Airplay for Macbook is not what I hoped for

Posted by jdog25 on July 26, 2012 11:30 am 13

So I have been hooking up my laptops to my TV for years now with a HDMI cable. I bought a Macbook Pro 13in last year and I did the same thing with a mini display port/HDMI cable and everything works fine for the most part. This year I bought a Macbook Air 13in, 256 SSD, 8GB Ram, 2.0 Core i7 and this thing has some major problems when trying to connect to my TV. With the cable it only works like 1 out of 4 times and this didn't start until right after I downloaded the first update for the Air in June. I remembered hearing that Mountain Lion would have Airplay for Mac so I bought my first Apple TV months ago. Yesterday I installed Mountain Lion and tried Airplay and it worked after a few tries. The colors do look a lot better then they did before but it is very laggy, so laggy that it is like using Android 1.0 on the G1. For anyone that had the G1 you know how bad that is. My main problem is that if I use my mouse to move around it is very disorienting because of this lag. The best way to use the mouse is to put the laptop in my lap and only look at it's screen but then what is the point of Airplay.

I can only hope that Apple can eventually eliminate this lag or fix the mirroring issue because there have been a few times where I wanted to throw this laptop against the wall.

Edit: I also have another complaint. When using Airplay at 1080p the icons are very small and so pixelated that it's hard to read them and when using the Airs resolution the screen gets so small that I get big black bars on the top, bottom, right, and left side of my TV. With the HDMI cable it fills 100% of the TV, this is good but then the crappy colors are still there. Also this has to do with the Air itself because as soon as I plug in my Macbook Pro it fills the whole screen and there are no problems with the colors and no pixelation.

Watching videos is great but it's trying to navigate to the buttons is where I get the problem. I was trying to skip ahead in a movie yesterday and even though I was moving the mouse very slow I kept stopping before or after where I wanted to be, it took like 4 tries. The reason I compare it to the G1 is because on the G1 when you swiped from one home screen to another there was a slight delay. If I move the mouse from the top to the bottom on the Air it will be on the opposite side on the TV screen, thats the lag.

Any suggestions?