"...je vous aime"

One day with a fine product from Apple.

To those who read this Tumbr, Hello and welcome to another short post.

And on today’s schedule is my thoughts on this ole Mac of mine and how it juxtaposes against other experiences I’ve had with other systems.

And I guess I need to speak about the packaging with failed not to amaze me in sorts. The box was nice and the Mac itself came a plastic envelope which had a tab to pull it out of the box, all very simple and effective, better than bubble wrap (despite it’s fun) or polystyrene (excuse any mis-spelling). Apple obviously spends quite a bit on how their things are presented to their customers and I hope this ethic stays with the company.

It came with the standard charger and leaflets and iconic Apple stickers which I can place on all those non-apple products I own. We all love ironic humour now, don’t we.

And the Air itself is very thin (And for reference I have the base 13.3" model if you need to check the specs.) and light. My parents though the machine had to be put together when I lifted the product to their amaze. It makes one wonder how such a fast and advanced system can be placed into such a small form factor, it isn’t even a centimetre tall at its ends.

Hmm, and the ‘Virgin Boot’ as I hear it called was an exciting part to the end of the day of waiting for it. With the almost traditional sound of a Mac start-up I thought I’d never hear. Met with a tinted grey screen and an Apple logo, waiting to be used to potential. And despite it having to load a set-up, the boot was surprisingly fast and nimble, it must have been less than 20 seconds as I waited for a 'Welcome’ in all possible languages screen. Set-up was simple, there wasn’t much data to give, simply my Apple ID and such for everything to sync into the machine. iCloud set itself up as well.

And so began exploring this fully functional Operating System called Lion (10.7.4). You maybe thinking why I didn’t hastily go and install Mountain Lion (10.8.1) onto the system with it only £13.99 from the Mac App Store. That is because of some bad reviews regarding memory usage and battery life which apparently seem to be greatly reduced compared to the pre-installed system. I’m not missing out on much anyway, The Notification centre seems to be the only standing out point, however correct me if you so wish.

The first thing I did was open some installed apps to see just how fast it would load with the SSD Flash Storage. And it really is as it is advertised. Apps load instantly, even ones I’ve downloaded of the internet, as soon as it is clicked it is open and ready to use. This is a considerable improvement compared to that of Windows and Linux as I have used both OSes on a regular basis. I though Linux was fast and snappy, however this Mac blows all else out of the water. One beautiful system with speed that is unrivalled, maybe even to the Ultrabooks that are rising in the portable computing industry. The fail when contrasted to the Mac.

Most of the installed software will also please most users, with internet browsing, music purchasing, music production, and video editing, mail, calendar and contacts all included by default, but may not be optimal to the professional in their respective industry. Safari is an excellent browser and now it is completely optimized for the Mac without it’s windows counterparts, but rendering is sometimes and issue (specifically with The New Yorker for me) so I reverted to Firefox after testing Google Chrome as it is my preferred browser of choice, next would have to be Opera (Haters gonna hate, I guess.) All run fast on the high resolution screen on this particular Air.

I even decided to install virtual box to see how well virtualization worked (Although more processor specific rather than sotware) and It worked very well. With me going from 1GB of RAM to 4GB of RAM was definitely worth it. The upgrade has definitely amazed me and leaves me to wonder what 16GB of RAM would be like and how that would fair with myOh So Intensive Tasks.

Battery life is also a huge improvement from my previous laptop. My last laptop could just squeeze an hours worth of constant usage on its battery. My new Macbook Air can put out almost 6 hours usage when doing light browsing, this drops to 3-4 when using something like Sibelius or watching a HD movie. This is a little less than the advertised amount but nonetheless if a vast gain against most laptops in the current market.

The speaker on the machine are hard to get used to at first as the are placed on the hinge of the laptop, a rather strange place, but the sound quality is excellent once ones ears are adjusted to the new placing. Using headphones is like any other computer, do I need say more.

I think I’m going to bring this to a close and for my final summary of this machine.

All in all the machine is smooth and beautiful, sleek and elegant, fast and responsive, and highly portable. This machine as a wonderful investment for all that have the disposable income to buy one as they are not budget priced. Software from all vendors looks and runs better on the Mac system in my opinion. The HD FaceTime camera and the slightly American keyboard are all easy to get used to. One of my complaints though are the aluminium can get dirty easily and so a sleeve would be my recommendation for it. You can use remote disc for using DVD’s and the such but an external drive would probably work a lot faster than the other option. The college even installed Anti-virus (Which I thought it didn’t need, Damn you college policy) and it still runs as fast as if it wasn’t there.

Games also run excellently on the system, even with no dedicated graphics card, Intel HD 4000 is used and games run beautifully, even Amnesia; which claims not to run on integrated graphics cards which is an achievement. Although Physical copies cannot be installed, don’t hold me to that, but Game now offers a download service for Macintosh customers.

Otherwise it is an great system and it’s no wonder that Mac and Apple are staring to dominate the mobile computing market.

And that is the end of my first day of use review of the product.