MacBook Air

When a new notebook model or line comes out, it rarely raises a cacophony of debates between lovers, haters, pundits and grandmas. Such is Apple's ability to engage the emotions. For the January 2008 MacWorld trade show in San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced the world's thinnest notebook. Indeed it's hard to imagine a notebook could be so thin. It makes the Sony X505, that once incredibly sexy, thin and expensive notebook (two varieties sold for $3,000 and $4,000 back in 2004!) look dated and chubby.

And at the sweet spot of 13", the Air is mainstream ultraportable: its light and small but still usable. It didn't replace the MacBook or MacBook Pro line of computers, it's simply a new option for those who need or love ultra-light computers. But folks were up in arms, or in love just a bit too early for Valentines Day. Those who wished for a revival of the 12" Mac notebook complained that 13" was just too wide and tall for an airplane coach seat, those who wanted it for cheap complained of the price, especially the SSD version. And all the while, veteran Mac users who hadn't perused the Windows ultraportable price tags lately were suffering sticker shock. I suspect that Windows users, including would-be switchers who hadn't yet done so because they wanted an ultralight, were thrilled. Put me in that camp.

We review a good number of notebooks, generally Windows models. Our specialty has been ultralight and subnotebook models, from that X505 to the seriously tiny Fujitsu U810. I'm a Mac person and have been since the late 80's, but I don't have the back or the desire to carry a 15" notebook or even a 5 pound 13" MacBook. Frequent business travelers and students already overburdened with books will tell you the same. A few pounds makes a ton of difference. So, like many Mac users, I instead toted a Sony Vaio TX850 or Vaio SZ650, and hoped some day Apple would take care of me. It seems they finally did.

MacBook Air

Features at a Glance

The MacBook Air comes in two stock flavors: the 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with an 80 gig hard drive ($1,799) and the 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with a 64 gig SSD (solid state drive) for $3,098. We got both models in house for review. Both run on the Intel Santa Rosa chipset with a specially shrunk-down but full-spec Core 2 Duo. They have Intel X3100 integrated graphics with 3D acceleration (there's no dedicated graphics option) and single-link DVI support (monitors up to 23"), an LED backlit display, backlit keyboard controlled by an ambient light sensor, an oversized multi-touch/gesture-aware touchpad, 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM, Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR, WiFi 802.11n (also compatible with 802.11a/b/g) and an iSight web cam. The Air has Front Row but you must purchase the $19 remote separately. There are build to order options so you can mix and match the CPU speed with the 80 gig or 64 gig SSD drive. There are currently no other drive or CPU options.

What's Cool?

The Air's incredible thinness, lightness and drop-dead good looks stand at the forefront. The oversized trackpad that supports multi-touch and gestures just like the iPhone and iPod Touch is fantastic: you can zoom simply by pinching two fingers in and out, even icons in the Finder, Safari web browser windows, PDFs and images. You can rotate images with a twist of the fingers, and move forward and back in documents and web browser windows by swiping right or left with 3 fingers. Use 2 fingers for a right-click since the Air, like all Mac notebooks has only a single trackpad button. The iSight camera works well with Skype and iChat and the backlit keyboard is as always something we wish all notebooks had.

Last but certainly not least is the relatively fast CPU by ultraportable standards. While the Air might not be as fast as the MacBook, it's much faster than most ultraportables on the market today weighing 3 pounds or less. For those on the forefront of mobile technology, the SSD is an exciting option that's light years faster, uses less power (for an average 20 minutes longer runtimes in our tests) and is silent. And like all Intel Macs, you can run Windows on the MacBook Air if you wish.

Design and Ports

Hands down, this is the most breathtaking machine I've ever seen. High end Vaio notebooks, once the bastion of understated modern elegant design, now look downright dull. And until you see and feel it in person, you can't get a true sense of just how thin it is. The casing is aluminum and it looks like a member of the MacBook Pro line. It weighs 3 pounds and measures 12.8 x 8.94 inches. The thickness is 0.16 to 0.76 inches-- it's thinner than a CD jewel case at it's thinnest points. That aluminum casing and relatively wide bezel around the display make for a very sturdy and rigid computer. The display has virtually no flex and there's no light pooling if you press the display from behind. Quality oozes out, suitable for the higher-end BMW and Mercedes crowd. This looks like a machine that should cost far more than $1,799. In fact, it doesn't really look like the notebook computer as we know it.

