Review of the 11" MacBook Air

My alternative: Put a 256GB Crucial RealSSD 300 in a 13" Macbook and max-out the RAM. It will be bigger and heavier, with less battery life, but if you already have a Macbook, this is a much cheaper move. The RealSSD has background garbage collection, so you don't have to worry about TRIM. You only need to do two things: 1) noatime and 2) make sure you're using less than 220GB.<p>I did this, and the performance is <i>fantastic</i>. (Original 13" unibody Macbook with RAM upgraded to 6GB.) Everything happens <i>instantly</i>. I had journalling off, because it increases disk writes by 12%, but OS X compensates by cranking up its RAM cache. Keep journalling on, as it helps boot-up and shut-down happen quickly and things just seem to run faster without the system managing the really large RAM cache to disk. (Another factor: The nasty bug in XCode 3.1 requiring you to reboot your machine to unfreeze the simulator. This makes fast reboots a big win for me. Otherwise, I'd use sleep and only reboot occasionally.)<p>For increased battery life on the plane, I have a Tekkeon myPower All, which I also sometimes use to power a mobile 4G hotspot. You can find a $14 Magsafe cord on eBay, and solder it to a male Adaptaplug from Radioshack to make yourself an adapter.<p>EDIT: If you have an older Core Duo plastic Macbook capable of supporting more than 4GB of RAM, then I'd recommend slapping a RealSSD into it. You'll have something lighter than a 13" aluminum with great performance.

I got the 13" Air (highest specs: 2.13Ghz+4GB) about a month ago and am completely loving it. I usually have Xcode, Photoshop, (occasional) Eclipse, and a slew of other tools open and it performs like a charm.<p>Most useful "feature": the battery really lasts around 6+ hours, esp. if you're not using wi-fi. This made some long airplane flights bearable.<p>I used to dread taking my previous Macbook Pro to a coffee shop, travel, etc. because it was bulky, required always plugging in the charger, etc. No more. Since it's so accessible on the go, my productivity has increased and I can quickly code up ideas anywhere.<p>It did take a week to get used to the smaller pixel size on the 13" screen-that-fits-a-15" resolution.<p>Sorry for the fanboy post, but seriously, this machine made my life as a developer that much better.

"I haven’t felt so thrilled by a new piece of hardware since I bought our first iPad..."<p>That long, eh?

I bought the entry level 11" MacBook Air 4 weeks ago and now it is the system I use for over 90% of my work, writing,and web browsing.<p>Caveat: most of my work is straight-up Ruby development, Rails development (both using RubyMine 3.01), and Clojure with Emacs. All three of these development scenarios take up little in the way of CPU or memory. I use TexShop for writing.<p>I do sit at my desk with a large external monitor occasionally, but not often. The only thing I don't like is the tiny escape key and I'll probably end up remapping it. Otherwise this is my favorite home computer ever (and I have owned many, starting with a PDP 8 one board, then serial number 71 Apple II, etc.) Both the light weight and a SSD drive make for a great experience.<p>I am going to start next week helping a friend's company do some back end Java EE 6 development and I'll either use my MacBook Pro or my beefy Ubuntu laptop for that.

I killed my MacBook Air envy by buying a Core i5 MBP, replacing the optical drive with a 128 GB SSD, installing the system and applications to the SSD and symlinking everything big and rarely accessed (iPhoto library, movies, iTunes U, etc) to the HDD. I have AppleScripts that mount/unmount the rotational drive when needed, and my machine now <i>screams</i>. It's heavier, sure, but I don't travel much and I love having all the additional internal storage. I still get over 8 hours of battery and the machine is silent as long as I'm not accessing anything on the rotational drive.

i've been using an 11" air as my only development machine for a month or two. a few minor things worth mentioning:<p>- no backlit keyboard<p>- no IR interface, so no ability to use a non-bluetooth remote control<p>- the LCD screen is glossy, but it's just a film over the screen, not a glass/plastic sheet over the entire display. as a result, the glare isn't as bad as the macbook pro.<p>- because the display is very thin, the glowing apple logo behind the screen sometimes shows through on the front.

People are worried that 128G is not enough for a boot drive!? On my eeepc, I did it in 4G. On my desktop, I did it in 9.8G:<p><pre><code> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 26G 9.8G 15G 41% / /dev/sda1 894M 19M 827M 3% /boot /dev/mapper/md0_crypt 917G 238G 680G 26% /home </code></pre> The key is to keep all your movies on an extra drive :P

I bought the 11" Air shortly after it came out as a fun little secondary notebook, and liked it so much I picked up the 13" as well for regular work purposes (replacing a 15" MBP).<p>I just finished coding an app on the 11" and it worked great. I never had a problem with the screen size or performance, and also have never had a problem with the apple logo showing through the display that another poster mentioned (on either the 11" or the 13"). I do occasionally hook it up to a 23" monitor when I need to do any design work, since there is a point where the 11" display is just too small for some tasks.<p>My only regret was going with the low-end 11" system. I really should have opted for the higher end 11", but didn't at the time because I was really buying it as "fun" purchase and the $999 entry price point was pretty attractive. If you're considering one, definitely spend the extra money to get the next step up.

