Mac Book Air
Monkey Archive Forums/Digital Discussion/Mac Book Air
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| Hi all, I just bought my very first Mac, a MacBook Air 13" i7 with 256GB SSD and I'm totally pleased with the Mac. It's such a great machine even though Mac OS is a bit different if you come from Windows. But wow, just great! Too pity Monkey doesn't work with Lion yet... |
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| I plan to get one really soon. I do all of my programming on a two years old $200 netbook. It's super slow, the screen is tiny, has no battery and the charger has a mind of its own. Are you using Parallels? |
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| Not yet, but I have to admit, I just heard from Parallels but still don't know what it is. ;) edit: Just found it. Looks good. Do you have any experience with it? My initial plan was to install an extra Windows 7 partition via Boot camp. I had a Samsung N510 before (11", Atom N270 plus NVidia ION). Quite a nice machine beside the Atom processor. It drove me crazy especially for development. Now with the Air it's a difference like between day and night. SSD plus i7 is HUGE. Dead silent, no heat, a dream came true. :) |
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| Parallel is a basically a virtual machine customized to be faster and more powerful than usual virtual machine software. It is also less frustrating since it allows you to use mac shortcuts in Windows which is a big deal to me. I am kinda cheap when it comes to buying software unless it effects my productivity. I have a Lenovo S10-2 (10.1", Atom N270). I actually bought it for my wife but after a year, she decided to take my old laptop and leave me stuck with this. I am suffering with it. I have to use an external screen for many things like designing web sites. It runs flash and HTML like a snail. I have to restart Jungle ide every now and then to prevent it from slowing down and acting crazy. Oh and I have less than 1GB of free memory here. |
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| MacBook Air doesn't come with core i7, does it? |
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| I tried parallels and ultimately went for vmware fusion. didn't like parallels as it felt too 'integrated' into osx whereas vmware behaved more like a dedicated windows machine which is what i wanted. seemed faster too. both have demos. try them. |
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| There is also VirtualBox which became very good in the last years. And it is free. |
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| @Aman: The Air is available with the i7 and that's the machine I have. Parallels supports DirectX, does VMware and virtualbox support this as well? |
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| @Xaron: Yeah, Parallels, VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox all support Direct3D. Congrats on your amazing new machine. The computer I still use the most is a 1st gen MacBook which is now more than 5 years old. It cannot run Lion, but I think I'll stick to it for some more time (at least until the base Air model comes with 4GB of RAM and 128 GB SSD). |
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| Ok, I think I'll give Parallels a try. Thanks! |
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| VMWare fusion does not work with Lion. VirtualBox does but it is slower than VMWare fusion and Parallels. |
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| I've installed Parallels now and I'm quite impressed so far. :) What a great machine! |
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| @Aman: The Air is available with the i7 and that's the machine I have. You sure about that? According to Apple's website, new Macbook Airs are only i5s but do come in 1.6ghz (11 inch) or 1.7ghz (13 inch) processors. However, i did read some benchmark results that placed the new 1.7ghz Airs on par with the i7 2010 Macbook Pros, which is quite impressive. VMWare fusion does not work with Lion Actually it does. I'm using it right now. |
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| Yes I'm sure. The 13" comes either with the 1.7 GHz i5 or with the 1.8 GHz i7. You have to configure it that way, it's not visible for the base setup there. Even the 11" has the option to choose the i7! |
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| @Neuro: It turned out that there is a core i7 choice but it is not visible unless you start customizing the most expensive choice only. What version of VMWare are you using? Does it support it out of the box or did you have to do some tweaking. |
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| Wow...thats awesome that you can actually get an i7 Macbook Air :)! Now if they can only work on getting rid of that intel graphics chip :). What version of VMWare are you using? Does it support it out of the box or did you have to do some tweaking. I'm using version 3.1.3 of VMWare Fusion. No didn't do any tweaking at. It just still worked normally after the Lion upgrade. |
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| i have been using virtual-box on my mac mini for a while just for the odd windows tool i still use for work. But am thinking of getting vmware fusion or parallels on my new macbook pro. |
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| I am running VMWare Fusion 3.1.3 on Lion and haven't noticed any problems. |
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| Lion/VMWare Fusion 3.1.3 fine here as well. |
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| Sorry, a friend of mine told me it didn't work and it turned out that he was using an older version that does not support Lion and even updating fails. He had to uninstall the older version completely before installing the new version. |
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