I was in the early crowd of MacBook Air buyers and for the first month I absolutely loved it. I originally bought the Air after a trip to Japan where I lugged around the 15 inch MacBook Pro on all the trains and subways until my back couldn't take it. The Air's weight and form factor are near-perfect if you commute or travel and when I was in the office a USB hub and power supply were always available.
However, once I started hitting the road, the MacBook Air disappointed on many occasions. Hands down the biggest issue is the terrible battery life. Despite trying every setting, even custom configurations, I was never able to get more than two and one-half hours of battery and in some cases couldn't get more than one hour. I'm not going to dwell on the performance except to say it was weak. I knew what I was getting into with a low-horsepower processor and limited (2GB) memory.
Battery life is embarrassingly bad
My first really annoying experience was when I rented Lars and the Real Girl from iTunes and tried to watch it flying from SFO-NYC. However, watching it in full-screen mode made the machine die in about 45 minutes. The movie wasn't great so I figured I would wait until I got to NYC and charge the machine. But, by the time I got there my 24 hours had elapsed and I couldn't finish it.
I had a similar experience flying from San Diego to SFO trying to calm my crazed infant with videos. The damn Air died after 45 minutes of full screen Elmo, which was just ridiculous for everyone around us.
... Read moreUPDATED: August 19, 2008 7:42pm
Problem solved. It was a hanging process that got triggered when I installed a new VPN client. The weird thing was it could only be killed via the command line and didn't show up in the Activity Monitor
This MacBook Air goes from decent, to bad, to terrible, back to decent and now into the ridiculous.
Even when running zero applications there are pieces of Apple software that are doing very strange things. The latest issue is that Spotlight is somehow using 98% of my CPU horsepower and the total percentage used is 114.4% which really shouldn't be possible.
Any of you Mac guys out there have any ideas? I killed my replacement Thinkpad battery by accident when I didn't put it into suspend or hibernate.
Having fixed my previous problem of the MacBook Air not actually going to sleep I am now seeing battery life of no more than 2 hours. It also seems to take about 4 hours for the battery to charge up completely...very strange.
I am not in Safe Sleep mode instead running a custom "quick sleep" setting. My friend is running the MBA with "Better Battery" and is also seeing about 2 hours of battery life.
Any thoughts or ideas would be much appreciated.
My one major pet peeve with the MacBook Air is that no matter what I do, it seems that this machine never goes fully to sleep. Somehow the battery is being drained (albeit at a slower rate) when I set the computer to "sleep" or when I close the lid.
This has become an incredible annoyance as my main purpose for this laptop was to be able to use it on the fly. Lately I've found that I have run the whole battery out in about 8 hours with less than one hour of actual usage. At first I thought it was because the Airport was constantly scanning, which often drained my old MacBook Pro.
My two theories are that if you bump the machine it somehow triggers the hard drive to spin up or that there is a software glitch that needs to get fixed.
I wrote awhile back about this cursed trend of spamming your resume. I got five of these today and guess what? Not only am I not going to hire you but I am going to start publishing your names as people who are clearly unable to manage their careers so that they have to rely on SPAM tactics to annoy hiring companies.
And guess what morons? I am not the hiring manager for every job at my company. So, the least you can do is research it and spam the right person.
By the way, all of this resume spam still comes from this Business Link International that forces me to unsubscribe to every single person individually.
We don't use foul language here at CNet, but if we did, I would tell you stupid motherfletchers to muck off and die.
There is an incredibly annoying trend that I am suffering where candidates are sending me resumes using a service that basically requires me to opt-out if I don't respond to the first email. This is actually more annoying than Plaxo, which was the bane of early 2000's and has now righted its course (though I still don't use it.)
Let me just tell anyone that thinks that this is a good idea that they are dead wrong. An impersonal email to the CEO that gets resent every few days will force me to write you off and make sure no one I know hires you since you can't even go through the effort of sending a personal note.
They all seem to come from this BLI company and you can't opt-out forever...you have to do it for each email. This is one of those things that probably seemed a good idea but in practice completely sucks. No one wants resume SPAM.
- prev
- 1
- next
