Traveling Light with the Macbook Air

We sent my son, Robert, off to college with a new 17" Macbook Pro and I inherited his Macbook Air. It's one of the original versions with a 1.6 Ghz processor and the 64GB solid state drive. He's been carrying it to school for the last 2 years and it's held up very well. Cosmetically, it looks brand new. The battery still lasts for three hours.

Lately, I've been leaving my 15" Macbook Pro at home when I travel. It's just too big and heavy to deal with for a minimal advantage over the iPhone. My thinking is that the Macbook Air will be able to travel with minimal fuss and bother.

So, I've committed to the Macbook Air and it's been my primary computer for about 2 weeks. It's slower by far than my old 15"MBP, but for most of what I do it works just fine. Most of the time I'm just using Safari to browse the web and the Mail app for emails. iTunes synchs my iPhone and plays music occasionally.

The Macbook Air will overheat and race it's cooling fan if I try to do too much. If I'm going to play a video I close all other apps. Playing video really taxes the Air's processors and the cooling fan runs loudly at full speed. The current model has a dedicated video card and doesn't suffer from this problem.

I've taken it on one trip so far and it wasn't any trouble to lug around and I enjoyed connecting with a screen larger than the iPhone.

What I like:

The screen is very bright compared to the 15" MBP. I don't miss the other 2" of screen.

The computer is very light and easy to travel with.

The power brick is small and light.

I love the multi-touch gestures on the large trackpad.

What I don't like:

It's slower than the 15" MBP.

It chokes on large/long videos. Particularly flash videos in Safari.

There is a fix I'm trying for the flash problem in Safari. It's "Click to Flash," an app that disables flash and speeds up Safari. I'm running noticeably cooler since installing the app.

I use "iStat Menu" to monitor things like processor load and temperatures. It's an indispensable app for me.

I"ll try to keep this up to date as I continue to travel with and use the Macbook Air as a primary computer.