Time Out: The MacBook Air, It Just (Doesn't) Work(s)

My wife has been happily computing for the last three years on her G4 iBook. It has been getting long in the tooth and she just started classes this semester at GMU. It was time for a new computer, one that was light but did not need to be exceedingly powerful.

The rumored light-weight MacBook seemed like a good fit. The keynote presentation at MacWorld by the man in the black turtleneck sealed the deal. I ordered the MacBook Air (MBA) that day and it finally arrived last Friday. So far so good.

Wireless Migration Assistant
The problems pretty much started immediately. The Mac has a great little intro video (Leopard, actually) and then it goes into a configuration mode that allows you to migrate your information from an old Mac. Well, as instructed, I popped the DVD into Christa's old iBook and loaded the Wireless Migration Assistant (WMA) and proceeded to launch the transfer. All went as expected until the estimate times for a completed transfer began growing, and growing and growing.

Eventually, the old iBook gave some cryptic error message. Basically, it said that the transfer had failed for an unknown reason. The new MBA did not fail out, but the estimated completion time kept growing. No keystroke combination was successful in stopping or interrupting the process. The only thing to do: press and hold the power button until it shut down. And I tried again several times to the same effect. All the while with no messaging to tell me what went wrong. Eventually, I gave up and went to bed.

The next morning (Saturday, now), I gave it a few more shots. I connected the iBook to an ethernet connection to try to eliminate flaky wireless on its part as being the source of the problem. No luck. I eventually concluded that it must be bad wireless on the MBA, and called my local Apple store to see if they had the USB ethernet dongle in stock yet. They did - I then planned to go that evening. Then I went crazy.

Crazy, as defined as, "doing the same thing and expecting different results" kind of crazy. And there is a reason that people go crazy. It sometimes pays off. To be cleared: I gave it another go, doing nothing differently, and for whatever reason, it finally worked.

After completing the process on the MBA, all was good. All was good except for their being no printer. [What's up with Leopard not transferring printers, or even remembering them when you do the upgrade from Tiger?]

Remote Disk
One of the compromises, so to speak, that I made when trying to get the WMA to work was skipping my wife's application directory. This means that I had to install iWork '08 again. My only choice to do this: Remote Disk.

Things began just fine here. I loaded the software on my MacPro and enabled sharing. I inserted the install DVD and the problems began.

While the MBA instantly found the disk and the install package, it didn't like installing from the remote disk. So much so that I repeatedly go the error message that the install DVD was bad and that I should contact the manufacturer to get a new one. [Hello, Apple? I understand that the install program is what was generating these messages, but didn't you test this thing? Provide some context for the user?] Trust me, the disk wasn't bad.

Again, craziness ensued. Lots of it. Eventually it did pay off and the installation completed. I can't explain why: I did nothing differently the 10th time as the early nine tries.

It Just Doesn't Work
Don't get me wrong, I'm still probably too much of an Apple fanboy. But that is why it really bugs me when their tools don't do what the say they do. Specifically, there were a number of things that really bugged me about the whole MBA setup experience:
- Lack of useful error messages and feedback. None. No message was at all useful.
- Processes still "working" when they obviously were not. This was perhaps the most annoying aspect. Just admit it already when you're broken.
- The migration process could be much more flexible. The MBA does have a USB port and indeed many people have large external USB drives. Why not give the flexibility of exporting to a USB-drive and then importing via that drive with the MBA?
- Finally, I am annoyed that the processes finally did work. It wasn't as if I was doing something (obviously) wrong. Just keep trying and it might work. Isn't that the whole reason I stopped using Windows?