MacBook Air reviewed
Posted by Jacque on February 4th, 2008
Let’s start with some specs for the new MacBook Air: 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz of Intel’s Core 2 Duo, with 2GB of soldered RAM, 802.11a/b/g/n (802.11n is Draft 2.0), Bluetooth, a 13.3-inch LED-backlit screen, and a choice between a standard 80GB ATA hard drive or a 64GB solid-state flash drive. There is no optical drive, no FireWire ports, only one USB port, and a micro-DVI port. It weighs 3 pounds, and fits in a manilla envelope.
If you are seriously considering a purchase, check out this very detailed review by Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica, who found “the size and weight to be nothing less than absolutely delightful.”
But the Air “slows to a halfway-unusable crawl anytime there’s a large amount of disk activity—running a browser that reads and writes a lot to the drive (*cough* Firefox), transferring files over the network in the background, anything.” She didn’t regret the absence of an optical drive, but declared battery life and time to recharge the Air’s worst feature.
“Think of it [the Air] as an iPod touch Extreme with a built-in keyboard. It is not meant to be your only or main computer—rather, it’s a secondary (or even tertiary) computer.”
