Perfect Air?

[darwiniandude]

Just got my Air tonight...

WOW!

Love the size. Glad I sold my Macbook Pro. Keyboard is great. Screen is bright/even.

On first powerup, the fans turned on a little, but i was running software updates and spotlight was indexing. Then they went quiet, and i realised i'd had the air sitting on an ironing board, soft padded stuff.

I loaded up 4 videos streaming from my usb2 drive pluged into my airport extreme base station, and a safari window with you tube, and it seemed to not do any core dropout stuff. i'll play more tomorrow. at the moment, i'm downloading 1.5gb of imap emails into mail, cpu is at 47 degrees/2498 rpm as i'm just typing, it is sitting on the bed though. (vents are blocked a little)

Tomorrow, I'm going to inflict parallels, games, Logic Studio and batch conversion of DivX files into H264 for the Apple TV i'll get soon... poor little air! I'll post back to this thread what happens.

Love the multitouch, just to make quicktime full screen by pinching... HANG ON... i didn't enter quicktime pro details, yet it went full screen! What the? I'm definitely glad i have the MBA. I'm glad the touch pad isn't any smaller, multitouch needs room to manoeuvre.

 

[krye]

Apple added fullscreen to the free Quicktime a while ago.

 

[NC MacGuy]

Refreshing read. Hope all stays well!!

 

[EB66]

make sure you let us know how it goes tomorrow

 

[darwiniandude]

Sitting up in bed with this on my lap now. It's sitting in a 'Toffee Brief' case done by an Australian company. http://www.toffee.com.au/ I love this case. It's real leather, has twin zip all the way around, little leather slide out handles and a front pocket enabling storage of the superdrive and powersupply. the powersupply makes it fat though.

It's meant for a Macbook, not the air... and very slim accessories... But i put a friends macbook in it and it's a tight fit, so it's great on the air.

Anyway. temp is currently at 40 degrees, and it's about 18 outside. The Toffee case being a padded interior if deffinately blocking vents. at the moment, just typing, it's sitting at 2500 rpm still, (temp 38 now) but i'm sure if i did anything intensive it would have to be done outside of the case.

I woke up in the night due to neighbours having giant party and shining lights in our windows, fun... so i started playing with the air early.

(while writing this i have now opened monolingual, and it's stripping out all languages other than english)

This morning, I got a 270mb Avi file, and started encoding it to H264 / ipod / tv format using Visual Hub. Whilst this was encoding, i logged into my Parallels account, and downloaded the macbook air beta build of parallels that doesn't have the kernel panic inside, build 5592, and installed that, then remotely grabbed the image of my XP cd from the usb drive attached to my airport extreme. I installed xp in parallels whilst the video was encoding. temps hovered between 80 and 85, i was using the machine on the edge of the bed (i had the back hanging over so the vents weren't blocked.)

(monolingual is still running now, temps 60, fan 2500, vents still blocked now in the case... monolingual obviously doesn't use much cpu)

Once the intensive apps had finished and i was web browsing again, after a full charge (which was a sensible time, not the ages long some have reported), unplugging the air with screen brightness on the lowest, it quickly said time remaining '3:25'.... but then jumped to 6:06 and then up a bit higher, then down to 5 something...

I haven't watched a full length movie yet, and not on the external screen (we have a vga projector) I will try that today.

Games wise i played Battle for Wesnoth, which is free and good if you like that sort of thing... (i do)

But that isn't intensive so i wouldn't have expected issues. I'll now try installing Logic Studio (minus some content, a full install is ~50gb, so wouldn't fit anyway) and see if it can handle that.

Temps are still now at 60 with monolingual running, with the air inside the leather case (it has straps that hold the base of the air and the lid to the case. )

I'll see what happens.

 

[w00tini]

congrats on your new laptop

 

[LevMac]

Congratulations on your new Macbook Air And by the sounds of it your loving it which is great to hear on these forums compared to most people who are complaining about things

Can I ask what week number your Macbook Air is ? It should be in the serial number after the W88.... just the two digits after it ....

 

[darwiniandude]

It's week 11, and yes I do love my Macbook Air, but yes, it does do core shutdowns. Admitedly I was using screen flow to record stuff i was doing in terminal whilst reinstalling parallels (wiped the drive today to perform a fresh install to ditch some languages and the printer drivers)

Doh! I will try the undervolting stuff now, see how that goes...

Logic Studio played the shiny disco demo song without issues, i was suprised. But when playing a piano software instrument at default latency, there was some crackling every few seconds, the first i've heard from an osx machine. this was from my external usb controller keyboard triggering it. I will play more tomorrow.

 

[Golden Master]

I thought I'd just add some more positivity..

Had my week 11 1.8/64 for a week now and it is almost perfect. Beautiful screen and no excessive fan action although I generally don't do anything that stressful for the cpu, just MS Office suite, web browsing and reading pdfs.

This means that I can sit with the MBA on my lap and work for hours without the fan going above base speed which may be comforting to know for potential buyers with similarly meagre computing needs but who want the portability etc.

By the way, I say only almost perfect because most of the time I can't connect to my netgear wireless router (where my MBP and MB are flawless). I'm currently trying to get to the bottom of this.

