Thoughts on the 13″ MacBook Air

I’ve had my 13″ MacBook Air (mid-2011 model) for a few weeks now and thought it’d be a good idea to share my impressions. I originally moved to Apple on a black MacBook, then switched to a top end 17″ MacBook Pro, and now I’m on an Air.

What’s Good?

Weight

It’s fantastically light. My MacBook Pro feels like a brick after using the MBA for a while.

Size

Not only is it light, it’s thin. Like, really thin. It’s not really that much thicker than my iPad and that’s impressive when you consider it’s a full featured computer.

Battery Life

I haven’t used it for photo/video editing nor have I used it for games, so my usage is pretty moderate, but still, the battery life is excellent. My MacBook Pro has a good battery life for its size, but the Air has been really impressive. I haven’t timed the battery life, but I can say that I frequently use it for extended periods of time without even thinking about the power cable. That hasn’t been my experience with other laptops (Apple or otherwise).

Solid State Drive

It’s amazing how much of a difference a solid state drive makes. Startup is extremely fast, launching apps is even faster, and even development in a virtual machine is faster.

What’s Bad?

Screen Size

It’s totally usable for most of my everyday tasks, but for things like development, it’s a bit small. The good news is that it powers an external monitor just fine. If you’re on the go and need to do certain kinds of tasks, it’ll feel a bit cramped. I can’t imagine the MacBook Airs line won’t merge with the MacBook Pro line to provide the larger screen sizes in the future.

Other Thoughts

That’s actually the only negative thing I’ve noticed. I happen to have the 4GB RAM/256GB SSD model, so it’s maxed out on the basic specs. It’d be nice if the RAM went up to 8GB, but honestly, 4GB has been plenty (even with large-ish databases loaded) due to the SSD. The storage space may end up being a problem for me down the road if I started storing my main photo library, but I’m undecided how I want to handle that. Overall, the MacBook Air is the best laptop I’ve used for my everyday tasks. I’m sure I’ll find a few things where I miss the power of my PC workstation or my MacBook Pro, but so far, I’ve really impressed.

Goals for 2012

It’s that time of year again. These goals will change over the course of the year, but today, my goals for 2012 are to:

  • Pay off cat medical debt
  • Sell (or rent) house
  • Launch at least one new iOS game or app
  • Get involved with open source

Of course, the standard goals of lose weight, eat better, save more, and the like are all things I plan to work on as well. The goals above are specific to 2012. It should be a fun & exciting year.

Switching to Octopress

I’ve been looking into Octopress for a month or so now and I finally decided to take the plunge. As of now, this blog is now powered by Octopress (more or less out of the box) instead of WordPress. I’d like to change the theme a bit, but it’s good enough that I’ll leave it for now.

WordPress -> Octopress

Nothing was wrong with WordPress itself, but I just didn’t use any of the features it offered. I’d rather just type the blog posts in a regular editor instead of a textbox on a webpage. There are some great tools out there that help with that of course, but I just don’t need the features there either. In addition, maintaining WordPress means logging in pretty often to check for updates, apply them, make sure the database is backed up, etc. All of that would be just fine if I received enough benefit to offset the time there, but I just didn’t.

Enter Heroku

In addition to switching the blogging engine, I moved the physical blog from Linode over to Heroku + Amazon S3. My blog is very low traffic, so I don’t need a high powered VPS host that I have to maintain & patch. Heroku offers a free account if you don’t need much power and can live without a database (well, effectively without a DB – a 5MB one is included). I decided to go ahead and put any post specific images/files onto S3 since Heroku offers a limited amount of local storage and I can also redeploy back to Linode if something doesn’t work out at Heroku. For the record though, I love Linode for a Linux VPS host. I highly recommend them as long as you’re comfortable dealing with Linux via the command line.

Simplicity

As I get older, the technology side of things appeals to me less and less. I still love technology in general, but the nitty gritty details of what platform/framework/OS/whatever is the best is less and less interesting to me. I’m more interested in the best way to deliver a solution in a way that is as simple as possible. That doesn’t mean I’m adverse to complexity under the hood though. It means I value the experience, productivity, and the ability to simply get things done over the technical aspects of a solution.