I chose the 13" over the 11". The 11" had too small of a screen for my tastes and felt like a netbook. The 13" has a really nice resolution and feels <i>amazing</i> for typing (as the laptop is so thin your palms rest perfectly on it).<p>My 13" is not a netbook. It is a powerful laptop that I now absolutely love and do so much on. It's also my first mac, but I prefer the feel over my friends 13" macbook pro so I think I made the right choice.

I got the 11" and it does Starcraft on medium settings better than my wine session on a quad core 8800GTS does. Boot time of 16sec is also kind of a moot point... it drops in and out of sleep so effortlessly I doubt I'll ever need to reboot the thing.

I recently purchased the 11 with the same config.<p>Xcode runs happily enough on my iOS and Mac OS projects.<p>It runs my web dev stack just fine (Textmate, Python, Django, Nginx, Apache, Postgres)<p>It reminds me of how much I appreciated the form factor of my old 12" Powerbook back in the day. I got a lot of mileage out of that little machine.<p>The speakers sound tinny (under the keyboard) and I wish it had a proper ethernet port. The webcam doesn't seem to do as well in low light compared to the one in my MBP.<p>Overall I'm very happy with it and it's already been getting a lot more use than I expected considering it was purchased as a secondary machine.

I bought the 11" when it came out and it quickly became something I don't fo anywhere without. I used to carry my 13" MBP in a nice laptop backpack, but now I have a small satchel bag which can hold the Air as well as my essentials. With 3G tethering it's SO useful to always have a real computer with Internet access at my disposal.<p>I still have and use my MBP and iMac, but I use them much less. Convenience trumps power 90% of the time.

Two things that really bug me:<p>1. No cleartype. I.e. although there is subpixel antialiasing, fonts aren't optimized for the pixel grid. Thus, the fonts are much clearer when I boot to Windows and so I feel like everything is fuzzy when I boot back to Mac OS. This isn't a problem for the web, but for coding and SSH it's terrible. I can't use Windows full time though because Spaces is so outstanding and I don't get trackpad options under Windows.<p>2. Excel on Mac lacks my most used feature: web data import. Windows Excel lets me choose a table inside a web browser, and the data in that table (stock quotes/currency rates/etc) are imported into Excel (and re-retrieved just by pushing F9).<p>Excel on Mac does allow you to manually create text files that describe web data import which would be a possible workaround except that the sites I use require a login, and Windows Excel can save cookie state because of its tight integration with IE, but Mac Excel can't.

I own the 13" version. I spent some time testing both at the Apple Store. I really wanted to get the 11" one, but the upper row of keys is significantly thinner. As someone who uses vim all the time, this means missing the esc key very frequently. My advice would be to test both versions as much as you can and see which one works better for you.

I bought the top 11" that I could and I love it. It has become my main machine. Not since the 12" PowerBook have I loved a machine - sad as that sounds. The form factor fits me and I've been much more productive with it

I've checked out the Macbook Air at the Apple Store a few times and I'm so close to just selling my i5 MBP for a fully spec out 13" Air. I like the idea of having such a light and still powerful system for web and ios development. From the sounds of it I wouldn't be giving up to much going with the Air over the MBP.

I have a 10" Samsung N210 - proper 'netbook' (Atom, 1G RAM, etc) - and is fast enough for my dev needs (HTML/CSS, C, Python). I do need to farm compiling out to my main machine (a quad core) with distcc if I need to compile anything &#62;10k LOC though.<p>I'm happy with it.

Another good satchel for the 11" Macbook Air:<p><a href="http://amzn.com/B001F7FMUA" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/B001F7FMUA</a><p>I have one of these for my old tc1100 Windows stylus tablet. It should fit the 11" Air quite handily as well as the iPad.

Got the 13" version with the 4GB ram upgrade. Works great for Android/iPhone/Web development. Loving it so far, haven't used by dell since. In fact, I'm going to give it to my mom (Core i7, NVidia GT435M)

problems waking up from sleep<p><a href="http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2630327&#38;start=0&#38;tstart=0" rel="nofollow">http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2630327&#3...</a><p>we have this problem with ours, we've installed the newest firmware updates as well, I'm hoping they fix this soon.<p>other than that, seems pretty good.

Is anybody else holding out for the 3G compatible Air?

I know this is blasphemy but is anyone running Win 7 on their 11" Air?