Bye, MacBook Pro. New MacBook Air Too Good
- Transfer
Last Wednesday, one of the new MacBook Airs fell into my hands. Since then, I have not touched my MacBook Pro, which is only 6 months old. Rip.
I know that my statement is more like an exaggeration, but it is not. I wrote down my first thoughts a few hours after the start of using a new laptop. I have not even left home with him. But now I have such experience. I took it with me almost everywhere, and so for about a week. Now I am 100% sure that Air has become a full replacement for my MacBook Pro.
This is really a great thing. And not only because it has the most suitable screen size for me (13 inches), but what surprised me - and excellent speed. The laptop boots up very quickly - in less than 15 seconds it is ready to go. An iMac with 8 GB of RAM loads about two minutes, and the MacBook Pro at least 30-45 seconds.
As for applications, it seems that they load even faster. The same applies to file transfer, which lasts about 3 seconds. Macworld offers more detailed comparative tests.
By download or transfer speed, I mean primarily performance. Recently, I used only the MacBook Air, and I completely missed it. Over the past 6 months, I had to combine the iMac and MacBook Pro to work. Judging by the processors, RAM, they should work much faster than Air. But I never noticed that the new laptop is inferior to them in something - it fully meets my needs for work and leisure. This was another surprise for me.
Initial benchmarking Macworld tests show that the new laptops partially support such a crazy requirement. I have a 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM and a 128 GB hard drive. Tests show that the new Air performs better than the MacBook Pro with a faster Core 2 Duo processor and RAM. And it's not about the i5 Pro model.
Manufacturers rely heavily on memory, which undoubtedly has a significant impact on performance. The second reason is the problems of heating the laptop case of the previous model, when it worked at capacities close to the maximum. With new models, the situation is different - there is no such problem and the MacBook Air can easily work at maximum load, which it shows in practice.
Earlier, John Gruber wondered if the new laptop fits into the MacBook product line. If you compare with the price of the main MacBook model - $ 999, then yes, at the moment it fits. But this is only for now. And I agree with that.
Air has a drawback - it has a 128 GB hard drive. Thanks in large part to Apple, we live in a world of digital music, photos, movies and TV shows that need to be stored somewhere. And these are tens and hundreds of gigabytes of information. That is why the 128 GB hard drive is too small if you intend to use Air as your primary machine. More often than not, even 256 GB is not enough to store the necessary information. My personal digital storage on iMac will soon take 1 TB.
But. We all know that Apple plans to store all the necessary information in the cloud. If this idea succeeds, their devices will go like hot cakes. Straight from the shelves. Instantly.
I suppose if the hard drive weren’t so important, the 13-inch MacBook Air would be in great demand.
I can not say anything about the 11-inch model, since I did not work with it, but there are reviews about this laptop. The 13-inch model, which we talked about above, is the main one and costs $ 1299, 11-inch laptops go on sale for $ 999.
It's funny, but I still haven't said a word about the size of the new laptop - and this is a great bait for buyers. But with Air it has always been. True, complete with compact dimensions served high price and low productivity. Now these flaws are fixed. Only in the last 6 days, five of my friends have already boasted a new thing from Apple. This is the same body material that iPhone and iPad are made of and this is a wow factor for people.
And no matter how much the hard drive is, I have no doubt that Air is a really worthy instance in the MacBook line. Moreover, in the near future we will stop using optical disks and flash drives and move on to storing information online. In fact, this is the only laptop that I want to think about at the moment. The 15-inch model is even better: 10 hours of operation without recharging the battery. True, and his weight is slightly larger - almost 1.5 kilograms. This is the future of the MacBook Pro, which begins today.
No less nice to talk about battery life. The documents indicate that it is equal to 7 hours, and my experiments have shown that this figure is close to the truth. Usually, without recharging, my laptop worked from 5 to 6 hours, depending on the tasks performed and the brightness of the screen. Several times this interval was around 7 hours.
As for the 30-day standby time, I had a great desire to test it, but it turned out only this option: in the evening the battery was 50% charged, and when I woke up, the indicator stood at 49%. And yes, the laptop wakes up from sleep mode instantly. The only thing that doesn’t work in an instant is WiFi, the connection of which has to wait a bit.
But what about the screen? At first, I thought that rebuilding after the 15-inch MacBook Pro would be quite problematic, but it turned out that it wasn’t. The new Air has the same standard resolution of 1440 by 900.
People also cannot believe that the laptop does not heat up during operation. The only time I felt that it was a little warm was during the repeated viewing of flash clips. But the amount of energy released does not compare with the one emitted by my MacBook Pro, not to mention the old MacBook Pro, which at some points was very hot.
It’s hard to think of anything else to say. This is the computer I was waiting for. The new Air makes me regret buying a MacBook Pro 6 months ago and I feel not too smart. I just can’t think about the time when I want something else new.
Goodbye MacBook Pro. Your candle burned out before the hard drive ended.
