07-31-11
My First Day with the New Macbook Air
Design
The design of the MacBook Air is not particularly new to Apple however, over the last 3 years or so nobody seems to have been able to replicate it. This is a telling indicator that Apple’s R&D department have a plenty of capital and time to go after future thinking design concepts, coming to market with something other manufacturers don’t seem to even thought of yet. The day this approach to hardware dies, is the day that Apple becomes run of the mill.
Even thinner and more precisely put together than my old MacBook Pro I find myself wondering how a computer can fit in a space this small! The keyboard is laid out perfectly (I love Apple’s keyboard design so much I even bought one for my work PC a few months back), the space between the keys helps you to avoid mashing two at once. There is a good feel to the scissor keys and while they have relatively shallow key travel, there is no doubting you have made the keystroke you intended to. The LED backlighting under the keys is very welcome and in my opinion essential on a portable. The display is still glossy but not the glass glossy panel that makes the MacBook Pro hard to use in bright spaces or near windows.
Apple’s unibody design has shone through again as being strong but incredibly light – holding the laptop by one corner while moving between rooms is natural and no flex or weaknesses are apparent. The one thing instantly apparent is the lack of ports – there are now 6 in total, that’s four less than the 13” MacBook Pro. Unless you are someone who connects to high-speed peripherals or needs wired network access often, this shouldn’t be a problem.
If anyone was looking for a compact well-designed ultraportable – this is it.
Speed
The new MacBook Air has already been hyped for it’s benchmark scores the world over – “2x faster”, “better than the 2010 13” MacBook Pro”, “biggest leap Apple has made in a long time”, etc, etc but that speed in performing image resizes and intricate maths for a score translates incredibly well to daily computing tasks. I ran a GeekBench test myself and the results put this Macbook Air in the same league as the base 27″ 2010 iMac.
Booting from power off takes under 20 seconds, opening Mail or Safari is faster than you can reach from the trackpad to the keyboard to input the URL you are looking for. Even more complex applications such as Photoshop CS5 and Aperture open snappily and respond quickly. I can’t name any task which this MacBook Air could do faster or better.
Bloggers and pundits put this down to the SSD and the i5 processor (I opted for the BTO i7 option) but I put it down to a great meeting of the hardware and modern OS. Apple is at the pinnacle of optimization with their personal computers – they have taken realistic hardware and paired it with an excellent operating system to create a winner.