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Apple Macbook Air
The new Apple MacBook Air is thin and beautiful, and is able to do tricks such as borrow the optical drive of another computer on a network.
The new Apple MacBook Air is thin and beautiful, and is able to do tricks such as borrow the optical drive of another computer on a network.
The MacBook Air has much longer batterlife than the MacBook or MacBook Pro. The thing is, given that this MacBook is aimed fairly and squarely at the traveller, extensive battery life when on the road is essential.
As a result, the MacBook Air’s trackpad is disproportionately large, compared to the size of trackpads found on the MacBook or MacBook Pro. Like the MacBook and the MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air features a slimmed down MagSafe connector for power. Apple estimates that with wireless networking turned on, the MacBook Air can get about 5 hours of battery life.
The touchpad has a few unique qualities that are either not seen in most notebooks, or were a first for notebooks. Our MacBook Air from a dead state would only reach 25-30% after charging for one hour with the notebook turned off. On most notebooks, in this period of time the battery would be well above 50% if not much higher.
For the kind of lightweight work that a MacBook Air would be doing, we think that the slightly slower processor was a wise choice on Apple’s part. The Multi-touch trackpad is an interesting innovation, although I’m sure I won’t be the only person slightly disappointed not to see a touch-screen on the MacBook Air. Actually, it would probably be a nonsense addition, but it would certainly be a better talking point. The one feature that I feel is really missing from the MacBook Air is a GPRS mobile phone connection. I think Apple missed a trick in not combining the MacBook Air with your iPhone account to enable users to send emails and surf the net (even over the EDGE network) from anywhere
In short, the MacBook Air is absolutely not a desktop replacement and shouldn’t be compared to a MacBook or MacBook Pro as you’re doing.