Apple Macbook Air

Ever since news about the Macbook Air broke (and in typical Apple style left the world open-mouthed) we at Tech2.0 had been waiting eagerly to get our hands on it. Well, the wait is now over, so without further ado or pontification let’s head straight to the heart of the matter – does the slim-and-sexy Macbook Air deliver?

Despite seeing images and videos of the Macbook Air, nothing could have prepared me for the “OMG THAT IS SLIM!!!” reaction I had when I first beheld the laptop. It is that thin. Measuring an incredible 14.2 x 10.5 x 1.9, this is truly the world’s slimmest laptop and will remain so till the competition gets its act together.

Considering how thin it is, quite a few users might have concerns about its sturdiness. Well these doubts can be easily laid to rest. The Macbook Air is constructed on a strong aluminum shell, which has a sober light silver finish. This is a revolutionary clean design and breaks new ground for high performance slim laptops.

However, the slimness has its drawbacks. The usual arrays of ports and the standard optical drive that are ubiquitous on normal laptops are completely absent here. Instead there's just a single USB slot – for any external connectivity one will have to use a variety of external connections that increase the number of items one has to carry. We'll cover this in greater detail later in the article.

Moving on to its features, the LCD panel on the Macbook Air is a 13.3 inch TFT LED panel with a native resolution of 1280 x 800. This glossy screen offers excellent levels of brightness and color/contrast. Thanks to the excellent anti-aliasing available on OSX, text and graphics were very crisp and rich. Watching movies was a real delight. The only hitch was the viewing angle – even a little tilt away from center led to a dramatic loss in clarity. The gloss of the screen did not pose a problem.

The keyboard of the Air seemed a bit off compared to other laptops. It was a little more angled to the left, which at first led to a lot of mis-typing. Once I got used to it, however, it was quite comfortable. The keys are quite slim but offer excellent feedback. They are evenly recessed and well spaced.


The touchpad is huge and occupies a fair bit of area. This is due to the addition of the 'Multi-touch' option first seen in the iPhone. While being able to manipulate images and text in a manner similar to the iPhone sounds good, the actual experience was not that great. At best it was was slow and not very responsive. Barring resizing images or manipulating basic text, I couldn’t find too much use for it.

The large size of the touchpad may cause some problems while typing, as it could inadvertently register as a click/movement and scramble the cursor causing mistypes. This can however be disabled from 'Options', so it's no big deal.

As we observed, the Macbook Air is stingy with port/ODD/connectivity offerings. To compensate, Apple's offered a series of external connectivity options such as an Ethernet port / Micro-DVI connector and a Super Drive. Additionally, a new program called 'Remote Drive' allows you to treat a DVD-ROM drive from another PC/Mac as a local drive, and allow you to install/modify applications natively on the Air. This program supports booting over the network and thus can be used to reinstall the OS if necessary.

The Macbook Air sports an Intel C2D processor running at 1.6 GHz, an 80 GB 4200 RPM drive, 2GB of PC5300 DDR2 RAM, and a 13.3 inch LCD Panel. The CPU is unique as it’s custom-made for Apple and is just about 60 percent size/TDP of a normal mobile CPU. Another unique fact is that instead of the 80GB HDD, one can squeeze in a 64GB SSD as the primary storage.

Keeping in mind the Spartan nature of the laptop, we decided to skip our normal Windows Vista installation and 3D/PCmark benchmark routine. We chose to instead focus on the usability factor of the Air within its native OSX. Performance-wise, the Macbook Air was pretty sluggish. Programs took some time loading and despite the 2GB of RAM it wasn’t a pleasant experience in some places. This can directly be attributed to the slow nature of both the RAM and very slow HDD. I suspect this would improve dramatically with the SSD.

Battery life proved to be top-notch. The laptop claims a battery life of five hours and I found this to be largely accurate. Even with mid-to-heavy use, I was easily averaging these figures.

The Macbook Air is an interesting product. It’s clearly aimed at the well-heeled user and positions itself between the entry-level Macbook and the high-end Macbook Pro range. This is indicated by its price of Rs 96,000 (and upward). While it certainly sets new standards in industrial laptop design, the negatives – such as the absence of USB ports, non user-changeable battery, sluggish system performance – can be overwhelming. Things improve if you put a SSD on this laptop… but then the cost of the machine goes up exponentially.

The tradeoff between system performance and funky design is a tad high, so at the end of the day we'd not recommend this product in its current form. Only someone who is really enamored by Apple will buy this. I suggest you give this generation of the Macbook Air a miss, and wait for a refreshed model that will undoubtedly be out before long.