Sexy, sleek, gorgeous. An object of lust and desire. ONLY ONE FRICKIN USB PORT YOU MUST BE CRAZY !!!11!!1! Cursed to run OS X. Runs Windows XP fine *and* it’s a Mac. The world’s lightest, thinnest laptop.
But … what’s it *really* like, for normal people – is a Macbook Air the right laptop for you? Unlike professional reviews, here’s my personal, http://t-machine.org review of the MBA (MacBook Air) after almost half a year of daily use and abuse.
Headline Facts
The MacBook Air still has a major problem with over-heating: it is possible on a cool day in winter in England to reliably kill-by-heat a MacBook Air: I’m talking “overheat it to the point the machine starts a high-pitched emergency beeping, having got within spitting distance of the point that Intel CPU’s become permanently damaged” just by running the right (wrong?) programs.
On the other hand, I’ve run it in strong direct sunlight on a hot day on the US West Coast and – without the deadly combination of apps running – it never ever needed to spin-up the fan.
Calling it “the thinnest laptop” is disingenuous (aka “not true” :)): I’ve used Toshibas and Sony Vaios whose thinnest edges were thinner than this thing, and I’ve used laptops whose thickest point was nearly indistinguishable from the MBA. More on this later…
It’s definitely not the lightest laptop. In fact, this is one of the heaviest small laptops on the market (possibly THE heaviest?). Again, more on this later.
It’s expensive – comparatively speaking (it’s well over 50% more expensive than the competing products) – and the SSD option adds an EXTRA 50% to the price (!) – but again, more on that later.
Apparently, it runs Windows XP perfectly (NB: I’ve not tried this yet, I’ll post a separate writeup once I have)
It comes with the latest version of OS X. OS X is still very buggy. I don’t want to bitch, but … when it comes to basic bugs that affect you every day in normal usage, the latest version of OS X has much in common with the infamously crappy Windows 98.
Features that matter – at a glance
I’ll go through all these in more detail, but if you’re wondering if an MBA is for you, or you have a burning quick question, here’s a checklist of the main features that would appeal to you as a user (as opposed to the simple technical factsheets you tend to see on review sites)
- It’s made of solid aluminium: this thing won’t break easily
- Battery life is good: in “real” use, I’ve found it varies from 3.5 to 5 hours – I’ve been to over 5 hours when doing nothing but text editing and image-light website browsing (NB this is the same as the expensive PC laptops, and assumes you’re not heavily using the wireless, which always kills battery life on laptops, and does so FAST)
- You can easily view it in direct sunlight on a cloudless day in summer (US West Coast)
- It has one AND ONLY one USB socket
- It has bluetooth and wifi/wireless built-in (this affects the “only one USB socket” in important ways, see below)
- It has no network (ethernet) socket – you CANNOT plug it into a network (you have to use wireless, or plug in an external USB ethernet adaptor. Into your one-and-only-one USB socket…)
- There are NO expansion ports: you cannot add PC cards / PCMCIA cards
- You cannot upgrade the processor, the hard-disk, or the RAM (sort-of…)
- Contrary to suspicions, it’s actually got *good* 3D graphics power in the GPU – good enough to play modern 3D games
- The battery CANNOT be unplugged/swapped, nor can it be replaced if it breaks (sort-of…)
- It’s not heavy but it’s noticeably heavier than the light+thin PC laptops (1.36kg for MBA versus 1.1kg-1.2kg standard for ultra-thin PC laptops)
- Its fast and responsive in general usage (noticeably much faster than some of the cheap Apple iMac / Mac Mini desktops)
- It has a decent, mostly future-proof, amount of RAM built-in (2GB)
- It overheats easily – even in cool climates like the UK
- It is totally silent. The fan is silent. The hard disk is silent. You cannot tell whether it’s switched on even if you hold it up to your ear and listen carefully (it has a light to tell you its on instead)
- The screen-size is terrible, sometimes literally “unusable”; this is NOT due to the hardware, it’s due to bugs in OS X (and/or Apple’s own applications). When you run Windows XP, the screen-size should be fine.
