The good, the bad and the ugly. Well, there's absolutely nothing ugly about the macbook air. It's absolutely gorgeous. Thin thin thin. It is much sturdier and lighter than I expected. It feels weightless. HUGE plusses for design and portability. The keyboard feels great. The screen looks fantastic. You can see some comparisons with my 15" macbook pro. It's definitely smaller by a long shot. I love the lighted keyboard. It seems to function even better than my MBP. 
As for performance, it's not the quickest horse out of the gate but it certainly wasn't as pokey as I expected based on the reviews out there. For most major tasks - keynote, pages, word, web browsing - it performs just fine. It even compared with my 2.0 GHz MBP in iphoto - granted with far fewer photos in the library. I don't need anything more intensive really, so this is good.
Did I mention it was thin? I can hardly tell it's in my bag when I carry it around. That's exactly what I need for traveling. For this reason it is fantastic for me.
One thing I noticed was that the charger works either way it is plugged in. I know some people have complained that the cord bends too much when plugged in if the plug is behind you. No worries. You can just attach the connector the other way around and no more 180 cord bending. The one negative thing that I would say is a real fault is the slow slow battery charging. I just noticed that it is only 35% charged after an hour plugged in when it was down to 15%. Apple, without a replaceable battery, you need to do better than this! Hopefully this can be resolved with a software update soon.
Overall I give this one Three Thumbs Up!
4 comments:
some lightweight batteries cannot be re-charged quickly
I am sure you can have a software patch that would let the charger to push more juice in - but you dont want the famous laptop self-igniting battery problem.
Sorry to butt in Greg, but you did comment on one of my posts in the Rib Van Winkle series in ChemBark (which hasn't had a post from Paul in 3 months). I've had to move, and can be found as "Chemiotics" in The Skeptical Chymist. Happy to have you look and comment some more
Retread
It's available in Malaysia now, and it will cost me RM6000++ (my 3 month salaries). Don't think will be able to afford it. :<
Hi I'm entering graduate school in organic chem this coming year and was wondering if the Air would be able to reliably run Chemsketch or any other programs that I would be using in my studies/research. Really appreciate any advice.
Thanks!
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