Apple’s MacBook Air Review

MacBook Air is carved from a solid sheet of aluminum. This revolutionary unibody design replaces many parts with just one and results in a clean, seamless appearance. The anodized aluminum surface and stunning contours confirm MacBook Air as a feat of beautiful engineering.  Let’s go into more detail:

What’s on the inside:
The MacBook Air is equipped with a Core 2 Duo chip and a smaller motherboard that keeps the thickness down.  The LCD is backlit with LEDS that helps save on battery power and allows the screen to dim lower than the CCFL screens.  It has Wireless N/B/G; Bluetooth 2.1 EDR and comes in two options:

$1,799 for the 1.6GHz chip, with 2 Gigs of RAM; 80 Gig 4200 RPM Drive.
$3098 for the 1.8GHz chip, with 2 Gigs of RAM and a 64 Gig solid state drive module which is shock resistant.

Note that there is no ethernet port, but a USB to ethernet jack that should be bought separately.

A Few Words on the Hardware:
It comes with a single USB port, headphone jack, external monitor port which are all hid in a fold-down compartment.  As with the MacBook Pro, it comes with an iSight camera for stills, video and conferencing that records to 640 by 480 resolution.  Next to those are the laser cut grills; one is a light sensor that adjusts the backlight of the keyboard and the other is microphone.  Its single speaker is much louder than the MacBook Pro, which is built under the arrow keys on the keyboard.  Like the MacBook and MacBook Pro, the quality of the build is superb.

Tells Us About the Performance:
Most benchmarking against other computers show it to be sufficient and quick, like a previous generation of the MacBook or MacBook Pro.  The CPU is fine, you can do many things at once with big files with its 2GB of RAM and the 4200 RM drive works fine.

Thin, very thin:
Try .76 inches at its thickest and .16 inches at its thinnest.  Of course, you probably know its thin as air already thanks to the clever marketing folks over at Apple.  It has a nice, full sized interface unlike its competition and is perfect for trips to the library, notes in class or killing time on a road trip.

Tell Us About Multi-touch:
It’s the same version of Leopard that ships with the Air that supports the iPhone touchscreen on the trackpad.  It’s nearly 5 inches by 4 inches and the touchpad bar needs some practice to get down.  Two finger scrolling is there as it is on the MacBook and MacBook Pro, but the MacBook Air adds additional features:

Three finger swiping up and down or side to side that can work like arrow keys
The zoom pinch, probably most popular with the iPhone
Two finger rotation for iPhone or Preview for rotation of images

Chosing The External Superdrive over Remote Disc:
The remote disc can use a network computer’s optical drive.  It comes on the install disc and takes some time to do.  The remote drive doesn’t work with a lot of multimedia playback over a network, it can’t rip CDs or DVDs from iTunes.  It’s recommended to use the superdrive for the things we all use these days:  CD reading at 24x; CD burning, DVD burning at 8x and double-layer DVDs at 4x.  Note that this superdrive does not work with other Macs.

What About the Screen and Keyboard:
The full keyboard and LCD screen help the MacBook Air beat the competition.  The keys are backlit (with an ambient light sensor for the brightness) and their color is black which help the keys from looking disgusting a few months down the road. The spacing is the same as on the standard MacBook and comes with the dashboard, expose and spaces buttons on top.

Battery Life;
It comes with a 34 watt battery.  The battery life is under the 5 hours and some test show it lasting around 4 hours and 30 minutes.

To get a FREE MACBOOK AIR, click here!