Apple Mac Macbook Air Review and specs:
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Features and Design
Apple's stated design goal for the MacBook Air was to make it as thin as possible while still being able to accommodate Apple's must-have features. Achieving that goal required Apple to ditch many of the features most people have come to expect on a notebook computer, including the optical drive, USB ports, removable battery, expansion ports and so forth. The result is an amazingly thin notebook that simply ditches any and all legacy connectors, expansion ports and features. The Macbook Air comes bundled with:
Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard (includes iTunes, Time Machine, Quick Look, Spaces, Spotlight, Dashboard, Mail, iChat, Safari, Address Book, QuickTime, iCal, DVD Player, Photo Booth, Front Row, Xcode Developer Tools)
iLife ’09 (includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, GarageBand)
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CPU, RAM, Storage
The specs on the MacBook Air certainly aren’t going to blow anyone’s hair back as they are decidedly middle-of-the-road. The CPU is a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, though it’s the good kind with 4MB of L2 cache. The MacBook also has 2GB of DDR 667 RAM, an 80GB 4,200rpm hard drive, and uses onboard Intel graphics. That’s the meat of it, which is typical for an ultra-portable notebook since they skimp on performance in favor of portability and battery life. We should also note that we’re evaluating the base model, but Apple does offer a souped up version that includes a 64GB solid-state hard drive and a 1.8GHz processor for an extra $1,300 USD.
Quick Specs:
1.6GHz or 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed
1066MHz frontside bus
2GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM onboard
LED Display and decent graphics
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Though the above specs are somewhat lack-luster, there are certain features of the MacBook Air that are quite interesting. The first is the 13.3” LED backlit display, which uses LEDs to light the display rather than a cold cathode. The benefits of this approach are more even lighting and better contrast. It also avoids “leakage” that some LCDs suffer, where the backlight “leaks” out from the edges of the display.The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M brings amazing, high-speed graphics to MacBook Air. With up to a 4x graphics performance boost, graphics-intensive applications now run faster. Movie and video playback is now richer. Even Cover Flow flips more smoothly. It’s a quantum leap for MacBook Air graphics. |
High Speed Wireless Access:
The Macbook Air also supports wireless Draft-N wireless, which is something no future-proof notebook can be without in our opinion. Draft-N wireless is the successor to 80211.G and provides faster transfer speeds and increased broadcast range. |
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The MacBook Air has no expansion ports, though it does have a tiny little flap on the right-side that flips open to expose a headphone jack, USB port and a mini-DVI (or VGA) connector. The opposite side of the notebook has a magnetic power jack. That’s it as far as ports go. There is no optical drive, nor is there a removable battery.
Backlit Keys
The Air has a backlit keyboard, which is a new development in the notebook world and one we suspect will be quite popular in the near future. However, this technology has been employed in Apple Mac laptops since the G4 powerbook, and makes it's use so much easier in dimly lit areas. The keys are illuminated by a soft white light that is adjustable if you want to control the brightness, but there’s an onboard ambient light sensor that detects available light and automatically adjusts the brightness of both the display and the keyboard backlight.
No Optical Drive
Let’s be honest – most ultra-portable notebooks don’t have optical drives. This has been the standard for some time now, and the MacBook Air is no different than the majority of ultra-portable notebooks. However, Apple has created a clever workaround for this conundrum called Remote Disc, and it lets you access the optical drive of another Mac or PC wirelessly across a home network. You do have to install some files on the host PC to enable this feature though, so it’s not like you can just pop a disc into any PC and use it on the Air.
OS Situation
Mac OS Leopard
The MacBook Air comes with the newest version of OS X, dubbed Leopard. This revision of the OS adds several enhancements including Cover Flow navigation in Finder, Time Machine (which requires an external hard drive, not included), “stacks” that pop out of the dock and other features.
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The new MacBook Air is still ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But somehow there’s room to add so much more. A bigger hard drive. A 4x graphics performance boost. And more power for everyday tasks. Mobile computing has yet another new standard.
MacBook Air is nearly as thin as your index finger. Yet it has a 13.3-inch LED-backlit display, a full-size keyboard, and a large Multi-Touch trackpad. It’s incomparably portable — without the ultraportable screen and keyboard compromises.
The MacBook Air hard drive is now larger at 120GB. So now there’s plenty of storage space for your photos, movies, documents — basically everything you want and need to take with you. Or upgrade to a 128GB solid-state drive, which has no moving parts, for enhanced durability.
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