MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But you don't lose inches and pounds overnight. It's the result of rethinking conventions. Of multiple... more
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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 ano...
Leopard operating system. Being carved from a single piece of aluminium pays dividends. It makes MacBook Air incredibly light amazingly thin extremely durable and em...
Practically every detail that could be streamlined has been. Yet it still has a 13.3 inch widescreen display, full-size keyboard and large multi-touch trackpad. Th...
Practically every detail that could be streamlined has been. Yet it still has a 13.3 inch widescreen display, full-size keyboard and large multi-touch trackpad. Th...
quality material. Custom made and perfectly adapted to the shape of your APPLE MacBook Air! Extremely resistant, the manufacturing process guarantees an extreme ease of application. Simple: You can apply it and remove it without leaving any trace. Your new skin is delivered ready to use. All you have to do is apply it by following the enclosed instructions. Shown visuals are only examples. It is up to you to personalize your device with the photo of your choice!
quality material. Custom made and perfectly adapted to the shape of your APPLE MacBook Air SuperDrive! Extremely resistant, the manufacturing process guarantees an extreme ease of application. Simple: You can apply it and remove it without leaving any trace. Your new skin is delivered ready to use. All you have to do is apply it by following the enclosed instructions. Shown visuals are only examples. It is up to you to personalize your device with the photo of your choice!
A review by sadoldbag on Apple MacBook Air April 8th, 2008
Author's product rating:
Speed
Fast
Look & Feel
Excellent
Comfort & Portability
Good
Robustness & Durability
Excellent
Value For Money
Satisfactory
Advantages:
Uber - light, ridiculously thin, very very cool indeed
Disadvantages:
Lack of USB ports, expensive, barely average hard drive
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
So you are thinking about a MacBook Air? At over $1700/£1200 even for the entry level it's not an impulse buy, so it is good to think through the pros and cons of this machine to decide if it is really right for you.
PROS:
1. THE LOOK: It's cool. Really, seriously cool. It's incredibly thin and light, so thin you could put it in an envelope and post it. There is no better machine to carry around if you want to impress your colleagues. At its thinnest it is only 0.16" thick.
2. THE HARDWARE: It comes with Core2Duo (a choice of 1.6 or 1.8Ghz) and 2GB RAM which is what most of us need, plus a good standard of video card and a 64GB solid state drive.
3. THE FEATURES: The MacBook Air comes with the built in wireless card you would expect, a built-in web cam and Bluetooth. A backlit keyboard and a brilliant big touch pad mean you can use this anywhere, and the touch pad has all the interactivity of the iPod Touch.
4. THE SCREEN: It has a 13.3 inch HD screen with 1920x1080 resolution. This is backlit, for improved visibility.
5. THE WEIGHT: It only weighs three pounds.
6. THE BATTERY: It has a battery life of up to five hours, even with Wi-Fi on, which is excellent in my view for anything this thin, better than other Apples, and streets ahead of almost all its competitors.
7. ENVIRONMENTAL CREDENTIALS Apple claim the Mac Air is made with a large number of recyclable parts.
CONS:
1. RELIABILITY: It is a new product and there are always issues with new technology products on the market. Great to have it before everyone else, but that means you are the Apple customer finding out what they haven't got right yet. If you wait for the second generation model then someone else has done the glitch-curing for you.
2. LACK OF OPTICAL DRIVES: It has no internal drives. If you do everything on a memory stick then this might not bother you too much, but it does defeat the object of an ultra-light portable if you have to carry a separate bag with all the peripherals in it. The Sony Vaio was like this and it drove me mad having to take a portable floppy drive and portable CD drive everywhere too. What drove me even more mad was NOT carting the damn CD drive everywhere and then needing it! Nowadays this may be less of a problem, depending what you do with yours. If everywhere you go is wirelessed, and everything you need is backed up onto a remote host, it may be fine.
3. SIZE OF HARD DRIVE: I think an 80GB hard drive is not massive at all. But then this is a sub-notebook, so that's probably quite reasonable for a sub-notebook. Compared to other 13-15 inch laptops though, it's average at best.
4. POWER AND CAPACITY: You get more under the bonnet with a MacBook Pro than you do with a MacAir, but then a MacBook Pro does not look anywhere near so cool. Would you rather drive an under-powered Ferrari or a suped up Ford Cortina? Exactly. Macs are traditionally beloved by graphic designers, but the MacAir is under-spec-ed for serious professional graphics work.
