Category: 
May 18, 2008
I love my Mac Book Air. But I have a few complaints about it. The first and most major complaint is the one stupid USB port that it has. I realise that a lot of people were complaining about this part of the spec when it was released and I honestly didn’t think that it would be that much of an annoyance. Turns out that it is a huge pain in my ass…
And here is the reason why.
The obvious answer to resolve this issue is to plug in a USB hub and be done with it. Yes, that was how I had planned on taking care of this. Turns out that it isn’t quite that easy.
Because the MBA has such a small harddrive (even smaller if you have the solid state drive), I have been using a portable USB drive to store my files. Namely my music files because I don’t want to take up the entire drive with 30 gigs of music. All fine and great. Yeah. Well, great until you decide that you want to sync your new iPod Nano with your music. This is where all hell breaks loose.
So back to the hub. You would think that you plug in your hub, plug in your harddrive and your iPod and you are good to go. But NOPE.
As it turns out, having experimented with several USB hubs, the MBA will not recognise my LaCie external drive when plugged into a hub. Therefore there is no way for me to sync my music and my iPod. How bloody stupid is that? I ended up having to copy the music onto my harddrive, resync my iTunes and then sync my iPod and delete the tracks off the local disk. Totally annoying and completely dumb.
Complaint number 2. I can’t get a Bluetooth headset (namely my trusted Jawbone) to connect properly to Skype. Damn it to hell.
Complaint number 3. Crap internal speakers. Really crap.
Complaint number 4. Even though my keyboard is set to British English, it still has the @ symbol and the ” in the American locations. WTF is that.
And one final complaint which is a software related issue. Microsoft Entourage sucks ass. It is a horrible piece of software that is making my brain explode.
That is all for now. I will follow this post up with all the wonderful Mac software that I actually do love…
Horaayy..there are 6 comment(s) for me so far ;)
Switch to Mail, Entourage is piece of junk.
British Mac keyboards have had the @ and ” in the American locations since the dawn of time - not entirely sure why, but it’s equally annoying for Mac users who occasionally borrow other peoples’ PCs.
have tried out to format your hardrive to FAT32 Format?
Were any of the USB hubs externally powered? If not, then I can see where the single port may not provide enough power throughput for multiple devices. Bummer, though.
It appears that others have succeeded with Skype/Jawbone. Don’t give up!
Entourage… yeah, the way I see it, those who have the experience to expect more from Entourage (i.e. you) are going to be disappointed. Plus, the time machine backups of the entourage database are non-intelligent, so it’s backing up the entire database every time.
If you haven’t, try another USB cable. They are not created equal, though they should be.