Get Brand New Laptop for FREE! Simply take our survey! It’s so easy!
The Basic Guts:
The Air has a Core 2 Duo chip in a specially designed package and small motherboard that help reduce its thickness. The LCD screen is backlit with LEDs, which saves battery, and allows the screen to be dimmed much lower than CCFL screens for additional battery. It has Wireless N/B/G, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR, and is available in two basic configurations: $1799 for a 1.6GHz chip, plus 2GB of RAM and a 80GBs 4200 RPM Drive. For almost double the price at $3098, you can get a 1.8GHz chip with the same 2GB of RAM and a 64GB solid state drive module that, like all SSD, is shock resistant. There is no ethernet port, only a USB to ethernet jack that needs to be bought separately. And there is no optical drive, save the $99 optional external. For all the bitching we do about it not having 3G cellular data, Apple considered it but couldn’t fit it into the case and didn’t want to lock consumers into one carrier.
The Hardware Details:
The Air has a few notable hardware elements all paying homage to the original conceit of a stripped down laptop. It has one USB port, a headphone jack, and an external monitor port, all tucked away in a fold down compartment. The USB port is difficult to get to, and keeps fatter USB devices from mounting. There’s no firewire, so no target mode. Above the keyboard and screen, there’s an iSight camera for video conferencing and stills, which records to 640 by 480 res (same as other iSights). Next to each are laser cut grills. One is a light sensor which adjusts the keyboard backlight. The other is the microphone. The Air has a single speaker, but its much louder than the speakers on the MacBook (But not those on the MacBook Pro.) Oddly enough, it’s built under the arrow keys on the keyboard. The touchpad we’ll address later. BTW, even the insides are beautiful (yes, we already opened it) reminding me of the Fake Steve Jobs rant about the iPhone’s CPU not being perfectly centered. Fake Steve would not be able to complain about these guts. Build quality is excellent. The general twisting you get in the frames of most laptops is practically gone. One minor quirk. The right side of my screen is not flush with the main chassis when the lid is closed. The cooling system is adequate. Using it on your lap is perfectly acceptable, temperature wise. Oh one more thing about thinness: While using the Air, you never feel that edge of the front wrist rest because it is so narrow. Very, very nice.
Performance:
It’s the slowest Mac you can buy right now. But our benchmarks show it to be sufficiently fast, and between the performance of a last generation MacBook and MacBook Pro (machines people likely have.) We tested the 1.6GHz 80GB MacBook Air and several things were clear: The CPU was adequate, the 2GB of standard config RAM helped with multitasking and big file handling, and the 4200 RPM drive was a bit of a bottleneck, especially compared to the aftermarket drives in the older machines. We look forward to testing the SSD version of the laptop. More performance details here in our benchmark post.
Portability:
It’s thin to the tune of 0.16-inches at its thinnest and 0.76-inches at its thickest. OK, you’ve been beat over the head with that, and with many sizemodos. But does thinness make it portable? I’m not sure. The thicker but smaller Sony TZ and Apple’s old 12-inch powerbook seem more portable, simply because they can fit into bags that are smaller than backpacks. And is it useful as a road machine? I think the Sony TZ is a better professional road rig, for all its storage, battery life of almost 10 hours, and 3G data connection. But I think the Air is a much easier machine to work on, thanks to its fuller sized interface and LCD, and is more appropriate for trips to the library or sitting on the couch because of how sturdy it feels being carried in one hand. In this way, it is perfectly spec’d for the majority of the world. (Sorry power users. Few consumers are going to spring 70 a month for 3G, as cool as it is.) The rest of us can lug a USB hub, someone will come out with an external magsafe battery pack, jack in a USB 3G data modem, and turn the Air into a monstrosity. You could also get a MacBook Pro. The Air is a focused machine that does the basics in a form factor that fits in with sheets of paper, magazines, and other stuff you’d toss into a backpack. It works.
