Software, Interrupted

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.

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UPDATED: 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.

I'm a big fan of tiny computers and I continue to follow the world of these "laptot" machines that pack a decent hardware punch into a very small form factor. The problem? They pretty much all run Windows. Some vendors have Linux options but I can't figure out why you would want to deal with the weight of Windows on a machine geared toward more casual use.

Wouldn't it make a lot more sense for the hardware guys to eschew Windows for these machines and move to some Linux distro? Today's multivendor announcement of Microsoft-free desktops is a great start toward this ideal.

I have the Asus Eee PC and despite some battery issues that were eventually resolved with a firmware update, it's great. I use it at home watching TV and can even let my 1-year-old play with it since Linux doesn't get completely hosed as Windows would. And the interface is so easy to navigate you don't have worry about icons, registries etc. $400 well spent.

At this point, 95 percent of all business users should be able to survive with just browser-based applications. Laptot machines give you everything you need running Linux.

For work I use a MacBook Air, which has a fantastic form factor but poor battery life. However, it's still a better choice simply because of the user experience.

As the target customer for pretty much every piece of technology I find it disappointing that hardware vendors aren't thinking this through more.

I've been a proponent of the Cloud and hosted applications for quite some time but today I am dramatically feeling the effects of having zero control over my infrastructure and the inability to get anything when a Cloud provider has issues.

My MacBook Air is clearly in it's death-throes just six months after purchase and today Google Docs was down for over an hour. I basically have no way to do any real work at this point as I can't use most of my applications and can't get to my documents on Google. I'm a living example of the limitations of the Cloud as well as the beautiful but unreliable nature of Apple hardware.

On the MBA, the CPU is maxing itself out with only one or two applications open and doesn't seem too thrilled when I attempt to force-quit running applications. It takes about 90 seconds for the dialog box to even pop up and let me try to quit an app. It then takes a solid 30 seconds for the application to actually quit. I have to reboot every 30 minutes or so to get back to a workable condition and then wait for the CPU to max out again.

My consumption and inevitable destruction of technology products provides a great deal of entertainment for my friends.

My first-month check-in with the MacBook Air was overwhelmingly positive. Several months later, not so much. Here is an update on life with my MacBook Air, with 2GB of RAM.

The positive:

• The size is great, and the keyboard remains a pleasure to type on.
• I have become dependent on the track pad, which is a total shocker, as I have never liked any of them in the past.
• The function keys are extremely useful, and I miss them on any other machine.

The negative:

• It's slow. When I open up a file window--let's say my Applications folder--it takes 10 to 30 seconds before the file list appears. It's painful when you are in a rush, being much slower than the regular MacBook, let alone the MacBook Pro.
• Battery life is generally bad. I have yet to get more than 2 hours and 15 minutes since I have owned the notebook.
• The need to lug around a bunch of accessories (including Apple's always-burdensome power adapter) defeat much of the purpose. My whole point with the MBA was to have a machine with which I could easily travel.
• I have been screwed by the lack of Ethernet connectivity at least three times. Many hotels don't offer Wi-Fi in room. Last week in New York, I had to go to the 24-hour Apple store to buy another USB adapter.
• It runs hot, and the memory tends to max out at least once a daywhile running very basic applications (Mac Mail, Mac Calendar, Safari, Firefox, and Excel are what I normally run). It's odd to me that the Apple applications are the items that push the memory over the top, whereas Firefox has gotten much better with it.

My MacBook Air has been down to about 2 hours of battery life and I finally looked into what the problem might be. At the same my friend who had the same issue took her MBA to the Apple Store and the guy there "fixed" hers. He didn't explain what he did but after some digging we figured out that he reset the System Management Controller.

After doing a full backup I reset mine and now the machine says I have 3 hours 40 minutes of battery life available, though I do have wifi turned off, which seems to really eat up the charge.

From the Apple Support Doc:

The System Management Controller is an integrated circuit (computer chip) that is on the logic board of the computer. As the name implies, it is responsible for power management of the computer. It controls backlighting, hard disk spin down, sleep and wake, some charging aspects, trackpad control, and some input/output as it relates to the computer sleeping.

Over time, the settings in the System Management Controller may become unusable, which can result in operational anomalies with the computer. Examples include not turning on, not waking from sleep, not charging the battery, or not recognizing the AC Adapter, among others.

On another note I have seen this machine do some weird things with the memory usage. There have been several times when I quit all my apps and the MBA is still using 90% of the memory.

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.