Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Upgrade

I love my MacBook Air.  To everyone who asks, I rave that it's my favorite of all the computers I've owned.  Sleek, light, ultraportrable, yet a workhorse with a full-sized keyboard and screen and plenty of memory for my cloud-computing tendencies.

The original knock on the Air, back when it was introduced, was the lack of a disc media drive.  I bought an external drive with the machine, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've used it in three years.  It makes no sense to carry a heavy drive every day when you might need it once a month to install software -- and with downloadable software the new norm, that's a level of use that few people will ever reach.

My original Air is a little more than three years old now.  It's served me well.  But it's showing signs of age -- increasing slowness, the spinning beach ball, a lot of force-quitting needed.  I'm inclined to think it could be rehabilitated, slimmed down, retrofitted for a different purpose, and live another several years.  My few tentative steps in that direction have made some difference, but I still have trouble playing video and keeping high-demand applications (like Twitter clients) open.

And Apple has introduced the next generation Air, which features a solid-state hard drive standard.  It was an option on the first generation, but I didn't get it.  I prefer iPad-style flash memory storage -- no moving parts to wear out.

It may not be the right time to replace my Air in terms of getting a closeout deal of some kind.  And I don't have any urgent need for a new machine for any particular projects or functions upcoming.  (Well, except for my movie-clip-laden orientation talk to the new freshmen in early June.)  But every time I have to shut down and restart to get my applications to run smoothly, or sit through long delays between mouse clicks registering, I start dreaming about a new dream machine -- and feel a little guilty about the love I'm leaving behind.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you're considering getting a new Air, they are supposedly getting a processor update in the next month or two. The only knock on the current generation is that the processor isn't that great. And if that doesn't matter to you, they'll be selling the old stock a bit cheaper.