The MacBook Air was released several months ago with a lot of fanfare but we thought we would check back in to see if the novelty has worn off.

When it was first introduced, the MacBook Air touted itself as being small enough to fit in a manila envelope yet was a fully functioning ultra portable laptop.  Unlike other ultra portable laptops, the MacBooks Air actually lives up to that name.  It has everything that you would need in a laptop to give you ultimate portability unlike many other ultra portables that leave you missing some key features.

This has got to be one of the coolest laptops ever invented!  It's so thin that is' incredible, but at the same time you get a full size keyboard and a decent size screen, which is important to me.  From a performance standpoint, Apple played their cards right.  Rather than offer a slow, low voltage processor like most of the other ultra portables, the MacBook Air comes complete with a re-worked Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM.  That will provide enough juice for most people, but not quite as fast as a regular desktop or MacBook Pro.

Storage space is reasonable with both a 1.8 inch hard drive and a SSD drive available.  Given the nature of an ultra portable, I would always opt for a solid state drive so that you don't risk losing your data by a few bumps.  This has happened to me before with another brand of laptop and losing all your hard drive contents is a big annoyance.

As for battery life; A light user might get around 3.5 hours out of it, which isn't too bad, although not as long as Apple had claimed it would be.

On the downside, there's only one USB port, which isn't ideal, but I can live with it and the price.  I know Mac's cost more money than PC's, but in terms of comparing it to other Ultra Portable PC's, it's a big expensive.  You can find some cheap MacBook Air laptops through online auctions or slightly used and they should run you about $1500 give or take a few $$.

Here's a short review of the MacBook Air.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptMxC9bbPDQ

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Laptop Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.