Overheard In Providence

Taking my cue from Stephen of cogitamus, I’m obliged to announce my acquisition of a macbook air just over a week now. Also I’m writing this from my local coffee shop, which I think makes the whole post more authentic.

So far I’ve found the Macbook Air to be quite lovely. I’ll admit, it’s not the thriftiest purchase I’ve ever made, but it does fit my lifestyle very well. Before last week, I had a 12″ Powerbook that I carried everywhere. The Air fits beautifully in the same bag and is definitely more pleasant to carry. Its screen is also a huge improvement. It’s much brighter and sharper, and I like the extra width as well.

Before I bought this computer, I read a lot of comment threads filled with a bunch of people whining about its supposed shortcomings. So far these complaints have not bothered me one bit.

The DVD drive on my 12″ Powerbook had been broken for years, so I certainly don’t miss having one in my new machine. Also, in my three years owning the Powerbook, I almost never plugged in anything besides an external monitor, an ipod, and a digital camera, so having one USB port is fine by me. Finally, I’ve never carried around a spare laptop battery, so its hardly a sacrifice not to be able to do so now.

One final note: This Ars Technica review reported a very poor experience with the Macbook Air’s battery, but this does not match my own experience. I agree that getting a full five hours of battery life is unlikely, but 4+ is definitely possible depending on what your running (PowerPoint appears to be a bit of a hog). I’ll also note that the first day I got this computer it was running fairly hot and the battery was depleting rapidly. When I opened up Activity Monitor, I noticed that Dashboard had froze up and was using 99% of my CPU. Restarting fixed the problem.