Wow, it's been already 5 years, I can't believe it.
I got my 13" mid 2011 MBA I believe on Black Friday 5 years ago, it was discounted so it cost me £989.10, it was the lowest end (1.7 Ghz i5, 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM).
I was happy with it's performance until around a year and a half ago, after updating to Yosemite I started getting this message to "service battery" when clicking on the battery icon. Then I noticed that the battery life wasn't as good as it was before. It got worse over the last couple of years, I looked at changing my battery at the Apple Store (£129) a few weeks ago but they said my laptop was now considered "obsolete" so it may take a while in the shop. Suffice to say that I didn't upgrade OS X beyond Yosemite.
Just to give you my background, I'm a windows developer, so you could say I'm a pro user, and I use my MBA for work. Thanks to Azure VMs and RDP, I don't need to use VMs running locally which saves me battery and also make me OK with the 128GB hard disk. Thanks to things like adblock plus my web browsers are quick and load pages without issues, making browsing a nice experience. At home I plug my MBA to a 27" external monitor and use it with an external bluetooth keyboard and mouse and it's like having an iMac (except for performance for handling photo/video processing which I don't do much nowadays).
I was expecting the new MBPs and upgraded MBAs in the latest apple event, looking forward to pull the trigger and update my MBA, mainly due to battery issues. To my surprise and disappointment, there were no new MBAs, and looks like they are dropping the line. Tried the new emoji machines at the shop, I hated the 12" Macbook keyboard and this is just slightly better, but still not good enough for me.
So here is what I did, I ordered a new battery from Amazon. I changed it a few days ago. Before, I could barely go 2h and the computer will switch off at 35% of battery. Now, I get around 5h to 6h of battery life. It feels again like a new computer.
And in case I need more hard disk space, I know that the hard disk it's replaceable, I can get 250GB online for around £140 which it's not too bad.
To make the story short:
- Don't upgrade OS X
- Use adblock plus
- Get a nice big external monitor
- Use RDP and the cloud for VMs
- Replace your battery
- Replace your SSD
So hopefully I should be able to keep this beautiful machine for a few years more, as I don't really feel I need to upgrade as I'm happy with the performance.
Hope this is useful for you guys.
I got my 13" mid 2011 MBA I believe on Black Friday 5 years ago, it was discounted so it cost me £989.10, it was the lowest end (1.7 Ghz i5, 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM).
I was happy with it's performance until around a year and a half ago, after updating to Yosemite I started getting this message to "service battery" when clicking on the battery icon. Then I noticed that the battery life wasn't as good as it was before. It got worse over the last couple of years, I looked at changing my battery at the Apple Store (£129) a few weeks ago but they said my laptop was now considered "obsolete" so it may take a while in the shop. Suffice to say that I didn't upgrade OS X beyond Yosemite.
Just to give you my background, I'm a windows developer, so you could say I'm a pro user, and I use my MBA for work. Thanks to Azure VMs and RDP, I don't need to use VMs running locally which saves me battery and also make me OK with the 128GB hard disk. Thanks to things like adblock plus my web browsers are quick and load pages without issues, making browsing a nice experience. At home I plug my MBA to a 27" external monitor and use it with an external bluetooth keyboard and mouse and it's like having an iMac (except for performance for handling photo/video processing which I don't do much nowadays).
I was expecting the new MBPs and upgraded MBAs in the latest apple event, looking forward to pull the trigger and update my MBA, mainly due to battery issues. To my surprise and disappointment, there were no new MBAs, and looks like they are dropping the line. Tried the new emoji machines at the shop, I hated the 12" Macbook keyboard and this is just slightly better, but still not good enough for me.
So here is what I did, I ordered a new battery from Amazon. I changed it a few days ago. Before, I could barely go 2h and the computer will switch off at 35% of battery. Now, I get around 5h to 6h of battery life. It feels again like a new computer.
And in case I need more hard disk space, I know that the hard disk it's replaceable, I can get 250GB online for around £140 which it's not too bad.
To make the story short:
- Don't upgrade OS X
- Use adblock plus
- Get a nice big external monitor
- Use RDP and the cloud for VMs
- Replace your battery
- Replace your SSD
So hopefully I should be able to keep this beautiful machine for a few years more, as I don't really feel I need to upgrade as I'm happy with the performance.
Hope this is useful for you guys.
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