wow! This is remarkable" moments with the Air than I had/have with the iPhone, I am still more than a little awed by the device when I use it.

I do not recall a notebook that has received anywhere near the degree of coverage prior to and just after release than the Air has. I have no interest in repeating what has already been written ad nauseam, so there will be no numbers or benchmarks here. Instead, I want to share a few personal thoughts about usability and a few thoughts about what I would change.

Let me get the common stuff out of the way—

Size—

While the Air weighs about what I would hope for an ultra-light notebook, I was more than a little concerned about the size of its footprint since it is no smaller than a 13 inch MacBook in this regard. Turns out, this is a good thing and I am quite pleased with the choice Apple made. Yes, it isn’t a TINY notebook by any stretch but that fact makes it FAR MORE useable. I used a Samsung Q1 with its 8-inch screen for a time. What an amazing experience the Air’s beautiful 13-inch LED is. I suffered with a Fujitsu P1510 and P1610’s functional, but small, keyboard. What a dream it is to type on the Air’s full size keyboard. No, with a footprint similar to the standard MacBook, the Air is not as easy to take everywhere as those smaller devices, but it is so much more functional. Apple made the right choice here.

Trackpad–

I have seen comments that the multi-touch trackpad is little more than a gimmick. Not so. The more I use the Air’s multi-touch trackpad the more intuitive working on the device becomes. I am able to navigate much more easily and quickly than on any prior notebook. And this is only a sign of things to come. It may well be merely a matter of taste and work style, but for me, I won’t use a notebook without multi-touch again and I hope Apple produces something like it for the iMac.

Screen-

Gorgeous. Period.

Speaker-

Small. Whimpy. Mono. Yuck.

Keyboard-

I liked the keyboard on my white MacBook. I love the Bluetooth keyboard I have for my iMac. The Air’s keyboard is BY FAR THE BEST typing experience I have had on a computer. The tactile feel is excellent. The size is “just right”. And the fact that it is illuminated is awesome, making using it in dim light or darkness a breeze. If you do not like Apple’s current keyboard design you are not going to like this keyboard. If you do like the current design, you will love it. I love it.

Battery Life-

I was horrified by the battery life the first few days. In real use, however, I am getting no less than 4 hours when writing and web browsing and, overall, much more than that. I have no complaints at all.

Power-

I have had no issue with the speed of the machine. No, the boot time isn’t the fastest, programs take a few seconds to load and I have not tried to edit video etc, but for my daily use it is plenty speedy. No complaints here either.

Heat—

Maybe I’m just the sensitive type, but I hate working on a machine that can fry eggs. That was one of my biggest criticisms of the MacBook. (That and the cheap plastic feel.) Forget what you have heard- the Air gives off heat. It gets warm while on battery but not uncomfortably so. It gets more than a bit warm when plugged in but not unuseably so. It gives off much less heat that than the MacBook and it is better than anything I have used except for the underpowered UMPCs that didn’t give off any noticeable heat at all.

Optical Drive-

The more I use the Air the more I am convinced that it was designed to be used differently than other notebooks. This is most clearly seen in the lack of an optical drive and the INCLUSION of software to compensate for the decision not to include the ubiquitous DVD drive. While many other devices have forgone an optical drive (has anyone taken a look at ANY of the UMPCs or tablet pcs?) all assumed that an external drive would be used. This is not the case with the Air. Yes, there is an option to purchase an external drive, but the Air is not set up to NEED ONE. That is a huge difference and, in my opinion, it is a positive one. I opted not to purchase the optical drive because I wanted to see if I could go without it. What have I discovered? I can and I will. The remote disk works incredibly well. It is not the fastest way to load new programs on the Air but it works and it works with ease. The only issue I have run up against occurred when I attempted to load a copy of Windows XP remotely as a virtual machine using Parallels. For the life of me I could not get it working. I did eventually load it by first creating an ISO image but I promptly removed it in order to regain the disk space. (Yes, my conversion to Mac is all but complete.)

Storage Space–

Admittedly, the 64GB SSD drive or 80GB hard drive mean MacBook Air has limited storage by today’s standards. Heck, the new iPod Touch has 32GB and my iPod Classic has the same 80GB drive as my notebook! (More in fact since the iPod Classic does have OS X Leopard consuming some of its valuable memory.) I have not, however found this to be an issue for two reasons.

