My MBA visits with the East Coast Radio’s breakfast team. Daryl Ilbury (pictured) a fellow Mac fan gasps in wonder!—

After the “oooh shiny” wears off is usually a good time to review and see if a new gadget is all that.

After a month with the MacBook Air, my biggest problem has nothing to do with the design, it’s apparent limitations or it’s size…

Coming off a MacBook Pro 15″, my biggest fears were screen size, performance and port-ability (as in lack of ports). After regular use in my basic workflow, the Air has easily replaced the MacBook Pro and I cannot imagine going backwards now.

It has come through in presentations, email and Word duties, web surfing … in fact everything I used to use the 15″ for, with flying colours. I don’t think I would use it for content creation – but in the main, especially when I am away from the office for days on end, it has served as a primary machine.

It is a godsend when travelling. For fellow South African air commuters, you will be used to the ritual of emptying your bag and sending your phone, wallet and LAPTOP through airport scanners separately. This is a major pain in the ass, and even though the MBP 15″ wasn’t a fatty to start with, it was mightily inconvenient.

Even so, I felt sorry for the obvious lawyer and accountant types who lug the document and laptop equivalent of steamer trunks. They just glower at me now as I breeze through.

In many cases, I haven’t even bothered to remove the Air from the bag and the Gestapo at the checkpoints have been none the wiser – unlike these guys …

So, as the saying goes, if I am this happy, why the sad face?

The problem is that it freezes and stutters. And not just now and then either. Every single time I watch a video. 10-15 seconds of freeze – no mouse pointer, no nothing and then back to normal for a brief period – and so the cycle goes. It seems to be related to overheating.

The Apple discussion boards for the Air have been going on about this for some time, and a recent SMC update claims to help the problem, but many of us are not seeing it.

The hot and humid Durban weather probably doesn’t help – we have had weeks of baking heat with temperatures well over 30°C which obviously doesn’t help. But there is no question that the Air should not be doing this and it is annoying.

The MacBook Pro, as anyone who has owned one knows, can double up as a heating element to brown your toast or fry an egg (I think someone actually did that) and it never froze and stuttered like this.And the Air doesn’t get anywhere near as hot as the MBP.

Since the day I unpacked it and moved my user over from the MacBook, I have never missed the CDROM drive, I never used it on the MBP anyway, and I haven’t missed the lack of ports either. The biggest impact was that I couldn’t use Firewire for my LaCie mobile drive and had to switch to USB2.

But about R800 later and 16GB of USB thumb-drive later I had enough quick storage to move my documents, presentations and the odd few episodes of television or music that I wanted to watch while travelling. So even that became no problem.

If it wasn’t for this freezing I would honestly say that this was the best laptop I have ever used. Apple needs to address this issue soon before the MacBook Air buzz gets killed by “freezing” stories – like the Cube crack stories.

Yes, it is NOT the fastest Mac laptop – you soon notice that the hard drive really doesn’t like being told to do two things at once.

Yes, it hasn’t got Firewire, multiple USB ports etc – but you learn to adapt.

Yes, it doesn’t have the CDROM – but like with the floppy, I think Apple have the right of it on this one.

For what the MacBook Air is, it doesn’t need it. And you bitching that it doesn’t have it won’t change the fact that you won’t use it even if it was there.

So, like those girls in school who were sexy but a bit, well, slow – and you went out with them anyway and then you discovered there was so much more to like about them – the MacBook Air will surprise you.

Tags: Apple, computers, Durban, freezing MacBook Air, laptop, MacBook Air, Reviews, South Africa, technology