my name is mwd

A couple of weeks ago I finally swapped my trusty MacBook Pro for a new laptop. It wasn’t for any of the reasons you might expect either. It wasn’t failing, it wasn’t too slow or outdated, and it did everything I needed it to. It was just too heavy.

Since I set out working for myself, I’ve had lots of fun working peripatetically doing contract work for various people. As a mobile contract worker you have to basically carry your office around with you, so I was hauling everything I need as an iOS developer – laptop, power supply, trackball, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, cables, etc. with me everywhere. Add a genius bar and my bag could pass for an Apple store at times.

When I got my MacBook Pro I wanted it to be everything I could need – large screen, lots of CPU power, big hard disk. Basically it had to do it all. But I’ve realised recently I’d failed to optimise for a truly nomadic lifestyle. Although the MacBook Pro is a great machine, at 2.6 kg it’s not light. It’s fine if you’ve only got a short distance to go when carrying, but if you need to walk a fair distance with it day in/day out, it becomes a noticeable weight.

Last November, after the launch of a bevy of new Apple products, Laura and I went to have a look at them in the Glasgow Apple store. Not normally an occasion to note, but we both came away amazed. The new MacBook Airs and revamped Apple TV were just insanely tiny and light. We’re both people who’ve had to produce hardware, and we both looked at these products in amazement – there was surely some form of devil’s work going on here. To pick up a MacBook Air, and then pick up any other laptop in the store, you realised there and then that this was the future. One day, all laptops will be made like this.

So, after my back started to complain about this portable Apple store I was carrying, I decided that it was time to do something about it, and switch my trusty 15” MacBook Pro for a 13” MacBook Air.

My main concern in all this was the reduction in disk space – as an avid photographer who shoots raw, I use quite bit of disk space. The lovely 500 GB Momentus XT in my MacBook Pro was within a month or so of filling up, and the largest disk you get in the MacBook Air is 256 GB. But thankfully Aperture, my photo management tool of choice, lets you periodically move the RAW files to an external disk. So, a slight compromise had to be made there.

The second concern was screen size. Xcode (where I spend a lot of my working time) is a screen hog, and is clearly designed for large monitors. But despite the 2” screen size difference, the 15” MacBook Pro I had and the 13” MacBook Air have the same screen resolution, so I didn’t lose anything out there. EVerything is slightly smaller, but I had a quick go with Laura’s MacBook Air and found that the smaller pixels weren’t an issue for me.

On paper, the MacBook Air seems like it should be a poor performer compared to my MacBook Pro, but it’s actually faster in use. This I suspect is largely down to the performance of the solid state drive, which is much faster than even the hybrid drive in my MacBook Pro. Add to that a more modern CPU, and you’ve got a system that will compile up software much faster than my old laptop, and even will throw around photos in Aperture slightly faster.

But all this technical stuff doesn’t cover why the MacBook Air is truly a better machine than my old MacBook Pro. It’s just a much much nicer form factor, and that really does impact on your day to day life more than you’d think.

As a peripatetic worker I’d often find myself either thrown onto what ever desk in the office happened to be free, or working from a cafe or such. The 15” MacBook Pro needs room, and it dominates a desk. The MacBook Air is much less assuming. Thanks to being both lighter and much thiner, you can shuffle it around the desk when you want to use paper or such; it is no longer the centre of your world when you don’t need it to be. Even my old 13” MacBook didn’t do such a good job due to its greater weight and bulk.

I comes back to that first impression Laura and I got when we first played with the new MacBook Airs last year. This is really how a laptop computer should be. My lovely MacBook Pro, which is an awesome machine, how feels a bit of a dinosaur. The Air is so light yet capable it just starts to vanish – it’s there when you need it, it’s not a burden when you don’t. It’s the ideal portable computer.

Sure, I need to compromise still to get here – particularly on disk space, but that’ll get better over time. It’s hard to imagine Apple making clunky fat laptops still in a couple of years time (hint, Apple have now dropped the old MacBook line and the low end Apple laptop is an 11” MacBook Air).