MacBook Air = Presentation Lemon

For the most part, my 11" MacBook Air (MBA) has lived up to expectations. Its balance of processing power and ultraportability still make it a compelling laptop to own for both office and personal use.

But there is one critical area in which it fails spectacularly: presentations.

One reason I took the plunge with the MBA was that it looked like the perfect presentation device. As a heavy Keynote user, I welcomed anything that would be more powerful and lighter than my trusty yet failing PowerBook G4. So on these accounts the MBA seemed ideal.

Until I hooked it up to a projector and found my slides too dark to see.

The first time it happened, I thought the issue was the projector's bulb. But then it happened to me again. And again. It was like a crapshoot: I'd hook up the MBA to a projector at one venue and everything would be perfect; but at a different venue my slides would once again be unreadable -- despite the fact that other laptops would have no projector issues. The problem has gotten so bad, in fact, that I've now made it a point to have a PDF copy of my presentation with me in case I'd have to present off a Windows laptop (using Adobe Reader...in fullscreen).

It turns out that this is an issue that has plagued the MBA line of laptops for some time. Had I known, I may have gone with a MacBook Pro instead. But the genie's already out of the bottle.

Some people I know have suggested that the MBA's graphics card might be underpowered. On various discussion boards, the single most common piece of advice offered by people who have encountered the same problem involves tinkering with the MBA's color calibration settings (which, from my experience, doesn't really help much). For my part, I've noticed that the problem doesn't manifest itself with all projectors; anecdotally, I've experienced the issue with Epson and Sanyo ones, but not with Toshiba and Panasonic units.

But that's neither here nor there. No one should have to worry about calibrating color settings each time they connect to a projector, and it would be the height of impracticality to identify which units work best with a MBA (if not to get one for its exclusive use). So unless Apple manages to develop a software fix for this problem, the inescapable conclusion is that the MBA is for all intents and purposes a lemon when it comes to presentations.

Alas, caveat emptor.