The Air's full-size keyboard is a gift - many devices this small and light tend to have crammed, unusable keyboards, so having a full-sized one is a relief. The keyboard has one much-touted feature that needs quite some work: the keyboard lighting. In all honesty, it is driving me nuts. Let me explain. Without the keyboard lighting, the keyboard is unreadable in lower-light conditions (which basically means the second the sun goes down, I prefer few lights in my house - much cozier that way), so you really do need the keyboard lighting.
The normal way in which Macs handle keyboard lighting is by using the ambient light sensor (my PowerBook G4 does that too); the lower the light conditions, the brighter the illumination. Sadly, this somehow never works quite the way I want it to, so I just put the lighting to maximum manually using the dedicated function keys. All good, right?
No. The Air insists on turning the lighting off after a short period of inactivity - watch a scene on TV, and the illumination turns off. The problem? It does not automatically turn on again. In other words, you need to turn it on manually every time. Trust me - this gets real old, real fast. There is a slider in Keyboard Preferences that lets you set the illumination to never turn itself off - but this option does not work. It will still turn itself off.
On a keyboard that actually requires this lighting in order to be used properly, these sorts of bugs or errors are unforgivable. I hope a software fix is all it takes to fix this.
This does not mean, however, that the keyboard does not look good. Trust me: the black keys, with the white illuminated symbols on it, and a white glow surrounding each key - it looks nothing short of stunning. I hope Apple fixes the bug soon.
The speaker
The speaker actually deserves a special note. Yes, you read that right, that is the singular form. That in and of itself is not a problem at all; seeing this device's intended use cases, there is no need for stereo speakers, in my opinion. The speaker's quality is of course abysmal, but again, I have no problems with that. This device is not intended for playing music out of its own speaker - nor is any other laptop for that matter.
So, what is the problem then? Well, the location of the speaker. It is located underneath the keyboard (slick!), to the right. Meaning, all the sounds you hear come from the right. This may seem like a trivial thing, but trust me, this is really, really annoying. I certainly would have preferred the mono speaker to be centered.
The trackpad
The MacBook Air is the first Apple notebook which incorporates the multitouch technology used in Apple's iPod Touch and iPhone. While on those two devices it actually makes sense to have such features, I am a bit more skeptical about this technology on my touchpad.
First of all, Apple made the touchpad big. As in, really big. This is a good thing, as it gives you more room to play with. The bad thing is that they made the trackpad button significantly narrower than on other notebooks, and this poses problems for accuracy - Fitts' Law, anyone? It is really easy to miss the button now during some serious touchpad action.
The big thing is of course the multitouch gestures that are implemented in the new trackpad. You can 'pinch' to zoom photos/images, you can rotate photos/images, you can 'swipe' through lists, and zoom the desktop. You can activate and deactivate these gestures in the Keyboard & Mouse preferences panel, where videos are shown that explain how the actions work - nicely done.
To me, the multitouch feels like a fun but rather useless gimmick. It has not been implemented in a wide-enough fashion for it to be of any real use, and the places where it is implemented, it simply lacks refinement. For instance, you can pinch and zoom in Safari, but it only zooms the text, not the images or the webpage itself. The desktop zoom does zoom everything, but of course just makes it all look blurry. In all honesty, I have never seen any use in desktop zooming without proper resolution independence anyway.
- "Introduction; The look"
- "The keyboard, speaker, & trackpad"
- "The ports, setup, & performance; Conclusion"
