Apple MacBook Air Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz - 13.3" TFT > Reviews > As light as air, as expensive as pure oxygen

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.