Leonard Armstrong Dot Net: Top 10 Personal Technology Influences

In a previous post I cited the iPhone as a premier hardware technology influence. Today I continue with the hardware trend with my fourth overall technology influence, a notebook computer that has shaped my life since the summer of 2011.

To set the stage let me first talk about the iPad. I was an early adopter of the iPad, intending to use it as an organization and note taking device. But in those capacities it just didn't cut it for me. When entering high volumes of text, I found the virtual keyboard made my typing error-prone. I tried both the iPad keyboard dock and a Bluetooth keyboard but I found it awkward to move my hands from the keyboard to the screen to navigate or do some other form of pointing. And the inability to have more than one application on screen was very inefficient. But I loved the portability of the device... the small size and footprint. I loved having built-in Internet access.

I resolved my problems and found the perfect, portable device when I purchased...

Technology Influence #4: The MacBook Air

In July, 2011 Apple released a major update to the MacBook Air, a device that combines the portability of an iPad with the power and flexibility of a laptop computer. A win-win situation. I bought an 11 inch 2011 Air on the day the update was released. It quickly became my favorite computer. Ever. I'm such an evangelist for this device that at least 3 people I know purchased one for themselves after seeing how effective I am with mine. And they love theirs too.

The Macbook Air has a physical, full-sized, comfortable, backlit keyboard with built-in multi-touch trackpad. It has a screen resolution of 1366 x 768 and a footprint of 11.8" × 7.5" which is only 25% longer than the iPad. The Air weighs in at a mere 2 ⅓ lbs. And the Air runs OS X, a full-blown multi-purpose operating system. It's small and light yet powerful and effective.

The one downside of the MacBook Air is that it only has built-in WiFi access. The orignal iPad had WiFi plus an option for built in 3G month-to-month, no-contract-required cellular access. If a WiFi network in unavailable the MacBook Air cannot connect to the Internet. Well... maybe. There are ways to counter this limitation. I purchased a 4G MiFi hotspot... a small devices that transforms an over-the-air LTE cellular signal into a WiFi signal. The MacBook Air talks WiFi to the hotspot which then translates the signal into 4G LTE and out to the cellular network. Problem solved, albeit with another device to buy, carry and charge.

The MacBook Air may be one rung lower than the iPhone on my Top 10 Technology Influences but it remain the overall favorite computer that I have ever owned, even two years after purchase. After purchasing my Air, use of my iPad dropped to less than 10% of what it had been previously. But the iPad still does have a part in my life, and I'll talk about that in my post on Technology Influence #5.

UPDATE (April 15, 2011, 6:25AM EDT): A comment on this post from Christopher Bruni via is Facebook account reminded me of a killer feature of the MacBook Air that I neglected to mention. The Air uses a solid state drive (SSD, also referred to as "flash memory") instead of a traditional mechanical spinning hard disk drive (HDD). This makes a world of difference for performance. While processor speed is often blamed when our PCs are running slow, these days our wait times are more often a result of slow I/O processing than CPU power. Writes and reads to/from a hard drive and across the network often dominate the amount of time we spend waiting for a device. One example is bootup time. A traditional PC, even an HHD-based Mac, may take the better part of a minute to complete a cold start. The MacBook Air with SSD takes a mere 12 seconds. Now that is a killer feature.

Next: Influence #5 - Audiobooks and e-books.