About a week ago I bought the new MacBook Air. I used to have the first generation MacBook Air as my primary computer. The first model, to put it plainly, was just about fine. These things s*#@$§ about it:
- One USB port
- Slow speed
- Standard 80GB HD
- Batterylife very very short
All of these things make the computer perfect for browsing, but as soon as you open iPhoto, the thing starts to heat up like a sauna and it basically takes you 10 minutes what takes you 1 minute to do on an iMac.
Buying the new MacBook Air I was incredibly relieved to finally have two USB ports. Dealing with one USB port for almost 2 years, it did seem rather surreal to sync an iPhone and an iPad at the same time. But that just on a side note. So connectivity is amazing.
Keeping my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on external drives, I am pretty much settled for enough disk space with the 256GB SSD. But even better, this SSD is lighting faaaasszzt. My quick benchmark was to geek-command Apple + Shift + A, Apple + A and finally Apple + O in the Finder. The result was beyond anything I had imagined: all applications were fully launched within four seconds.
Unlike the first MacBook Air, this new generation has it’s own graphic card. Along with the upgraded 2.13Ghz Intel processor and an added 2GB of RAM (totalling 4GB RAM), I should have enough speed to install Windows and play Mafia 2. Seems like the slow speed is fixed as well.
Though, the real stunner about this laptop is not it’s lightness or it’s thinness, it is the batterylife. Browsing, listening to music and maybe writing a few Word documents with display brightness set to around 50%, this tiny computer easily gets 8 hours out of a single full charge. Just wow!
I have been thinking hard to try and find a con about this laptop. But, there just don’t seem to be any. You don’t need a disc drive, nor do you need the backlight keyboard. Firewire is dead and you have stereo sound. You have a high-density display and a good camera. It’s out of durable aluminium and doesn’t have a glass-covered display. I just can’t think of any reasonable bad thing about this laptop without making the argument sound redundant or stupid. In other words, this laptop is perfect. It truly is perfect.
- Connectivity: 10/10 (enough for daily purposes)
- Speed: 9/10 (why no iCores?)
- HD Space: 10/10 (enough and speedy)
- Batterylife 20/10 (stunning)
So for those who have been skimming to read my conclusion, here it is: 10/10.