Like the MacBook Pro, the MBA has an LED backlit display that's downright gorgeous and extremely bright with no color cast. It's easy to read text thanks to the relatively roomy 13.3" display running at 1280 x 800 (same as the MacBook and Sony Vaio SZ). Unlike the MacBook Pro, there's no matte screen option, the Air comes only with a glossy display. Again like the MBP, the keyboard is backlit, though the keyboard feels more like the MacBook's, which isn't a bad thing. Key travel is good, though shorter than the MBP's and the size is just perfect unless you have really large mitts. The large display and keyboard (by ultraportable standards) make for a perfectly usable machine. Yes, the 11" Vaio TX and TZ series notebooks and the Fujitsu LifeBook P1510 and P1620 aren't as wide or long but their displays are harder to read and the keyboard is sub-normal sized. The MacBook Air gives a big nod to usability and ergonomics, unlike many subnotebooks. It doesn't feel like a stop gap measure that sends you running to your desktop or larger notebook ASAP.

The MBA's 3 ports are on the right side of the notebook, under a small door that drops down. The MacBook Air's edges curve to a thin point, and that leaves space for the door to drop down, like the cargo door on a military aircraft. Space is tight as we mentioned, and fat USB connectors might not fit. We had to use a USB extension cable for our Yego Y, but our DVD drive's cable, mouse cable and flash drives fit just fine. The 45 watt MagSafe power connector is on the left side near the rear, and Apple's designed one that fits in that tight spot. For those new to Mac portables, the charger is incredibly small and light and adds little overall weight and bulk to the travel package.

When working with MS Office documents, browsing the web and doing email, the notebook stays fairly cool and the fan rarely comes on. Play a game Like Age of Empires III and you'll feel a hot spot about the diameter of a golf ball just left of center toward the rear of the computer on the underside. The fan will also run continuously quite audibly. The Air runs cooler than the MacBook Pro and Sony Vaio SZ series, but there's little space between the CPU and the case so you can feel it when the machine is working hard. This is true of both the 1.6 and 1.8GHz models.

MagSafe port on the MacBook Air.

Extremely light and compact charger.

Is the MacBook Air a design and engineering marvel? Certainly it is. But so are the Sony Vaio TZ series (for squeezing so many features into such a small package) and the Fujitsu U810 for shrinking a notebook down to a 7" x 6", 1.56 pound package. Which is better? There is no right answer: it depends on your preferred OS, size, weight, screen viewablity and keyboard needs. Has Apple started a trend? Definitely. Some folks have compared it to the ill-fated Mac Cube and that's wrong-- the world wasn't looking for a small Cube-shaped desktop PC. Ultralight notebooks and subnotebooks are in contrast an established market. Will the MBA do for notebooks what the RAZR did for phones? It could very well be. After all, the RAZR didn't even do much of anything-- it was a basic phone with a great design. The MacBook Air, despite its tradeoffs, is still a powerful and capable machine.

What's vanished into thin Air

Subnotebooks make compromises-- the CPU is usually slower, there are fewer ports and the optical drive is often not internal (though that's slowly changing since Sony raised the bar and found a way to squeeze a DVD drive into slim but still much thicker subnotebooks). As you've probably read or heard by now, there is NO CD or DVD drive built in.

Instead Apple sells a very light and compact USB external SuperDrive (dual layer DVD burner) for $99. Or you can use your own USB optical drive if you have one-- it needs to be the kind that provides its own power (plugs into an AC outlet). We tested two different external drives (a Sony external drive and the compact Ridata Quattro drive) and they worked fine.

We used the Sony external dual layer DVD drive to install Windows Vista via Boot Camp with no problems. Alternatively, the MacBook Air's Mac OS X DVD comes with Mac and Windows drivers that allow you to share any machine's optical drive that's on the same network (this won't work for installing Windows or playing music or movies but it does work for everything else, including installing software and Mac OS X).

If you need to burn DVDs on the road, the Air isn't the best machine for the job unless you want to carry the Apple SuperDrive and bring your total toting weight closer to 4 pounds. But if you're the kind of person who rarely uses the DVD drive when traveling, it makes more sense. And of course, Apple wants you to buy or rent iTunes movies for those plane rides.

There is no built-in Ethernet port. Apple sells a $29 USB Ethernet dongle adapter that handles 10/100 Ethernet with a standard RJ45 jack. We've seen other tiny notebooks and ultralights with no built-in Ethernet port, but the required dongle is usually in the box-- stingy Apple. WiFi is the way to go, or a USB WAN (cellular data) stick like the Sierra Wireless Aircard 595U on Sprint. Speaking of which, we don't mind the lack of a built-in WAN card. We'd rather choose our carrier and not be tied to an internal WAN card that may become outdated.

Port door dropped down.

