twi.gs

Last Saturday, I was mildly bored so I decided to head down to the Apple Store to look at the MacBook Air.

As it turns out, J.D. (Kagi/Ken Ken J.D.) works there. We talked for quite some time, and caught up on the happenings. While we talked, I pined over the Air. He did a stand up thing for me while I was having a gander, he exchanged my iPhone for me. I had tried to return it a month or so earlier because the apps were always finicky on it. A few days before this, I dropped it giving it a nice dent in one of the corners. Normally I don’t think they’d have considered taking it back, but J.D. worked some magic.

At any rate, at some point during my adventure I had convinced myself to get one. (Luckily) they were out of the SSD model, so left the store with a 1.6Ghz Air safely tucked away in it’s “LOOK AT ME EVERYONE” MacBook Air bag. I guess Apple is trying to make me feel more pretentious than I already felt.

I like it. It’s really light which is what I was going for. The screen is nicer than my MBP screen and the keyboard and trackpad are a pleasure to use. (They did however, swap where the shortcut keys are for the screen brightness, dashboard, and volume control. This is only a minor setback.)

The most annoying thing about it to me is the mono speaker. I’m alright with a mono speaker in the Air, but they should have put it in the middle instead of to the right. Whenever it decides it needs to play a sound I get the sensation that I’ve suddenly become deaf in my left ear.

I was skeptical about the battery life, but with the keyboard light off (I know where the keys are) and the back light turned down a bit I can squeeze right around 5 hours of it. Just for fun, I streamed Groove Salad for most (roughly 5 hours) of the day at work on the battery.

Should you buy one? If you have $2,000 laying around, sure, otherwise probably not. It’s a really frivolous toy. I just feel like I need something light to tote to school and work. It was this or the EEEPC and the resolution on the EEEPC didn’t do it for me.

P.S. If you want to talk to J.D. his jabber account is jack@im.zzq.org.