Apple MacBook Air Review – Ultraportable and Beautiful

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The Apple MacBook Air stands out as the most premium ultraportable notebook ever. It is aesthetically an amazing piece of art. Measuring just 0.7 inches think and weighing 3.0 pounds, the MacBook Air is the most portable MacBook for mobile computing. This notebook retains the rigid aluminium unibody of its predecessor but includes much faster processor, Nvidia GeForce 9400 graphics card and 128GB drive. While sufficiently fast, this is the slowest of all the Mac computers.

The laptop’s strong points include the rigid aluminum architecture, good performance for graphics, fast SSD, backlit keyboard and Multi-Touch trackpad. However, its battery’s short life and the few ports limit the applications of this otherwise sexy and ultraportable computer.

Many manufacturers of laptops are striving to compress computers into ultrathin notebooks. Consequently, many features are thrown overboard as they reduce the size of the computer. Thus, the smaller or thinner the notebook, the lesser the features as they are forced to leave out some ports. Apple is no exception and MacBook Air proves the point.

Therefore, you will have to be contented with the limited connectivity of the Apple MacBook Air as the ports are very few. It has only 1 USB port, a headphone jack, Mini-DisplayPort connections, and omitted the rest; FireWire Port, optical drive, Ethernet, mobile broadband. This product is thus suitable for users who do not need wired connectivity but rather their lives revolve around Wi-Fi. Furthermore, it is an excellent product for users who travel a lot.

The MacBook Air has a good 13 inch display LED-Backlit screen and shares the resolution with its standard 13 inch MacBook counterpart at 1,280×800. The keyboard is illuminated with the ambient light sensor just like the MacBook Pros. The Multi-Touch trackpad is large enough allowing you to use three fingers to scroll through contrary to the two fingers in the MacBook Pros.

The laptop also has an iSight web cam for video conferencing. The two microphones – one to the left and another to the right – mean that the notebook is good for telephony. However, there is no watching of movies or installation of software from DVDs because there in no built-in Optical drive but you can use an external optical drive by connecting to the adjacent standard MacBook notebook.

If you have discount coupons from Apple, you can purchase the Apple MacBook Air at discounted price. These coupons are available online.

There are many reviews online on Apple MacBook Air. Reading as many as possible enables customers make informed decision before committing to buy the notebook.

About the author:

Nadav Snir operates a website which includes coupons and discounts to the best electronics stores on the web. To get those discounts, visit: http://Great-Info-Products.com/Electronics/index.html

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Macbook Air 13 Inch 2010 Review

In October of 2010 Apple revealed the long anticipated update to the Macbook Air. This new model features an all-new design, crisper display and a video chip that’s actually capable of doing some work. Because I was in the market for a new laptop, I decided to buy one and test it out.

The model under the magnifying glass is the 13″ model with a 1.86ghz processor, 128gb SSD storage, 4gigs of memory and a 320m GPU from Nvidia to top it off. The price for all this goodness is a hefty $1399 before taxes. When I visited the Apple site I noticed a few immediate downers. For one Apple charges a considerable amount to double the storage, meaning that most people will be forced into configurations with 128gb or less. And secondly the model comes standard with 2gigs of ram, my advice: upgrade to 4. Not a great start but I’m sure the heavy SSD prices and the thin casing have to do with it. Nevertheless I was excited.

Design

Much of that excitement was due to the fact that this is the best-looking Apple laptop ever made. Most remarkable is its thinness, which ranges between 0.11 and 0.68 inch depending on the position you’re measuring at. I think they’ve come to the point that I honestly don’t want the thing to be any thinner. Despite the slimness this laptop feels sturdy and offers almost everything its bigger brother does. Just open the lid and you’ll see a full-sized keyboard, large trackpad and a screen that’s actually better than the Pro model in terms of sharpness. Most of this is due to the 1440×900 resolution on the 13″ display, that’s the same amount of pixels over a smaller surface. The display is surrounded by a silver border, which looks nice. Because the display isn’t covered by glass this Macbook has no glare, but at the expense of screen protection.