There's 1 USB port, a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack and a micro-DVI monitor-out port. That's it. If you use a Bluetooth mouse, life will be easier since that frees up a USB port. If you need to use 2 USB devices at the same time, you'll need a USB hub or a Y-adapter (we used Ridata's Yego Y adapter, which is compact and has a 1 gig flash drive built in). Serious musicians won't be happy with the lack of a 3.5mm line in-- only USB mics and converters will work.

There's no battery door or latch because you can't swap the battery. That requires some disassembly and you can take it into an Apple store where they'll replace it for $129. That does little good for cross-country and trans-Atlantic travelers sitting in an airline seat with no power outlet. Apple claims the MacBook Air can run up to 5 hours on a charge, which is optimistic: so far we've been getting 3hours and 40 minutes on the "normal" power setting at mid-brightness under Mac OS and the "balanced" setting under Vista on the HDD drive model, and 4 hours with the SSD. This is with WiFi and Bluetooth on doing light web browsing and working with Office documents. Streaming video and playing video from the drive reduce runtimes and does gaming.

Bottom of the Air: look ma, no battery compartment!

Clearly, the MacBook Air isn't meant to be a desktop replacement. If you need all the ports, drives and integrated card readers of a full size notebook, then consider a MacBook, MacBook Pro or Windows notebook. This is a travel and couch machine, a secondary or tertiary machine. If you want something incredibly light and thin that doesn't compromise on the display and keyboard sizes, with a much faster CPU than most ultralights and subnotebooks, then consider the Air.

Horsepower and Performance Here's a touchy subject: ultraportables almost universally run on slower CPUs. The MacBook Air is definitely the slowest Mac in the current Apple lineup, but it's nonetheless a powerful machine that's faster than competing 3 pound and under notebooks. The MBA is available with either the 1.6 or 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo and this is not the ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) CPU that runs slower. Intel designed a shrunk down 65nm Merom processor (the Intel P7500) to fit in the Air and it runs on the Intel Santa Rosa 965GMS platform. The CPU has 4 megs of level 2 cache and an 800MHz FSB just like the MacBook, MacBook Pro and Santa Rosa Windows notebooks. The MacBook Air is about as fast as the last generation MacBook and is similar in CPU and chipset specs to Windows notebooks released in the spring to summer of 2007. That means it's no slouch and both models are extremely responsive using the Finder, playing iTunes content including 720p streaming QuickTime content, surfing the web, using MS Office 2008 and working with 10 meg images in Photoshop CS3. This is not a desktop replacement or power user's notebook suitable for serious movie making, 3D design and CAD work, but it's fine for lesser tasks. Streaming QuickTime trailers in 1080p is decent in terms of playback, though pointless unless you're using an external monitor since 1080p's resolution at 1900 pixels wide doesn't fit on screen. There's quite a bit of buffering even over 802.11n for 1080p, so we suggest downloading the trailer to the drive first rather than streaming.

We were concerned that the 4200 parallel ATA drive would be deadly slow but we've experienced no lagging launching applications, loading large game resources from the drive or playing movies stored on the drive. It is a bit slower than other current Mac notebooks installing software and deleting large numbers of files (3,000+) from the trash, but not horrendously slow. Why does the MacBook Air use a 1.8" low RPM PATA single platter drive? Because that's all that would fit. The drive formats to 74 gigs with 56.8 gigs free from the factory (iLife 08 uses a few gigs). There's enough space to install Vista and still have room for apps on both partitions and some multimedia files but not a 30 gig iTunes library.

The 64 gig SSD drive version with the 1.8GHz processor is obscenely fast launching applications-- nothing comes close in the world of conventional hard drives and even the Mac Pro seems slow in comparison. The SSD drive is comprised of memory rather than hard disk platters and that's why it's so fast. It won't help speed up processor-intensive tasks like encoding a song or video however. But it doesn't care if you shake the computer up and down all day long since there are no moving parts. SSD drives are found in some ThinkPad, Vaio and Dell notebooks but they're still relatively new to the market. They cost an arm and a leg: the 64 gig drive used in the Air costs between $900 and $1,000 if purchased separately. Is it worth it? At the current price point, it's not worth it to me, but for those who literally use the notebook on the go bouncing and bumping or need that speed boost, the answer might be yes. 64 gigs is currently the highest capacity drive available in the 1.8" size as of Feb. 2008, and that's tight. For those who need to install Windows, you won't have room for more than a set of core applications (Office, Adobe Creative Suite) on each partition and a bare minimum of music and videos. The drive formats out to 55 gigs with 38 gigs free from the factory. You can get rid of any Apple apps you won't use (say some of the iLife 08 suite) to recover up to a gig.

http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/MacBook-Air.htm