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 in 2008, but under the hood it is a different 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 fear of being roasted alive! Though memory is still stuck at 2GB with no 4GB option in sight, the memory has swapped from DDR2 to DDR3 to consume less energy and produce less heat. Also helping alleviate the heat production and adding a small measure to multitasking performance is 9300m graphics chipset which offloads a substantial portion of the H.264 encoding. The NVIDIA 9300m borrows 256MB of memory from the main system memory, but it is a solid performer in a category that is dominated by Intel’s underperforming integrated graphics. Love it or hate, Apple’s OS X is at the heart and sole of every Mac including the MacBook Air. Those that just want the geek sheik of a svelte and trim aluminum body can always use Boot Camp and load their OS of choice. Those who haven’t given OS X a chance really should spend some time with it; it takes a short while to the hang of how things are done in OS X, but many who do never go back! The only downsides to the Air are that it has no expandability, and is a touch expensive. The memory, hard drive, and even the battery are all non-user replaceable. Given the relatively small storage capacities of the available hard drives and the 2GB of memory this problem will only get worse with time. Buying a new MacBook Air is costly, and some consumers might be tempted to go with a regular MacBook which is faster and more expandable at a far lower price. The bottom line is that the MacBook Air may have a few shortcomings, but it is still an amazing laptop in its own right. Even those that may not like the MacBook Air will certainly agree that it is nearly a masterpiece of modern design and engineering.
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(+) cool and quite robust trackpad, good display,64-bit windows 7 (-) few connectors,dell drivers only, not realy for gameing (most models), finger print prone!
The Apple MacBook Air 13 inch screen size with 128GB hard drive. 2GB RAM and Mac OS X ... more
Leopard operating system. Being carved from a single piece of aluminium pays dividends. It makes MacBook Air incredibly light. amazingly thin. extremely durable ...
Postage & Packaging: 0.00 GBP Availability: In stock
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
samclarkesurvey 16.07.2008 (16.07.2008)
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Review of Apple MacBook Air
Advantages: fast loading, amazing GUI, fun applications, easy to navigate Disadvantages: can freeze, minimally compatible with Windows and can be very irritating for new computer users.
Evorious 23.09.2009 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: somewhat helpful
Review of Apple MacBook Air
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