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GCN Home > 05/19/08 issue

Almost ready to fly

GCN Lab review: MacBook Air is fast and light, but it’s missing a few important features

By Carlos Soto, Special to GCN

WITH SO MANY PC-based laptops covered in this issue, we wanted to make sure Apple was not left out of the mix. Although it’s difficult to compare Apples to PCs, we can look at the Apple MacBook Air in terms of ultraportability, power and reliability. Apple’s first entry in the ultraportable market is a good attempt that incorporates almost all the features a frequent traveler wants in a mobile workhorse.

The MacBook Air’s sleek new design retains creature comforts that a lot of ultraportables give up, including a full-size QWERTY keyboard and 13.3-inch LCD screen.
ALSO IN THIS REPORT: Portability meets performance
Despite one of the thinnest bodies in the laptop industry, a 12.8- by 8.94-inch frame makes the MacBook Air cumbersome in tight spaces, such as on an airplane seat tray. However, the most noticeable difference for me wasn’t the height of the laptop, which ranges when closed from 0.16 inches at its thinnest point to 0.76 inches, but its light weight. At 3 pounds, it was easy to extract from a bag in tight spaces with two or three fingers.

The MacBook Air has only one USB port and no extensions for additional ports. If you buy the top-of-the-line version, you spend $3,098 for the laptop and an additional $20 to $80 if you need a USB hub. That’s not acceptable when you consider that some of the laptop PCs of equivalent weight have as many as three USB ports.

The $3,000 version of the MacBook Air comes with a 64G solid-state hard drive that functions like a giant flash drive. Having no moving parts means the laptop uses less energy and processes commands a little faster, but I noticed little difference.

The areas in which the MacBook Air excels are battery life, performance and functionality. In our battery testing, we got nearly 5 hours of wireless surfing time on the laptop’s built-in 802.11n wireless card.

The 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor — with 4M of on-chip shared L2 cache running at full processor speed and an 800 MHz front-side bus with 2G of 667 MHz DDR2 synchronous dynamic RAM — makes computations fly on this machine regardless of the task.

If you choose to dual-boot with Windows XP, you won’t have a problem with performance, but we recommend an additional external drive, especially if you get the model with solid-state hard drive. Windows XP uses least 7G of additional drive space.

More news on related topics: Hardware



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