Last Wednesday Adam and I had our work laptops stolen out of the back of my car. It sucked, and I was stupid about information security so all my data was open to whomever decided to steal it.
For a variety of reasons I decided to buy a MacBook Air out of pocket, which I intend to do all my work on. I shelled out the extra money for the SSD drive after looking at the read speed numbers.
After a few days I’ve got everything up and running, and all the files I need restored from a TimeMachine backup of my old laptop. I have to say, this computer is fast enough to do the vast majority of tasks most people do, including developers.
Even though I love this machine and am perfectly able to get everything I need done, I do think there are some work situations in which you just cannot use this machine on a daily basis.
- You work on a large compiled application
- You write Java
- You spend a sizable portion of your time in VMWare
The write speeds are pretty slow, and it maxes out at the OOTB 2GB of memory. BUT, the read speeds are astonishing. In fact I’m finding most of what I do on this laptop to be FASTER than my MacBook Pro.
You read from your drive a lot more than you write to it, and seeing 18x improvements in read performance has some stunning consequences. Firefox is noticeably more responsive, bootup times are really fast, Mail.app is usable again, and switching applications is instantaneous.
Not to mention, this machine is BEAUTIFUL. I never thought I’d be staring over at a MacBook Pro and thinking it looked “dated”. I really like this keyboard better than the MBP, I know it’s the same keyboard that’s been on the Macbook for a while but I’m happy to finally have one in my hands, it’s a big improvement.
Is this a first Gen MBA or 2nd? Also, which CPU?
First Gen. The lower CPU, the difference between the two CPUs doesn’t justify the price difference.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to get the SSD drive. I had to use a loaner from work at one point with the standard drive and it was far too slow.