First– I Purged—When I first set up the Air I followed the advice of MacWorld’s Jason Snell’s austerity campaign before getting his Air. Like him I removed as much clutter as possible, leaving only the data and programs I absolutely needed. It is an important first step and I was amazed at how much unnecessary data I already kept on my month’s old iMac. I stripped out all languages except English, Spanish and Hebrew. I removed iMovie etc etc. In doing so I saved gigs of space. But that is only the first part of the Purging Stage.

The second part of purging is to think differently about what I put on the Air and no longer expecting my portable to carry EVERYTHING. It is not dissimilar to the approach I take with the iPhone versus the iPod Classic. The iPod Classic has enough room for pretty much all my music and current TV shows. The iPhone has just 8GB of space and I really only have the option to use 5GB for music and shows. So I CHOOSE which ones I load. The result is that I have everything I really NEED on the Air with space to spare.

Second—I Use Web.

No matter how much purging you do the Air still has a limited amount of storage. In addition, I want to be able to access the file I used last night on my iMac when I am sitting in a coffee shop. That’s where the Web comes in. Between Apple’s .Mac, Amazon’s S3 and a host of other web-based storage solutions the web is now a convenient and inexpensive place to storage a whole lot of data. Prior to getting the Air I rarely used my .Mac account except to keep my devices in sync. I now find it to be a terrific way to store my data and keep it in sync between my two machines. Best of all, every meg of data I keep there is one less meg of data I need to have on my Air. It not only works, it works well.

It is exactly the kind of “new thinking” that makes the Air an awesome device and it furthers the change in approach that began for me when I got the iPhone. When used with the Web, the iPhone is one is one powerful device. The same holds true for the Air.

Connectivity-

In my humble opinion Apple blew it here. As I have written previously, Apple had a chance to change the playing field in a big way but failed to do so. To have a device with limited ports, that is web dependent and carries the name Air but neglect to give it a 3G internal modem just doesn’t make sense to me. Especially when WWAN connectivity is an increasingly common option, especially on devices targeted to the mobile profession. However all is not lost.

First, my ATT USB modem fits into the Air’s (single??) USB port without an issue.

It isn’t the most convenient or elegant solution but it works. In addition, options now exist for using a Windows Mobile Device as a modem and a jailbroken iPhone can even serve the purpose (although it is Edge slow and may put your data plan at risk with ATT.) All of these solutions work. Apple could have done it so much more elegantly and they didn’t. Too bad.

Things look a bit better with Bluetooth. I was concerned at first because when I tried to use either my Samsung SBH170 Bluetooth stereo headphones or my Sony VGP-BRM1 Bluetooth gateway device the sound was awful. The connection was weak and there were frequent pops and crackles- good for cereal but not for music. I was more than a bit disappointed, especially since the mono speaker on the Air is terrible! A few days later, however, I tried both devices again and low and behold each worked fine. They connected and paired easily and worked perfectly. They make listening to music on the Air a pleasure.

So What would I change?

1. The hard drive-
I don’t mind the 80GB drive. It works fine for me. But with just the slightest increase in thickness they could have used the 160GB drive from the higher capacity iPod Classic. And they should have. Even at a few mm thicker the Air would be a beautiful design to behold.

2. Memory Slot-
Even Sony got with the program and put a standard SD slot in their second-generation reader along side their proprietary (read- "ridiculous") memory card format. Had Apple put an SD slot, or even a mini or micro SD slot behind the port door it would have alleviated some of the memory capacity sting people are feeling. The capacities of these cards are so high and growing every day. It would have been a simple and an easy solution to the 80gb drive. But nooooooo!

3. 3G-
I won’t belabor the point. Okay, I will.
How the hell can you call something the AIR, plan for it to use a good deal of the power and storage of Web 2.0 and only give it two of the three common forms of connectivity????? Come on…..

Conclusion–

So what do I like most about the Air? I love the fact that it is a super light but that once I open it up I am working on just another MacBook. The keyboard and screen are a dream. The weight is good. It runs OS X Leopard. And, the more I use it, the less of a compromise the compromises seem to be.

At the end of the day it comes down to this question—

Almost three weeks into having the Air am I feeling any buyer’s remorse? Not in the slightest. I am beyond happy with this notebook.
It isn’t perfection but it is pretty amazing and I can’t recall enjoying using a device this much.

And that says it all.

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