Thursday , March 28 2024
The new 2012 MacBook Air is full of awesome.

Me and My New MacBook Air: A Non-Geek Point of View

The new MacBook Air is awesome. Really, really awesome. It almost makes me happy that my (also very nice) MacBook Pro died last week (a premature death, since it was only a couple years old). Having been a happy MacBook Pro user for the past three years, I grappled with whether to get one of the brand new Retina display models or to go with the sleek, light MacBook Air.

As a writer, I bring my computer with me everywhere; it is the nerve center of my professional life. It’s also powered-on many, many (too many) hours a day with numerous applications open on my desktop. And my Mac was dead, so I couldn’t really wait the week or two for the Retina models to make their way into my hands.

So, I went for the MacBook Air, 13-inch version, i7 Core. I packed it with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a 512 gigabyte solid state drive (SSD), knowing that my usage patterns stressed even the 8 Gig CPU of my 2011 MacBook Pro. I was curious about how the brand new Air would perform compared to my Pro, similarly outfitted.

All I can say is “Wow!” The thing barely breaks a sweat going full throttle with many apps open, including Chrome (with five open tabs), iChat, Word (with four documents open), iCal, and a few other third-party applications to boot. With all that open, the system is only using about a third of the available resources, and nearly a week later (without a restart), I’ve yet to hear the cooling fan trigger. It’s quiet, cool and damned efficient.

Although it’s a bit smaller than the 15.4” MacBook Pro to which I’d become accustomed, I have to say that the display is more than adequate for writing, browsing, watching Netflix movies or anything else I’ve wanted to do. The Pro had a matte high-definition screen, and I was concerned about eyestrain with the Air’s glossy display. I needn’t have worried; there is virtually no glare on the screen, to my mild (and pleasant) surprise.

With my old MacBook Pro, I’d shied away from using the Mail (and Outlook, for that matter). As a Gmail user, I tend to keep every email I get, which amounts to thousands of emails sitting in my various mailboxes. I never could get Mail to work well on my old Mac—the beach ball of death loomed over my display far too often, as it gamely tried to sync to my Gmail account. So I just gave up.

Browsers, too, tended to bog down the CPU, even with 8 gigs and the SSD. I would wander between Firefox, Safari and Chrome, since each would seem to drain the system’s resources idiosyncratically. I never quite knew which one would do better on any given day. (And, no, I never bothered to figure out why that was.)

So, imagine my surprise with this lovely new device. I’ve been using Chrome with a lot of open tabs, and it’s barely registering on Activity Monitor. Smooth, fast, cool, and just a pleasure to use. All I can say is “thank you Ivy Bridge” (the new Intel processor that powers the new MacBooks).

I have to admit that I started with a clean installation. I didn’t transfer anything over to the new machine from the old. All my documents and videos and anything else of value had been copied over to Dropbox. I re-installed my key software applications, easily finding the old serial numbers in some of those thousands of Gmails I’d kept (See? there is a method to my oversize-email-box madness). I reinstalled applications from the Apple App Store, which, smartypants that it is, remembered what I’ve purchased. Up and running in a little less than an hour with everything I needed, pretty much right where I’d left it.

Safari and Chrome (which I prefer) maintained my old logins and bookmarks (but not passwords), and even histories, so picking up right where I’d left off was pretty effortless even without cloning my old drive. (Neither browser is machine-dependent; your settings and bookmarks are available upon login.) My iTunes items were already either on my phone or iPad (or in iTunes’ purchase record) so, again, it was incredibly easy to restore everything.

Speaking of iPad, I’m beginning to wonder whether my iPad 3 is now a redundant machine. The Air is so light and small, it’s really just as portable as my iPad—and it’s much more powerful (and easier to type on, did I mention?). With the iPad set into its Zagg Folio keyboard case aboard, I believe my iPad is nearly as heavy as the Air, so where’s the advantage? I might just sell my iPad 3, and get a new Kindle altogether.

One of the things I really love about the MacBook Air (besides its size and overall awesomeness) is the typing surface. My wrists rest comfortably on the aluminum, and because the front of the surface is so thin, my wrists don’t get irritated like they had with the thicker MacBook Pro. For a writer, always typing, hours and hours a day, this is a real blessing—and a huge improvement over the Pro (for me, anyway).

After more than 20 years using a computer, I think I’ve finally found the perfect computer. MacBook Air, I think this will be the start of a beautiful relationship.

About Barbara Barnett

A Jewish mother and (young 🙃) grandmother, Barbara Barnett is an author and professional Hazzan (Cantor). A member of the Conservative Movement's Cantors Assembly and the Jewish Renewal movement's clergy association OHALAH, the clergy association of the Jewish Renewal movement. In her other life, she is a critically acclaimed fantasy/science fiction author as well as the author of a non-fiction exploration of the TV series House, M.D. and contributor to the book Spiritual Pregnancy. She Publisher/Executive Editor of Blogcritics, (blogcritics.org).

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