11" Owners, how do you like it?

Not sure how old the 13" Air you used, but if you thought it was too slow and it was a recent model with an i5, you might want to reconsider.

To answer some of your questions..

It performs much better than I thought it would. The i5 I have in my 11 inch is able to handle pretty much any task I throw at it. It runs aperture extremely smoothly, and this library is hooked up to a usb hard drive, so I'm very impressed there. I can play 1080p videos on youtube and there are no hiccups.

Battery life is probably the only thing I can complain about, almost on the verge of being abysmal. I get about 3 hours doing moderately intensive things, 5 hours when just typing, surfing.

Anything I don't like about it? See above ^

I don't notice it not having an optical drive, mainly because I never used one in the months leading to my purchase. If this really bothers you, you can always buy a cheaper one on amazon.

Charging time is surprisingly impressive. It's almost dead and I plug it in for what seems like a short time and it's already at around 80%! Kinda nice in that it makes up for the bad battery life (sort of).

I don't use any virtual programs on it but I don't see it being a problem at all. I would recommend going with 4 gigs of RAM, unless this is going to be lightly, lightly used. 4 GB is just 'future proofing' it in my opinion.

Hope this helps.

i have mine since last monday, its the 11''/i5/4g/128 and coming from a pro 13 i can honestly say that i don't miss the 13 and not gone go back to pro any more. its heavy and bulky, and also i don't need all that power of the pro.

this 11 i5 model 4g its plenty power. i use the same apps of the 13 pro and the mba run them the same, maybe because the pro was core 2 duo and the 11 is i5.

but it is fast, sleep wake is instantly. power and off is very very fast, it is damm portable, just a little bit bigger than an iPad, the weight almost the same..

well i think i said enough, my point is that its kinda like a mini macbook pro

you won't regret

Best portable computer I've ever owned.

I have the 2011 MacBook Air 11" 1.6GHz i5 with the 250 GB SSD and 4 GB RAM

This machine is very very capable in my opinion. It replaced my 2009 13" Pro with a Core 2 Duo, and the Air blows it away. It runs everything smoothly, such as Safari, iTunes, Mail, iPhoto, Pages, editing RAW files in Photoshop CS4, as well as when I created an 18 minute video in Final Cut Pro X.

I've also played "The Movies" game on my MacBook Air, and it runs well. The battery life isn't exceptional, but it's not as bad as I had originally intended it to be. I mostly use it plugged into the wall when I'm at home, but when I use it at school I'll simply lower the brightness most of the way, and it can last between 4 and 5 hours of word processing. That's my estimate with gauging the percentage, but it's at least that much. It charges really quickly as well.

The criticism I would give the Air is that I had started having a problem develop with my Trackpad where it would seem to be extra sensitive (even with tap-to-click being disabled as it has always been) and clicks being registered even though I didn't depress the trackpad. It would happen sporadically, and I'd generally be scrolling through a page with two fingers and all of a sudden text would begin to highlight and drag as if I was clicking the trackpad and dragging.

I was thinking that it had to do with how thin the Air was and how thin the trackpad area was that might have been affected with pressure being applied if the air wasn't completely flat (such as if you used it on your lap). I took it to Apple but they couldn't reproduce the problem so I'm stuck with it. It stopped happening these past few days however, but I'm just worried it will develop into a bigger problem, especially considering how thin the Air is and the possibility of the trackpad area being bent if you perhaps lift the computer up by where the palm-wrest area is.

I have the mid-range 11" MacBook Air model. It's the one with 1.6GHz Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB SSD. Today I upgrade the SSD to a 240GB OWC Aura.

How does it perform?
Before the upgrade, it performed spectacularly. I partitioned half of the old SSD to Windows 7, so it was 60GB for each OS (8GB I guess is unavailable for use due to over-provisioning I would imagine). I did not have any slowdowns, boot into both OSes were very quick and waking from sleep is very close to instant. I don't do a lot of work on this MacBook Air as it's primary just a computer I use when I need to travel light or I'm on the couch watching TV and need to check something (I still prefer a mouse/trackpad and keyboard vs. using my iPad); it's great in the car, or whatnot. However, I do have Microsoft Office 2011 installed and that runs without any hiccups. Photoshop CS5.5 works for basic needs, but it'll be limited if my images get too large. Luckily the SSD works great as scratch, but nonetheless performance is much lower compared to my MacBook Pro (Early 2011, 2.3GHz). For viewing movies, and other media viewing, everything is fine.

