A Quick Two-Week MacBook Air Review

Two weeks ago I purchased a new MacBook Air and I thought I would share all aspects of my user experience so far.

The model I bought is the 11" 124GB HD w/ 4GB of RAM and a 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5 Processor. It is running OSX 10.7 (Lion). The way my graduate program is set up, nearly all of my reading is done online so having a reliable computer that I can easily carry to school is important. I switched from a 5 year old MacBook with a failing internal hard drive.

Size: 

The size of this computer is awesome. Perhaps this is the first truly mobile computer. I've actually noticed that this computer (and probably all Macs running Lion) acts more like my iPhone. I'll get into the nuances of this later. I've watched movies and played video games on this small screen without feeling like it's too small. However, when I run programs like Dreamweaver or Word I do miss the extra work space. Sometimes windows will open larger then the screen and I'll need to resize them to be able to work with them. Also when editing documents with small text (Word, HTML...) I tend to lean in closer to my computer then I have ever before.

The balance of the computer is a bit off. It feels like it could easily be tipped over. When I lightly push on the top of the screen it easily tips backwards. This also makes it difficult to open with one hand. Instead of opening, the computer will rock back toward the hinge. I do not foresee this to be a problem over an annoyance. The computer is very light in weight which is why I bought this computer.

Functionality:


The MacBook Air is sold without an optical drive. I was not really worried about this because I rarely ever put CDs into my computer anymore. However, it is difficult to get around CDs when you first begin using a new computer. I had two new applications I needed to load that I bought from my campus bookstore plus I had professors giving me CD-ROMS full of readings. The nice thing about Macs is that they can share optical drives with each other. This means I can use the optical drive on my older MacBook to load these programs onto my computer. The downside of course is that both computers will need to be present for this to work. Perhaps this computer is ahead of the game here. It will be interesting to see if software programs will begin to sell their products as digital downloads even when sold through vendors like campus bookstores.

The hard drive capacity is the same as on my previous MacBook but I wanted to create a system of storing all of my data on an external hard drive. The system I am now using is the GoFlex Home by Seagate. (Costco had a great deal on these!) This is a 2TB hard drive that syncs to my computer wirelessly from home. I believe I can even access my files from the web but have not played around with this much. The wireless transfer rate is really slow compared to USB or Firewire but once the data is on the server it can instantly be accessed. I now keep all of my music on the hard drive which frees up a ton of space on my computer. It's great! Of course if I leave home I need to transfer a playlist onto my iPhone or else I'll have no music. I'll need to get creative when I go on my first vacation. The hard drive dock even has a USB port so I can plug my printer into it and print wirelessly.

Lion:

Perhaps the only downsides so far has been with the new Lion OS. Not all of my previous programs work with this OS. I image eventually these programs will begin to work. For example Time Machine cannot sync with my new wireless hard drive but it does sync with my older Mac running Snow Leopard. The SFTP client I use (Fugu) also does not work with Lion. This was really problematic last week when I was trying to get a webpage I had worked all day moved onto my Unix account. As I said, I image these will all begin to work at some point.

On the positive side, Apple has create an OS that mirrors their mobile applications. This means that scrolling on the touchpad is similar to the way you would scroll on an iPhone/iPad. In previous versions of OSX they were reverse. What this means is that scrolling is completely backwards to the way I use to do it. It took a couple of days for me to get use to it.

I also really like all the new shortcuts that were added with Lion. Launchpad gets me to my apps with a single click, my document folder is always open and accessible and downloads are always found in the same place! These are great.  

Overall, I really like this computer and would encourage anyone looking for a truly mobile computer to consider it. I've been a Mac user for just under 5 years now and have always been pleased with their products. Right now I think their computers are a bit overpriced compared to other options. I looked into other mobile computers and none of them seemed to be as powerful as this computer. Still, I do believe it is worth the money I've paid for it.