EightBlack.

Ben, our Technical Director, reckons the way to get traffic to any blog is simply to write something negative about Apple - and within minutes, hoards of ravenous Apple Zealots will show up and beat you into a virtual pulp.

Or something like that.

I’m happy to admit that I’m a Mac convert. Wouldn’t admit to joining the cult just yet. But close.

I received my Mac Air about 6 weeks ago.

As far as travelling goes, the Air is unbeatable. It’s obviously light, the wireless is great and the same Mac features like simply closing the lid when you’re done and the auto detect of any wireless network, are just so user friendly. I don’t think the thing has crashed yet.

But I do have some gripes.

For one, the battery life sucks. The charge times are all over the place. Sometimes it literally takes 5-6 hours to charge the thing. It will last for maybe 2 hours tops. Run video and your toast.

I always buy 2 power supplies with every laptop I own. That way, you can leave one at home and one at the office. The power supply for the Air is actually the same as it is for MacBook Pro’s - but it does have a slightly different end plug. I don’t know why they couldn’t have just standardised the thing - probably because some design nazi at Apple wanted the plug for the Air to be “at one” with the overall look and feel.

Or something like that.

Also, the lack of USB ports. Couldn’t the designers have fitted just ONE more? For example, when I’m at work, the Air looks like it’s connected to life support as I have a USB router connected to it with the printer, the back up drive, the wireless mouse, the keyboard and whatever else there is.

As it is, I have now bought an external CD/DVD drive and an external hard drive for when I travel - so it starts to negate the purpose of a laptop that can fit into a large envelope when you take into consideration all the ancillary crap you have to lug around.

The full size keyboard is nice, although I preferred the “feel” of my MacBook Pro’s keyboard. Screen is exceptional. And the in-built camera works perfectly fine with iChat.

No doubt, the next version will be faster, have a bigger capacity hard drive and maybe Apple will have addressed the power issue. The Apple website reckons you’ll get 5 hours wireless use out of your new MacBook Air. Pigs arse you will.

Maybe they could design one to run off plutonium. I wouldn’t care. Already had kids.

Also, if you work with iMovie a lot (like I do), then the Air will start to hyper-ventilate. Just doesn’t have enough grunt.

My summary. The machine is cool. Would I buy another one? Maybe not. I’d be happy to go back to a Pro for performance and horsepower reasons.

And as far as helping me pick up women or improving my overall image, the Air has done bugger all. C’est la vie.

* Specs for my machine: (1.6 GHz, 80 Gig standard hard drive, 2GB ram)

* Image courtesy SMH

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 7:52 am and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.