I LOVE my 11.6 mba, 1.4ghz, 4gb, thoughts of performance for potential buyers

[dgdosen]

What's the corners / trackpad hack about? I've been using F1 to switch spaces when I don't have my Magic Mouse hooked up (and then bind middle-click to it).

Rob

I use three finger up and down swipes for expose and spaces, respectively. For that you need a hack tool like BetterTouchTool.

I have the three finger swipes on in the trackpad - but that only goes back and forth. That then allows me to add hooks into three fingers up and down... I think it's great! It's especially useful when only using a single screen - as you never lose your mouse pointer, and it makes it very easy to switch apps or screens. I was a big fan of doing this on my hackintosh....

 

[Rob.G]

The screen size is okay for me. And that's coming from 1920x1200 on my 17" MBP. I've had much less trouble coding (using Eclipse) than I thought, due to the smaller size.

I LOVE the keyboard. I think it has a better feel than my MBP. The only "issue" is that you have to be very careful to not put pressure on the kb with your right thumb when typing, or you'll "click" the touchpad and make the cursor jump and/or lose focus. I've trained my hand to not do that anymore so it's rarely an issue.

As for space, I have 128 gig and it's tight. 256 would let me keep all the files with me that I want. For now I have a 1TB external for that, but it's not convenient to use unless I'm at a desk and plugged into power since it uses computer power, and would suck the battery down even more. Likewise, on battery, I don't often use my Verizon USB 3G modem; instead I turn on the WiFi hotspot on my Droid X phone, since it preserves the MBA's battery.

Memory-wise, with 4 gig, it also does surprisingly well. Right now as I type this, I have seven copies of Chrome running, one copy of Firefox, one Terminal, Eclipse, the new Mac App Store, Forklift, VirtualBox with a running Windows XP guest session (which I gave 768 meg of RAM), which is running MSSQL. I also have ColdFusion 9 server running, Skype, TweekDeck, and TextEdit. I'm only 225 meg into swap, I have 1 gig inactive, 2 gig active, and 1.07 gig wired (whatever that means).

Rob

 

[size100]

Memory-wise, with 4 gig, it also does surprisingly well. Right now as I type this, I have seven copies of Chrome running, one copy of Firefox, one Terminal, Eclipse, the new Mac App Store, Forklift, VirtualBox with a running Windows XP guest session (which I gave 768 meg of RAM), which is running MSSQL. I also have ColdFusion 9 server running, Skype, TweekDeck, and TextEdit. I'm only 225 meg into swap, I have 1 gig inactive, 2 gig active, and 1.07 gig wired (whatever that means).

Rob

wired would be the osx and the virtual box. inactive is stuff left in the memory but basically 'free'. So you're still way under the choke point. What are your page-outs and what is your uptime?

 

[jamesryanbell]

I'm posting this reply from an 11.6" MBA Air at the Apple Store in Houston. I LOVE that it has a full size keyboard. Great move. I think I'm destined to own one of these. I think I'd want to sell either my iPad 3G 64GB or my late '08 MBP to make it happen though. I'd have to get the Ultimate.

This is an IMPRESSIVE machine all the way around.

 

[Rob.G]

wired would be the osx and the virtual box. inactive is stuff left in the memory but basically 'free'. So you're still way under the choke point. What are your page-outs and what is your uptime?

Current pageouts are 78.3 meg. Uptime is not much... I did the 10.6.6 update this morning around 9 AM and of course that required a reboot. BUT, prior to that it had been up for something like a week or ten days and was doing fine. Uptime reports as 4:13.

Rob

 

[Sounds Good]

Guys, what would the 11" version NOT be powerful enough for? What things would require the 13" version instead?

 

[Rob.G]

Guys, what would the 11" version NOT be powerful enough for? What things would require the 13" version instead?

Heavy-duty gaming, or maybe anything that uses a LOT of CPU power, like, say, AutoCad. But even then, the MBA13 might not be the best choice either.

The only time I've taxed mine so far was when I was installing MacPorts. Since it does a lot of compiling, it ran the CPU pretty hard. The unit got quite hot, the fan was screaming, and battery power (I was on the couch at the time) was reading barely over an hour (I started with a full charge). But once it finished, everything returned to normal and I was seeing 4+ hours on the battery life.

Rob

 

[firewood]

Guys, what would the 11" version NOT be powerful enough for? What things would require the 13" version instead?

My guess is that anyone with a usage for which a MBA 11 clearly wasn't powerful enough, would need to step up to something with a Core i7, and/or a high end graphics card, to get speedy results.

 

[dgdosen]

I can't even hear the fans on this thing unless I put my head next to the keyboard.

I'd be willing to bet that the next generation will go Sandy Bridge - and will consume so much less power that Apple can opt for passive cooling on an air - which would mean no moving parts.

As it stands, this is the future of computing...

 

[jace88]

I'm very happy with performance of my 11" MBA with 128gb SSD. It's perfect for casual computing. I don't do photo editing or video editing. I just surf the net, talk to friends, and do a bit of Word/Excel every now and then when I'm outside the office and not in reach of my Lenovo work laptop.

 

[thelookingglass]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I can't even hear the fans on this thing unless I put my head next to the keyboard.

I'd be willing to bet that the next generation will go Sandy Bridge - and will consume so much less power that Apple can opt for passive cooling on an air - which would mean no moving parts.

As it stands, this is the future of computing...

Have you seen anything to suggest that Sandy Bridge laptops would consume significantly less power? I thought I saw news about a PC laptop that was recently discovered to have the Sandy Bridge chipset. Battery life was better, but not significantly so.

 

[Tjnlv]

I am in love with mine, NO REGRETS.

Hello. I've read the forum for a few years but have decided to participate. I traded MacBook Pro 13 2.26 320 GB Drive for the new MacBook Air 11 inch ultimate specs. First it was not my plan to buy ultimate, it is what they had in stock in store in November. So I sucked it up and went for it. I'm very very glad I did. 4gb ram, 128gb storage, and the small processor bump make this machine fast fast fast and a joy. It's January and I have no regrets. The aspect ratio of the screen truly does give the illusion if nothing else of a larger screen. I love the absolute portability but have been stunned by how quick this machine is!! OK it's not for intense movie or photo editing, but certainly capable with if you give it time. But if I was a serious movie editor, graphic, artist, etc.......I would be doing those things on a 27 Inch maxed out iMac or Mac Pro. That seems obvious, and a very hollow argument that I see on here too much. That is why they have a full range of the best machines around to match to your needs.

So let me tell you why it suits me......I am a school teacher and the portability and the instant on capability, make it very efficient to use at a student's desk to assist them without any spool up wait. Believe me, thank you apple for those precious few seconds back, you have no idea in today's classroom what can happen in 3 seconds. It's not heavy. The 13 inch pro now feels like carrying a child and the 15 feels like I might sprain my wrist, even though they are terrific machines.

I use this as my main computer and synch an iPhone and 2 iPads to it. Airplay to apple tv, multitask with aplomb. It's outstanding. I would consider the 13 inch for even more screen real esate. I think they really hit a bulleseye with these two new Airs. And I hope to see the revisions include lighted keyboard, even though I hardly miss it, the new processors, and more more of all that is good. I find I tale it everywhere with me now. I picked up a 64gb touch at the x-mas sales and use that in conjunction and for extra media storage. Battery Life for me has been better than advertised and of course dependent on your usage activity. That's just my thoughts and I believe the pro line when it refreshes will probably incorporate many of these features that work so well. It is probably a safe bet that the spinning hard drive is in it's last years. And laptops are gonna get back to being just that portable powerful little scream machines.