Product Description

After an endless era of rumors and speculations the long awaited MacBook Air has officially been released. Apple’s new notebook is extremely light weighted and compact. It has support or wireless technologies like Bluetooth and WiFi, that’s why the product is called “Air”. The notebook is extremely slim. It is 0.76 inches thick at the top and 0.16 inches at the button. MacBook Air weighs only 3 pounds.

Technical Specifications

Review

I can’t wait to get my hands on Apple MacBook Air, finally it is here now. MacBook Air certainly the thinnest laptop ever. Its main competitors are Toshiba Portege R500 and Fujitsu LifeBook Q2010, but neither of them is as thin as slim. Air also looks way too cool. The motherboard of Air is as long as a pencil!

Despite of compact design of MacBook Air, the key board is full-sized. You won’t find any difficulty in using it. The keyboard has an ambient light sensor which adjusts the brightness level of keys to suit the lighting conditions. The keyboard also has a big touchpad which has multitouch support. Now you can zoom in or rotate pictures by just twisting your fingers of the pad.

MacBook Air has an Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor, the version included is especially designed or mobile platforms. It consumes very less power. 80 GB hard drive is included in the notebook which may fall short depending on your requirements and you will have to get a USB powered external hard drive (80 GB or $99) or you can switch to SSD drive. The SSD or Solid-state Drive is relatively new and very expensive. 64 GB SSD will cost you around $999.

Gaming Experience

Intel's Graphics Media Accelerators (GMA) chips are pretty common in notebooks. The graphics engine runs at 500 MHz. If you want to play old games like Doom 3, Half Life 2 and its episodes, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 3 etc then this chip will be able to run the games. If you intend to run new games like Unreal Tournament 2007 or Bioshock then forget about it! The chip can easily run Adobe Photoshop, movie editing, audio/video format conversion and office applications. The same chip has a rating of 3.0 in Vista gaming index.

Disadvantages

Apple MacBook Air lacks pretty basic features like Express or SD card slot, onboard Ethernet jack, FireWire, optical drive. You can access optical drives from other computers through WiFi connection or get an external drive. Although most of these limitations can be dealt with by purchasing external counterparts or peripheral devices, it becomes very expensive. Moreover the whole concept of a laptop is all devices available at one place. If I want a cut down version of a laptop, I will use iPhone instead.

Thanks to the new ultra compact motherboard, upgrading MacBook Air is very expensive task. Furthermore the new SuperDrive (the hard drive) will only work with MacBook Air. It is not compatible with other version of Mac or PC.

The new multitouch feature is introduced in the notebook or the first time. It was irst available in iPhone. Although this feature seems pretty cool, but it can cramp you figures, especially I you are not used to it and try to use it for long time. This feature is only useful for smart phones, as they don’t have a keyboard! Besides there is the scroll feature already available on touchpad of most of the laptops (virtual scrolling feature).

Is MacBook Air for gamers? Or is it for business users? Or is if for IT professionals I guess only Steve Jobs can answer! It appears to be an extended version of iPhone. Nobody likes carrying lots of external devices along.