Review of the 11" MacBook Air
mattgemmell.com
Review of the 11" MacBook Air
1–10 of 84 posts
Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air
#2I own the 13" version. I spent some time testing both at the Apple Store. I really wanted to get the 11" one, but the upper row of keys is significantly thinner. As someone who uses vim all the time, this means missing the esc key very frequently. My advice would be to test both versions as much as you can and see which one works better for you.
Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air
#3I got the 11" and it does Starcraft on medium settings better than my wine session on a quad core 8800GTS does. Boot time of 16sec is also kind of a moot point... it drops in and out of sleep so effortlessly I doubt I'll ever need to reboot the thing.
Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air
#4i've been using an 11" air as my only development machine for a month or two. a few minor things worth mentioning:
- no backlit keyboard
- no IR interface, so no ability to use a non-bluetooth remote control
- the LCD screen is glossy, but it's just a film over the screen, not a glass/plastic sheet over the entire display. as a result, the glare isn't as bad as the macbook pro.
- because the display is very thin, the glowing apple logo behind the screen sometimes shows through on the front.
Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air
#5I bought the entry level 11" MacBook Air 4 weeks ago and now it is the system I use for over 90% of my work, writing,and web browsing.
Caveat: most of my work is straight-up Ruby development, Rails development (both using RubyMine 3.01), and Clojure with Emacs. All three of these development scenarios take up little in the way of CPU or memory. I use TexShop for writing.
I do sit at my desk with a large external monitor occasionally, but not often. The only thing I don't like is the tiny escape key and I'll probably end up remapping it. Otherwise this is my favorite home computer ever (and I have owned many, starting with a PDP 8 one board, then serial number 71 Apple II, etc.) Both the light weight and a SSD drive make for a great experience.
I am going to start next week helping a friend's company do some back end Java EE 6 development and I'll either use my MacBook Pro or my beefy Ubuntu laptop for that.
Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air
#6Two things that really bug me:
1. No cleartype. I.e. although there is subpixel antialiasing, fonts aren't optimized for the pixel grid. Thus, the fonts are much clearer when I boot to Windows and so I feel like everything is fuzzy when I boot back to Mac OS. This isn't a problem for the web, but for coding and SSH it's terrible. I can't use Windows full time though because Spaces is so outstanding and I don't get trackpad options under Windows.
2. Excel on Mac lacks my most used feature: web data import. Windows Excel lets me choose a table inside a web browser, and the data in that table (stock quotes/currency rates/etc) are imported into Excel (and re-retrieved just by pushing F9).
Excel on Mac does allow you to manually create text files that describe web data import which would be a possible workaround except that the sites I use require a login, and Windows Excel can save cookie state because of its tight integration with IE, but Mac Excel can't.
Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air
#7My alternative: Put a 256GB Crucial RealSSD 300 in a 13" Macbook and max-out the RAM. It will be bigger and heavier, with less battery life, but if you already have a Macbook, this is a much cheaper move. The RealSSD has background garbage collection, so you don't have to worry about TRIM. You only need to do two things: 1) noatime and 2) make sure you're using less than 220GB.
I did this, and the performance is fantastic. (Original 13" unibody Macbook with RAM upgraded to 6GB.) Everything happens instantly. I had journalling off, because it increases disk writes by 12%, but OS X compensates by cranking up its RAM cache. Keep journalling on, as it helps boot-up and shut-down happen quickly and things just seem to run faster without the system managing the really large RAM cache to disk. (Another factor: The nasty bug in XCode 3.1 requiring you to reboot your machine to unfreeze the simulator. This makes fast reboots a big win for me. Otherwise, I'd use sleep and only reboot occasionally.)
For increased battery life on the plane, I have a Tekkeon myPower All, which I also sometimes use to power a mobile 4G hotspot. You can find a $14 Magsafe cord on eBay, and solder it to a male Adaptaplug from Radioshack to make yourself an adapter.
EDIT: If you have an older Core Duo plastic Macbook capable of supporting more than 4GB of RAM, then I'd recommend slapping a RealSSD into it. You'll have something lighter than a 13" aluminum with great performance.
Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air
#8I own the 13" version. I spent some time testing both at the Apple Store. I really wanted to get the 11" one, but the upper row of keys is significantly thinner. As someone who uses vim all the time, this means missing the esc key very frequently. My advice would be to test both versions as much as you can and see which one works better for you.
i use vim a lot and i got the 11". i simply remap capslock to esc, which i would do anyways.
Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air
#9I own the 13" version. I spent some time testing both at the Apple Store. I really wanted to get the 11" one, but the upper row of keys is significantly thinner. As someone who uses vim all the time, this means missing the esc key very frequently. My advice would be to test both versions as much as you can and see which one works better for you.
ive been remapping 'esc' to be triggered by rapidly hitting 'jj' and havent really run into this problem. jj is also more convenient than a fullsized esc key.
Re: Review of the 11" MacBook Air
#10I recently purchased the 11 with the same config.
Xcode runs happily enough on my iOS and Mac OS projects.
It runs my web dev stack just fine (Textmate, Python, Django, Nginx, Apache, Postgres)
It reminds me of how much I appreciated the form factor of my old 12" Powerbook back in the day. I got a lot of mileage out of that little machine.
The speakers sound tinny (under the keyboard) and I wish it had a proper ethernet port. The webcam doesn't seem to do as well in low light compared to the one in my MBP.
Overall I'm very happy with it and it's already been getting a lot more use than I expected considering it was purchased as a secondary machine.