Apple MacBook Air Laptop Review MC965LL/A

Once advertised as the world’s thinnest laptop, the Apple MacBook Air was only introduced in early 2008 but has seen so much success in the market that it is now considered a market leader in the ultra-thin laptop category. The latest iteration introduced mid-2011 has seen a number of changes brought to the Air line up, some of them are only incremental adjustments but a few major updates have been included as well.

Physical

With the Apple MacBook Air in hand, the first thing that comes to mind is thin. Apple may have stopped advertising the Air as the “World’s Thinnest Laptop”, but its slim fit profile does give you the sense that it’s one of the thinnest.

At only 0.68 inches at its thickest point and 0.11 inches at its thinnest, the Apple MacBook Air weighs 3 pounds which means it’s lightweight and extremely portable. The MacBook Air is made up of an aluminum unibody frame cut from a solid block of aluminum. This adds to the sleek profile and gives the Air that unique aesthetic look.

On the left side of the Air is the MagSafe power connector, a USB port, a microphone and 3.5mm headphone jack. The right side features the second USB port, an SD card slot and a Thunderbolt port. The top of the notebook (with the lid closed) reveals the backlit Apple logo. Opening up the lid reveals a 13.3” LCD screen with a 1440 x 900 resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio. The Macbook Air’s bumped up resolution makes the display sharper and more visual than the bulk of 13” LCD notebooks still stuck at 1366 x 768 resolutions. Slightly above the screen is iSight, the camera for Facetime Chat that could also serve as a web camera when running a video conferencing apps like Skype.

The MacBook Air keyboard is a full sized keyboard, and it’s well spaced ensuring users with large hands can type comfortably. The keyboard is now backlit, making typing in the dark easier than before. Below the keyboard is a glass covered large trackpad area. The trackpad serves as a mouse and a gesture area for pinch zooming, double finger scrolling and other gesture inputs supported by the Mac OS.

Processor

The 13” MacBook Air features a 1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (i5-2557M) with 3MB shared L3 cache on the lower end configuration and a 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 (i7-2677M) with 4MB shared L3 cache on the higher end. An Intel HD Graphics 3000 processor with 384MB shared memory does the tough job of graphics processing on the MacBook Air.

The 13” MacBook Air also comes by default with 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM that cannot be upgraded by the user, primarily due to the Air’s unibody construction which makes it more difficult to access the board. The RAM is also soldered to the board, unlike in other notebooks where it remains detachable.

Storage

The MacBook Air now uses flash storage. With a Solid State Disk the Air makes zero noise while in use and is a lot faster than conventional hard drives to boot as there’s no need to have the hard drive rotate up to to a certain speed before data is read. Flash storage devices like the Air also pose a lesser drain on battery life. Depending on configuration, the 13” MacBook Air can carry a 128 or 256GB SSD.

Battery Life

The non-removable battery on the 13” MacBook Air model is a 50-watt-hour battery as against the 40-watt-hour battery used on the previous model. The Air battery grants up to 7hours of battery life and notebook may be kept on standby over a 30 day period without the battery running flat.

Software

The 13” MacBook Air 2011 model is preloaded with the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion software. This is Apple’s newest and greatest OS till date with smart features like Time Machine backup for automatic backups to an external hard drive, Auto Save - an OS built feature that keeps track of documents and automatically saves them so you never have to lose data again. There’s also the Mac Store from where users can download thousands of Mac Applications, just like the iOS App Store.

Summary

The MacBook Air continues to be the end-product of revolutionary designl. It’s a lightweight ultrathin and ultraportable notebook that packs in as much power as notebooks twice its size. Thanks to its dual-core CPU and extended RAM, it delivers on really tasking processes such as Graphics Editing or Gaming, and can also be the perfect work or travel companion with its long-lasting 7hour battery. It does however come at a steep price. The lower model costs $1,299 while the higher model is $300 more expensive.