Nine years with a MacBook Air
While I follow most consumer electronics news, I don’t tend to buy first generation products. That’s why I was excited about the very first MacBook Air in 2008, but didn’t rush to buy it. It was laughed at by many - Apple omitted the then popular CD/DVD drive, only had one USB… oh and it fit inside a Manila envelope. It had problems, obviously - it was fairly slow, the disk wasn’t impressive, a single USB was quite a blocker etc.
That’s why I was even more excited when Apple unveiled the second generation two years later with many of the flaws fixed. As soon as Apple shipped a minor refresh of this second generation, I bought it - this was the summer of 2011 and I still have and use that machine as my only personal computer.
This computer was and still is pretty amazing - the design sparked an era of ultrabooks, the lack of a DVD drive became a standard and SSDs, while not super rare at the time, became more popular not just in ultrabooks. The longevity is not just in my household, A MacBook with the same chassis is still available to this day, Linus Tech Tips have a video about it, released just last month.
While the laptop has held up, it’s not all rosy:
- The battery is pretty dead, it holds up about an hour of charge - this is fine for me, as I mostly use it around a power socket. But it’s obviously less portable than a fully functioning laptop.
- The bezels around the screens are huge by today’s standards. If you look at what Dell has achieved with their XPS 13 models, you see how much you can squeeze from a small frame - this makes the Air a little larger than today’s 13” ultrabooks, but the weight is still pretty much the same.
- There was a pretty dramatic improvement in I/O in recent years - be it SSD speeds or USB transfer speeds - both are pretty abysmal on the 2011 MacBook Air, but perfectly usable for many workloads.
- The screen resolution is decent, but it’s not Retina - which is fine for me, because I use an external monitor for the most part. That’s a fun side story there - the matte Dell is one of the few tech things older than the MBA that I possess - it’s a really nice IPS Full HD display, which still works very well today. But I am sceptical the Air would power a higher resolution display well.
The reason I held off buying a new laptop was that 1) the MBA worked just fine, 2) Apple has been making some weird decisions when it comes to keyboards. This seems to be over now. The reason I’m writing this today is that Apple has finally released something that resembles the 10-year old MacBook Air - a thin and light laptop with a great keyboard. Also, finally, after 10 years, the base model no longer sports 128 GB of disk space, the default is now 256. I never thought I’d wait nine years to buy a computer with the same disk capacity.
The only downside of this year’s models is that with USB-C, you no longer get MagSafe connectors. While that’s a bit sad, I do welcome USB-C, because it’s the only intiative that makes it likely for us to all have one cable to charge everything. Once I get a new laptop, I’ll buy a USB-C capable external monitor and I won’t even have to worry about a charger as the power will go through the display.
PS: I did have to invest in the laptop once in the last nine years. Last year, the charger pretty much fell apart, so I had to buy a new one for ~£80. If I wanted to fix the battery issue, I could have bought a new battery on eBay for ~£40, but me being so cheap, I never bothered.
PS #2: The keyboard situation has been so bad in the past few years, that I actually never use my keyboard on my MacBook Pro at work - instead, I’m using the age old bluetooth keyboard from Apple, which has the same layout and clickiness of the old MacBook Air. That’s not the Magic Keyboard, that’s the old one powered by two AA batteries.