Review: Apple MacBook Air – A MacBook Pro with an Eating Disorder

Let’s be honest. The last MacBook Air did not cut it. Yes, it was pretty; yes, it was thin and yes, it was portable but it just did not come together. The battery only gave about 4 hours; it was slow and it was far too expensive.

Apple has just launched a new MacBook Air and it is awesome! It is sexy, slim, well built, fast, has a 9 hour battery life (13-inch model) and is available for a reasonable(ish) price.

Design

The design, in typical Apple style, is sexy. It is angular enough to differentiate it from the old MacBook Air and rounded where it has to be to give the Air a very solid organic feel. I was also glad to see the Air is now built using Apple’s unibody Aluminum construction. The Air is so thin, it looks most fragile. To give you a sense, when placed on a desk it looks as if it is floating on the desk rather than sitting on it. There is currently nothing on the market today that has the same solid, well-built feel of the MacBook Air. Even the new Samsung 9 notebook launched at this year’s CES can’t compete with the sheer class of the Air’s design.

The entire interaction with the MacBook Air has a polished feel to it. It starts with opening the laptop; there is a resistance that gives the Air a feel of quality. Once opened, on the 13-inch model the same keyboard that is found on the MacBook Pro is revealed, while on the 11-inch model the top keys have been shrunk to accommodate its diminutive form. On both models the keyboard feels solid and has great feedback, the glass trackpad is responsive and very smooth to use (even in Windows with bootcamp).

Versions

Apple has launched two models of the Air in South Africa, an 11-inch and a 13-inch. The 11-inch is available with a 1.4Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM and a 64GB or 128GB hard drive. The 13-inch is available with 1.86Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM and a 128 or 256GB hard drive.

Insides

Now, 64GB to 256GB may appear to be rather small, especially for the price of the Air’s. I had to agree, until I discovered that the new MacBook Air only comes with an SSD (solid state drive). Currently the price per gigabyte for SSD’s is far higher than for a regular hard drive, so the price is somewhat justified. Whilst other computer manufacturers have SSD’s available for their computers as well, the MacBook Air differs as the SSD is built onto the motherboard itself, rather than being plugged in. This has two advantages and two disadvantages; the advantages are the SSD’s makes the MacBook Air a very snappy device to use as well as positively influencing the battery life. In terms of speed, starting the Air takes about 12 seconds from when you click the on-button to it being fully useable and from sleep it wakes up in a second or two. The disadvantages are once you have ordered your MacBook Air you cannot upgrade your hard drive or memory, also if the SSD dies (which ours did in the 1st week) then your information is not recoverable.

[Note: The answer I found is to backup files constantly. I use a service called dropbox that keeps files, across multiple devices, up to date. It uploads them to the interwebs and when you make changes it changes them online automatically.]

The other bits of the Air are as spectacular, the screen on both the 11 and 13-inch models are high resolution making them a pleasure to use. Even the 11-inch model because of the resolution of the screen is perfectly usable, even as a main computer.

Overall, I am very impressed with the new MacBook Air. It ticks all the boxes for an ultraportable and having a look at what the competition is doing to try and catch up is fascinating. Samsung are the first with their notebook 9 and others will follow soon but the MacBook Air, in whichever size you choose is a fantastic device.

MacBook Air – Open

MacBook Air – Held

MacBook Air – 13-inch Side

Images courtesy of Apple Inc.

Brendon Ambrose – Managing Editor | About Me – Scared of: Clowns, spiders and Hilary Clinton; Dream Wing Man: Jacob Zuma; Started Writing Tech: 2005 for Gadget.co.za; Favorite cereal: Frosties; Find me on: Twitter & Facebook