How is the battery life?
For rudimentary use like checking stuff on the web or typing up something in Word, I have no trouble lasting through 5 hours on 50% brightness and WiFi—I have auto brightness off, so my screen is at 50% all the time no matter the condition. As usual anything that requires extensive CPU (ie: Flash, etc.) use will decrease the battery life, but overall I can go a day without a problem (sleeping the computer whenever I don't need it). If I watched a movie or something, especially 1080p, I would see a slight drop, to about 3.5-4 hours which still isn't bad.

Is there anything you don't like about it?
There are several issues I would prefer Apple remedied. One of these is connectivity. USB 2.0 is ancient by today's standards. I have FW on some computer, eSATA on others; Thunderbolt is a still a lagging standard, so I'm stuck with USB on this machine. Sometimes I need files to transfer faster and USB 2.0 does not do. I also do not like glossy displays and this is one of the things I do not like very much on the MacBook Air. Although compared to the glass covers of late MacBook Pros this isn't bad, compared to a true antiglare display, the MacBook Air display looks like a dull mirror to me. Lack of better RAM options is also quite a drawback for me. I would prefer an 8GB option as it's not really that expensive anymore, but I don't mind paying for more RAM. So I guess the lack of upgradeability is a drawback, but since we need to compromise somewhere I can forgive Apple for making everything integrated.

Is there anything that you've noticed, on the go, that the Air couldn't provide?
As I mentioned already, I find the lack of a fast and common connectivity option to a big drawback. I sometimes work in the field and someone gives me a 20GB file to transfer. I have to wait a long time when a faster interface would have helped. The wireless performance on the MacBook Air can also use some improvement. I have a Thinkpad that can discover a zillion networks and the MacBook Air barely sees one or two. That's a bit ridiculous for a computer that's designed to be "wireless." The lack of an optical drive doesn't really bother me, and I usually have to carry a card reader as my DSLR uses Compact Flash.

How's the charging time?
I haven't really ever timed it, but I feel it never takes more than an hour to fully charge my computer. It seems pretty fast. When I run low on power and I plug it in, it seems that when I come back later to the computer it's almost done charging. Just a heads up if you're looking for 100%, I'm not sure, but usually 96% is when fast charge stops and that 4% takes a while.

