The Technium

Nice Air Book


I am loving my 11-inch Mac Air.

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Random stickers I had around the office found their new home pretty quickly.

Since I previously did not have a laptop, I carried a first generation iPad for my travel device. I spent several months on the road with only the iPad in the US, and a several long trips overseas with only the iPad for my connection. I had trouble doing a lot of writing on the iPad so I got the nifty blue took portable keyboard — which is a very fine piece of technology. I considered duct-taping the keyboard to the iPad to prevent the frequent inadvertent key activations which drain the pad’s power, but then these new Airs came along to solve my problem.

The smaller 11-inch Air is about the same weight as the iPad plus keyboard, and just as cool. Battery will last a cross country flight. Instant awake (from sleep), compact, enough speed and power for non-game needs, it has everything I wanted except a touch screen. It’s more of a working stiff, but it can play too. It has a full sized keyboard, and sits easy on the lap or knees, or even in your arms. Compared to an old Mac Air it feels light as a breeze, and feels like a zero compared to a MacBook.

I got the minimum configuration ($999) since this is my nomadic netbook which I only use when I am away from my Mac Tower and two cinema screens. I don’t keep any unique data on it for long; everything stays synced on the cloud.

One significant problem is that the ONLY way to connect to the cloud is via wifi. There’s no built-in ethernet plug. Sure I could carry an extra plug-in or a mi-fi, if I wanted to, but if you rely on the device itself, you need to find a wifi spot to get online. That’s no problem in the US, a bit more an issue in Europe, and a big problem in Asia. As far as I could tell there’s no wifi in India worth mentioning. I’d get the 3G version at this size in a hearbeat. Can’t be far away.




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