Thoughts on the Macbook Air

From past posts I’ve written, people can probably tell I’ve been waiting a long time for the MacBook Air, or at least the successor to my phenomenal 12” G4 PB (which is still the greatest computer I have ever owned).

So, how does the MBAir stand up then as far as my personal requirements go ? I have the 80 GB HDD version for testing (I’d asked for the SDD version for testing, but no dice).

First, some caveats… I’m not your typical target audience. I head up IT for a large global charity, I take my laptop back and forth to work with me each day and virtually everywhere when I travel and am rarely out of contact with it for more than a day (read: obsessed). Even then, since I write, ponder and use my laptop as an outboard brain it has a lot more about having power at my fingertips than making sure I’m up on the latest email. I dislike blackberries and their ilk (had a palmpilot way back but it was never enough—though admittedly have not tried the iPhone yet) because I find they make me reactive rather than encouraging me to focus on getting things done, and I simply find them impossible to use for getting serious work done.

Basically, I live out of my laptop like its a suitcase and a large part of what I do in the world and communications with others is mediated through my laptop, so I need something reliable, effective, portable and powerful enough to get things done with.

So, this is what I’ve been thinking :

Damn, it looks sexy. It’s bright and shiny and appeals to my magpie brain that wants to collect such things. You could use this thing as some sort of gigantic thrown aluminium shuriken for taking down enemies it’s so thin. I’m sure the next Bond villian’s henchman will use this for lopping off heads Oddjob-style (in fact, I may practice this for handling some fairly annoying individuals in meetings).

So, I can’t complain about the weight or the dimensions. My only real complaint about the 12” PB was that its screen real estate seemed paltry now that I’ve got a 13” Macbook. Packing that much screen and a solid keyboard into the machine is an excellent design decision from my perspective. The external DVI will drive an external 24” monitor which is more than sufficient for my needs (at work, I’ve just got another 15” one).

The screen is bright and the keyboard is excellent (though I had to adjust to an annoying British one which caused issues – will definitely be buying it with a US keyboard.

The press complaining about the lack of the optical drive, or rather, the need to have an external puzzles me. Basically, every standard ultralight laptop I can think of worth the money (even the Dell D430s we standardize on in the office) have external DVD drives or media slices with the exception of the IBM X300 (which I am also testing out at the moment on Ubuntun and it seems excellent). I’ve rarely found this a problem as I tend to rip DVDs before I go travel while at home as it is much more energy efficient to watch them off the hard drive than the optical drive.

The wireless only option is puzzling and seems to have been a “first world” design decision. Fact is, outside of North America, free wireless connectivity is quite rare, if it exists at all, and a lot of corporate offices block it period, so this seems to be a misstep to me (though I was surprised how available wireless was in Turkey for instance). I mean, you can carry a usb-ethernet converter, but again, not many would want to though I imagine the size of the RJ45 jack would have made this tricky to keep its profile. And especially with the lack of 3G wireless WWAN. In Europe especially, where wireless costs less money a lot of people are opting for this option which means you use the high speed mobile phone networks (GPRS/3G) as your internet provider from virtually anywhere. This is an amazing option in Western Europe and means you just need to pop in a SIM card from your carrier in order to get this working. Dell has this on its machines, as does IBM, I honestly have no idea why it’s not in the MBAir and I see it as a serious oversight. You can use a USB modem dongle, but you’ll notice that this seems to be the hack solution to a lot of problems. It does destroy my little visualized fantasy about using this thing on the Eurostar right up to the tunnel to get things done. I honestly believe Apple could have seized a huge amount of the personal market for laptops nailing the 3G stuff.

Battery life, by all reports, seems not much better than any other mac laptop at the 2 hourish mark, and much, much less than the imaginary 5 they keep reporting even with the SSD. I imagine with the solid state drive that will be better, but considering IBM with its high capacity drive can now get you nearly 8, good enough for a trans-Atlantic flight this is kinda disappointing. Still, it’ll get me to Paris on the Eurostar working fine, so I’m not too upset (plus a lot of places except planes have things you can plug into for power now).

