Rain Rannu

I've been a Macbook Air user for more than 2 years - since it came out in early 2008. I was satisfied, except for a few hinge problems. And the fact that whenever I needed to use the hard-disk (like load or write a file or open a program), Air slowed down until nothing on its screen moved anymore. Eventually, it became too much pain to use for work. So, when its hard-disk completely died this summer, I switched to Macbook Pro.

Macbook Pro is fast and reliable, as expected. But of course, for someone who has used to carrying around an ~1-kg laptop for the last 2 years, it's too heavy. So when the new Macbook Air's were announced last week - promising to cure all the hard-disk problems by completely replacing it with flash memory - I was sold.

The 13" Air that I got is almost exactly the size of the previous MacBook Air and the same weight as well. But speed is a completely different story. Even though the specs do not look impressive (especially compared to Macbook Pro), everything feels lightning-fast. Programs open quickly and nowhere does reading or writing data put the computer to halt. It feels almost as fast as iPad - so certainly a big improvement here.

Another apparent improvement is screen resolution: they have updated it from 1280x800 to 1440x900. What does not look like much on paper, actually amounts to a whole lot in reality: there seems to be much more space on the screen. However, the downside is that the fonts are small: sometimes to a point that it is painful to read. While in some apps (text editor, Skype, browser) it is easy to make the font bigger, it does not appear to be that easy everywhere: for instance, changing the font size in menus and dialogs, or in iTunes, is either very well hidden, or not available.

What's worse, if I want to change back to the "old" 1280x800 screen resolution (i.e. to look at our websites the way other people look at them), the result looks blurred and out-focus. It seems that the new hi-res screen seems to be incapable of showing lower resolutions at an acceptable quality. All in all, I'm not sure that "improving" the screen was necessarily a good idea.

Battery seems to be lasting for about 4-5 hours of normal work. This is more than previous Air's 2.5 hours, but not quite Apple's claim of "7 hours of wireless browsing". That said, I haven't seen a computer where these figures correspond to the actual usage I get out of it.

They have added another USB to the other side (very handy) and a memory card slot (does not fit my camera). Unfortunately, they have also removed keyboard backlight that was handy for typing in the dark. Cost cutting?

All in all, I'm quite happy with the Air so far. If you liked previous Macbook Air, I'm pretty sure you'll get used to this one too. And some Macbook or Pro users will likely switch too...