Apple has re-imagined the MacBook Air and we’ve been using one full time for a few days now. The Apple MacBook Air has always been a proof of design-concept for Apple. A laptop that shows Apple as one of the world’s leading companies in design and technology. MacBook Air is a product that boasts such a thin profile, so light that enable you to put in your bag without knowing it’s there. Unfortunately, that phenomenally extraordinary exterior has always been marred by an under-powered interior, and other issues such as a lack of ports for peripherals.

MacBook Air: Aluminum Casing

The exterior of the new MacBook Air is now milled from one single piece of aluminum, going one step further with the display also included in the housing. This means that the display is not only thinner than it was on the previous model, but it’s more durable too.

The display does not have the flush look that it does on the glossy displays that you can find on the MacBook Pro line-up that is slightly disappointing; there is still a silver outline to the display rather than the gorgeous, black surrounding that’s present on the Pro, but all things considered the Air is one hell of an attractive machine.

MacBook Air: Classy Peripherals

When Steve Jobs, the Apple’s $1 CEO, introduced the new MacBook Air, We were incredibly surprised to see that on paper, the new models look more under-powered than the old ones. The base 11-inch model packs a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 CPU, with the 13-inch model coming with a 1.86GHz version of the same CPU as standard. Just to put things in perspective, the older generation came with a 1.86GHz CPU as standard as well, so things do not show up to have significant changed on that front.

The Air only equipped with a 2GB of DDR3 RAM as standard, although you can upgrade to 4GB. In use, the 11-inch MacBook Air was quicker than our 13.3″ Apple MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz CPU and 4GB of RAM. How is this possible? It’s all down to the storage.

The Apple MacBook Air uses flash storage in favor of a hard disk, but not in the form of a 2.5″ SSD as many may have expected. Instead, Apple has mounted the storage on a card connected to the motherboard, bypassing the SSD casing altogether, as well as the opportunity for users to upgrade at a later date if they wished to.

This does boost the performance several times over, though. The speed of the SSD unit in the new Apple MacBook Air is multiples quicker than the hard disk that you’d have found in the previous generation, and you can tell, too! Let us give you a few descriptions. Booting in to Mac OS X: under 15 seconds. Launching Safari: too fast for us to count. Launching Apple iTunes 10: under a second.

Using this type of connection for storage also seriously reduces the size of the module, and it’s just 10% of the size you’d see in a 2.5″ SSD. Space was always a commodity in the 13.3″ model of the Apple MacBook Air, and it’s even more crucial now as we have an 11-inch option as well. Most of the space saved from the lack of a SSD has been given to the battery to ensure that this thing will run for as long as possible. If you’re using the 11-inch model, you can expect to see around five hours of usage on a charge, with the 13-inch offering a further 2 hours on top of that.

It’s apparent that a lot has been improved from Apple’s other products in its line-up that run iOS. One thing we’ve always liked about the iPad tablet is the ability to put it on standby, come back four days later and still have battery life left to do our thing. This has been taken one step further with the new model of the Apple MacBook Air laptop. After hibernate for an hour, it will go in to a low power state where it can last for as long as a month and still have juice left over when you come back to it. To be able to shut the lid of your laptop with the knowledge that you can come back to it a couple of weeks later and have no trouble carrying on where you left of is pretty amazing, and something that we would love to see in the Apple MacBook Pro’s as this technology makes its way across Apple’s line of products.

Any Mac OS X fanatic users out there will be glad to know that the graphics chip inside the Apple MacBook Air can hold its own fairly well against the rest of Apple’s line-up of portable machines with an integrated NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPU with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with the main memory being utilized in both models. If you want to play some light games and view HD video content on your laptop then you shouldn’t have a lot of problems in doing so. We were surprised to see that gaming performance on the 11-inch model is actually better than the previous generation 13-inch model thanks to the flash storage.

One area that certainly hasn’t been forgotten by Apple is the screen-display. Both models feature a backlit LED display, with the 11-inch model’s resolution of 1366 x 768 giving you a far higher pixel density than you’ll find on the vast majority of 13-inch laptops on the market. The screen resolution on the 13″ MacBook Air is equally impressive at 1440 x 900. If you thought that an 11.6″ screen meant dropping your productivity, reconsider it again. With a resolution that high, you can easily run your everyday applications such as Safari and iTunes without worrying about fitting everything on. We’ve even used Safari with a visible Tweetie window sitting next to it, and we had no problems with content fitting in the window.

