A few months ago I was notoriously known for being anti-Apple. Whether iPhone, iPod or MacBooks, I was the detractor. I was the rebel against the herd mentality, and quite fiercely so.
That was, until I met the MacBook Air.
Finally, I understand why in the recent years Apple products are getting increasing popular - because they understand what we users want.
I’ve had my MacBook Air for over 3 weeks now - and my 2 year old Asus laptop is now happily retired at a corner of my table. I’m still deciding what to do with it… but here’s why I love my Apple.
- Slim profile and sleek design.
- Lightweight, device and adapter.
The Air weighs 1.3kg, and the adapter without the extension about 200g. The entire package with the extended power adapter still weighs 25% lighter than just my Asus laptop alone. - Long battery life.
When I had my Asus, whenever I decided to work someplace outside, it had to be a place with readily available power. If not, the Windows laptop would last me about 1.5 hours before I have to frantically search for a powerpoint somewhere.
With the Air, I’m going without connected power for up to 7 hours when I’m just doing some writing or surfing, and above 3 hours when I’m doing design on Photoshop.
It was liberating.
One huge factor is the MacOS - it is much less of a power vampire than Windows. Which brings us to… - MacOS X.
It took time to get used to, but MacOS is simply wonderful. Everything is fast, elegantly smooth, and very responsive. It was everything Windows never were.
The Air is a step down from my Windows machine in terms of processing power, but contradictorily, everything runs much faster. My Photoshop is faster, on average I’m wasting less time waiting for that split second lag when I click on something.
And I love the Dock, the Mac’esque version of the Windows task bar. I like how it flows like a wave when I roll my cursor over to run an application. My most used applications are right there, waiting for my sortie, while the less used applications are hidden in a folder of my creation that slides open when I need it.
There are other subtle but thoughtful touches to the OS, that just enhances the overall experience. - Zero waiting time for starting up.
When I was on my Asus, I rarely use the sleep function, mostly because of the limitations in battery life, and the fact that it isn’t very reliable nor fast.
But with the Air, like most MacBook users, when I want to move from place to place, I rarely power down it. Instead, I just close the lid and it goes to sleep.
The time it takes to wake up from a sleep is about 2 seconds.
And when I decides to off it, it takes about 5 seconds to shut-down, and around 10 seconds to boot up and be ready for use. - LED display, and natively high resolution.
My old Asus sports a LCD that seriously pales in comparison with LED. Most new laptops, Windows or Mac, are now equipped with LED screens, but the Air triumphs in one way - it runs 1440 x 900 resolution on a 13.3” display. It’s somewhat like the Retina display on the iPhone 4 - more pixels on the same sized display means everything is sharper.
Even the newly refreshed MacBook Pro 13.3” does not run a resolution this high. - The multi-touchpad.
is a god-send when I don’t have a mouse. Conventional laptops have us scrolling through a webpage by sliding our fingers along the sides of the touchpad, but it’s often a hit-and-miss affair.
With the MacBook’s touchpad, I slide my 2 fingers on it to scroll in all directions, and 3 to perform a click-and-drag action, for example selecting a bunch of text.
It is also wonderful to play Angry Birds on. - Great sounding speakers.
There isn’t any visible sign of the Air’s speakers (or air vents), but my music and movies play loud and beautifully. Wonderful piece of engineering. - Bundled software, and Adium.
My MacBook Air came with iLife ‘11, a suite of applications for managing and creating media. There’s GarageBand for musicians (sadly, I’m not equipped with the necessary music skills to do anything), iMovie for creating high-quality montage videos, iPhoto for managing photos, and iDVD.
There’s also Mail and iCal out of the box, for emails and calendaring.
Adium, on the other hand, is a free unified instant messaging client exclusive for Mac. Unified meaning that I’m using the same application to connect to my Google Talk for business conversations, MSN for social, and even Facebook, although the last is unstable.
Perhaps the feature I love most about the Adium is how customisable it is. For example, it is how it looks like on my dock:
- Running Windows without rebooting, via Parallels.
And for that rare occasion where Windows is required (for me - testing my websites on Internet Explorer):
Can’t say the same for Windows.
When I had my Asus machine, I happily deemed it a laptop, and called it a laptop. But I didn’t know it wasn’t really one; it was just a portable computer that still required one to be connected somehow, and lug around 3 kg’s worth of equipment.
How is that a laptop?
Anyway, rumours say a MacBook Air refresh is coming in June. This means I’ve become the new owner of a machine that is going to be slightly obsolete soon, but I can live with it - it is currently fast enough for my use, and I’m enjoying the 2 months use of it.
But if you are going to get one, it might be worth waiting for the 2011 version.
