It’s now almost a week since I’ve ordered a MacBook Air, and it arrived two days later. As usual, the packaging is superb and everything worked out of the box. I spent a couple of days upgrading and installing software, getting a faster WiFi network up at home, and generally testing things. I was unable to get a USB-Ethernet adapter though; neither Apple’s nor third-party models can be found in local stores so far.
The Air is everything I expected; excellent design, very light, runs somewhat hot under heavy CPU loads, takes longer than it should when recharging – I measured 4 hours to recharge from empty to full with the machine sleeping.
What I didn’t quite expect, with all the whining about it being slow, was the speed. Building Quay on it is at least twice as fast as on my not-quite-2-years-old iMac G5 (2GHz, single CPU). I suppose that hard drive-dependent operations will prove slower, but then it’s a puny 1.8″ drive.
All in all, I’m planning to use the Air as my main development machine away from home, and it should be fully set up in time for our upcoming Europe trip in May.
