Joanna Stern reviews the MacBook Air as a Windows laptop.
I enjoyed this—I’ve considered in the past whether the MacBook Air would be a suitable laptop for me even though most of the time I don’t run OS/X. (Conclusion: probably not any more, though it might have seemed that way once.)
She does highlight the thing I’ve always found most painful about the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro: that vicious sharp edge along the front. (sucks teeth in recollection of past pain)
But she likes the trackpad. I’m not keen on the Mac trackpad, finding it too easy to operate by accident and too hard to “click” reliably. Perhaps it’s just that the PC vendors’ attempts at the Crazy New-Era Big Trackpad are worse.
The review is of a machine with a US keyboard, so although there are some quibbles about keyboard layout, there’s nothing to compare to the difficulties presented to the UK programmer—most obviously the lack of a hash sign (#) anywhere on the keyboard, and the tiny, tiny Return key (right).
The Return key is hard to hit on every current Mac and MacBook UK keyboard, even where there’s plenty of room to spare in the chassis.
It just feels gratuitously punitive to me. And that’s surely the way it is, given that Apple did it perfectly well in their older keyboards. They do know how to make a big Return key. They have learned the technology. They just think it’s not quite appropriate to accommodate whims like that from us.
The Breakfast Post 
