Blog Post

More Thoughts on the Mac Air

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I’ve been living with my Mac Air for a few weeks now, thought I’d share some quick thoughts:

  • I miss the backspace key/behavior. Air only has the delete key.
  • I miss the right click button.
  • And I miss the home/end keys.
  • Two finger scrolling is natural, I find myself trying to do it on the trackpad at work.
  • App store is so obviously a good idea its hard to understand why Windows hasn’t had something similar
  • Battery life seems good, though watching the debate caused the power meter to visibly tick down
  • I’m using Parallels to run Windows 7 and it works fine, and the hardware doesn’t seem to bog down at all (though I’m not doing much to tax it most of the time). Very very smooth.
  • While I’m reasonably a power user in Windows, I’m not in OSX, and not feeling the urge to become one. I just want my OS – whichever one I’m using – to just work. It’ll be interesting to see if decide to dig deeper on OSX.
  • I used the agent provided with Parallels to create the VM on an external SSD on my old laptop, took about 90 minutes to build it, about 30 minutes to load it on the Air (for about 60gbs).
  • Chrome works fine on OSX, as does LastPass (my current password vault)
  • I love the guest mode/login, has been a good way to let my kids use it without sharing passwords or creating accounts.
  • The hardware really seems solid, keyboard is fine,screen is good,I don’t even mind the glossy screen.

Mostly I’m logging into OSX and right into a full screen VM running Windows 7, making it a Windows machine with a funny keyboard layout. From a hardware perspective if I had a choice of the Air or an equivalent PC based one with a Windows keyboard I’d go with the latter, though of course so far the latter doesn’t seem to exist. For the OS the Mac OSX seems fine, I’m just vested in the Windows space and don’t see – so far at least – much of a reason to try to find equivalents for Mac. I like the idea that there might be better options in some cases for the Mac, so I’ve got to work at thinking about that once in a while so I can leverage having both.

So I’m still happy with it. Lightweight, good battery, power to spare. If you’re thinking about buying one I’d tell you the difference in the keyboard is the biggest change and it’s one of those changes that you may or may not find to be worth the effort to come to terms with.

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