Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

So, I took a chunk of my tax refund this year and threw down for a MacBook Air. Yes, the total-pimp version, Solid State Disk and all.

So, lets clear up some stuff. The battery life is OK. Not great, but OK. I don't know how much this is going to affect me over the long haul. I would say it is on a par with the first-gen MacBook I upgraded from. However, I had two batteries for that. I only ever actually used the two batteries when dealing with air-travel days. Is the irony that the Air sucks in the air? Har har.

Secondly, and bear in mind I am upgrading from a 32 bit Core Duo to the 64 bit Core 2 with a marginal upgrade in cycle speed, but this thing is FUCKING FAST. I know there are a number of benchmarks out there now on the SSD from Ars and such. Let me just say, this thing smokes even the standard ATA drives in the regular notebooks in a huge way. "Splash Screens" are almost entirely a thing of the past. Even the behemoth that is NetBeans 6, which with all my plugins installed takes almost two minutes to start on my Win32 desktop and slightly longer on the old Macbook, is up, running and has indexed all the classpaths for my projects in 24 seconds flat. Honestly, aside from the still half-a-loaf Intel graphics card, if people feel this thing is slow, I can't imagine what it is they are accustomed to.

One thing I read in a number of reviews is that relative to the MacBook, the Air actually runs cool. Now I haven't worked on the Core2 MacBooks, but I'm here to tell you, these statements are lies, LIES, LIES! After 3 hours of heavy code/compiling on this thing, the bottom is so hot you could fry bacon on the thing. The heat even starts to reach around the aluminum case to the point where I feel the left side of the keyboard radiating heat like a Waffle House griddle.

Speaking of the case, as I sit here at the pub around the corner from my house typing this, I have 2 bars on the WiFi. I now feel Adamson's pain from the metal casing. Even my iPod Touch has better WiFi reception than this. Granted the WiFi I am connected to is through a concrete and steel building and a few hundred feet away, I never felt any net sluggishness on the MacBook. However, at the office earlier, where the WiFi is five by five, the whole internet experience felt AMAZING. When you start seeing your browser loading stuff out of the SSD cache, Flock, FF, Safari, doesn't matter. They all feel like a rocket ride across the net.

I have already bumped into "issues" with Leopard. The GWT guys fixed some classloader issues to make 1.4.61 an "unofficial" release for Leopard. However, they overlooked the startup for the JUnit shell, so my unit tests on Gwittir all fail, all the time. I am still not a fan of almost anything in Leopard, from the iTunes-style finder, to the translucent menu bar (though my standard white-based background makes this less of an issue than the Babylon Five looking default).

And yes, it does weigh nothing. Honestly when they hand you the box, you would think there was nothing but packing material in it. It is thin, I guess. A lot of the "feels thin" comes from the beveling on the case, which is fine. In real terms, it is about as thick as my iPod G5 with the fatty plastic case it is in. If does feel suprisingly sturdy. It takes a good bit of pressure on the lid before you see the screen flex, and the base feels like a brick. I do wish Apple had gone with a more sealed keyboard. Partially because I can see light leaks around the backlit keys, and partially because, as someone who is constantly nursing a coffee, soda, or cocktail all day long, I feel the keyboard is a little liquid-vulnerable.
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Give me a week to work on it, and I will revist this post. After a good 6 hours of work on it, I am, thus far, pretty pleased. In spite of being a modest upgrade from what I was using -- 83mHz, 4GB storage, identical RAM, slightly better video -- it feels like the difference between TOS and TNG in tech level.