![]() I was playing with a new Sony Vaio Pro last night, courtesy of Amazon, and it’s no more generous. ![]() Too few ports? No fewer than the Sony Vaio Pro offersĪpple remains as parsimonious as ever with ports: just two USB 3.0 connectors here, along with an SDXC-compatible card slot and a Thunderbolt connector. Perhaps that extra battery in your pack really will be made redundant at last. The good news is the machine’s battery life, which is considerably improved over previous MacBook Airs and of other vendors’ laptops too. Possibly less so since Apple has - surprise, surprise - introduced a seemingly proprietary connector for the machine’s SSD. So people who expect to be able to tinker with the insides of their computers are not going to like the new Air any more than they did its predecessors. That’s a trade I am willing to make, though it’s clearly not one other folk will want to accept, especially people who spend a lot of time on ten-hour-or-more flights. And if integrating the battery makes for a slimmer, less weighty, more portable machine, I’m all for it. Likewise, I don’t feel hindered by losing the ability to swap out a battery, largely because I’ve found by experience that a sensible charging regime and a few battery prolonging tricks can eke out a charge to keep me up and running until I can get to a power outlet - all without compromising how I use the computer. Still skinny, still almost impossible to upgrade I’ve wanted to upgrade it, and probably would have done if I could, but the truth is I’ve not actually needed to. My travel machine is still a 2010 Core 2 Duo-based 11-inch Air with a mere 2GB of RAM and I’ve not felt the need to increase that capacity, even though it gets used for pretty much all the ‘pro’ tasks I put my main, largely desk-bound machine to. ![]() But I also find myself increasingly wondering whether that’s as sensible a view to take as it once was. I want to be able to increase my computer’s memory and storage capacities over time as I see fit. Now I - and, I suspect, most of you lot too - find this irritating. The Air’s memory is soldered onto the motherboard, leaving the Wi-Fi card and the SSD flash storage as the only readily removable components - and, as you’ll see, swapping out the SSD is a non-starter: it needs a special Apple cable to interface with the motherboard. I couldn’t just throw in the extra memory and storage myself. ![]() The reason I wanted to get hold of the upgraded version of the Air is, of course, because Apple’s mania for providing punters with sealed units containing "no user-serviceable parts within". Apple’s MacBook Air 13-inch: cutting-edge internals, behind-the-curve casing ![]()
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