Sébastien

Two weeks ago, my main workstation (a two year old Apple Macbook Pro C2D 2.33/3GB, 2nd generation) had the second complete hard drive failure in 4 weeks. With no spare HD on hand, I was cornered into either waiting 48h to buy a new 2.5″ HD, or waiting 10 days to get the warranty replacement HD. However, I was set to leave town in just 36 hours to travel to NYC and did not intend to carry my external Time Machine backup HD with me on the plane. After all, this was my last life line for my 100Go+ data and settings.

I therefore started to consider buying a new MacBook the next day, even though I had not planned to do so for another year. After all, my MBP set with a brand new HD should sell pretty well used on eBay. So I bought a new MacBook! However, to my great surprise, I did not end up buying another MBP, no matter how sweet and shiny the latest revision looked. I actually went for the newly released MacBook Air 2nd generation. So how does a power user manage to switch from a large 17″ screen with numerous ports to a small 13.3″, with limited memory? Well, that is what I am about to unveil.

First Impressions

First of all, the version I ended up getting is the higher end model (1.86Ghz C2D, 2GB DDR-3 built in RAM,128GB SSD, and new nVidia chipset/integrated video card). For many early users of the MBA, several issues darkened the experience: CPU locking up due to heat, less than optimum Intel SpeedStep implementation, slow video subsystem and random bugs. As far as I can tell, the 2nd generation of the MBA is a home run, as none of those issues appear to be present anymore and the 128GB SSD is much faster than the first generation 80GB SSD previously offered. One thing that is really a pleasure is how fast the unit boots, and loads everything. From the chime to the login screen, it is around 17 seconds, and after hitting the login button, all my apps load within 1-2 sec. That means that I have a fully functional workstation in less than 20 seconds. That might seem superficial, because you don’t need to reboot often in OS X, but it makes the few times you need to do it much less painful. The deep sleep function works very well, and takes about 20 seconds as well to restore your desktop to the same state as when you lost complete power. So overall, my first impression is that the unit is FAST. Yes, I said it, FAST. I went from a 2.33Ghz proc with a 7200rpm Seagate drive to a 1.86Ghz proc with a SSD drive. The second feels much faster to use. Applications load in a fraction of the time and then load even faster once they are loaded in the system cache. The internal faster FSB and DDR3 must be responsible for this. Battery life seems to be excellent. After the customary three first full drains to calibrate the system, it reports above 4:30 of battery life, and I actually witnessed 4+ hours when working with low to medium CPU applications (no DVD watching, etc.) Finally, the restore from TimeMachine actually worked flawlessly, just like it did 1 month ago. It took a little bit over three hours to restore over 100Go of my data stored on an external USB HD. For the record, the previous restore on the MBP 2.33Ghz took about 2h30min, however the amount of data restored then was only 80Go. It seems that the Leopard 10.5.5 install DVD that came with the MBA fixed some early issues with Leopard 10.5.0 when restoring from TimeMachine. In my previous restore, for example, my MacPort data had not been restored, along with a lot of data outside my home & application folders.

2GB enough? Really?

I hear many thinking already “alright, you restored, it feels faster, but now what? How does it fair when trying to fire Photoshop, and actually perform some work on there”. Well, actually it is a very good experience! Of course, I don’t pretend to be able to run heavy video encoding, open large Photoshop pics on there or anything that requires a lot of memory. For my use, I can run all the apps I need at the same time without seeing any slow down. I run a couple of heavy IDE sometimes such as FlexBuidler (built on Eclipse), or Aqua DataStudio and memory does not seem to be a problem. What’s interesting is that OS X seems to tune itself better on 2GB of mem than on 3GB. I am not sure why, but it does not seem to be wanting to cache that much, and even when it starts to swap, the highest I got so far is with a 1GB swap file, and thanks to the SSD speed, it is hard to tell it is actually swapping. Overall, again, while using the apps I use daily, it feels faster and snappier than my previous MBP, and the limited amount of memory does not seem to be as much of an issue as I thought initially.

The good, the bad and the ugly

The good:

• Better keyboard (same as the ones available on the new unibody MB and MBP)
• Unibody rocks! This is light and feels much sturdier than previous generations of MB and MBP
• Sweet LED based scren with limited glossy factor (compared to the new definition of glossy introduced by the new MB and MBP)
• Perfect touchpad. Large, allows for advanced gestures and still has a small area of a click (personally I don’t like to have to press on the touchpad itself like it is now necessary on the new MB and MBP, I feel it requires too much pressure. The simple click bar on the MBA is easier to activate with your thumb.)
• Mini DisplayPort. It has a small footprint and with the help of small adapters you can output to DVI, HDMI or VGA easily.
• Battery life. It is above 4 hours under moderate use right now.
• Portability. I actually can open it up in an airplane seat in coach without being uncomfortable (think about the 17′ MBP I had before…)

The bad:

• Integrated Video. Even though it is actually somewhere close to 5x faster, remember that the video chipset uses RAM from the limited 2GB. Count therefore about 1.75GB available.
• This light weight comes at a price, no user replaceable battery. However, if like for many, you have an Apple Store close by, you can make an appointment when you want to replace it.
• Limited ports. With this latest release of unibody MB and MBP, firewire got ditched. USB 2.0 unfortunately rules the world of computer accessories. This means that you might need to purchase a good USB hub for your desk and/or your laptop bag if you need to plug more than one device. If you can’t do your work without Firewire, then the MBA is NOT for you.
• Battery charging time. Right now it can take up to 3 hours when I plug it to my 23′ CD and try to charge it at the same time. My previous MBP would charge fully in under 2 hours, most of the time less.
• Can’t seem to get around Video display bugs while plugged to my DVI based KVM… sync seems to be out of whack with the miniDisplay -> DVI adapter. Not sure what’s up with that yet, even though many reported similar issues with the new MB and MBP as well that share the same video card. Looks like Apple needs to release an updated driver.

The ugly:

• The price… Can’t believe I had to shell out $2,499.00 + taxes for this machine. It is less than what I purchased my previous MBP though, but still!
• Graphical glitches for now still unfixed. Sometimes the mouse cursor disapears after waking up or unplugging external DVI monitor. Come on Apple, release a fix!

Verdict

Loving it! I actually find myself using VMWare fusion often, even with the limited amount of memory available, the SSD and new FSB makes a huge difference, the VMs are actually quite responsive and it is nice to be able start/resume one in just a matter of 5-10 seconds tops. So don’t be fooled by the small size and the mixed reviews of the 1st generation of the MBA. It is a very solid ultra portable system, that can act without shame as a desktop replacement for most of us when plugged to an external screen/keyboard/mouse. It is an addicting machine though, any other laptop you end up looking at or using feels bulky, fat and heavy, but I guess that’s the price of such a beautifully engineered laptop.

Disagree? Let me know what bothered you. Still wondering if I drank the KoolAid? Don’t hesitate to ask me tough questions!