Friday, April 17, 2015

MacBook Air Review

While looking for a great lightweight windows laptop I ventured out to the YogaPad and an ASUS.  I didn't like either one.  The YogaPad had an amazing display and could run the highest resolution I've ever seen.  But it was too high, in my advanced years I couldn't read the text. And I couldn't get use to the chicklet keyboard on the ASUS.

I decided to continue to venture outside of my comfort zone to Apple.  I bought a MacBook Air 13.3" and it has been great.  Things I love about it so far:

  1. The Microsoft RDP app lets me remote into all my windows desktops and servers and even supports RD Gateway.
  2. The back lit keys - they can be turned on/off and brightness adjusted
  3. lightweight - I really like how lite it is.
  4. Battery life - I can run it for a few hours a night for 3-4 days before needing to charge it
  5. Even though I'm used to a 15.4" laptop - the 13.3" is a great size and the resolution seems to be just the right size
  6. Two finger scroll, on the nice and wide, touchpad makes sense - move two fingers from the bottom to the top and it moves the page up the screen.  This gesture makes more sense than in Windows which has it reversed.
  7. Three fingers is mind blowing.  I love the idea of never having to click and hold or click with one finger and drag with the other.  Three finger select something and then just drag where you want it.
  8. Very first setting I enabled was "Tap to click".  Out of the box you have to press down on the Trackpad which can very loud in quiet settings.  "Tap to click" lets you just tap on the trackpad as with most Windows laptops

Things I dislike:
  1. The corners/edges seem sharp.  Considering a wrap/case seen on Amazon that might make it smoother.
  2. In the beginning I had trouble opening but that has gotten easier now.  The laptop is so light that lifting the lid, can sometimes lift the whole laptop, not open the device as expected.
  3. What's with the widgets dashboard?  I've never seen anyone use it and I've never found a use for it.  And I'm told it was replaced with the new dashboard on the right.
  4. Haven't found a way to run more than one copy of Chrome.  In the windows world we found a way to run more than one copy.  This came in very hand. We could run one copy for our personal gmail, one copy for work gmail and one copy for customer gmails that we would need to access at various times.  

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