Review: Apple's MacBook Air

Ever since Steve Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air at 2008 MacWorld Expo, Apple's ultra-thin notebook has been on our to-review list. Test Center snagged a model for review as soon as New York-based Apple solution provider Tekserve got them in stock.

Weighing in at almost three pounds, the MacBook Air is about three-quarters of an inch thick at its thickest point (and only one-fifth of an inch at its thinnest) and features a 13.3-inch LED backlit display. Just shy of 13-inches wide and 9-inches deep, the Air has a built-in battery and a port hatch (which flips down) with a USB 2.0 port, a headphone jack, and a micro-DVI port. The Air supports Bluetooth 2.1+ EDRX300 and 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity. The tested model came with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, 2 Gbytes of memory, an 80 GB 4200 rpm PATA hard drive -- not the 64 GB solid state drive, sadly -- and a Intel Core 2 Duo P7500 1.6 GHz processor.

The metal case is rigid and pretty solid. It doesn't feel like it would snap in two at any second. The keyboard is rigid, which is comfortable for resting the wrists, although reviewers kept worrying about the watchband scratching the metal.

Despite all the ink (both electronically and in print) devoted to how small and sleek the Air is, and how it may have gotten thrown out in the trash, its physical look didn't render us speechless or in awe. At 2.9375 pounds, it's clearly not the lightest notebook to come in through the Test Center -- the Fujitsu Lifebook P7230 wins that distinction at 2.63 pounds. It is, however, wider and deeper than an ultra-portable notebook, so the extra space devoted to the keyboard and trackpad could justify the excitement over its size. Except the keyboard -- the slim key design found in other Apple products -- had two things going against it: a weaker pressure point as compared to other Apple keyboards and slightly-off spacing between keys. Neither one is a deal-breaker, but they did require some time to get used to. The trackpad, with its multi-touch capabilities such as zoom and rotate, was a nice enhancement.

The MacBook Air is, as Apple keeps insisting, the thinnest notebook out there (its thickest measurement is equivalent to Lenovo X300's thickest), but despite what fashion magazines suggest, thin is not necessarily better. A sub-1-inch laptop does not improve portability if it still goes into a standard laptop bag instead of a large purse like the Sony Vaio TZ 150does. And for the frequent flier not flying first-class, the MacBook Air takes up just as much space on the airplane seat as a regular MacBook. Sure, it's lighter, but we aren't convinced giving up an optical drive is worth that. There was nothing to quibble over the screen, though. It's spectacular. It's bright. And it's clear. Watching a movie or surfing the web while sitting outside in the sun was easy, without needing to squint. The viewing angle is very wide, to the point where the movie playing was clearly visible even when looking at the screen sideways from five feet away. Of course, for an executive on the go, this might be an issue -- do you really want the person sitting at a table next to you to be able to read your screen? During a presentation or a demo for a small group, however, it is excellent, offering a 1280 x 800 native resolution.

Apple proudly proclaims five hours of wireless productivity for battery time on its Web site. To measure battery life, a Quicktime movie file was downloaded to the hard drive and set to play on loop at full-screen. Under this test, the Air ran for 2 hours and 44 minutes before popping up a message about running on reserve power. The unit shut down less than 15 minutes later. Recharging time was abysmal, taking two hours from dead-state to charge up to 25 percent, and about seven hours to fully charge. In order to try to match Apple's claims, a second test was performed with Firefox, iChat, and NeoOffice (in place of Microsoft Word). A "typical" scenario for a wireless user involves word processing, flipping to a browser to surf the Internet or to look something up, checking and replying to E-mail (in this case, Yahoo! Mail) every 25 minutes or so, and occasionally instant messaging. The Web surfing included reading RSS feeds stored in Bloglines, so it actually helped the test, minimizing pop-up windows and ads. A few single-page or two-page PDF files were opened as well. This way, the hard drive wasn't always being used, nor was there continuous heavy network activity. The battery life under this test drained at 3 hours and 45 minutes.

While that's not bad for overall battery life it can't be expanded. At this point, it doesn't even cover a cross-country flight and the built-in battery means there is no way to carry extra batteries and swap in a new fully-charged one during the trip. The battery -- slow charging and non-swappable -- mock the Air's claim as being the ultimate road warrior.

The MacBook Air is aimed to make life easier for the business traveler. However, for many of these people on the road, 3G Internet access is necessary, something the Air doesn't support. While 3G/WiMAX can be added with a USB device, it's surprising that Apple left this out in light of the company's existing relationship with AT&T.

In terms of the user experience, there is a longer wait on the MacBook Air than there would be on a MacBook when accessing the disk. That is quite understandable, considering that the Air is essentially running on a drive similar to that used in the iPod. Some freezes were noticeable, such as the one that happened when switching from Photo Booth's video effects pane to new motion video composite effects, but there seemed to be no problems switching back and forth between several large word processing files while running several YouTube videos and downloading several large files.

Movie playing was seamless, even when downloading another large file using Bit Torrent in the background. The SSD model will most likely have better performance, even though it's still a parallel ATA device.

Complaints aside, performance-wise, the MacBook Air delivers better performance than its ultra-thin competitor, the Lenovo X300 or the aforementioned ultra-portables. Using the GeekBench benchmarking software from PrimateLabs, the Air scored 1952, to the X300's 1573. A quick look through comparable systems on the Geekbench Results Browser, which lists the benchmark results for systems tested with the software (not just the ones tested by the Test Center), highlights an interesting fact: the Air's performance is about on-par with a late 2005 Power Mac G5 (Dual-Core PowerPC) and slightly worse than an early 2006 Mac Mini (Intel Core Duo at 1.6 Ghertz). According to the Geekbench Results Browser, the solid state models have slightly higher scores, or about 2180.

Considering that most people tend to view the MacBook Air as a supplementary notebook and not a primary machine, having performance of about 80 percent of a late 2006 MacBook (Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2.00 GHz and 2 GB of RAM scored 2563) is actually not that bad. If performance is important, it's worth re-considering. With a $1799 price tag (the solid state model jumps to $3098), some users might not find the slow speed acceptable.

The lack of an optical drive, while lamented, is not critical. Movies, music, data files, and applications are all available as long as there is a wireless network. While a docking connector would be nice, as already mentioned, no one is looking at the Air to be a primary machine. For multiple USB devices (say, an iPod, a USB drive, and a printer) an external hub plugged into the single USB port does the job just as well.

A simple suggestion to solution providers: if customers travel frequently and would use their notebook for something other than e-mail and the occasional memo while on the road, steer them clear of the MacBook Air. If they sit in Starbucks all day, then the Macbook Air fits their needs perfectly.