- It runs Windows XP happily, as well as OS X: you don’t *have* to use OS X if you don’t want to (you can run in Windows nearly all the time, potentially)
- The only built-in mouse is a trackpad (you can use an external mouse or trackball too)
- The trackpad has the iPhone’s “multi-touch” system which is much more useful than you would expect – even for people who never use most of its functionality
- Battery recharge is slow: it typically takes 5 hours to recharge the battery
- The trackpad physical surface is both more robust and more sensitive than average laptop trackpads
- The screen brightness AUTOMATICALLY changes – and changes very fast – as you move through light and shade (e.g. if the sun comes out from behind a cloud and shines through the window)
- It has a built-in web-cam, speakers, microphone, etc
- There’s no VGA-out and no DVI-out – but you get two free converters (about 6 inches long), one that gives you VGA-out, one that does DVI-out. Don’t lose them :(
- For a very small number of USB devices, the USB port is obstructed and you may not be able to get your USB device plugged in
- The keyboard keys are high-quality plastic, and are large and well separated (they’re great for people with large fingers!)
Personal Requirements
I intended to buy a cheap iBook (or MacBook as they now are) – but was horrified to discover that the lightest one available these days weighs in at a stonking 2.7kg. I had no intention of buying an MBA – I know from personal experience that I regularly use 2-3 USB ports at once, and I make huge use of built-in SD card readers (it means carrying fewer cables in order to download photos from my cameras) – plus the lack of swappable battery was a major problem for me. Again, from experience, I know that it is usually a life-saver to have a second battery that you can carry with you.
But I ended up buying the MBA instead. So, I need to put a small bit of explanation here :).
What am I?
I’m a computer games developer, a senior manager, a technology consultant, and a conference speaker. I spend a lot of time in meetings both taking notes and giving demonstrations. Specializing in online games, social networking and web 2.0 properties, I frequently use a laptop to make impromptu demonstrations or to utilize online services during a meeting (e.g. using dopplr in the middle of a meeting). As a frequent conference speaker, and attendee, I go to a lot of conferences around the world and have to lug a laptop around with me, where it has to do all the stuff that a blackberry or PDA isn’t capable of. I have a desktop PC (something that can take a hefty GeForce or Radeon) for playing games at home, but I also need to do some game playing, image editing, and other CPU / GPU intensive stuff on the laptop. Ditto with programming / using an IDE. I can live without any of that, it’s just a big help if I can do it (in limited amounts) on the move.
I’ve also been a SysAdmin for large and small networks of Windows, Linux, and OS X at various companies, and so have a lot of first-hand knowledge of fixing computers and interoperability issues, and getting computers to do what I or other people need them to.
OS X / Applications
Every important application that I need under Windows I can also get on OS X. I have spent most of the last 10 years finding and adapting to cross-platform (Windows + Linux, and to a lesser extent OS X) software because I frequently have to use other people’s machines and have no control over what OS they’ll have installed. So far, I’ve had no problems, largely thanks to people like Adobe having first-class support for Macs, and to frequent use of Java, Perl, et al for writing small tools and applications.
But there’s a few key applications I can only get on OS X, especially ones I only need on a laptop (my main desktop is a Windows XP PC) – for instance Apple’s Keynote – so it had to be a Mac.
Weight
Let’s be clear: this thing is heavy (1.36kg + an extra . It is barely light enough to be tolerable (based on heavy use travelling to meetings, attending conferences with lots of walking around, etc). I’ve used approximately 20-30 laptops over the years, and found experimentally that anything in the 2.5kg – 3.5kg range quickly becomes physically painful to carry around, even with well-padded shoulder bags / rucksacks / etc. Anything in the 1.5kg-2.5kg range becomes painful within a month. Anything at around 1.2kg or less is light enough that you can use a lighter bag to hold it, and you end up carrying it everywhere because it’s no heavier than a hardback paper notebook. No pain, ever.