Apple made some more changes to fit everything into the insane thin casing. The speakers for one aren’t visible, and the power switch is now a regular keyboard button. Both changes are probably due to the lack of space on the sides. The Macbook air is a little light (no pun intended) when it comes to the connectivity side. On the left it has a magsafe connection, usb port and a headphone jack. The right side is equipped with a mini display port connector (buy converters!), another USB port and finally an SD port. I found the connectivity to be just right, but it is still a potential issue for buyers.Overall this laptop feels strong and looks amazing. In fact the only real issue I had was when opening the laptop. Because the body is so light (2.9 pounds/1.3 kg) I’ve had instances when the body would lift when opening the screen, simply because the weight couldn’t keep the laptop down. It’s also more prone to movement, again because it doesn’t have any weight to keep the thing in place. Now let’s see how this supermodel performs.

Functionality

Unfortunately as I was working on it, things came up that reveals that Apple has had to make some additional cutbacks when fitting the components into the body. The first miss is the lack of a backlit keyboard. I often work in the dark or with candlelight only, so this was a true burden for me. In fact it’s probably what I miss most of my old Macbook Pro. Secondly the screen is very thin and apple managed to insert a facetime camera in it, which is great, but that’s about it. The new Macbook Air does not have a sensor that adjusts the screen brightness based on ambient light. Also missing is the infrared receiver. This shouldn’t be much of a problem as it’s an inferior technology anyway, but it was a real blow to learn that my flashy Apple remotes no longer work. Once I got over the setbacks though I was finally able to enjoy the many great features that this macbook has to offer. The keyboard is absolutely amazing. I have to write a lot and this is the best typing device I’ve ever used. The keys are nice to the touch and feel a little stiffer than the earlier models, which is a good thing.

Work on it

This is where things get tricky. Because the Macbook Air uses flash memory, boot-up times and app start-up times were never faster. Thanks to this working on the Macbook Air feels fast and pleasant. Coming from a Macbook Pro (late 2008, 15″) this thing feels quite a bit faster. I installed my Adobe CS5 package, words 2011 and other suits that I use a lot and was all set. Because I bought the air as primary workhorse I was really hoping it wouldn’t disappoint, and luckily it didn’t. Thanks to its high-res display I never really missed the 2″ that I gave up going to this machine. Granted it feels smaller, especially when viewing movies, but it’s just as capable in displaying a proper workspace as the bigger machines are. When I wrote this review I got to know the machine as a partner in workmanship. I started in bed with the Macbook Air on my lap. Because it’s so light, I felt comfortable having it there. And unlike my previous laptop, the Air didn’t double as a heater.

After pointing the display slightly down to see the keys, I started typing. After I was done I saved my work and opened iTunes, it started after 1 bounce, played some music and started Adobe Photoshop to resize the pictures. It opened swiftly and applying the effects went smooth, though slightly lagging behind due to the lack of processor speed. During all this my battery decreased by just 10 per cent and was all ready for additional work in the morning. My point is this; the Macbook Air is a great working machine for light work, and let’s be honest that’s what we’re doing most of the time. Writing, editing photos, illustrator, those are the things we designers or writers do most. And sure when video editing is involved I wouldn’t want this machine to be in the center of the office. But for a capable working machine that’s portable and has a great battery (5-8 hours), look no further. (video editing goes great, exporting is the problem)

Benchmarks

Now it’s time to convert those thoughts into numbers. Because my site isn’t some corporate web of writers, editors and buildings with fancy logos on it, this session will have only one contestant. However I sometimes refer to my old Macbook Pro as reference. That machine made do with the following specifications: 2.4ghz core 2 duo, 4gb 1066mhz ram, 500gb 5400rpm, 9600m. Now let’s get started.

Before any work can be done, it first needs to boot. The following time is measured with the Macbook coming from a cold start to the OS fully booted. The timer stopped when the dock and navigation bar were visible. The Air was in used state, with adobe CS5, flash, iLife, iPhoto and Office 2011 all installed and used at least once.

