Apple MacBook Air (11.6-inch) Review Discussion

The point of the 30-day number is that it is indicative of how much energy you loose per second, if you wish. What it tells me as an end user is that during a day or two, where I need to use my computer on battery, I can use the "sleep" state virtually as an "off" state (i.e. with minimal power loss). If the sleep state consumed 20% of my battery say, then I don't have instant on because the computer is not essentially off to begin with...

Bottom line, what we care is energy loss per second, and the 30-day period gives us an idea about that.

 

I have read some posts on Mac forums where even after 1 day usage some owners are complaining that their 15secs boot has turned into noticeably longer boot times. There is a good deal of tweaking happening.
I've owned some Sony laptops where i could instantly actually put my laptop on without booting to Windows- it's called Instant On. This is more useful to me.
With tweaking you can get a Windows laptop with an SSD to also boot extremly fast.

A 30 day sleep is pretty much useless to me and above 1 day sleep is not something that i would even explore. Most laptops today will wake pretty much instantly from sleep. I know that my Sony TT does this.

 

So basically, it's not the feature itself that's important to you, but rather it's the implementation of said feature. I guess it's just differing opinions. I still see it as a novelty, especially since sleep doesn't consume that much energy on many laptops these days.

 

A long review and no mention of the camera?

 

Was there something specific you wanted to know about the specs/performance of the built-in iSight webcam?

We still have this system in our test lab if you need additional details and our editorial team is always happy to help when we can.

We typically don't go into too much detail on webcams unless there is something really spectacular about the webcam or new software on the laptop that relates to new webcam capabilities.

Of course, if a notebook has a particularly horrible webcam we will be sure to mention that too.

 

When the new Air was announced I got immediately suspicious because of the name of the webcam. It's not an iSight but instead a FaceTime camera. In going to the sexy thinness I had to think that camera wasn't going to be good. Most reviews don't mention. I did however hear one person say it was awful.

Of all the things you have to come to terms with on this pretty package, the camera situation is a deal breaker if it is indeed as low grade as I heard.

 

FaceTime? Isn't that the same camera used for the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4?

 

They share the same name. I don't know if the internals are the same though.

 

Most regular people who put in a decent ssd to say an acer 1830t will get it to boot in 25 seconds to a usable firefox page (inc a virus check program booting up). With no or amateur tweaking. Compared with 15 seconds for the mba 11. Yes you can get your win 7 laptop to boot in something like 10 seconds if you really work at it, tweak it and strip it down or whatever but few people have the time or ability to do it. m

 

I agree the MBA boots fast. But my Acer 1830t isn't bad either. It boots to an input ready situation in 17.5 seconds without any tweaks. (measured with Boottimer)

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=6071&p=2

The reason some Windows laptops boot slower is the amount of bloatware they come with. The MBA comes with a rather clean install.

 

Yeah frankly, it's one reason why I've recommended people buy laptops from the Microsoft Store, before. Guaranteed zero bloatware.