When laying your eyes on the MacBook Air for the first time, prepare to involuntarily draw a breath of disbelief. It looks like alien technology, with its titanium appearance, ultra-modern design, and unbelievable thinness, it simply looks fake.
Until you open it and witness a bright screen and the colorful, clean interface that is Apple’s newest operating system, Leopard. Click the Safari icon (Apple’s web browser), and the machine noiselessly thinks for a second, and presents you with the Apple home page. I don’t remember being this excited over a laptop in a very long time. It would seem that Apple has once again solved all the problems in the world of computers, but alas, everything that glitters is not gold.
Design-wise, the Air hits all the right spots. At 3 pounds, it feels like a clipboard in your hands, but still manages to be weighted enough to prevent sliding all over the desk as you’re typing. The thinness is, perhaps, the biggest selling point of this machine. At 0.16 inches at its thinnest point – it seems almost absurd, thin enough to lose it in a pile of magazines. Its feel feels sturdy though, and I would have no qualms with throwing it in a briefcase or backpack on the way to work or a flight.
Speaking of flights, the Air seems squarely marketed at the road-warrior type who will do anything to lighten the load for those early morning and red-eye trips across the globe. To this end, it sacrifices what some would consider mandatory features to achieve its diminutiveness. One good example of this is the absence of an ethernet port. You heard me right: This laptop is wireless only, no cables allowed. Granted, you can purchase a USB to Ethernet adapter from Apple, but something about having wires dangling off the side of the laptop just ruins the sexiness of it all. Another omission is a user-replaceable battery. Meaning, when your battery dies in the middle of a movie, you cant reach into your bag and grab a backup, the Air’s battery is built into the unit, and cannot be removed except by Apple. However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Chances are I won’t be watching a movie anyway, since there is no built-in DVD drive. Therefore, unless I have downloaded the film to my hard drive, or purchased an external drive, I’m out of luck. To Apple’s credit, they have released software that will assist you in installing the software that comes on these apparently ancient physical disks. The software enables you “borrow” the drive of another computer on the same network, and install software from there.
In the end, if you are looking for the lightest, thinnest laptop possible, then your search stops here. However, if you intend to do more than emailing, document processing and web surfing, you may want to look at a regular MacBook or even a MacBook Pro instead.
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