I tend to just lurk this site, but thought I'd post my own impressions of the new Air after spending a day with a new one. I sold an old MBP for 900 today (they really hold value) and put it towards a 13 inch Air with 128 gig HD. Its stock, so just 2 gig of ram.
I should say I'm also an iPad owner...a frustrated one. I got so sick of having to switch to a real computer anytime I wanted to view something with Flash, which is a lot of sites. I dont subscribe to Jobs' opinion that Flash is evil. So I figured a really thin and light Macbook with a decent battery life would be an ideal replacement for both my heavy MBP and my giant iPod Touch - aka iPad.
And boy was it a great assumption! I love this little bugger. It's really fast, the screen is beautiful and my biggest fear was going to be the heat on the bottom, but it barely heats up. My MBP got painfully hot.
I was disappointed in the video quality when I put Simpsons Movie on it and the HD quality looked blurry. Then I remembered they didnt have the HD version on iTunes when I bought it and it was just standard def. Doh! indeed. So I copied over content I knew in fact WAS in HD from the iTunes store and it looked great. Phew. One of my other gripes about the MBP was how heavy it was, and travelling with it in my backpack was painful on days when I was in airports almost a full day. This thing is light! And I love it. Feels like nothing in my backpack.
Whereas I felt like I needed to make a ton of sacrifices using the iPad, I don't feel like that at all now. It feels like it shouldnt be a "real" computer, if you know what I mean, but it is. I know that sounds weird. It doesn't feel or look substantial, but it is. It really is.
I'll leave you with a few gripes:
- No Flash installed. Thanks Apple. Obviously not hard to user install it, so I did.
- No backlit keyboard. I read other people saying the screen lit up the keys enough, but that's not true at all. If you dont know where all the keys are by memory, you're going to have issues. Fortunately my fingers have some great memory, because I'm typing away like crazy without any light.
- Fan has kicked on a few times. It's weird to have this silent computer all of a sudden kick on the fans seemingly at random. I watch Hulu once, no fan. I watched it again later and fan comes on. Seems kinda arbitrary at this point, but very rare. When the fan came on, I felt the bottom of the Air and it was merely warm. When my MBP's fans would come on, the bottom was burning up. I love that hot on this device is only mildly warm to the touch.
I should say I'm also an iPad owner...a frustrated one. I got so sick of having to switch to a real computer anytime I wanted to view something with Flash, which is a lot of sites. I dont subscribe to Jobs' opinion that Flash is evil. So I figured a really thin and light Macbook with a decent battery life would be an ideal replacement for both my heavy MBP and my giant iPod Touch - aka iPad.
And boy was it a great assumption! I love this little bugger. It's really fast, the screen is beautiful and my biggest fear was going to be the heat on the bottom, but it barely heats up. My MBP got painfully hot.
I was disappointed in the video quality when I put Simpsons Movie on it and the HD quality looked blurry. Then I remembered they didnt have the HD version on iTunes when I bought it and it was just standard def. Doh! indeed. So I copied over content I knew in fact WAS in HD from the iTunes store and it looked great. Phew. One of my other gripes about the MBP was how heavy it was, and travelling with it in my backpack was painful on days when I was in airports almost a full day. This thing is light! And I love it. Feels like nothing in my backpack.
Whereas I felt like I needed to make a ton of sacrifices using the iPad, I don't feel like that at all now. It feels like it shouldnt be a "real" computer, if you know what I mean, but it is. I know that sounds weird. It doesn't feel or look substantial, but it is. It really is.
I'll leave you with a few gripes:
- No Flash installed. Thanks Apple. Obviously not hard to user install it, so I did.
- No backlit keyboard. I read other people saying the screen lit up the keys enough, but that's not true at all. If you dont know where all the keys are by memory, you're going to have issues. Fortunately my fingers have some great memory, because I'm typing away like crazy without any light.
- Fan has kicked on a few times. It's weird to have this silent computer all of a sudden kick on the fans seemingly at random. I watch Hulu once, no fan. I watched it again later and fan comes on. Seems kinda arbitrary at this point, but very rare. When the fan came on, I felt the bottom of the Air and it was merely warm. When my MBP's fans would come on, the bottom was burning up. I love that hot on this device is only mildly warm to the touch.
