Lost: Apple's Apple MacBook Air 13.3-inch notebook computer experience

Purchase experience

This 13.3-inch Air was purchased in December last year. Before that, I have been using a VAIO's Fit15 released in 2013. In fact, according to my understanding of the life of the computer, that VAIO had to fight for another three years. But unfortunately, this network card signal is odd, the battery lasts for up to two hours to stop the dishes, and the last straw that killed the camel is broken shaft, so angry for it.

Taking into account the VAIO's various defects, as well as their own is not a performance party, as well as their own affordability, determine the scope of the Macbook Air, Surface Pro4 and XPS13.

Sophie is indeed very good, the lightest weight, even with a keyboard cover, touch screen, standard stylus, notes with Onenote and annotation PDF is very easy to use, but at that time about i5, 128 version was 7000 or so, the cheapest 6500, plus the price of the keyboard cover I can not accept anyway, and various evaluations show that Sufi's life is probably a half-day look, shorter than I expected, but also to bring The portability of the charger is greatly reduced, and it is not time for the computer to be bad. Perhaps these problems will be solved by the next generation.

XPS13 was not cheap at the time, but it was also the appearance of the 7000. It was also not worthwhile to cut prices or sea scouring. After all, there was no computer or inconvenience. And think about it, this guy had a very high value, but the write speed of SSD made me very Worry, life is stronger than Sophie but not without power. There is no support for touch screen, but also with a mouse (I have not used a very good touchpad at that time, in fact, XPS touchpad can be used The most frightening thing is to see a lot of sun shine in the keyboard, also in the wait to give up.

In fact, MacBook Air was not considered as the main force at first. After all, the screen was ridiculed by all, and the release time was long. At that time, it was rumors that new models would be released in March. But the battery life is really awesome, the interface is stronger than Sophie, and the product has been stable for many years. In addition, I also use the iPhone and iPad. So in the morning of December, Jingdong broke the price of 5988. Live to win. The configuration of the computer is i5, 4g, 128g. After a few months, 8g became a standard and it made me uncomfortable for a while. This will be mentioned below. Attach a link


Sorry, I only took a contrast picture when I got it.

Thirteen inches and fifteen inches do not know what I am comparing to

trouble

Apple's out of the box is always exciting, whether it is the appearance of "a full aluminum art tour," or the simplicity of the packaging and the damping of the lid, gives a sense of quality. But happy moments will soon pass and into the pit of OSX. You will find that many of the original serious problems can now be solved easily, and you will find that everything that was not a matter of the moment cannot be solved now. The specific issues and solutions are summarized in the following table.

There is a better solution Welcome to correct

I believe you have also discovered that some solutions to many problems are dependent on virtual machines. The virtual machine I use is Parallels Desktop. VMs are used and the network is unstable. Because this computer is a 4g memory version, using a virtual machine is very catching, after repeated trials, installed xp Lite, win7 flagship, win10 64-bit and 32-bit versions, the least resource consumption is naturally xp, allocation 512m of memory can be, but the function is missing, such as the previously mentioned does not support exfat format, and ugly outdated interface and interaction, so give up. Followed by 32 win10, 1g memory can be allocated.

Configuration settings in the PD

Windows resource usage after booting

Open three-piece productivity

At this point OSX opens a web page and Omni Outliner, there are some background plugins

As you can see, win10 really did a great job in saving system resources. In the case of allocating 1g of memory, there was no stalling in normal use. When people played games, I didn't say that. At the same time, it should also be discovered that this will only affect the level of use when it is used lightly. It really needs to make the virtual machine work. I think that 8g is the most basic requirement, so although Apple didn't upgrade the Macbook Air product line later, it just added Memory, but this extra 4g memory is very necessary. For me, if it is 8g memory version, the experience should be even higher.

Advantage

As mentioned earlier, the inconvenience brought by so many Air, then the following boasted, and then suppressed.

First of all, the air brought me the greatest convenience is the life, different people use different intensity, just for reference.

Wake from hibernation, 50% brightness, do nothing

When I use it normally

I normally use it to start ShadowsocksX, MacID, Paste, Yoink, Cheatsheet, and Karabiner running in the background, turning on wifi and Bluetooth. At home, it's possible to connect a Bluetooth keyboard and a touchpad. This is the case when testing and connecting to the phone. The memory card slot is enlarged by inserting a 64g tf card, and web browsing and word processing are alternately performed, and the brightness is more than 50%. In addition, Air's display life time is basically accurate.

The benefits of such a battery life are not just longer. Even if I don't come back in the morning to go out in the morning, I don’t need to bring a power supply. Note that I’m talking about normal use, with wifi turned on, comfortable and comfortable. , is not what brightness down the ridiculous test methods such as movies, so there is also the enhancement of portability, Imagine if I bought Sophie, although the body is lighter, but if you need to bring the keyboard cover and power, If you're mad, then you have a mouse, then the portable advantage doesn't exist.

