Macbook Air Micro Review

There’s a lot of buzz around with the final arrival of Macbook Air review hardware in the USA. We’ve aggregated the reviews to give you a micro look at the good, the bad, and the plain ugly from Apple’s new baby.

Coming packaged in 40% less wasteful pretty packaging, the MacBook Air is Apples greenest product so far. Well they had to jump on the Green bandwagon didn’t they?

The Good

It’s thin - It goes from 0.76 inches at its thickest point down to 0.16 inches. The MacBook is 1.08 inches thick (all the way around) and the MacBook Pro 1.0 inches thick.

The weight, just 3 pounds compared to the MacBook’s 5 pounds is a noticeable difference when you’re always on the move with your Mac.

The new LED back light screen is considerably brighter than the older MacBook screens.

The optical drive has gone, and good riddance. Nobody really used it, apart from upgrading the OS to Leopard!

A full size back lit keyboard, just like the MacBook Pro users have! Sexy. The accompanying trackpad has been en-enlarged for the multi-touch capability. The size is great, but the multi touch feature is a bit of a novelty fad - and of little use outside of iPhoto resizing.

The Bad

The minimalist number of I/O ports are crammed in to a small flap - and a lot of cables will have problems sharing the space when connected. The Firewire connection was also dropped, does anybody actually use that on a laptop?

No matter what capacity hard disk you opt for - they are all spinning at 4200rpm - which is slow, iPod speeds. For a fully functional laptop this isn’t a good sign. Any applications which love to hit the hard disk soon bring the Air to a crawl. Examples are Firefox and its disk cache, and copying files from the network. Bit Torrent downloads too. Reviews of the solid state disk (SSD) are not available yet - but the cost for this option is a barrier for most people.

The remote disk software doesn’t allow ripping audio & video discs, nor can you play them.

Sound wise, the Air gets a speaker downgrade. Unlike the MacBook & MacBook Pro, the Air gets just the one speaker. It is louder than the MacBook though.

The Ugly

No upgrade options once you’ve bought the MacBook Air. The usual hard disk, RAM, battery are not accessible to users. If you do break in to the case, you’ll find the 2GB of RAM is soldered to the motherboard!

Migration Assistant software is useless in its new default Wi-Fi configuration. Nobody has managed to get it to work!

With all this streamlined sleekness you’d be expecting some great things from the battery life, don’t. It is nothing like the claimed 5 hours by Apple. The battery life guesstimate is supposed to include wireless use too. Battery life is more like 3 hours tops.

The nail in the Air’s coffin is the price - with all the usual frills dropped from the spec in order to make the MacBook Air more portable, the price doesn’t reflect this at all. Apple’s RRP is £1199 for the entry level spec.

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