6. CONNECTIVITY: It's Wi-Fi only i.e. there is no Ethernet port. Probably in today's world that will soon not be that much of a con. I remember when they first starting making laptops without floppy drives I had a real job persuading my boyfriend he could buy one and it would be fine. He wanted to buy a laptop with a floppy drive and without a built in wireless card. He just couldn't imagine Wi-Fi happening and him not using a floppy disc for everything. So maybe this is the same. The customer has to catch up! But just for now, for many of us, the ability to use a wire to access the internet is useful. At home maybe you get improved connectivity, or faster download speeds from an Ethernet connection, even if you don't use it out much.
7. PORTS: It only has one solitary little USB port. Just one. So how many do you really need? On my laptop I am glad to have four, but two strikes me as a minimum at least so I don't have unplug the printer in order to plug in a memory stick to upload a document in order to print it. And I often like an infra-red keyboard and mouse with my laptop when actually at my desk. That's another USB. To be fair, the MacBook Air is a sub-notebook so is not designed for heavy "portable desk" options, but lack of connectivity does cut down your options.
8. PRICE: It is very, very expensive just now. Prices will surely come down, if you can bear to wait, but $2000 give or take is a lot of money.
In summary, if you want ultra thin, ultra cool and ultra-portable, you won't do better than this. If you want a great pile of hardware, so your laptop can basically be your desktop but on the move and you don't mind lugging a hefty 5 pounder home every night, then the MacBook Air is probably not the right laptop for you. Certainly if you only own one computer, then it would be an unusual choice to have the Air. If you want to do an awful lot on the move you might find that a 13.4 inch screen is actually too large as you still need a bag to carry it around in and though it's ultra light, it's not portable enough. Perhaps in that case you need a handheld with something like a 7 or 8 inch screen. But if you really want to look uber-cool and just revel in every touch of the keyboard, then stop here. You've just found what you are looking for.
Advantages: Ultra thin construction, light weight Disadvantages: Sacrificed some features to its size
...some basic accessibility features.
Apple is a grandfather of laptop market, when they launched their super hit model MacBook Pro, rolled out market toward Apple. The main reason behind hitting market by Apple MacBook was its configuration and superb graphics quality.
After the huge success of MacBook Pro Apple has decided to go for ultra thin laptop market, considering high profile market, and they have launched newly MacBook air, light weight ... ...graphics is more important and Apple is the main player for providing good graphics card in laptops but here they also sacrificed this in its size.
Due to its ultra thin size, the graphics card also provided as traditional which we have seen in many previous models.
And this graphics card is Intel GMA X3100 graphics (144MB of shared memory).
Here is what means by shared memory?..
Shared memory means the graphics card will share memory from RAM, ...
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Advantages: Mac OSX operating system, running windows/linux/etc. if chosen, style, compact and stylish design Disadvantages: lack of optical drive (in some cases), costly - but value for money
...system. Macbook Air runs the Apple OS X 10.5 most peopel are familiar with something like Microsoft Windows XP or Vista, OS X runs in a different way, it looks and feels didfferent, and runs in a different way, it is considerably more stableand reliable, and is often the industrial choice those in the design, music and of creative specialists for it's effective industrial standard software built in and compatability. This perticular mac, the macbook ... ...options to upgrade (see the apple store) the macbook air does however lack an internal CD/DVD optical drive. however, there are ways around needing this, music film and software can nowadays all be obtained online, and in eceptional occations wheree this cannot be done, there is either the option to use another mac 's drive to do this wirelessly, or to use the externall CD/DVD drive avaliable seperatly from aspple. If using another computer, that ...
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Advantages: Great look and design Disadvantages: No Disk drive
...air as thin as possibe. Apple chose "looks" over "personality" in this case. and i think they made a huge mistake. Most of the applications connecting computers with our daily lives, require cd roms. of course apple suggest that you buy an addition cd drive which plugs into one of the usb ports. but this is just a hassle, and seems uneccesary to start buying extra necessities for an already expensive product.
SECONDLY The macbook air, is rather ... ...the technology found in the apple iphone such as pinching to zoom and swiping into the touch pad of computer.
on opening the notebook lid, the led lit backlight automatically turns on to full brightness giving a beautifully crisp picture which uses minimum battery due to led lights
it has an alluminium finish which gives it a stirdy appearence. In the end i feel it is a good computer but does lack some key features.....
i feel that this computer ...
