I’ve held my wife’s 13-inch MBA up alongside the revised rMBP, and the weight difference is bordering on negligible. After a few weeks, I’ve largely adjusted to the change, but it still feels more suited for use on a tray table or desk. With this bantam replacement, it constantly feels as if it’s about to slide between my legs and into the abyss below. Perhaps I have the world’s worst posture (read: I’m certainly vying for that crown), but I never had to think about how close my knees were together when using a 15-inch laptop.
(My 15-incher would routinely hang over a bit, especially on regional jets.) On the other hand, it’s far more difficult to use on my lap.
On one hand, I barely feel the 3.46 pounds floating around in my backpack, and it fits perfectly on the tray table of a coach airline seat. I’ll say this about moving to a 13-inch machine: the smaller footprint is both a blessing and a curse.
That’s what I was accustomed to on my outgoing 15-incher, and I knew that if this thing were going to meet my demands as a desktop replacement, that was the only possible avenue. Using Apple’s internal scaling mechanism within Mavericks, I immediately tweaked my test unit to ‘More Space,’ which gives the appearance of a 1,680 x 1,050 panel. Even when the original 13-inch rMBP arrived, I wondered if I’d find the display too cramped. I earnestly tried to shove my workflows onto a 1,440 x 900 display (offered on the 13-inch MacBook Air), but I ended up having to compromise in too many ways, costing me precious minutes and seconds in varying degrees of productivity. The issue with downsizing, of course, is the loss of real estate. I say all of this to make a point: the weight of a 15-inch machine, coupled with the sluggishness of a mechanical hard drive, has become a marked burden. I’ve logged roughly 150,000 airline miles for 2013, and put upwards of 25,000 miles across a variety of rental cars. It’s also worth understanding that I barely stand still. “This boots up so fast!,” she’d exclaim, forcing a grimace on the face of yours truly as he deals with a 3-minute reboot during some important live-blog. Meanwhile, I’ve grown increasingly envious of my wife’s far more luggable 13-inch MacBook Air. You know, the big one that shipped before “Retina” was a word that could be applied to notebooks. Read on for my take on Apple’s most fit-for-travel workhorse yet.įor those who don’t understand the inner workings of my mind, here’s a useful nugget: for the past two years, I’ve relied solely on an (aging) 15-inch MacBook Pro. For those who spend an embarrassing amount of time in airline seats, Town Cars, and/or questionable-designed hotel rooms, there’s a new champion in town. (Save your effort reaching for the calculator - this new rig is just 0.03-inches thicker than the MBA’s thickest point.) To boot, Apple dropped the entry price for its smallest pro-grade machine to just $1,299, placing it just $200 north of the baseline 13-inch MacBook Air. How thin? At its rear, the 13-inch MacBook Air measures 0.68-inches, whereas the new 13-inch rMBP measures 0.71-inches. For those who slept right through the announcement, here’s a bit of a refresher: it’s dramatically faster than last year’s model, it’s cheaper, and most impressive of all, it’s thinner. Released last month alongside the iPad Air and revised iPad mini with Retina display, the Haswell-infused 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display has been my sole computer for the past four weeks.
And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s another Apple product that’s doing the trumping. It happened: the MacBook Air has officially been trumped as my recommended road warrior machine.
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