Laptop Review: Apple Macbook Air 11.6-inch

The Air up there


Laptop Review: Apple Macbook Air 11.6-inch

by Hedirman Supian
10:05 AM Dec 12, 2010

The 11-inch MacBook Air (starts at $1,488) is a sign of things to come for Apple's line of laptops.

The machine might be wafer-thin at 0.11 inches (at its thinnest point) but it feels sturdy and well-built. It takes up almost the same space as an iPad and weighs 1.06kg.

The aluminium unibody enclosure won't creak like a laptop that's made of plastic. The size is a god-send for those who have to work while they commute or travel - it fits nicely on your lap or an airplane seat tray. If you can't touch-type, you'll miss the back-lit keyboards found on Apple's Pro line of laptops.

Its minimal design did get on our nerves. Just a little. The laptop only has two USB slots and none for memory cards. There's no Ethernet port either. We found ourselves lugging around an SD card slot reader and Apple's USB-based Ethernet port. You're better off packing a portable USB hub while you're at it.

Storage is limited, too. You can only fit 64GB or 128GB of storage space on the 11-inch MacBook Air. So you'd better bring along a portable external hard disk or create a workflow that's based on cloud storage if you're a data hoarder.

Performance is impressive for a computer this svelte. The Air woke up instantly from sleep, thanks to its flash-based storage. Boot-up times averaged around 11 seconds and shutdown times were almost instantaneous. Running on a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and sporting 2GB of memory, it scored 118.11 on Xbench, a free benchmarking application for Mac OS X. A top-of-the-line 2.66GHz MacBook Pro based on the Intel Core i7 processor with 8GB of memory scored 171.60. And it took an average of 38 seconds to boot up.

The MacBook Air played 1080p high-definition footage without any stutter. Note that the Air doesn't come with Adobe's Flash plugin. It's supposedly a drain on the battery. You can install it manually.

Battery life was slightly more than the five hours Apple claims it can do. Standby time fared much better. After a week of intermittent use, the laptop's battery still had 93 per cent capacity.

We didn't think we'd say this but the 11-inch Air could be the primary laptop for the jetsetter or for the user with casual needs - like surfing, the odd game and Facebook.

Source; www.todayonline.com