Reliability is something that time will tell. Aluminum for the body seems like a good idea. I know my 12” PB fared much better at my hands than my MacBook has. I can tell it’s not going to make out the year despite my trying to coddle it. I really do need something that has the survivability of an AK47. But it doesn’t feel that tough, which is a concern. Of course, with it being so thin and light you’ve got plenty of room for neoprene padding though before sliding it into the backpack.

Hard drive capacity and speed is probably my biggest concern. My laptop is my primary computer so it has a lot of historical info on it from mail to journals to photos, plus my music all of which suck up some considerable hard drive space. And while my current 160GB drive has a good 60 GB left after I cleaned up after Leopard, it still means that the MBAir would need to have some serious choices made (or a lot of cruft dropped which may be possible too). True, my 12” G4 PB from a few years ago only had 80 GB, but one of the reasons I upgraded to a new one was the fact it was running out of hard drive space. And 4200 is dog slow to be honest. It really makes a difference whenever you’re running quite a few apps at the same time and the machine has to swap (that is the very good reason 2GB RAMis standard). SSD probably corrects this but still, that’s a lot of extra money to pay and you drop down to 64GB of SDD space.

Environmentalism is another big pull for me, which may seem strange, but Apple’s computers are quite toxic and they’ve got a lousy enviromental footprint… until now. Now if I buy this maybe my buddy Ze (who runs the Green My Apple campaign) will start talking to me again.

Power of the computer doesn’t bother me at all. I never switched from my 12” G4 PB because it wasn’t fast enough. Truth is, most of the stuff I do is mail, internet comms, office producitivty apps, surfing, blogging, writing, systems administration work (generally over ssh) and development work on web applications. So, I don’t need killer cruncher graphics on the MacBook Pro side like some people seem to think they need (I won’t be chopping and slicing films on the thing is what I’m saying). So, yeah, the processors plus the 2GB of memory will be very sufficient (though an upgrade to 4GB would be sweet).

So, will I get one ? I’m going to do the wait and see. I could see myself getting a second generation one of these, though with IBM bringing out their X300 (and a constant guilt I should be switching back to Linux), it makes sense to hold off. I really need a bigger hard drive though or to go through my entire hard drive and clean out some serious cruft. And I’d love to see the SSB model drop down in price a bit and increase in capacity. Mmmm…

Still, it’s an extremely promising machine and it was one of the first machines I wanted to take a look at when we needed to approach our hardware vendor to look at the next generation machines we need as laptop (ok, admittedly probably not these, but it didn’t hurt to look).

Personally, I really do think this is an all in one computer for loads of people. I especially think it would be great for me, and have to admit I am going to have trouble returning it to our hardware vendor since it is a really nice piece of hardware. Small things about it are fantastic like the backlit keyboard and the fact they’ve modified the function keys on the basic keyboard to handle things like exposé and dashboard (though I never use dashboard), backlighting levels and music (though these are things I’ve got hotkeyed on my own system via utilities like SizzlingKeys). I really like the bigger trackpad features and the gestures. I messed around with rotating pictures and pdfs just for the hell of it as well as increasing the size by expanding my pinch fingers. I know it’s stupid, but I increase the size of things on the mac all the time so I can tell I’m going to love that one. Especially with the photos

I did notice a little sluggishness when you’re doing more than a few things which I think has more to do with the slow hard drive and the graphic card lightness than anything else. No big, but I do generally run quite a few proggies so could be an issue.

One interesting thing I noticed. Side by side with my macbook the screen on the Macbook Air is even crisiper and brighter than the Macbook, which I was always shocked was so much crisper and brighter than the 12” G4 Powerbook. That alone makes it a nicer computer to work with in terms of eye fatigue.

Basically, though, if you’re willing to put up with its very balanced, design compromises, this is one awesome piece of hardware and a portable, fashionista dream. I think I’m going to try and hold off until the next generation though as it still lacks that all-in-one solution I need as my primary (and only machine). They are bound to increase the hard drive size in the next version which would make it just about perfect for me. Hurry up Steve, jonezing for it already.