Soft powder do not spray me, I did not black Sophie, I still have something to say - if you open the virtual machine, life time waist ... ...

Although the Air touchpad did not use Force Touch, but because of OSX's excellent gesture operation optimization and the touchpad's own material quality, in addition to thinkpad red dot I dare not draw conclusions, you can spike I used The touchpads of all Windows computers touched are relatively large in area and use smooth and responsive. One of the great advantages of touchpads is that they can go with fewer mice, which also enhances portability.

Air's keyboard should be considered an excellent level in the notebook. I tried Sophie and XPS13. I feel that Sufi's knocking is not a kind of empty sense. Pressing one key will sink the whole keyboard. The XPS keystroke is short. Buttons are hard and the feedback is not good, but it's a thin film keyboard. For a thin film keyboard, I don't think it's enough to affect the input efficiency. When I don't go out, I still connect the mechanical keyboard.

Keyboard touchpad close-up

The interaction of the OSX system itself is simple and intuitive. Personally, it seems that the windows system before win10 looks more concise and beautiful, but a thousand people have a thousand Hamlets in their eyes. At the same time, I think the beauty level of win10 is already quite high, especially the recent anniversary update. For some details, mainly to set the menu further adjustments, but now look at OSX some old-fashioned and old-fashioned. In terms of interaction, the main advantage of OSX is that many global shortcuts and gestures have great advantages, and Command+Q is so easy to use. However, one thing I think is that Windows is better, that is, the windows collide with different parts of the screen to adjust the size of the window and quickly split the screen. , This function can be realized by third-party software on osx but it is not so smooth, and its own split screen operation is tedious.

Another advantage of OSX is its terrible wake-up speed. First of all, I usually never shut down, need to open the screen, you can wake up instantly, after using MacID to unlock with a mobile phone, it is just as easy to use IPad.

Then there is Apple's three-piece set to summon the dragon. I edited half of Mindnode on the Air, and then Ipad can be drawn or viewed. The desktop system is more convenient and clear. I use Air to sort the PDF files to iCloud, then use the iPad version of PDF Expert as an annotation.

OSX has certain advantages in software. For some reason, there are indeed some software programs on OSX that help improve efficiency, such as the Omni Outliner used at this time for writing this article, and Mindnode, Ulysess, PDF Expert, etc. With the convenience of the specifics of what these softwares are for, everyone can move to the minority.

One day, software costs more than lost hardware.

Hard disk read and write speed is really a few seconds in the 128g version of Sophie and XPS, but I don’t think it has much effect on the experience.

Enough

There are some small details, such as magnetic charging interface, used to know the convenience and safety, Sophie also has; the plug has a charge status indicator; power plug can be folded, comes with a winder.

Magnetic charging interface

Small and practical power supply, if the line can be pulled down just fine

In addition, individuals think that the problem of the screen has been over-exaggerated components. Although the screen is TN, the resolution is 1440*900 is not high, but whether it is the viewing angle or the degree of exquisiteness, it is highly recommended by the unscrupulous merchants of Bainaohui. The machine is still a lot stronger, I usually use a BenQ's 2k resolution IPS monitor to use, there is no discomfort when I go back, but after seeing my mother to see a drawing of Solidworks with HP, but Quite uncomfortable.

The actual appearance of the right side of the color is obviously white

In terms of performance, if the game is hard to play, my game on the steam is civilized 5 and there is no problem with the Kambara space plan. Besiege and the city skyline are more cards, and it feels like the gt735m on the old computer. Play the game. If the virtual machine allocates 2g, it should be okay to play a lol, not a card, but the osx system can no longer open other programs, but I do not play so these are only speculations.

to sum up

Why was it so long to write such an article? Because to tell the truth, the above content is not discovered immediately after touching the Air, and the problems encountered are not quickly resolved. OSX is indeed an excellent system, and Air is indeed an excellent product, but the cost of learning from the Windows camp is extremely high. In my opinion, the effort is worthwhile, but whether you accept it depends first and foremost on whether you have left all the courage to relearn you are familiar with and whether Air or other Mac products can meet your computer-to-computer needs. At Microsoft, we have upgraded the hardware capabilities of PCs today. There are many products on the market that are running Windows systems. We have to carry the XPS13 and Surface Pro4 that we mentioned just now. We need to pay for XPS15 and Surface. Book, to be portable to want to have a certain performance and poor money to buy millet notebooks, Windows manufacturers think of all the product you can think of the form, it is not necessary to do a less wise thing to buy a Macbook installed Windows. I think my mother's words reflect the fact that OSX and Macbook are respected: If there is no OSX version of Solidworks, I also buy a Mac.