Other Sites
Thin is in: Ars Technica Reviews The MacBook Air
TechRestore Posts MacBook Air Teardown Video
MacBook Air Performance (February 2008)
Intel Makes MacBook Air Processor Available To All
MacBook Air Diary–Day 3: Migration assistance
MacBook Air Revisited
Thin is in: Ars Technica Reviews The MacBook Air
If you're looking for the definitive MacBook Air review, Ars Technica, which is known for its extremely thorough product reviews, has posted a good one courtesy of Jacqui Cheng. It's very long, but worth reading. Here are a few snippets:
We decided to take a look at this thing to see whether Apple had come up with the next iPod for the computer world, or whether it had cut too many corners in its attempt to make the slimmest, sexiest notebook ever.....
Is the MacBook Air powerful enough for everyday use? While I'll get to some benchmarks in the next section, I found the Air to be quite usable... most of the time..... Put simply, the Air slows to a halfway-unusable crawl anytime there's a large amount of disk activity.... The cruel and unusual 4200rpm drive began burning me on my first evening using the Air, and has continued to burn me every evening since.....
Air users who want to use Migration Assistant must do so either over WiFi (the default setting) or a USB Ethernet adapter.... Let's be honest here - neither of these are exactly the speediest options. One person I know said it took him five hours to transfer his settings over Ethernet. But after attempting to run Migration Assistant in its native state over WiFi, five hours over Ethernet sounds simply divine...considering how abysmal my experience was, coupled with everyone else's complete (and justified) lack of faith in the system actually working, I'm left pretty disappointed..... Don't waste even a single minute of your time on WiFi. If you really must transfer your settings, buy a $29 Ethernet adapter.
The next stop along this path of disappointment is battery life....
I can pretty regularly squeeze a good 3:45 to four hours out of a brand new MacBook or MacBook Pro battery.... the MacBook Air's battery life sucks. A lot. I ran down the battery from full charge four times and came out with an average of two hours and 33 minutes.... This is pretty bad for a brand new battery, and even more infuriating because it can't be (easily) replaced by the user.... It also takes me about twice as long to charge the battery back to 100 percent than it does for me to run it down..... I can't even imagine what I'll do the next time I have to cover a keynote and have things like a USB EVDO modem sucking battery like no tomorrow....
One way to look at the MacBook Air is as the largest and most capable iPod in Apple's line - think of it as an iPod touch Extreme with a built-in keyboard. It is not meant to be your only or main computer—rather, it's a secondary (or even tertiary) computer.... Because of this, the MacBook Air is more an extension of your computing life than an entity of its own....
For the full review visit here:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-review.ars
TechRestore Posts MacBook Air Teardown Video
TechRestore's Shannon Jean says:
Our MacBook Air arrived today and our lead technician, Chet, promptly reverse-engineered it. It's amazing how small the screws are in this thing - it's like a big iPod. A lot of folks are dissing the, seemingly small, 80GB drive, but it wasn't that long ago that stock PowerBooks shipped with 80GB drives. I think that the Air is a fantastic innovation and bound to be the slickest mobile computing option available (until the tablet Mac comes out). Below is my stop-motion video of the unboxing and take-apart. Enjoy!
You can check it out at:
http://www.techrestore.com/blog.shtml
MacBook Air Performance (February 2008)
Primate Labs reports:
One of the big concerns surrounding the MacBook Air is just how much will you give up if you switch from a MacBook (or MacBook Pro) to a MacBook Air. Some things, like the optical drive and FireWire ports, are obvious while others, like processor performance, are harder to measure.
Of course, now that the MacBook Air is shipping we can take a look at their processor performance with Geekbench 2 and find out just how fast (or slow) the processor in the MacBook Air is.....
For the full report visit here:
http://www.primatelabs.ca/blog/2008/02/macbook-air-performance-february-2008/
Intel Makes MacBook Air Processor Available To All
The Register's Tony Smith reports:
The reduced-size 65nm Core 2 Duo designed by Intel and incorporated inside Apple's super-slim MacBook Air is available for other computer makers to buy, the chip company confirmed last week.
No great surprise there - Intel's in the business of selling as many chips as possible, not operating as Apple's in-house silicon specialist - but the news hasn't stopped commentators speculating that a raft of Air-alternatives will be hitting the market in the very near future.....
For the full report visit here:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/02/04/intel_opens_air_cpu/
MacBook Air Diary–Day 3: Migration assistance
The Apple Core's Jason D. O'Grady says:
I received my MacBook Air on Thursday (unboxing photos here) and have spent the last few days learning a thing or two about Apple's Migration Assistant software. It's that handy little application the auto-runs when you start up a new Mac for the first time or re-install Mac OS X...
Migration Assistant helps you move your data from a previous Mac to a new one, and for the most part it's brilliant. The MacBook Air however is a different story.....
Because the MacBook Air doesn't have a Firewire port and USB doesn't support Target Disk Mode Apple had to update Migration Assistant to allow for migrations over wireless networks. The problem: it doesn't work (at least for me).
I can probably save you several hours of wasted time if you're migrating to a MacBook Air with one simple tip.
If you plan on migrating to a MacBook Air, do yourself a favor and buy the US$29 USB-to-Ethernet adapter and do your migration over Ethernet. Apple really should have included the Ethernet dongle in the box.
[Editor's note.... Hey, d'ya think?]
For the full report visit here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1253#more-1253
MacBook Air Revisited
CNET's Dan Ackerman reports:
Apple's new laptop, the MacBook Air, may not be the true ultraportable that many had hoped for, but it still easily breaks new ground for small laptops.....
As we've come to expect from Apple, the design and engineering that went into the MacBook Air is extraordinary, but it's certainly a much more specialized product than the standard 13-inch MacBook and won't be as universally useful as that popular system.....
The real key to finding out whether the MacBook Air is right for you lies in its stripped-down set of ports and connections. Those who regularly use more than one USB device, or need FireWire, an SD card slot, or an Express card slot will find the single USB jack too limiting.
For the full report visit here:
http://us.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/02/01/macbook.air/index.html
Tags: News ď Tech-Industry ď