So, although I really really wanted something as close as possible to 1kg, the MBA is “just about tolerable” at its current weight. Unfortunately, I have to keep emptying out my laptop bag to shave another 500g of weight off – I can’t travel with a separate pen-and-paper notepad any more, for instance – because the combined weight starts causing back pain, bad posture, neck ache, etc.
But it’s by far the lightest laptop that runs OS X, and this ended up being the deciding factor for me.
Cost
Apple Computer Corp: Never knowingly under-priced (never any danger of THAT).
As most long-time Apple owners know, only the rich and obsessive buy Macs at their full price: Apple operates a fantastically good “Refurbished” programme, actually on the main Apple Store website, which gets you an average of 10% to 30% off the price of modern computers.
Unfortunately, there are no refurb’d MBA’s. I doubt you’ll find an MBA on there for a long time yet, and even if you do it’ll almost certainly be snapped up immediately. It’s too slinky, it’s got too little in the way of credible alternatives (assuming it was enough of what you wanted for you to buy it in the first place), and there are only 2 official configurations, so few people will reject a refurb one for being “the wrong” set of hardware options.
However… at £1300 (approx), it’s cheaper than a top-of-the-range desktop gamer PC, and I’ve seen plenty of people buying PC laptops even today that cost as much or more. They – obviously – are packed with more features, more powerful processors, etc – but only slightly more powerful, and traditionally with laptops the thing you pay the biggest premium for is “lightness” (lack of weight), so I think in an absolute sense it’s a reasonable price.
Oh crap. I just spent a paragraph justifying Apple’s high price-tag strategy and claiming it’s actually fair in the wider scheme of things. That’s the first sign (or is it the second?) of becoming an Apple Obsessive. Argh! Oh well. Take it with a pinch of salt…
Summary
Simple summary, without going into the detail that I’ll cram in a followup post: it’s an excellent laptop. Overall, Apple have essentially taken the “best of the things you need and appreciate, including all the small touches” and put them into one laptop. This is reinforced by the lack of configuration options: this is a perfect laptop and YOU ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO QUESTION ITS GENIUS. Or something like that; that’s clearly the *aim* of this laptop (well, actually, my inner engineer is arguing that it was probably just because the limited configurations made it easier for the hardware guys to make sure it all fit in such a small package without breaking).
However. (yes, there’s a “but” – and it’s a BIIIIIG “but”)… I am inclined to say that NO-ONE should buy one of these things: Apple has at least one massive horrendous engineering disaster hiding somewhere in the core of this beast, and the severity (and speed!) of the overheating is really quite scary, especially if you’ver ever (accidentally) melted a computer’s CPU in the past (I’ve done two or three over the past 10 years).
Seriously, Apple: WTF are you playing at? This is not an unknown problem, but there’s no mention of it in the sales literature. This, and the bugs in OS X, are the only two “serious, major” problems I have with the MacBook Air, and I’m on the verge of taking it back for a refund as a result. Which would be a huge shame, because otherwise it’s generally fantastic. And if you’re lucky enough never to trigger the overheating bug, and you can suck it down when it comes to OS X, you’ll probably never have either of these problems. More later on my investigations into the overheating…
On the plus side, when it overheats you KNOW it. You, personally, start to sweat. You soon learn that if you’re feeling really hot for no apparent reason then have a look at the CPU temperature, and be prepared to get the thing in front of a cold desk fan ASAP. I have a vague suspicion this is simply because the case is solid aluminium, and so when it gets hot it acts as a radiator – even though you’re not in the direct line of the heat, the air is being vented away from you, it’s still radiating heat directly into you, across several feet of intervening air.
Next…
In the next post I’ll start going through the details of the various features, the practical problems, and some unexpected benefits I’ve experienced in my time as a a Macbook Air owner. I’ve been collecting a large amount of notes (and some occasional fixes for problems I’ve encountered), but this first post is probably enough for most people just wanting the quick overview.