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When I got off the plane after being in Dublin, Ireland to deliver a presentation on the iPhone at the Irish Web Technology Conference, I had a pleasant surprise waiting for me. In addition to being able to see my family, I also got to see an inconspicuous box in the corner by the front door... It was my shiny new Macbook Air!
This review is entirely based on my own personal criteria. I don't really care whether the machine has 500 ghz of processing power or an internal Blu Ray or Purple Ray or Mauve Ray drive... I care whether it makes me happy, and here's what I think:
Display: 5/5
It's a 13.3" screen, so I am not going to negatively rate it for having lack of screen real estate. And in fact, I barely notice that I have a lack of screen real estate because, for the purposes that I'm using the laptop, I don't need that much. On my 17" MBP I often have multiple documents open and I'm doing multiple things at once and I've got the widescreen completely used up. On the Air, I make judicious use of Spaces and Expose and I find no problems or slowdowns there. Plus, the display is FREAKING BRIGHT. I sat it next to my MBP and my first response was to touch the trackpad on my MBP to see if it had low-power dimmed.
Battery Life: 4/5
With my USB cellular broadband card plugged in, while writing documents using Pages, with Safari open for occasional browsing, a terminal Window open, Xcode running and the occasional compile, the battery life measured around 3 hours and 30 minutes. This remained pretty accurate because after 2 hours of solid usage of the same pattern, the time left was around 1:30. The reason I mention this is because on the 17" Macbook Pro, I can gain or lose 45 minutes of battery time remaining estimate without knowing why.
When I don't have the USB broadband card plugged in (which is a HUGE battery hog) and I'm not using WiFi (so, I'm on the train or something), I get an estimate of 4 hours 45 minutes remaining. This is perfectly adequate for what I use the Air for. The Air is not my primary at-home desktop computer, it is my mobility computer.
Horsepower: 5/5
I fired up Xcode, Interface Builder, a couple other tools, Safari, a terminal window, and started writing a sample Rails application (BTW, the Apple Developer Connection has an awesome new article on Rails on Leopard. If you have an ADC membership, go read that article, it's extremely well-written and straightforward). Unit testing, text editing, refreshing with Safari - all were visually indistinguishable in terms of performance from the 17" Macbook Pro.
In short, I am entirely confident that this machine will be able to support my coding whether I'm doing iPhone development or full-on Leopard coding using Xcode and IB. Compile times for applications I've written in the past were nearly identical. I'm sure that as the solutions get massive the MBP might get faster, but I'm never one to quabble over .05 seconds compile time difference... The Air is small, lightweight, mobile, and powerful enough to compile my code - what's not to love? If I want to game, I will game on the Macbook Pro, a machine that was designed to support that type of person. The Air is NOT designed to game, although I have heard that if you can manage the heat flow, it will run World of Warcraft just fine in a pinch.
One thing of note: The SSD is insanely fast! Software installations are so fast I can barely see them happening. Remote Disk works flawlessly, and, as I said, the SSD is ridiculously fast. I was told that sequential access would be slower than random access, but I think that's relative. No matter what I do, my SSD looks, feels, and acts twice as fast as my MBP's 7200 RPM drive.
Battery Recharge Time: 1/5
I have come to the conclusion that the battery inside the Macbook Air was salvaged from one of the many alien wrecks in Roswell. As a result, there is a complicated process that switches Earthling power to Alien power during the recharge cycle, making it take an insanely long time to recharge! That said, I don't need it to recharge all that quickly... if I bring the Air with me to work, it can recharge while I work. If I have it at home, it will recharge while I'm working on the big 17" MBP. The only time it would cause me a problem is if I sucked the battery dry on a plane and then had no power source at my ultimate destination. If you are bringing a laptop to a foreign country somewhere and you're doing long haul flights, don't bring your air, bring your MBP with 2 batteries. If this is your only workflow, and you don't have an MBP or an Air - pick the 15" MBP that was just released and grab a couple spare batteries and some international plug adapters and the airline power adapter. If you are me, or are like me and using the Air as a second, more mobile, computer that is subservient to larger home-based machines - then the Air has no negative consequences from this recharge time.
Overall: 5/5
This machine is a freaking work of art. It feels heavenly to type on (I enjoy the typing experience on it FAR more than on my MBP). The SSD is insanely fast. The hard drive size is perfectly adequate given what I use the machine for - I don't keep my media on either laptop, I keep it on a USB drive that weighs 4 ounces, so I'm fine there. If you can afford this machine, or you've got a spare hardware discount left in your ADC membership, and you already own a high-powered Mac for your home (either an iMac or a Mac Pro or an MBP with all the trimmings), then this machine is the perfect highly mobile laptop for you. It beats the crap out of the Lenovo offering because it does what it was designed to do flawlessly, and it is not trying to be a little bit of everything and best at nothing. The Lenovo has weaker battery life, and a weaker processor, and has stuff in it that I don't want that makes it redundant with other hardware I already own.
