Computing

MacBook Air

July 6, 2012 - 10:23 am

air@2x

My laptop has finally received a long-overdue upgrade. After going through my second power cord, the cord on my old 15" Dell is hanging on by a couple of alligator clips. I just received my new MacBook Air last Monday, and it is wonderful. It really is amazing how light and thin it is; two aspects which weren't even really my main motive for choosing the Air over the Pro (more-so the SSD and higher resolution screen; sure you can configure a Pro with an SSD, but that adds yet another $200 to the already high price). The new retina MacBook Pro looks amazing, but they're just too expensive, and definitely overkill. Having my desktop, the MacBook Air provides all that I need on the mobile end of things. The hard drive is only 128GB, which sounds tiny, but I hardly need more than that. With Spotify and iTunes Match, I no longer need all 56GB of music in my iTunes library, and all other documents I may need can be kept on an external drive. With the SSD everything is ridiculously fast, from rebooting, to launching apps, to copying files. It's incredible. The battery life has also been extremely good. The trackpad, with it's multi-touch gestures, and the keyboard, which I am typing on now, are both great as well. I can't remember the last time I've used a CD drive, so that's certainly something I don't miss; and as far as the lack of ports goes, with the occasional need for a USB hub, there's really no others I need. For classes where I need to bring my laptop with me, it's going to be a lot nicer carrying this in my backpack than my late 6+ pound laptop; the Air being less than half that. Being on such a big campus means lots of walking. I like the 13" form factor much better for a laptop. 15" just seems too big, and 17" is just preposterous (no offense to those getting their mobile desktop on). This is my first Mac, and while I do like OSX, I'm still a fan of Windows. Anyways, I couldn't be happier, and I'd definitely recommend the Air to anyone looking for a ultraportable laptop!