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The keyboard is a backlit chiclet style and with a very shallow depth and relatively silent. As a Canadian, it is refreshing NOT to have to endure another mandatory Canadian bilingual keyboard and the touch pad is a totally new experience. Its multi-touch abilities are very simple to grasp, yet there was no right mouse button that we had grown so used to.
SPECIAL NOTE – RUBBER GASKET IN LID
I swear that there was a point a few years back when I considered patenting my idea of a rubber gasket around the inside of laptop lids to prevent damage to the screen as well as wear over time from the material on the lid resting on the keyboard. To this day, I haven’t a laptop or Ultra yet that hasn’t suffered some type of cosmetic or screen damage from contact between the lid and body.
Apple must have been reading my mind because, if you look closely in the picture above, there is a small rubber gasket set into the lid that surrounds it completely. When the system is closed, the rubber is all that is in contact which becomes very beneficial should there be any shock to the unit.
BOOTCAMP INSTALLATION
Before we speak of the screen, we would like to explain a bit about a utility found in the MBA called Boot Camp Assistant (Launchpad/Utilities). Boot Camp enables the installation and use of Windows 7 on the same system and the user can then select between either Windows 7 or OS X Lion. Actually, it is a bit more intensive but truly as simple as a normal software installation and only requires a copy of Windows 7 for installation.
Once started, Boot Camp confirms that you have a valid .iso of Windows 7 available to the system on a DVD or, in the case of the MacBook Air, on a USB flash drive that is created. From there, it will offer you a choice of how you want to partition your system as both operating systems need their own partitions. We simply chose a 50/50 split. Boot Camp then needs access to the internet and downloads all appropriate drivers, many being Apple variants created for just this purpose, and installs them on your media device which, in our case, was a USB flash drive. From there, Windows 7 is installed along with the normal Windows 7 drivers and the user must then find and install appropriate drivers, wi-fi being the most important to get us live again.
On rebooting, simply hold down the ‘Option’ key for a few seconds and you will arrive at this screen. Select your wi-fi source and either the Macintosh HD for OSX or Windows. Once selected, the system will start on the OS you have chosen and all that is required is a quick restart while depressing the ‘Option’ key once again to switch OS environments.
Does Apple still offer the extended AppleCare hardware warranty on these units? Almost a necessity.
Yes, I noticed it in a Google search. The unfortunate part is how they maintain such control. On any other laptop, if say the RAM or ssd went dead, you could simply replace it…not with Apple! It practically mandates the warranty…agreed.
Great article.
To give you some help with … “Now if I could just figure out this right mouse button thingy” To Go to System Preferences and click on Trackpad. Under “Point & Click” you will see a settings for “Secondary Click”. This will give you a “Right Click’ function.
Sorry if you were looking for “right mouse” help in Windows 7, I cannot help you there.
Thank you and it was the right most button in Win 7 for the most part but I was surprised at the ability to personalize on the mac side. Thank you very the response by the way.
Les, I was a Windows guy through and through like you were. Call me petty but when my wife insisted on buying the 2011 macbook air (after using a Lenovo X61), I felt ‘betrayed’.
After 3 Hail Mary’s (you know, for protection)…needless to say, after a few days with the MBA, it is an ‘experience’ and the best designed hardware in any notebook/ultrabook I have seen to date. I had to fight her for the privilege of using the MBA ;p.
I now easily recommend the MBA to all my friends who want to buy a notebook.
OSX was another matter. After a while, I started to miss Win7.
Yes…small hiccups as well… Office Outlook just crashed and I lost some messages. In Win 7… What is a crash? Litttle things to work out I am sure but sincerely like the system and OS.
These are quickbench results for the original Samsung 256GB SSD on the MBA 2011 and the OWC 6G SSD 480GB (I upgraded last week).
Original: https://www.box.com/s/g6dg77qgv4gu5xuvi8st
OWC 6G SSD: https://www.box.com/s/07350f2899bd6fea063c
Migrating an OSX boot drive using Superduper! is very easy, especially if OWC would release a similar “external drive enclosure” for the new “air” as well. You could also exchange the drives, put your old one in an external enclosure and then use the migration assistant to move the information from your old drive to the new one when installing OSX on the new drive.
