マック本・空気 hands on & アイポード触れる音質テスト...

The MacBook Airs are now in Apple stores.

First thing I did after noticing it in the store, is shut it, and see how thin it is. Well, it's nice, but I don't know why I don't feel any "WOW" or astonishment. I hold it up, horizontally. A thin slab of metal. Feels more like an over sized kitchen knife. Okey. Sometimes some weird expectations make weird feelings. Instead of feeling "Wow, what a thin notebook", I felt more like "oh, this kitchen knife is a little too big for comfort..." Oh, and the weight also confirms with what I'd expect from a kitchen knife, too. It's of course, light when compared with a MacBook, yet not light enough to surprise me. Simply put, the Vaio TX did surprise me with it's lightness, the MacBook Air didn't; although they actually weigh similarly, the overall visual feel do has an impact to what you'd expect it to weight, and that, then affects wither you are surprised or not. But then, they would both feel much more different in backpacks, which of course is impossible to test in stores.

What did surprise me is the flat sleep signaling LED and Apple remote IR receiver window. They are now so thin that they seem more like little cracks. It looks very cool, yet it is now even harder to see if the computer is in sleep mode or not. Another looks overriding functionality design choice by Apple.

Something else notable is that there is a thin rubber seal around the screen to make the lid/keyboard fit each other nicely.

The 2 holes on both sides of the iSight camera are now 2 grids of holes, more like a bee hive.

The new cylinder shaped Magsafe connector looks great and seems to have a more sturdy construction. I wish I had that one with my MacBook.

The out of the box system is very smooth and responsive, much smoother then my MacBook CoreDuo. Hay, didn't someone say that the MacBook Air is slower then MacBooks? Well, first of all, it's the out-of-box configurations, so there is no large softwares for me to try. Second, although my CPU is slightly faster, it's an older generation, and the Air's got 2gigs of RAM. (I've only got 1gig.) Anyhow, realizing that the Air is faster then my MacBook made me slightly pissed for a split second... (想掀桌啦！)

Overall, it's a nice machine, yet at that price and only 1 USB port, it's not something worth buying unless you've got money to burn.

Oh, I saw this girl in the store pointing at the Air saying this is what I want, and her grandmother just went "you tell me what you want and I'll buy it for you!" Okey, so that's the situation when over priced stuff gets to be sold. (Hay, is that the right way to rip off your rich grandparents???)

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I also brought my own headphones over to test the sound quality of the iPod touch.

Well, at first it felt pretty well. The sound wasn't as great at what some people say, certainly not the best, yet not the worst either. Reminds me of the entry level Panasonic portable CD players that played flat sound. I think this flaw would be unnoticeable to most people.

But here's the ugly part. I turned the unit to switch the screen over to landscape view. Well, guess what, I heard a pop of static noise when the screen flip occurred. The "pop" didn't occur every time I flipped the unit, but it is downright annoying when it did. The pop also occurred on every tap of play and stop. This reminded me of the days of playing MP3 with Winamp on Pentium 100MHz computers with Windows 95. Oh the days of inferior music playback when every Windows event that required some work of the CPU would put "pops" of noise in your music. I am used to my Sony Clie with a dedicated MP3 playback chip so that nothing except a system crash would interfere with my music. So a gadget that was meant to play music having this PC-like behavior is totally unacceptable. Now I am even more sure that I would never buy an iPod touch.