As you can read in my many articles about Apple, I am not impressed by how Tim Cook runs Apple. He steered Apple into as many convulsions of downstream evolution as he could to appease Wall Street and Warren Buffet, neither of which understands that without upstream reinvention of the company, Apple’s days are relegated to the size of greenfield and numbered. A business strategy akin to selling sugar water to as many people as possible is the failure that made Steve Jobs return to Apple and now turns him in his grave. The escapism to a virtual world with Vision will not improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy and is, therefore, a net negative.
Forced to buy a new Mac laptop after I poured rosé over my already crackling and not-that-old MacBook Pro, I decided to replace it with a 15-inch MacBook Air after a two-week writing isolation stay on a friend’s sailboat in Rock Hall, Maryland. The built-in screen was no longer functioning, and a helpful Apple employee at the extremely busy Annapolis store dug out an external display and helped me transfer all my data from the old to the new in about three hours. Ready to write my book in the Catskills, NY.
My experience with the MacBook Air has been fantastic overall. The screen is big and bright, and the battery life is absolutely amazing. The sound emanating from its tiny speakers is fantastic and true to life. Finally, it has a 1080p built-in camera. Magic Island is whimsical and stupid, but extending the screen to all corners is probably necessary. My systems management tools reported the battery will last for twenty hours with 87% remaining. This Macbook Air will go all day and then some without needing to drag a charger around. Hooking it up to Apple’s external display was seamless with Thunderbolt, and connecting a mouse and Logitech wireless keyboard was equally so.
The CPU performance, apparently with an M2 chip, is more than sufficient for my work. Albeit you would be surprised to know everything at methodeva.com, and I mean everything, is produced by myself on this Mac. My website storefront is my brand, and I control every aspect of it. Video editing in Final Cut Pro, editing images in Photoshop, presentations in KeyNote, financial modeling in Excel, and writing my book in Scrivener all work splendidly without the MacBook Air breaking a sweat. Although not as thin as previous MacBook Airs, the form factor is very slim and easy to slide into most bags or backpacks.
The one gripe I have is something I have complained about years back. I avoid the use of the built-in trackpad like the plague. Apple decided to make the trackpad as big as possible for some unexplained reason, running too close to the edge. And so whenever you actually hold the laptop in your lap, tilted up, a small portion of the shirt you are wearing interferes with the clickability of the trackpad. The trackpad then refuses to acknowledge clicks unless you hammer it down. This is a major multi-year flaw indicative of the many mistakes the input device people at Apple have made over the years. Putting the MacBook Air on an even surface resolves the issue. Apple should just decrease the size of the laptop and design built-in algorithms to detect false positive interference.
Overall, I love this new MacBook Air and highly recommend it to people who do a fair amount of creative work on the road and need a reliable and lasting laptop to keep going. The MacBook Air is a worthy successor in Apple’s downstream evolution.
