MacBook Air Wrap-Up...For Now

OK, so I have had some great opportunities to use the Air as a standard and daily machine. Instead of separating out items, I decided to wrap up individual topics on the Air at least for now with this post...

* I attended a conference recently where I got tired of taking notes and transcribing them later...So, since the MacBook Air fit into my portfolio, I brought it with me. I used this wonderful tool the entire conference, from 8 AM to 5 PM two days in a row...I turned off wireless and bluetooth for the majority of the day and used mostly MS Word 2004. I only turned on Bluetooth and used Safari during 2 segments of about 10 minutes each on both days. I entered the notes into Word and closed the cover when I was not taking notes. The battery lasted the entire day and all sessions on each day. There were no outlets close, so plugging in was not an option. The battery can last, it just needs limited usage and manual power management of closing the cover when not using it.

* There have been many periods where when logging in or opening an application, especially Microsoft Office 2004 applications, the spinning beach ball lasted for a while. I am still trying to figure out what is causing the beach ball. I am still learning about Leopard, so there may be something in the logs that I am missing.

* For BootCamp, I noticed that when I changed our AirPort Extreme router to N only, I was not able to acquire an IP address. So, I have to use the slower G part of the network. Not too bad, but a pain. I will be playing with the settings further to make sure it is not a simple user error, but for some reason it is not connecting at N speeds...The ironic thing is that when I mixed the network, XP indicated that it was connecting at 130 mbps...interesting...

* A couple of harddrive clicks when shutting down have caused some worry, but all seems to be OK. I have run the diagnostics, checked disk permissions, and Onyx to make sure the drive was working OK. So, far, so good, but the sounds have been few and far in between.

* I believe I will be giving up on the virtual software for now as well. BootCamp will have to do even with the incredibly lower battery life...

* Lastly, the size of the hard drive is still a point of concern...While I am far from running out of space, it decreases everyday with podcasts, pictures, as well as personal and professional documents. About 15 GB remain even after splitting out pictures, movies, and most music files to an external drive.

Still excellent machine that I carry all over the house at ease. We'll see how an upcoming flight works out soon as well.

MacBook Air BootCamp, XP Continued

Having limited space on the XP partition, thought I keep thinking it is enough (12 GB), I was running into challenges when playing simple strategy games such as Civilization and Railroad Tycoon. I got a blue screen which indicated that I should turn off shadowing. After looking this up online, I made sure that the system restore points were turned off. While this may not be a good idea at all when running Windows XP regularly, it does make sense with limited space and a sparse image backup. I figured that if I need to reinstall, I will just copy the image instead of attempting restore. There are very few needed files on this partition, but, it works and the random crashes seemed to have ceased.

One additional item learned during this process is that Windows will go through a chkdsk when it restarts from this crash. Even though the screen indicates that you can bypass this option by pressing a button, the keyboard does not seem to be active. When I plugged in a USB keyboard, I was able to bypass the chdsk. This may appear to be a limitation at times given the one USB port, but a simple USB hub came through again. I am not sure why the laptop keyboard didn't work, but it seems to be one of those things that loads from the Bootcamp items that Apple installs.

MacBook Air Storylines Experienced and Reviewed

So, you are asking yourself..."Who would buy one of these...they say it is under powered...they say it can't run things...they say that a business traveler would not be able to use it...why would I want one...?"

OK, I bought one. It is very, very nice. It is incredibly thin...it has a beautiful screen, and runs all of the software I need right now...it fits into a standard 8.5 X 11 portfolio without any zipper challenges.

So, I will cover some basics now and delve further into details as I use the MacBook Air. First of all, though, I must add that it is running Leopard. I have found the biggest change impact is just some changes in Leopard.

Screen: The screen, listed at 13.3 inches, is beautiful. It is crisp, clear, and adjusts in brightness better than the MacBook Pro we have. It looks good at every angle except maybe starring down from the exact top of the screen...but then, again, why would you like want to look directly from the top of any monitor.

The touchpad: Wonderful addition to the machine. We have many, many pictures, especially of our two little ones...Scrolling through them is a pleasant and easy experience in iPhoto or with Cover Flow. The preview mode for Windows is nice, especially using the large icons...However, paging through pictures, zooming in and out, and rotating pictures is better when you do not have to use anything but the touchpad.



The Superdrive...it is nice. While I am not sure I would have purchased the MacBook Air without it, I do not see myself using it much at home or on the road. I must admit that I have already used it to create a disk image of a business DVD we needed for work. I burned over 50 copies from that image directly to the Superdrive. No problems with the burning or playback from a Windows machine or standalone dvd player. The only wonder I had was regarding the recording speed of 8X. It seemed a little slow in theory, but I didn't really notice as I multi-tasked while the disks were being created. The great thing about this drive besides its size is that it does not have to come along for the ride. It does not work with the non-powered USB hub, but testing is not complete with a powered one.


Wifi and bluetooth included...same as any other MacBook. While the ethernet dongle is workable. It is obviously not ideal, but the only thing I tested so far was configuring of an airport express through ethernet. It would well, just as it it had the connection built in. It is not known through whether this will work in a usb hub. with other items attached.

Speaking of USB Hub...for those wondering what you can do with one USB port...buy a USB hub...I know, I know...why would want to spend even more money...well, I will get to that in a moment, but for the MacBook Air, I have a Wacom tablet, external harddrive, an iPod, and a usb drive connected to one hub. All work well and without interruption.

In regards to the what to do with the usb hub...the MacBook Air has allowed us to rethink the usage of each device such as the wacom tablet and harddrives. Instead of moving each item, we move the other items to the hub. Now, the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro can share the same hardware and iPhoto, and iTunes libraries just by plugging in the one cord from the hub...I know, I know...many of you already thought of that and have been using hubs like this since USB 1.1...

While the price may be a little higher than expected. It was about what I would have paid for a new machine anyway. It get to "test" new features and feel productive at the same time. So far, Office 2004, Citrix Presentation Server, Pixelmator, Wiretap Pro, and iStop Motion run about the same as on the MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz). This is, of course, without any statistical measurement. However, from a timing and pure user-experience satandpoint, it is the same. The speed (I am using the 1.8 GHz model) and RAM (2 GB) is fine to run these programs. I am sure they will have a memory upgrade that you need to pay Apple to perform, but for now, it works well with these programs.

Lastly, the only piece that seems to be a challenge is the hard drive space. While it was not a feasible expense to get the SDD harddrive, the 80 gig HDD is a little small to store all of those pictures, music to fill a 30 GB iPod, and the usable programs for business and family. Again, I suppose that this will be an optional upgrade from Apple at a later date. Until then, the usb hub and external harddrive will be there for the non-essential, and nice to have files...of course, that is also why we have a home and business network...

More to follow as more applications are used and experiences encountered...