 

[darwiniandude]

I decided against the 1.8 as a lot of people reported the heat and throttling, and i figured it wouldn't be running at 1.8 much anyway...

I love the machine, if i can get it so it doesn't core shutdown no matter what it's doing, i'll keep it.

Did you try the delayedack startup item? http://systemsboy.blogspot.com/2006/02/delayed-ack-startup-item-for-intel.html

i had to do that to stop drop outs on my macbook pro and imac under 10.5.2, haven't had to on the air yet though, odd.

Using Airport Extreme base station (giga)

 

[gcwieser]

Another happy Air owner

I got my Air on March 5th.

It does get relatively hot, and the fans do run at 6200 rpm when I'm doing "cpu intensive" tasks. I got the 1.8/80 (and the number after w88 is 09)

My most used apps are: Safari, Mail, Adium, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, CSS Edit, NetBeans and Cyberduck.

Photoshop makes the fan run at 6200, but the temp is ok at around 55 - 70 celsius.

I can easily work in Dreamweaver, CSS Edit and NetBeans with the fan running at 2500 and temp between 50 and 60 celsius.

The worst application in terms of heat for me is the Adobe Software Update - what a piece of ****.

So, bottom line... I can see how this notebook isn't for everybody. But I have never had a more perfect computer and I couldn't be happier with it. The keyboard is amazing, the screen is beautiful, the industrial design is flawless (except for that audio out port, but I don't use it... so still flawless to me), the trackpad is great, my wireless works great too at home, school, and work. It's faster and snappier than any other computer i've ever owned, and i've never had a slowdown (like the one ars technica describes in their review of the regular hd version).

I'm glad I didn't go with the ssd version, it's not worth the money for me, and 64 gigs is 16 gigs too few for me.

Only regret - i should've pre-ordered it and gotten out of Vista hell a few weeks sooner.

-GC

 

[darwiniandude]

Glad you're happy GC.

Adobe updater? Don't get me started!

You delete the thing and it comes right back! I eventually right clicked on photoshop and chose "show package contents" then somewhere in there i found a file with a unixy looking icon 'updater' and i deleted that. Now it doesn't auto recreate the updater utility in the applications folder.

Anyway, I've had great success with Coolbook whilst trying it this morning, for me needs at least this will make the air always usable, instead of nearly always usable.

But i'll mention the details in the cookbook thread.

 

[darwiniandude]

 

[fredrickyoon]

Got mine on Feb 5th, a Week 03 model and happy with it ever since. Knock on wood, let's hope that it stays that way.

 

[evirob]

I thought I'd just add some more positivity..

Had my week 11 1.8/64 for a week now and it is almost perfect. Beautiful screen and no excessive fan action although I generally don't do anything that stressful for the cpu, just MS Office suite, web browsing and reading pdfs.

This means that I can sit with the MBA on my lap and work for hours without the fan going above base speed which may be comforting to know for potential buyers with similarly meagre computing needs but who want the portability etc.

By the way, I say only almost perfect because most of the time I can't connect to my netgear wireless router (where my MBP and MB are flawless). I'm currently trying to get to the bottom of this.

I can't get my MBA to work with my Netgear router too...

So bought the airport extreme...I must say it's much easier to configure...

Though it's slight more pricey then comparable products...

 

[Golden Master]

I'm willing to buy an airport extreme or time capsule as long it will definitely work. I'd still have to used my Netgear as a modem with the wireless turned off.

Good to hear it worked for you, I'll probably get one if my one last try with applecare doesn't do anything.

 

[darwiniandude]

I can't get my MBA to work with my Netgear router too...

So bought the airport extreme...I must say it's much easier to configure...

Though it's slight more pricey then comparable products...

I've been in tech support over the years with PCs, and I know my way around configuring routers. I highly reccomend anyone to spend the extra and get an Airport Extreme, as it walks people through the required steps to set up a secure network. Little things, like the 'this computer' button in the mac filtering area, so you don't have to find and type in the mac address. It's great!

(i'm aware mac filtering isn't really secure... you should always use that and at least wpa and hidden ssid.)

My big complaint was airport disk not working properly, and not working for time machine. Luckily, it now works (for me) faultlessly with the latest updates. It's 6 months late, but well done Apple.

 

[whitlecj]

Congrats on your new Air. You will like it I am sure.

 

[Particular]

I call BS on the OP. No way you are doing those CPU intensive tasks and not experiencing 6200RPM Hoover Vac type sounds comming from the fan.

I just don't believe you. I have used fan control @6200RPM for long periods of time and can not even get my CPU temp down that low when I am doing nothing and yours happens to be that low on intensive type tasks while you are blocking the vent? Get the f out of here

 

[Golden Master]

I'm not surprised you're angry..

If your MBA is as hot as that with max fans and "doing nothing" then it's broken and needs fixing.

 

[Particular]

I use the term nothing liberally... I really should say moderate intensity. Nonetheless, his story sounds highly suspect.

 

[FireArse]

Play on G4

I'm so glad I'm sticking with the 12' PB. You guys can iron out the "1st gen" issues...