Has anybody's CTO MacBook Air shipped yet? Ordered my Ultimate 11" MBA, says 3 business days, but expected delivery is August 3rd.

Wouldn't make much difference though, I'm going to LA on 26th and won't be back in the country until August 2nd. Planning to replace the 2-generation old Mac Mini as well, but not CTO-ing, just off-the-shelf purchase from MacStudio.

Awesomesauce news from my side as well. The order went from zero status .......to SHIPPED! I was anticipating the order status to move slowly to preparing for shipment for actually seeing it SHIPPED, but yes, unbelievably, it is moving from Shanghai now to KL. It may even have half the chance to reach KL before I leave for Los Angeles on the 26th. Fingers crossed!

My 2011 MacBook Air specs:-

Had to invoke the Command-R to do Lion Recovery on my new MBA last night. So simple, and installs pretty quick too.

This MBA practically flies! Not even a single icon bounce and it already opening the said app. Video encodings takes more than 50% less time to complete. MKV full screen hardly taxing the processor, Activity Monitor shows 2-5% only. My AVCHD vacation videos are finally watchable without stuttering compared to the old MBA!

I'm carrying my new MBA with this:-


Waterfield Designs MacBook Air Travel Express. Fits my MBA, SuperDrive addon, 1.5TB USB-powered HDD, charger, MiniDisplay-HDMI cable, USB Ethernet addon, and I can still fit in my iPad 2 if needed. Opted for the D-ring with suspension strap. Perfect for travelers.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: Aug 2 2011, 01:56 PM

Lion Recovery.

It basically negates the need to find your Install DVD to access the Utilities section. Lion OS still needs to be downloaded from the internet. Mine was plenty fast download on UniFi20 around 17 minutes.

Here.

Should have done this first. No Internet recovery required.

Addendum: still need to be online to download Lion. Apologies. Such is the way with Lion.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: Sep 3 2011, 12:14 PM

Disable pop-up blocking on Safari or any other browsers you're using. The next step in confirming these types of WiFi usage is confirming your T&C or informing your time left to use on a separate pop-up browser page.

4.5 hours on my 11" Ultimate MBA. Only on light surfing, BT off, 50% brightness, keyboard backlight off.

I don't worry anymore about battery life, I have the HyperJuice for my MBA. Last more than 24 hours.

http://www.m3shoppe.com/index.php?page=sho...emart&Itemid=26

Please be more clear with that statement. That USB drive is the RECOVERY Lion USB drive, it helps you RECOVER your Lion, but you still need to reinstall LION by downloading them from Apple servers. Which is what wiraone was querying.


This method only works if your machine comes with Snow Leopard and you are installing Lion OVER Snow Leopard. Macs with Lions preinstalled in them, like the 2011 MacBook Air or the 2011 Mac Mini, are not recoverable using this method. The Lion copy for these Macs are tied by the hardware ID of your Macs. I face the same problem when I was recovering Lion preinstalled in my 2011 Mac Mini when I was upgrading it to SSD. The CCC method is still the only way.

It's ambiguous. Those who are new (God knows there are many of them posting questions on Mac here lately) will think that it does the installation by itself without the need to download from Apple server. I certainly made that mistake myself when I read it last time.

There is another option if you don't have a Lion USB Installer. That happened to me when I was upgrading my Mini to SSD. Brought it over to the guy at MacStudio and after they installed it in, I started Lion Internet Recovery by pressing Command-R while Mini is rebooting. This will treat the situation as if the HDD is broken or you're installing a new HDD in and needed to start fresh. It will require Internet connection though (it is called Lion Internet Recovery), as it downloads the equivalent of the Lion USB Installer portion, then again reinstalls Lion over Apple Server. Over my VIP20, the Lion Internet Recovery part only took 10 minutes, while the reinstallation of Lion from Apple servers took 35 minutes.

This method works incase you're clueless on how to CCC, or in my case, did not CCC my previous HDD, as the 2011 Mini bought was brand new, and I'm removing the HDD for the SSD.

Benchmark that thing, I'm interested to see how it fares against my OCZ Vertex 3. Use this for the benches:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-...425264550?mt=12

Erkk, my mistake! I thought it's the OWC SSD kit. Still in the SSD frame of mind.

If you don't have any data at all, i.e. it's a stock OS install, the restore from backup is a viable alternative. Reason why cloning is preferred to some is because we have tons of apps and work content installed, and would wanna avoid the hassle of migrating things over and putting things back into place where it was previously. Since yours is stock, that should not be any problem at all, you can just restore from Time Machine backup.

Also bear in mind that if you're running Lion, cloning is a much better option than restoring from backup, since backup restoration will require you to reinstall Lion online via Apple servers and that may take a while on local connection.

Good question, I've never had the need to ask myself that, coz once I've coned it over, the old drive gets wiped out. I don't want anyone to get hold of my data.

This article just came out just now, on Macworld on details about migrating, data backup and cloning. Very relevant to your case, alvin. Have a read at it.

http://www.macworld.com/article/162156/201...l#lsrc.rss_main

Mac OS X has always rely on the "honor basis" for OS installation, no serial number. A quote from PCWorld's article on the last Snow Leopard release: http://www.pcworld.com/article/170883/revi...ow_leopard.html



It has changes since for Lion, where it requires purchase for upgraders, or for preinstalled ones, you need to reinstall via Apple server download after authentication. Still no serial, but Lion downloads/installs are tied to AppleIDs used to buy the Lion upgrade and which Mac the AppleID is tied to. As for preinstalled Lion Macs, the only way to get back Lion is to reinstall by download from Apple Server.

You surmised correctly. Your Time Machine backup disk should be at least as big as the hard drive it is backing up.

After your external drive has filled up with backups, it will delete the oldest backup to make room for the new ones.

The principle is the same.

Say your internal hard drive in your Mac is 1TB, but you only used 100GB. You decide to use a 500GB external drive to backup using Time Machine.You can still back up, it will still do the 100GB and incremental backups, until your external drive is full, it will then delete the oldest back to make room for the new backup. A Time MAchine backup is always bigger than the size of the disk it is backing up, so bear that in mind.

As big as the hard drive you're backing up. The larger it is, the more backup you can store, and you can keep older backups longer without being deleted.

"Remember Olivur, the Fourth of November, the iPhone 5 Keynote and plot! I see no reason why the iPhone 5 Keynote should ever be forgot!" - Stringfellow Fawkes.