19.17 seconds boot time

Xbench is a freeware Mac-tool that stresses the computer and returns a number. The Macbook Air 1.86ghz, 4gb, 320m scored the following:

163.75 xbench test (speed 20)

Remember when I said that the SSD helps with opening apps or starting the computer? Well this test counts the seconds it takes to start an app. The timer was stopped when the panel appeared and the dock indicated that loading was complete. All programs were loaded after a cold boot

Time it took to complete for each application:

iTunes: 2 sec

iPhoto: 3 sec

Flash CS5: 30 sec

Adobe Photoshop CS5: 4 sec

Adobe Illustrator CS5: 6 sec

Pages 2009: 2 sec

Words 2011: 2 sec (5 sec incl template)

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5: 15 sec

Now for the last test I convert a 700mb divx movie to iPhone format using the best settings possible. The software used was the iSkysoft iMedia converter (add i to product name fever much?). In this test it’s not so important to compare it to i7 machines or anything, rather take the time into account and make up your mind whether you find it fast enough for the occasional converting you may do.

Time to complete: 49.59 minutes

And that’s it for the benchmarking side of this review.

Conclusions

The Macbook air is finally a mature product. It’s beautifully built, has a vivid display, and offers just enough connectivity to make most Mac-users happy. Apple did omit a few things that I like, most noticeably the backlit keyboard and the display sensors. Work is finally possible on an Air. During my tests I found that everything was as fast or faster than the Pro, with exclusion of processor insensitive tasks such as video editing, converting or professional 3D modeling. Including the new generation of Intel processors would’ve helped this bit. Thanks to the great battery, the SSD and a casing that exceeds the imagination, this Macbook air is a great portable workhorse and a great member of the Macbook-family. Thanks for coming!

macbook air review

I’m Robin Chung. A 19-year-old student studying software design. In my spare time I like to write, for my homepage and novels. Please learn more about me by visiting my homepage. There you can read more articles and find out more.

Robin Chung

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Macbook Pro 13 Inch Review

I bought my Macbook Pro to upgrade my home recording studio. At the time I was using an older Mac tower and the Macbook was more than twice as powerful as the tower. Because I was traveling a lot this made good sense at the time and I could take advantage of available time to write and record music on the road… plug the MBox interface to the Mac, fire up the Pro Tools software and you’re ready go. It was great having the same flexibility on the road as at home with a much bigger system.

Should I Get The 13 inch or 15 inch?… decisions, decisions.

Deciding between the 13 or 15 inch models was difficult at the time. I needed a big screen for the music editing I was doing (plus some video editing with Final Cut Pro as well), but going bigger also meant less portability. My friend at the time got the 17 inch and it seemed a bit ridiculous while we were traveling, putting it on the airplane fold-down table it took so much room.

Finally went for the 13 inch because of the portability. When I worked at home I added a 19 inch computer monitor. It’s great having the double screens, changes your whole computer experience.

So what are the differences with the new model from last year’s model?

2X the RAM from 2GB to 4GB – Any amount of multi tasking and running media programs the Pro Tools and Final Cut the 2GB’s wasn’t enough.

Hard Drive – the old model came with 160Gigs compared to the new 250GB

Graphics Card – new high performance NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M integrated graphics processor compared to the old Geforce 9400M graphics chip.

They (Apple) claim the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M has faster and more powerful processing but is up to 30 percent more energy efficient than the previous one because of the improved technology.

Battery – lasts up to 10 hours, depending on how you’re using it. That’s one to two hours longer than the 15 and 17 inch models. Also, these new advanced batteries will last five years and up to 1000 full charges whereas a typical notebook might use three.

Two Choices For Your 13 inch Macbook Pro:

Macbook Pro 13 inch 2.4 GHz – Things like memory and hard drive size can be upgraded to at least double: So, 4 GB memory can upgrade to 8GB. Hard drive comes with a 250GB serial ATA drive and can go as high as a 512GB solid state drive.

Macbook Pro 13 inch 2.66 GHz – The upgrade options are identical to the 2.4GHz model except the 2.66 comes standard with a 320GB hard drive as opposed to the 250Gb drive on the lower model.

The Difference?

As you can see the only difference between the two 13 inch models are the processor speed and the stock hard drive size.

Read the full Macbook Pro 13 inch Review and learn more about Computer Recording.

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