The Apple MacBook Air – Worlds slimmest notebook
Slim, sleek and elegant, the Apple MacBook Air would boast of many ‘love at first sight’ stories. Its beauty not only lives up to the hype, but outlives it. Although the MacBook entices all, it is designed for a specific section of people: those who hate carrying bulky portables. It is so slender that one wonders if in order to acquire the looks, Apple has compromised on some key features.
If it would not be for its well contoured body and its quality finish, one would wonder if it has been run over by a road roller. Although the MacBook Air feels good to touch, its 3 pound anodized body feels surprisingly heavy in the beginning, since one would expect a lighter weight for such a wafer thin body. Its 19mm thickness at its thickest end will even put some smart phones to shame. No wonder it has earned the title of the world’s slimmest notebook. Although the MacBook has won the thinness war, one would like to know if it would satisfy the work-drive of the roadster.
The MacBook Air is equipped with a custom-made Intel Core 2 Duo processer with a speed of 1.6 GHz. One can opt in for an optional 1.8GHz which may be slightly faster (but much costlier). The standard configuration comes with a 1.8 inch 80GB drive which is a bit dinky as compared to what most laptops offer. Yes, it barely gets by with the routine tasks; but there is an option to shift to the much lighter and efficient 64GB SSD which can be acquired at the cost of losing 16GB and some extra bucks. It may also help achieve the stipulated 5 hour battery runtime.
Although a 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM is sufficient enough to run most applications smoothly, it is integrated with the minuscule motherboard making upgrading impossible. The MacBook Air comes with a shared Intel Graphics processor and therefore puts load on the main memory, resulting in slower graphics during gaming and movie watching. After all, the MacBook Air was not designed for gaming.
Apple has managed an amazing 13 inch LED backlit display that does give a resolution up to 1280×800, and the iSight VGA webcam is quite invisible. The screen is a bit too glossy though. So, one has to position himself in such a way that the glare doesn’t hit the eye. The full sized backlit keyboard dons a large multi-touch touchpad that responds to finger-antics and allows one to control the cursor by using the two-finger scroll, rotate, swipe, pinch and drag actions. Although these moves may seem awkward in the beginning, with time the user may find them convenient as well as amusing.
As seen in all Apple laptops, the operating system is the Mac Leopard which comes with its characteristic applications for Word processing, email, internet browsing and entertainment. The MacBook gives a good wireless performance with the 802.11n draft and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR capabilities; but an ExpressCard port would have been helpful.
The usual line-up of ports as seen on most laptops is missing, making one wonder where to connect the USB. But on closely examining the side, a movable flap reveals three MacBook Air-specific connectors: a Micro-DVI port, a USB port and a headphone jack, most of which require adaptors that are supplied in the box.
Probably including an optical drive would bulk-up the MacBook Air, and therefore it has been excluded. Therefore Apple offers the optional external SuperDrive optical drive that can be connected to the USB. But who would want to shell out an extra 100 bucks and, that too, for an optical drive that is restricted to working only with the MacBook Air?
The 1.6GHz +80GB HDD version costs $1799 and the 1.8GHz+64GB SSD version costs a whopping $3098.
So, although the MacBook has acquired that thinness that would make many drool over, there are quite a few computing essentials that it has left out. So, whether the tech-savvy road runner would trust the MacBook Air with valuable official data or he would use it as a secondary machine, would not be difficult to guess.