Let me preface this by saying that I absolutely love my MacBook Air.
But…
I’ve owned it for over a year now, and ever since its purchase it has had one big plaguing problem. It has a tendency to overheat when doing mildly intensive tasks (mainly video/flash playback, or other intensive tasks). Now I know this is an ultraportable machine designed for use on the go, and its not intended to be a main workhorse computer. I do use this as my main machine, mainly because I hate having to keep track of all my files across various machines. For me, I don’t generally do many graphics or processor intensive tasks. I do encode video (tv shows) for playback and storage in iTunes on my television, however I store those on the Mac Mini that is attached to the tv and it has a faster processor; so it gets to have that fun. With my photography I do edit photos, but I absolutely hate Photoshop (mainly due to its complex nature, and all the classes I’ve taken in photoshop have taught me nothing) so I use Pixelmator (which runs so much better on any machine). So as you can see the only problem I should be having is storage, since this machine was only available with a 60gb SSD or 80gb ATA (and I have the 80gb). I’d love to have an SSD but thats a story for another day.
Now this overheating issue use to be much worse, Apple has issued a firmware update that helped mildly. No longer did it simply shut down one of the cores to cut back on heat problems, now it just scales back processing so bad that watching youtube videos are impossible. Playback becomes so choppy that you can’t make it through an entire video. It would get so hot trying to play freaking farmville on facebook (flash content) that it got out of sync with the server because of how slow it was loading.
On to this magical fix; and no I didn’t buy a Rev. B or C MacBook Air to replace it. There is a utility called CoolBook that allows mac users to effectively under-clock the processor. This utility lets you specify the voltage the processor is getting when its running at different speeds. This doesn’t change the speeds, just the amount of power its consuming, therefore keeping it from getting nearly as hot. This also has a side benefit of using less battery power and giving you more time away from the plug. The utility is $10.00 and its attached to the computer you are using so it isn’t transferrable, its tied along with its serial to the machine. I installed it earlier today, and while it has gotten warm, it hasn’t gotten nearly as hot. I’ve been able to watch all the things on youtube I’ve missed out on! Hell i’m tempted to install iMovie and see how well it’ll create them.
While I am in the minority for people that own Airs, I still have to say its a wonderful everyday main machine for my uses, and I love it. Just now, I love it even more.