Do you use any virtual machines on it? If so, How well does it run?
I do not use VMs and do not plan to, so I cannot comment on it. However rebooting into Windows 7 via BootCamp is seemless and works very well for me.

~~~~~~~~

Other thoughts:
I upgraded my SSD because I was running on space. With half of my drive partitioned to Windows, I had only about 5-8GB of free space which isn't a lot if you think about how big many video files are these days. So I doubled my capacity to 240GB and allocated 60GB to Windows, leaving 180GB to OS X. It doesn't really feel much faster, but the additional space is nice to have.

I have a base model C2D 11" Air (2GB, 64GB, 1.4GHz)

How does it perform? How is the battery life?
It's fast at some things because of the SSD but there are times when I realize I'm not on my i5 Air. It boots up in 10-12 seconds, Firefox starts in a second or two, etc. But it's slower at things in Xcode like 'Build project, open iPhone simulator, run app" than a brand new one would be. It's not slow by any means, but something that takes 8 seconds might only take 3 on my i5 Air.
The battery lasts about 4 hours in most cases.
Is there anything you don't like about it?
Battery life could be longer, and the screen could be bigger. But then it wouldn't be 11"....
Is there anything that you've noticed, on the go, that the Air couldn't provide?
Not really.
How's the charging time?
It charges okay with the included adapter, but the bigger adapters from a Pro will charge it faster.
Do you use any virtual machines on it? If so, How well does it run?
Once in a while I run a Linux server VM (256MB/1vCPU), and it's fine. But if I run a 1GB, 1vCPU Linux desktop VM it's pokey. It works, but again it flies on my 4GB/i5 machine. You should never give a VM any more than 1 vCPU anyway, especially on a dual-core machine.

Macbook Air 11in i5 1.6Ghz, 4GB RAM, 128GB HD.


How does it perform?

This is probably my favorite Mac ever, and I've owned a ton.

For the most part very well. I use it for websurfing, small bursts of coding, a ton of scripting, writting, email, occasional game.
I have a 27inch iMac at home that stores my iTunes library and a few other VM's. Since Christmas I've been attempting to use my 11inch as my primary machine. It's been an interesting but fairly positive experience. I have a 27inch Cinema Display I connect it to when at home, which alleviates any screen constraints.

While I haven't tried any newer versions of Skype (within last two months) previous versions would cause my fans to crank. Minor annoyance.

How is the battery life?

Around four hours moderate use. If I want longer I'll kick the brightness down to 1 to 2, turn off the keyboard backlight and kill any VM's or big applications I have running.

How's the charging time?

I've never really timed it, but somewhere within two hours I think is safe.

Do you use any virtual machines on it? If so, How well does it run?

Yes, I've had two running at once. One Win 7 one CentOS. Cent VM had half a CPU and 512mb of memory. Win 7 had half a CPU and 1GB.

Both machines ran fine for the tasks I needed. Fans did/do tend to kick up.

Is there anything that you've noticed, on the go, that the Air couldn't provide?

Not for my needs.

Is there anything you don't like about it?

I wish the bezel around the screen was smaller. I know it's a pipe dream but I find the formfactor of this laptop perfect and at times the 11inch screen feels cramped. When I upgrade I'll be getting the larger SSD and hoping the GFX capability is better.

yeah the 11" screen is cramped and you spent a lot of time scrolling, I too wish at some point they made the bezel smaller if they could technically.

ayeying said:

I'm deciding more on the $1199 model. Specs are: 1.6GHz Core i5/4GB Ram/128GB SSD. I figure if I really need, I can always drag around an external USB hard drive and still be cheaper than getting the 256GB model.

Click to expand...

Love it, love it, love it.

I got the 1.8GHz Core i7 / 4GB / 128GB SSD model. Its part number per Apple is z0mg0000b, and it's a screaming machine.

You can buy it for $60 over the config that you're looking at right now if you purchase from Adorama: http://www.adorama.com/ACMC969LLA1.html

Now if you don't declare Use Tax on your returns this year, you'll probably come out with an awesome machine for less money than the 1.6GHz i5 that you're looking at right now. More power for less money ... How do you like them Apples?

blow45 said:

yeah the 11" screen is cramped and you spent a lot of time scrolling, I too wish at some point they made the bezel smaller if they could technically.

Click to expand...

You can almost fit the 13" screen in the 11" Air.....that would be killer.

How does it perform?
Fast. Loads games faster than my desktop windows pc
its completely silent when just browsing or using text programs (word)
ive had no problems with anything except a few tiny programs that didnt want to start. a reboot solved that. np. (nothing is bug free anyway)

How is the battery life?
Batterylife for me, is somewhere between 3 and 5 hours. i mainly use mine for browsing and typing in school, so i dont really play or watch videos a lot on it.

Is there anything you don't like about it?
I'd prefer if it had one or two more usb ports.. 2 ain't a lot.
But ive never had to plug in more than two so far, so..

Is there anything that you've noticed, on the go, that the Air couldn't provide?
Nope. it even runs my games np!

How's the charging time?
MAX ive seen is 1 hour from like 10-20% to 100%
That was while using it. its a bit faster while not using of course.

Do you use any virtual machines on it? If so, How well does it run?
No experience in that area

Im a long time windows user, and to get the macair is a breath of fresh air tbh.

Ive got the same spec as you (maybe would have paid the extra £150 for the i7 but w/e)

I intend to get the thunderbolt display and dock it when i want to sit down and use it and get a really nice real estate.

I'm also paranoid about damaging my MBA so having my air off the desk and using a BT keyboard and trackpad is perfect....

No real complaints with my 2nd MBA, it is easy on the shoulder and gives great battery performance, so it it ideal for travel.

does it have hyperthreading?

about to purchase one and curious about it

ayeying said:

Yes. I have the Dual-Core i5 and it shows up as 4 Cores in OSX

Click to expand...

Thanks for clarifying that

responding to the original question (posted in the title)

i'm coming from a 15'' macbook pro. i now have the 11'' mba and it does everything i need it to do. regarding the screen I think it is perfectly sized. i'm currently a senior in college majoring in physics so i mostly use this to latek (word process), code , terminal things, web browse, spotify, etc. i don't use the computer for video or photo editing.

a lot of the time people think they require a more powerful, larger computer than what they actually need.

give the 11'' a try - you have 14 days to return it in case you really think you need something more powerful / larger.

Ah good old Ayeying, remember your cordial self from the old MBA days

Glad you like it, it simply is the best notebook I'm aware of. J'adore!