As I said on an other thread I just bought a late 2012 MBA (1.8 ghz, 4gig, 128GB) and I am in love with it. This is my first Apple computer but couple days after purchase I was already a fanboy.
It is funny how blinded I've got over Apples heavily refined and optimized UI, aluminum casing, great form factor, size battery life etc. I started thinking, maybe I can replace my Desktop computer with a MBA. After all I have seen people do that, I know numerous people who use MBA's as their only personal computer. I have a PS4, I could move all my gaming to that. Why do I need a mid tower PC where the constant whine from the water coolant fans mix with the shame of constantly drawing 800 watts from the wall?
In order to to give this MBA a true test I connected it to my external 1440p ips monitor, apple keyboard and mouse and removed everything else from my desk including the MBA itself. My Herman Miller envelop desk looked amazing. Just a monitor, a wireless keyboard and mouse and no wires. It looked almost like out of an apple ad to be honest. So I started using it just like how I use my trusty Windows desktop computer (2600k OC 4.5Ghz, 16gig ram, GTX680 SLI, 240gb Kingston SSD Raid 0, 4TB Hitachi 7200rpm Raid 0, mechanical keyboard, wired big mouse with lots of buttons)
At the beginning it was great, My room was quiet, I was getting used to using the large screen real estate with apple desktop, but as time passed I stopped being so careful about which program I started and which one I stopped, before I knew it I had 20 tabs open on firefox, 3 large pdf files, spotify playing on the background, Matlab churning an algorithm and the poor MBA came to a screeching halt. The fans were screaming louder than my desktop trying to cool the little guy down, firefox was taking 5-10 seconds between switching among tabs and Matlab crashed.
Just to let you know, I was not purposely trying to break it, just doing my daily thing to see how it would handle it and it failed miserably.
This does not mean that MBA is a bad product or Apple sucks. I am still enjoying my MBA, although at a much less capacity. I love being able to get 7-8 hours of battery life while listening to music and coding in python, and not even feeling the thing in my back pack. It probably is the best laptop out there, it is just not the best computer. I just realized that someone like me will almost always need a Desktop because my daily activities and replacing a big power hungry mid tower with a sleek smooth Apple laptop is a dream that will never come true.
It is funny how blinded I've got over Apples heavily refined and optimized UI, aluminum casing, great form factor, size battery life etc. I started thinking, maybe I can replace my Desktop computer with a MBA. After all I have seen people do that, I know numerous people who use MBA's as their only personal computer. I have a PS4, I could move all my gaming to that. Why do I need a mid tower PC where the constant whine from the water coolant fans mix with the shame of constantly drawing 800 watts from the wall?
In order to to give this MBA a true test I connected it to my external 1440p ips monitor, apple keyboard and mouse and removed everything else from my desk including the MBA itself. My Herman Miller envelop desk looked amazing. Just a monitor, a wireless keyboard and mouse and no wires. It looked almost like out of an apple ad to be honest. So I started using it just like how I use my trusty Windows desktop computer (2600k OC 4.5Ghz, 16gig ram, GTX680 SLI, 240gb Kingston SSD Raid 0, 4TB Hitachi 7200rpm Raid 0, mechanical keyboard, wired big mouse with lots of buttons)
At the beginning it was great, My room was quiet, I was getting used to using the large screen real estate with apple desktop, but as time passed I stopped being so careful about which program I started and which one I stopped, before I knew it I had 20 tabs open on firefox, 3 large pdf files, spotify playing on the background, Matlab churning an algorithm and the poor MBA came to a screeching halt. The fans were screaming louder than my desktop trying to cool the little guy down, firefox was taking 5-10 seconds between switching among tabs and Matlab crashed.
Just to let you know, I was not purposely trying to break it, just doing my daily thing to see how it would handle it and it failed miserably.
This does not mean that MBA is a bad product or Apple sucks. I am still enjoying my MBA, although at a much less capacity. I love being able to get 7-8 hours of battery life while listening to music and coding in python, and not even feeling the thing in my back pack. It probably is the best laptop out there, it is just not the best computer. I just realized that someone like me will almost always need a Desktop because my daily activities and replacing a big power hungry mid tower with a sleek smooth Apple laptop is a dream that will never come true.