I will look closely into this. If you do the migration, does it affect your registration with any of the OS X utilities like iTunes/itore etc and also, once the migration is complete, does it automatically delete the source drive? The deletion of source drive is the big one.
I am not sure how the iTunes/store is affected.
What do you mean by deletion? As far as I know it does not automatically delete the source, but if you want it to I guess you can just format it. Superduper! allows for some scripting and stuff to be run after the mirroring so it might be able to do what you are looking for.
Yes it may be what I am looking for. The reason I ask about it formatting the source is because this is an Apple thing so there arent two copies. I would like that, however, as it is easier to maintain a duplicate of the laptop.
I just did a migration last week to the 480GB OWC drive with carbon copy cloner. The new version (last few months now) of CCC has the option to clone not only the primary partition but the hidden OSX install source partition as well.
I bought the external enclosure, stick the 480GB SSD in it, cloned the main partition and the hidden partition.
Before you physically replace the SSD, press ALT during bootup and you can boot off the newly cloned drive running off USB (this is an amazing feature of OSX that I wish MS could do with Win).
If that works, then just put the new SSD in the MBA and voilla, a bigger partition.
By the way CCC will automatically detect when you destination drive is missing the hidden OSX source partition and all you have to do is follow the on screen instructions, easy.
I would love to read this on my iPad but those crazy widgets on the left get in the way. please get rid of them.
Try it now and let me know how it works for ya!
That fixed it, thanks!
Sent from my iPad
hold on, you can clone Lion, i am a MAcOSX noob, and bought my wife a late 2011 MBP13″, i migrated the installed OS , quite seamlessly using carbon cloner, it was so beautiful and trouble free, i just hated being a PC user, oh..if you found facetime (which we incidentally found out 1 week ago) amazing check out the time machine backup system…sheesh… an apple update launched recently, upset the OSX, 1.45 later the machine had used the latest time machine backup, from an aged netgear nasduo, and restored the entire thing, 0 user input in one hour 32 min….
Thanks OM. The difficulty lies in getting the recovery partition to clone as well which I dont think you can do. Am I right? Is it partition only and not entire disk? I have a dual boot I would LOVE to migrate!
Les, Carbon Copy Cloner for the past several versions can clone the recovery partition.
See this https://www.bombich.com/software/docs/CCC/en.lproj/advanced-strategies/the-disk-center.html
Under heading:
Cloning Lion’s Recovery HD partition
Can Disk Utility do the same work?
Nice write-up. I have been a Mac user since 1985, only in the past 4-5 years have I seriously been able to use them in business. They are great and have been easy to use with the iCloud this year. This really has made it worth having a Mac Pro, iPad, iPhone and I have been waiting for 3 weeks for the retina display Macbook Pro. I hope that the flash drive (768 GB) is just as good. Thanks for the review.
Thank you especially for letting me know about the screen issue. Don’t like losing potential readers!
You write about the rubber strip around the edge of the lid as if it is a unique Apple feature. Take a closer look at the edge of the display on your Samsung Series 9.
You are right John. They have done similar in the new S9 release of less than a month but, IMHO, the key here is to ensue that rubber completely surrounds the screen and, in fact, the most wear I see in laptops and ultras always seems to be along the bottom ledge closest to the hinges.
Thank you for your review. I’m looking forward to your review of the
Toshiba SandForce Driven SSD and a comparison with the Samsung one. Apparently, of all the models of the new MBA that I’ve checked in person across various apple premium retailer stores in my current country of residence(India), it seems that only the 11 inch i5 models(64GB/128GB) and the base 13 inch i5 model (128GB SSD) have a Toshiba SSD and only the 256GB 13 inch seem to have the Samsung SSD. I hope that you’ll have your review published before or at least just in time when the “Back to School” discounts roll out here, to help me decide if it’s worth opting for the base 13 inch model(My first Mac) or opt for an Ultrabook instead. Whatever I choose, I still plan to keep Win7 as my main OS.
Personally, I hate the “lottery” concept propagated by Apple-The idea of getting a “better performing” SSD/TFT for the same price as the one with mediocre performance(in comparison, as evident in the 2011 MBA’s) but advertised as “calibrated” & living up to a certain minimum performance, as decided by the company beforehand, without the customer finding out what he has paid for until he opens the packing & boots the machine and leaving the rest to sheer “luck”!
Good news! The article is complete and should be up by days end.
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