If Samsung and Acer Chromebooks aren’t doing it for you and you’ve got a lot of extra money to throw at your ChomeOS experience, notorious ChomeOS hacker Hexxeh has ported the latest build of the ChromeOS to The $1000 MacBook Air.
Hexxeh uses the Boot Camp Bios Emulator to get it working but sadly that adds about 15 seconds to the boot process.
Every piece of hardware works except for the Bluetooth (because Bluetooth isn’t supported by Chromium OS yet). So WiFi works, graphics are fully accelerated via nVidia’s drivers, screen brightness controls work, sound works, touchpad works. Basically everything works. The touchpad drivers could use some tweaking, as scrolling is currently painfully slow, but that’s about the only issue I can think of. Boot time is around 22 seconds to the login screen, most of which is wasted by Apple’s EFI implementation, as once control is passed to the kernel, the boot only takes a further 6-7 seconds thanks to the fast SSD inside the Air. Battery life is probably slightly better than that of OS X.
In case you haven’t visited 9to5mac.com recently, MacBook Airs are due for an update any day now (back to the drawing board?). But perhaps it is something to try out with your old MacBook Air?
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