It’s been awhile since any recent Mac I’ve purchased, has exceeded my expectations. The MacBook Air (2011 11″ model) does just that.
Previously, a 13″ MacBook Pro served as my test machine for the Mac OS X 10.7 seed and several other non-OS projects. Before that, a 13″ MacBook (White) was the 10.6 seed test system. For 10.5 and earlier seeds, they were all done on Power Mac desktop systems. I purchased the Air to kill a few birds with one stone.
One was to see how much portable this thing was in actual use. A second was to use it for the 10.8 seed. The third was to also allow me to do this on the go (the 11″ MBA is far more toteable than the 13″ MBP). Finally, on top of all this, I would do my other stuff (like this post for example).
Now I’ve made no secrets about how much I don’t care for 10.7 (Lion) and part of that is because even on my MBP, I use a mouse (since using the track pad on it gets annoying after awhile). To make some of the annoyances less so, really requires using the track pad and gestures. Here is where the MBA’s form factor makes a huge difference (at least for me) where I don’t find myself wanting to connect a mouse to it. That tapered wedge which results in that slight downwards angle, makes it more comfortable (for me) to do typing and track padding for long periods of time. The MBP by comparison is parallel to the surface it is on. It’s one of those personal preferences thing as I’ve always used my desktop keyboards with a slight angle to them. Because of this, 10.8 testing has turned out to be a far more tolerable experience compared to the 10.7 seed.
Performance wise, I didn’t really expect much either. This one is the 2GB RAM, 64GB SSD model, with a 1.6GHz Core i5 (which I paid $875 for). Turns out this thing benches faster than my 13″ MBP (which has 8GB RAM and a 2.26GHz Core Duo) and 2.4GHz Core Duo mini (both of those are around 3600 on Geekbench – the Air benches at 5100). What’s interesting is that I remember the 1st generation Mac Pro (2 processor quad core Xeon running at 2.66GHz) would score around the 5500 range; that system was not slow by any stretch of the imagination since it used to crunch through 1080p H.264 encoding. I don’t expect to do that on the Air but the performance per watt efficiency of these newer Core i-series processors (even the lower voltage ones used in the Air) shows that it would be able to periodically handle a moderate amount of intensive tasks. And while such benchmarks aren’t always realistic, this Air in actual use, hasn’t shown any significant drop off from what I had been used to with the MBP.
I also thought the smaller screen with its higher resolution (meaning slightly smaller text), would give me eye strain. Again, the actual experience is far better than I imagined. Last of all, while the 13″ MBP isn’t gigantic, it looks and feels large and clunky by comparison (see images below). And that is saying a lot because when these unified body MacBook Pro’s came out, they were much thinner than their predecessors. I can now see why these are such hot sellers and why it would make sense for Apple to adopt this form factor across their Macintosh portable line.
About the only con is the soldered on RAM (meaning you need to make a decision at purchase to get a system with more memory). For the next revision, I’d like to see these with 4GB minimum. As for storage capacity with SSD’s, 128GB should be the minimum, but I don’t see this happening until 2013 (else Apple would need to raise their price points). Even with my minimal test setup (which includes installing 3rd party apps), this leaves me with around 12GB free for data files (I couldn’t install all of Adobe CS5 because it required more free space than I had). Furthermore, I normally re-partition so that I can have the pre-release stuff on its own volume, but in this case, I left the SSD as one large partition. The good thing is the SSD stick is easily replaceable (OWC sells replacements from 120GB to 480GB with the 180GB having the current sweet per GB cost of around $260).
Overall, this 11″ MacBook Air has impressed me beyond my original expectations to where I’m looking forward to the next revision. If they manage to include 3G/4G/LTE, I can really see them hitting a grand slam homerun in terms of unit sales.
