Does MacBook Air Hit The Sweet Spot Between Laptop Power And iPad Portability? – The ‘Book Mystique
For me, a computer is primarily a writing and communications tool, and when I bought my iPad 2 last June I had hoped that it would be a usable substitute for a laptop, at least for relatively light-duty computing tasks. I was more curious than under any illusion. The dominant school of thought was that the iPad is an excellent content consumption device, but a content creation tool not so much. However, I wanted to find out for myself.
Now, with more than half a year’s iPadding under my belt, I have, and the preponderance of critical opinion was right. The ‘Pad is great for Web surfing, music listening and so forth, tolerable for email, but mediocre to miserable for the sort of work I mostly do with computers. Definitely not a comprehensive laptop substitute answer for me, but I have been seduced by the easy tote-ability enabling me to do stuff virtually anywhere in the house, or for that matter out of it where there’s WiFI access. I would find that tough to give up. The iPad has roped me in at least that far.
Consequently, I was interested to read in a review of the MacBook Air by BusinessInsider’s Dylan Love last week, relating his impressions after using his Core i MacBook Air for about four and a half months.
Love says that while he found his old PowerBook clunky, heavy, and not packing well at all by comparison, he doesn’t think twice about putting his Air in a bag and carrying it around all day as he used to do with the iPad but doesn’t any more. He explains that he prefers to sacrifice a little more room in his carry bag in order to have a fully capable computer available wherever he happens to be, with a more comfortable and tactile keyboard, a larger screen, full access to parts of the Internet that aren’t immediately there for the iPad, and so forth.
Love further observes that while the iPad’s quality of forcing you to focus on one app at a time appeals to some users (not so much to consummate multitasker me), the MacBook Air is an omnicapable workhorse that lets him keep multiple projects and tasks on the go simultaneously, switching back and forth among them while they’re in dynamic progress. That’s the way I prefer to roll as well, especially when working from notes and collected research materials.
Normally, on the Mac, I’ll have the document or documents containing my notes and research resources open in one window, and my working draft in another, switching back and forth frequently. They don’t even have to be in the same application. This is not possible on the iPad, where everything is full–screen, and you can only have one app running at a time, the notion of iPad “multitasking” with apps running in the background being a myth for the most part. I find the iPad’s incapacity to display multiple open windows and to actually muiltitask a constant irritant. Instead, I’m obliged to keep switching back and forth between at least a couple of open documents in two different text apps, plus a browser, as well as contending with the miserable iOS text selection, copy, and paste menu. There is just no way that a touch–based menu like that can ever be as slick or efficient as a mouse, touchpad, or my personal fave for speed and comfort –– a rollerbar.
So it’s encouraging to hear Dylan Love report that his MacBook Air has “been a total joy and a very welcome upgrade from my previous laptop,” and most anyone who’s ever owned a 12″ Powerbook G4 like the one Love says he “used and abused from August 2004 until August 2011″ knows that’s a tough act to follow. When it came time to replace the elderly PowerBook last August, Love says he sprung for a Core i7 13″ MacBook Air in and has never looked back, praising the Air’s impressive combination of size, weight, and battery life.
Personally, mulling the possible purchase of a MacBook Air later this year, there are a number of things I’ve been wondering about in terms of whether to go Air, or to opt for the larger, known-quantity, 13″ MacBook Pro. Of course by the time I make my move, the point may be moot, with some Apple laptop sector watchers contending that Apple will meld the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines with the next refresh, the 11.6″ and 13″ models retaining the MacBook Air nomenclature, and the 15″ and 17” units to be MacBook Pros, but all models sharing the same MacBook Air-like skinny wedge styling, SSD storage, and lack of internal optical drives. One question is how this will affect ruggedness and reliability.
“Don’t let its low weight and skinny profile make you think it’s some forgettable softie of a machine,” Dylan Love assures. “I’ve never once felt like I could break it and I routinely get way more hours of use out of the battery than I need. It’s robust as hell…. I don’t think twice about taking it somewhere… The opposite of this.
Another point I’ve been wondering about is whether an Air would provide the sort of near-effortless portability that I’ve become accustomed to with my iPad.
Love addresses that too, saying that while his old PowerBook was clunky, heavy, and didn’t pack well at all by comparison, he doesn’t think twice about putting his Air in a bag and carrying it around for a day, and that consequently he’s using his iPad, which he used to carry with him all the time, much less than he used to, preferring to sacrifice a little more room in his carry bag so he can have a fully capable computer available with its more comfortable and tactile keyboard, larger screen, and full access to parts of the Internet that aren’t immediately there for the iPad, and so forth.
What about performance? In a word, “fast,” Love confirms, observing that “Computers this thin shouldn’t be this fast.”
Another caveat for me is the compromise imposed by the meagre capacity provided by the MacBook Air’s SSD storage drive as opposed to a 360 GB or 500 GB HDD in a 13″ MacBook Pro. Love notes that the SSD’s two big advantages, significantly enhanced battery and much faster data access come at a cost – less capacity and a higher price, but in his estimation the speed is worth the trade-off, reasoning that you can always store stuff using iCloud, Dropbox, or other cloud service. No doubt, but this remains a sticking point for me, since I like to have copies of everything important on a local volume. However, I’m not quite yet ready to say a final goodbye to CDs and DVDs, so I will want an external drive anyway with a MacBook Air, and Apricorn has announced a new Mac Edition of their Aegis NetDock ($229 for 1TB model), a compact 3 in 1 USB Docking Station, combining a 4-port USB Hub, dual layer DVD burner and 1TB hard drive in a footprint smaller than an office stapler. I f you don’t require the added storage capacity, and/or you’re comfortable storing your data in the Cloud, you can opt for Apple’s $79.95 USB SuperDrive.
However, Dylan concludes that the 13″ MacBook Air is the best computer for his needs that he’s ever used, and he’s used a lot of them. A convincing endorsement in a great review. A MacBook Air is looking better and better all the time.
For Dylan Love’s full MacBook Air review visit here:
http://read.bi/zOZ9Gs