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Advantages: Small size, light weight, impressive speed, OS X Disadvantages: No expandability, 1 USB port, limited storage/memory
The old adage is that one should never judge a book by its cover. Apparently an exception to that rule is when the proverbial cover is as geek sheik as that of the MacBook Air. Now in its second iteration, the MacBook Air is the de facto king of the thin & light laptop market despite Dell, Lenovo, and even MSI throwing their hats into the ring in recent months. Not much has changed on the outside of the gorgeous MacBook Air since it was introduced ... ...story. Gone is are old 65nm processors and the somewhat underpowered integrated graphics by Intel. In their place are newer, more energy efficient 45nm Penryn family CPUs mated to NVIDIA’s latest chipset featuring an integrated 9300m class graphics controller. The new CPUs are not significantly faster than their predecessors, but they seem to run a lot cooler. No longer will consumers have to avoid touching the underside of their MacBook Airs for ...
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Advantages: High quality, fast memory, good design, perfect durability. Disadvantages: None at all!
About Apple MacBook Air
Firstly, I would like to recommend this product for eveyone who needs a really high quality notebook.
This one does not have incredible features but it works perfectly. It has 2GB of memory (RAM) and that's enough for working with documents, playing or even working with professional graphical programs. Most of new notebooks has more than 2GB of RAM but I can say that it is not a truth - the Apple MacBook Air works ... ...like the most about this Apple product is:
* The design (I like the color and shape)
* The quality (Its quality is better than other notebook with more features)
* Amount of memory and hard drive space (It's more than enough for me)
* The durability (I use it for more than a month but it works much faster than other mine notebook which has 4GB of RAM and more features)
...and a lot of more!
I highly recommend this ...
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Advantages: Great optical drive Disadvantages: Only for macbook air
...GENERAL INFORMATION
First of all it is only compatible with the Apple Macbook Air Notebook.
(This is because the USB ports that Apple have used are designed to put out more power than is normally possibly, this is why the Superdrive has no need for a power supply of its own).
When you buy this product this is what you get -
1) MacBookAir SuperDrive with attached USB cable
2) User's Guide
Doesnt seem like much but that is all you need, the absence of a power supply of its own means you dont have all those annoying cables.
Dimensions -
Size: 5.47 x 5.47 x 0.67 inches; 139 x 139 x 17 mm
Weight: 0.71 pounds; 320 grams
Drive capabilities -
1) Play and burn both CD's and DVD's
2) Watch movies and play music
3) Install software
4) Create backup discs
Specifics -
Slot-loading 8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL...
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Video Memory: Dynamic Video Memory Technology 4.0, DDR3 SDRAM
Max Allocated RAM Size: 144 MB, 256 MB
Audio
Audio Output: Sound card
Audio Input: Microphone
Notebook camera
Camera Type: Integrated
Input device(s)
Type: Trackpad, backlit keyboard
Features: Multi-touch technology
Operating system / software
OS Provided: Apple MacOS X 10.5
Software: Drivers & Utilities, Apple QuickTime, Apple Mac OS X Mail, Apple iChat, Apple iCal, Apple DVD Player, Apple Address Book, Apple Safari, Apple Dashboard, Apple Spotlight, Apple XCode Developer Tools, Front Row, Photo Booth, Apple iLife '08, Apple Spaces, Apple Quick Look, Apple Time Machine, Apple Boot Camp
Manufacturer's product description
MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But you don't lose inches and pounds overnight. It's the result of rethinking conventions. Of multiple wireless innovations. And of breakthrough design. With MacBook Air, mobile computing suddenly has a new standard. MacBook Air is nearly as thin as your index finger. Practically every detail that could be streamlined has been. Yet it still has a 13.3-inch widescreen LED display, full-size keyboard, and large multi-touch trackpad. It's incomparably portable without the usual ultraportable screen and keyboard compromises. The incredible thinness of MacBook Air is the result of numerous size- and weight-shaving innovations. From a slimmer hard drive to strategically hidden I/O ports to a lower-profile battery, everything has been considered and reconsidered with thinness in mind. MacBook Air performance is as impressive as its form, thanks to its Intel Core 2 Duo processor. This chip was custom-built to fit within the compact dimensions of MacBook Air.
