Macgasm

I got to play with a client’s MacBook Air today because she was tired and went home early. I love some things about it, but with most new Apple breakthrough products, most of us are better off waiting for the release of Gen 2 or 3.

Simply speaking, no firewire and the base model still having a sata drive are deal breakers. Solid state is the reason I was excited for this thing, and the additional cost to get that leaves me waiting like everyone else should. The one USB slot sits on a nice little pop-out slot, but one connector mandates a hub and what’s the point? The proprietary video connector again disappoints me. Who knows, maybe THIS one will become the standard. The track pad is enormous and the mouse button is far slimmer than its predecessor’s. I can adjust in time I guess, but I spent the afternoon tapping the bottom of the trackpad over and over.

On the plus side, I walked around playing with everything I could think of and found it to be very quick and obviously light. For the money, an Asus EEE is fine in the short term for that kind of mobility. I was also hoping for a far faster sleep response after closing the cover, but the lights on the front never faded and pulsed any faster than my MacBook does. I have repaired many MacBooks/Pros hastily closed and thrown into bags before the hibernation data is done being written and a shorter memory dump will someday help reduce the damage of my clients’ impatience.

All in all, it’s as gorgeous as anything Steve Jobs has ever had Apple create. There is no disappointment there and so long as he is able to maintain that, I actually don’t care how well the initial product release is for Apple’s next line of hardware.

I was working with our Chief Technology Officer today, and he was surprised to learn from me that you can quit apps without switching into them. I often find myself at a designer’s Mac to do support work, and most designers never quit apps. Typically, the entire CS suite is open, usually 2 or 3 MS Office apps, email, iTunes, a browser window and perhaps Transmit or Fetch. This means, of course, that the memory space for many of the open apps has been paged to Virtual Memory. Switching into each one to quit out causes the OS to load that information from disk into memory. If you are simply interested in quitting the program, loading it’s memory into the RAM is a waste of time.

So, if you keep the command key down as your desired app is selected in the pop up list of running apps, then simply tap ‘Q’, the program will quit before processing the memory contents from VM. The data is simply removed from the paging files and on hard drives over 50% full, this can be a HUGE time saver when prepping a machine for maintenance or patching.