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.