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I didn’t think Apple made buggy products: the new MacBook Air 13”

I bought my first MacBook Air 13” in March because of the extended vacation I was taking, and because my main Dev laptop was approaching its end.  I had looked at some of the ultra notebook type things like the Sony Vaio line, but there wasn’t one available, and since I needed to do some IPad/IPhone development soon, I decided to go ahead and take the plunge.

Once the new ones were announced, I bought one as I wanted the faster processor, upgraded memory (since I had bought only the 2 GB model), etc.

My experience with the first one was seamless and largely phenomenal.  I still do most of my work in Windows 7, so I bought Parallels and installed there, but it basically just worked.

With the new one….not so much.

I’ve had a lot of issues with running Parallels on the new one.  The Windows 7 install will simply lock up, to the point that it can’t be shut down gracefully at all.  This requires the Apple equivalent of a hard shutdown, which almost always corrupts the install.  Since I have snapshots taken periodically, I’ve always been able to recover (though with some manual work as I usually have to delete the workspace solution I am working on and re-download), but I’ve had to do it twice now in less than a week.  This could be because I upped the memory used by the virtual machine to the maximum 2302.  I’ll drop it back to 2048 and see if it gets better.

Additionally, even though I should be able to back up to my WHS box using Time Machine, it simply doesn’t work.

Now, both of those things could be seen as non-Apple things.

But, I also have this weird issue with AppStore.  It keeps telling me that I have 3 available updates, which are for IPhoto, GarageBand, and IMovie.  Yet, when I try to update them, it says I can’t since I didn’t purchase them previously.  No kidding, they came with the thing installed.  Also, when I had to update my AppStore profile, it failed at first (without any visual indication that it was necessary) because I hadn’t chosen “Mr” as my title.  Really, that’s required?

Once you use a MacBook Air, it is hard to imagine going back to any other type of notebook due to its form factor.  Yet, I wish I could simply upgrade the memory on the original one (which I can’t since the memory is soldered to the motherboard for form factor reasons) as it never gave me an issue.

posted on Sunday, August 07, 2011 6:29 PM
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