I purchased a MacBook Air recently mostly for school. I was pretty impressed with how it looks, how thin it is, and also how powerful the thing can be as well. The MacBook Air can be configured in a few different ways. You can get them in two different sizes 11 inch and a 13 inch. The 13 inch also includes an SD card slot on the side of it as well. Both models come with 2 USB 3.0 ports, and 1 Intel Thunderbolt port which is very expandable as far as its capabilities. They all come with Solid State Drives instead of Hard Drives, which definitely helps increase the speed of the machines. The model I acquired was the 11 inch MacBook Air with the Retina display, a 1.7 Ghz i5 intel cpu, with turboboost, 4 gigabytes of ram, 128 gigabyte SSD, and an Intel HD 4000 GPU also with turboboost. The guys at school have HP EliteBooks exactly the same specs on this so I was quite impressed and decided to pick one up. I also got the school discount which also made the deal even sweeter of course. Its very fast I never have to wait for any of the programs I use for my computer courses in college to load. Everything is pretty much instantaneous with the SSD drives, and the quite capable hardware. They also manage to play games very very well on the computers as well, so I figured I would download a few games for Mac OS X and also Windows 7 because I also did manage to use BootCamp to dual boot the Macintosh as well.
The first game was Counter Strike - Global Offense.
I didnt test out any frames per second or anything like that, but I did manage to throw all the settings on high pretty much without any lag at all from the game. The game itself ran very very smooth, and played extremely well on the little machine. I was actually quite impressed with the results myself after playing the thing. I'm still getting used to the gameplay of this game so I will definitely have more results as far as how I rate the game at another time.
The second game was Modern Combat : Domination
This game is a series that was made mostly for mobile phones such as iPhones, and Androids. The games are very detailed as far as graphics even on the mobile devices. I seen this in the App Store so I figured I would give this a shot since the graphics I knew where also going to be pretty demanding on the system as well. The graphics on this game as well were also on high, and played extremely well. The game itself is also a very good game, the maps are pretty unique, and the weapons are also nice.
This game also I haven't had the most time playing, but I will also comment on this game at a later time in another blog.
The OS
The MacBook Air has plenty of software available now days to pretty much accomplish anything. The new OS X Mountain Lion that came pre-installed on the machine as well is a pretty smooth operating system. I tested the one with 10.7.4 installed as well, same specifications and everything. The system itself didn't seem near as fast as the new 10.8.2. Apple included 200 new features into this operating system. They brought many iOS features such as the notification menu to the desktop, as well as an integrated iMessage application which also combines iChat into it to run various other chat programs as well. FaceTime is also included with the OS as well as with the last OS it still maintains the ability to FaceTime other Apple computers with Lion and above, and iPhones and iPads as well. There are basically to many features to name, but the ones I'm very fond of are the desktop switching commands by swiping your fingers in different ways across either the trackpad or the Bluetooth Wireless mouse. It's very useful when you want to say have a web browser open to read, but you also want to type out a report from what you're reading instead of having to fumble through the windows to try to find out where your Document editor is at. You just swipe three fingers upward across the pad, and it'll display Mission Control which is like Expose but also includes a more compact style of viewing, and your desktops you can add quite a few of them even if you like. It really comes in handy because you can swap between the desktop of the Document and swipe to the desktop with the web page, enabling you to have a clear full paged view of each one. If you haven't bought a brand new Mac with Mountain Lion installed, definitely download it from the App Store for the 20 dollars. The features, and speed of the operating system won't disappoint you. I have read reviews of people saying that their Mac's have slowed down. Apple did recently come out with 10.8.2 with quite a few patches and tweaks to make the system run a lot faster and also more efficient as far as battery life. I'll talk more about the software at a later time.
System performance
As I mentioned earlier this thing is a speedy little machine. Don't let the size of the thing fool you, I have brought this thing to school and impressed quite a few people with the games on it, and how well it played them as well. I have applications that I run that are very large and usually use a lot of
resources. I use many Microsoft Office applications, as well as OpenOffice with Oracle to edit PDF's. I also run Linux as a virtual machine on here using both cores, 512mb of ram, 128mb of graphics memory, and 8gb of hard drive space on my OS X installation. I'm using VirtualBox to run it, it actually runs OS X quite a few of the office applications, and Ubuntu 12.04 really quick. Plus leave me with the room I need to keep a browser open and of course all the MSOffice stuff. I have Mac Blu Ray player which I purchased because OS X doesn't natively support Blu Ray playback at all. The Application is built by VLC which is a very popular and versatile movie application and another movie player company called Mongoose which I don't know much about. Mac Blu Ray player is great utilizing the Intel HD 4000's high definition capabilities very well. I hook up to my HDTV with the Thunderbolt port to HDMI adapter, the port itself supports very high transfer rates so the picture quality comes out amazing as it should. You can also choose various other adapters for the Thunderbolt port as well, since the port supports many types of devices with the 10 Gbs + transfer rates. Such as multiple hard drive stacks configured in raid for server like storage, also an ethernet adapter which lets you hook up to the internet as well by wire. The port can support a few devices at once too, which makes it even more expandable.
I also run an application called Crossover which helps me run some Windows based applicataions on my system from OS X as well, they install like as if they were part of the operating system which is pretty nice. The software and system are built so well that the application installs and runs the applications extremely efficient. With Boot Camp Windows 7 runs extremely fast and scores a decent rating on the Window's Experience rating. Everything is pretty much the same result of OS X very good performance overall for daily use as well. I would not advise doing BootCamp to a 64 gig model. Both operating systems use about 20 gigabytes of space to install well. splitting the drive in half to share the operating systems would not leave either with very much space to be very useable without the use of an external hard drive, but your computer would also keep losing space to future updates. The 128 gigabyte model would be fine to do so on, because at least each could have 60 or one could have 70 or 80 and the other would still have more than enough gig's to be useable for quite a few things. The BootCamp installation is very simple to use as well. It prompts you with three options when you start it up. Create windows 7 bootable usb, Download Apple BootCamp Drivers, and Install Windows 7. Before you can do this you have to create an ISO from Disk Image, just google how to do it from using your Windows Disc in your BluRay/DVD drive. It literally takes only a couple minutes, and is very simple to do. There isn't anything I have thrown at this thing that has lagged or taken more than a second to load on this thing. The boot time is extremely fast on this MacBook Air too.
All in all I'd have to say that this machine was well worth the 940 dollars I spent on it with a student discount at Best Buy. It came with 10.8 which of course an update came out Sept 19, 2012 to 10.8.2. Has a 128 Gb Solid State Drive (Flash Drive for hard drive space), 4 Gb of ram installed, an Intel HD4000 GPU, and a 1.7Ghz i5 intel processor with turboboost to 2.6 Ghz (overclocks the processor when the cpu is in high demand). It does everything that I need it to for now, and I'm sure it will for a while longer too. I'm really impressed with what apple has been coming out with lately, at first I was in shock with the change from the white, but it has been working really well. I'd have to say I'm really impressed with how the price has managed to go down about 900 dollars for the cheapest MacBook Air as well yet yeilds much more powerful hardware than before. This thing is very capable, being able to play games, run virtual machines yet multi-task on OS X, and run MS Office.
