MacBook Air

The MacBook Air is driving me insane. I want it like no other hardware. It's thin, yea, ok, we know this. And many power users have been bitching for more: 3G, bigger storage, more USB ports, and an internal drive. If you feel that way, this computer isn't for you. I'll go ahead and call it the most simple, focused, and beautiful laptop ever. And the MacBook Air's shortcomings matter no more than the discomfort that fashionistas endure while wearing high heels, or car fanatics do when they have to fill up their tanks twice a week in their 5MPG sports cars. It just doesn't matter to those who are smitten. For the rest of you, here are the facts.

The Basic Guts:
The Air has a Core 2 Duo chip in a specially designed package and small motherboard that help reduce its thickness. The LCD screen is backlit with LEDs, which saves battery, and allows the screen to be dimmed much lower than CCFL screens for additional battery. It has Wireless N/B/G, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR, and is available in two basic configurations: $1799 for a 1.6GHz chip, plus 2GB of RAM and a 80GBs 4200 RPM Drive. For almost double the price at $3098, you can get a 1.8GHz chip with the same 2GB of RAM and a 64GB solid state drive module that, like all SSD, is shock resistant. There is no ethernet port, only a USB to ethernet jack that needs to be bought separately. And there is no optical drive, save the $99 optional external. For all the bitching we do about it not having 3G cellular data, Apple considered it but couldn't fit it into the case and didn't want to lock consumers into one carrier.

The Hardware Details:
The Air has a few notable hardware elements all paying homage to the original conceit of a stripped down laptop. It has one USB port, a headphone jack, and an external monitor port, all tucked away in a fold down compartment. The USB port is difficult to get to, and keeps fatter USB devices from mounting. There's no firewire, so no target mode. Above the keyboard and screen, there's an iSight camera for video conferencing and stills, which records to 640 by 480 res (same as other iSights). Next to each are laser cut grills. One is a light sensor which adjusts the keyboard backlight. The other is the microphone. The Air has a single speaker, but its much louder than the speakers on the MacBook (But not those on the MacBook Pro.) Oddly enough, it's built under the arrow keys on the keyboard. The touchpad we'll address later. BTW, even the insides are beautiful (yes, we already opened it) reminding me of the Fake Steve Jobs rant about the iPhone's CPU not being perfectly centered. Fake Steve would not be able to complain about these guts. Build quality is excellent. The general twisting you get in the frames of most laptops is practically gone. One minor quirk. The right side of my screen is not flush with the main chassis when the lid is closed. The cooling system is adequate. Using it on your lap is perfectly acceptable, temperature wise. Oh one more thing about thinness: While using the Air, you never feel that edge of the front wrist rest because it is so narrow. Very, very nice.

Performance:
It's the slowest Mac you can buy right now. But our benchmarks show it to be sufficiently fast, and between the performance of a last generation MacBook and MacBook Pro (machines people likely have.) We tested the 1.6GHz 80GB MacBook Air and several things were clear: The CPU was adequate, the 2GB of standard config RAM helped with multitasking and big file handling, and the 4200 RPM drive was a bit of a bottleneck, especially compared to the aftermarket drives in the older machines. We look forward to testing the SSD version of the laptop.

The battery ain't that bad:
The 34 watt internal battery of the Air has been a point of contention for pros who do lots of field work. That's fair, considering this is a highly portable machine. You shouldn't worry. We took that mother apart and found it was far easier to deconstruct than any notebook Apple's ever made. With a small philips head screwdriver, the thing takes 5 minutes to disassemble. And the battery was simple to swap, no glue, just a few screws. I even think the aftermarket can make a new aluminum base that allows for battery swaps. I'll update this post with battery life info very soon, but a preliminary test shows that it's slightly lower in capacity than what Apple's 5 hour rating. (No surprise.) We'll see if using 3G on this smallish battery (fine for the low power system itself) go to mush with serious use. UPDATE: The first rundown test included putting the Macbook Air on normal power settings, prohibiting the screen, computer and drives from going into power save mode. Then we ran mp3s through the speakers using iTunes. We're at 3:15 and its just about done. More rundowns tomorrow. UPDATE: A second day of battery testing shows the Air lasting 4:30 by lowering LED brightness from full to midpoint. An alarming find is that the 45watt Magsafe adapter (an ipod adapter sized brick) will charge the Air from empty to full in 8:30 with the Air in sleep mode. We've confirmed this twice. Will test with a Macbook Pro adapter to see if that changes anything. (I doubt it, but we'll see.) UPDATE: Phew. Retests show the Macbook Air charges to full battery in about 3 hours with either charger.

Value:
It's hard to put a price on such a thin, simple and interesting machine. The $1799 MacBook Air with a 1.6GHz, 2GB of RAM, and 80GB of space is not a deal, but this is the lightest OS X machine out there. $3098 for the 64GB of SSD and a relatively meaningless bump to 1.8GHz is ridiculous. If this is a secondary machine, you shouldn't pay more for this than a more powerful and capable MacBook Pro. For comparison, some SSD laptops include 128GB of storage for $3k.