Apple MacBook Air Review

Overall Rating

Sleek design

Price
Overall Design has bad features, see listing
Limited ports
No optical drive
More hype than substance

From my experience the Mac Air, for all its hype, is a great idea with a flawed execution.

In all fairness, I did borrow a new model from an acquaintance and had it just a half day, but during that short period of time I noticed the following shortcomings:

'The power connection is the usual Apple Mag-Safe attachment, but it goes in at an odd angle making it difficult to sit the computer on a flat surface. I had to fidget with it to stop the rocking. Push it too much one way and the attachment pops off.
'The USB and DVI connections are under a flimsy side mounted door that I expect will stop closing after a few openings. For $1,800 I expect more than one of each, but the size limitations imposed by the design made this an unfortunate necessity. Also, the door hiding the ports really isn ' t necessary but is there to keep the design flow even. Even the audio out plug is crowded in this cramped area. Fat chance you ' ll get to use it while something is plugged in at another port.
'You are pretty much limited to plugging one USB or one DVI appliance in at a time. I had access to an Apple external combo drive and whenever I plugged it in to the USB port, the dongle covered part of the DVI port. One or the other, but not necessarily both.
'I originally thought the O/S was a little pokey but it turns out the hard drive is the culprit. Best as I can tell, it ' s using a sub 5,000 RPM hard drive, probably to save space. This leads to excruciatingly long access times, especially for fat apps like Photoshop.
'I got the unit with a fully charged battery and by the time I gave it up the unit was already close to being dead with no more than 2 hours off the power cord. What happened to the claimed 5 hour usage?
'Included wireless worked like a charm but had a nasty tendency to drop signals for no apparent reason. The signal would show as strong but it would drop it. Even goofier, I was literally sitting on top of my router but yet my neighbor ' s signal from across the street came in stronger. Go figure (but this signal strength discrepancy has also happened on my Windows PCs so it ' s not really an Apple problem).
'The external Super Drive costs extra bucks. For this much money, it should be standard. I had a different combo drive than the one that comes as an option with the Air, but if weight is any indicator, the external drive weighs have as much as the unit itself.
'I tried the graphics and sound card and found both wanting. A simple Space Invaders game clone had way too many hiccups and stoppages and it appeared the graphics card was doing its best to keep up. Likewise, while tuning into an internet radio station was a breeze, keeping it connected wasn ' t. It would often drop the station and then suddenly find it again several minutes later. Part of the radio signal loss has to be blamed on the wireless losing its way occasionally.

On the plus side:

'It is light, very light. It can ' t tip the scales at much more than 4 pounds although the external power pack and combo drive add heft, as with any laptop.
'It has that neat automatic on feature when you open the lid, shades of my old Tandy 1000 HD from the 1980s.
'It has a really nice finish that appears to be aluminum. Feels sturdy and even the hinges, a usual sore spot on laptops, felt sufficiently strong to do the job for years. The only down spot is the USB/DVI access panel that really is unnecessary except from a design point of view.
'Leopard O/S is really sort of neat, in a Linux, geeky, sort of way.
'The included webcam is nice and produced crisp pictures but it didn ' t seem to work with anything but Apple apps. MSN Live Messenger for Apple just couldn ' t get it to work (although it tried).
'Everybody who saw it liked it (until they heard the price).


If I could make any recommendations, they would be as follows:

'Speed up the hard drive, if at all possible.
'At least make the combo drive standard and charge extra for the Super Drive. Some drive is better than none. Apple seems to believe that users won ' t mind downloading apps instead of using a CD or DVD drive, but, I for one, don ' t believe this.
'Put the USB and DVI drives farther apart or on opposite sides of the unit. Add more of each, if possible.
'Redesign the Mag-Safe attachment so it doesn ' t have the odd angle of entry.

Is the Mac Air worth the $1,800 price tag (even higher with the external drive)? At this point, I can ' t say it is. There is insufficient justification for spending close to $800 more than the base Apple laptop that comes with a built in optical drive and more USB ports. So what if you save an inch or two here or there, are you really needing something that compact?

If you really want to get technical, compact laptops from other makers can easily hit this price mark and then some, but they also offer larger and faster hard drives, CD/DVD burners built in, numerous USB (and Firewire) ports, and a host of other options not found or even offered on the Mac Air.

In short, don ' t buy the Mac Air quite yet until the initial bugs are worked out.

Members' Comments onted3929's Review

• azzers on 25th Mar 2008

  I agree with this review because... the opinion is backed up by facts in my opinion.