Despite the many high-end features to the Apple MacBook Air, there is one feature missing that really does let us down: a backlit keyboard. Before we had a backlit keyboard we couldn’t care less about them; when we needed light to type with we’d just tilt our screen down a little. Now we’ve been using one for well over a year, we couldn’t even think about buying a laptop that doesn’t have one.

Why the backlighting has been removed is anyone’s guess, maybe it just took up too much room in the small chassis of the Apple MacBook Air. Whatever the actual reason is, we want it back, and want to see it in the next generation.

MacBook Air: Abundant of Ports

If there is a thing that seriously hampered the previous generation of Apple MacBook Air it’s the sheer lack of ports available. With such a thin shell, there obviously isn’t adequate space for the number of ports that you’ll see on an Apple MacBook Pro, but everyone has peripherals and one USB port simply didn’t cut it. If you carried an external DVD drive, you were out of ports. If you carried a USB to Ethernet adaptor, you were out of ports.

Luckily, Apple has doubled up on the USB port count for both the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air. You’ll find one next to the Magsafe adaptor on the left hand side of the machine, and one next to the Mini DisplayPort on the right hand side. In many ways, the crucial of the Mini DisplayPort is as significant as the additional USB port. You can carry around your 11-inch MacBook Air and hook it up to an external screen-display or projector without any problems.

Not only can you utilize the Apple MacBook Air as a portable device, you’re safe in the knowledge that you can prepare a presentation on it and use it at the work office with the projector, or take it round to a friend’s house for a movie on the big screen. It’s this kind of flexibility that is appreciated when you’re working with such a small laptop. If you opt for the 13-inch model, you can make good use of the built in SD card reader, too. That’s one less USB port needed when you’re copying images across from a camera!

You will not find a DVD drive or Ethernet port for obvious reasons, and there isn’t a FireWire port in sight either, although quite frankly we can imagine the vast majority of users living without those ports without any issues. We can’t remember the last time we used an Ethernet cable to connect our laptop to the Internet, we seldom use the DVD drive, and we haven’t any FireWire peripherals to speak of. Of course there are some MacBook Pro users that will sorely miss a FireWire port, but the MacBook Air isn’t a MacBook Pro laptop, and doesn’t try to be one either.

With FaceTime making the transition from iOS over to Mac OS X, the newly named FaceTime camera is also present above the screen. Apart from the name, you won’t notice anything technically different here, just a new name for the same toy.

One thing that we would have loved to see in the new Apple MacBook Air is the ability to use a MicroSIM like you can in the iPad. The freedom of having an independent data connection on your device when you haven’t got a WiFi connection is one that we would sorely miss if we traded in the ol’ iPad for a MacBook Air; for us, it’s the killer feature. If Apple really wants to transition features of the iPad in to its MacBook line, then it needs to start with 3G technology. Google’s done it with the Cr-48, and will continue to do it with every Chrome laptop that hits the market. As far as we’re concerned, Apple needs to jump on board too.

Surely, there isn’t anything stopping you from getting a USB 3G dongle with that spare USB port that you’ll have, or alternatively if you’ve got smartphone running Android 2.2 ‘Froyo’ then you could also use wireless tethering, but either option is a bit more awkward than having a built-in connection and will completely kill the whole portability theme you’ve got going with your new MacBook Air.

MacBook Air: Little Added Features that’s Make Huge Impression

As with all Apple products, there’s always that sense of luxury about what you’ve just bought. For us, it’s the super cool Apple branded USB flash drive that contains Mac OS X so that you don’t need to use an external DVD drive or borrow the drive from another computer over your network. Of course, you can install Mac OS X with any standard USB flash drive by following our handy little guide, but the Apple pen drive is just so damn cool!

MacBook Air: the Conclusion

It’s clear that the new MacBook Air once again sets the bar extremely high for competitors in the ultra portable laptop market. With a weight of just 1.06kg on the 11-inch model and 1.32kg on the 13-inch model, you are looking at the definition of ultra-portable. Hopefully, a few of the drawbacks such as the lack of a backlit keyboard will be rectified with the next refresh, and we’ll start to see some more powerful CPUs developed for the device, too.

The entry level MacBook Air starts at approx. $1314.45 and the 13-inch model will put you back $1701.50, only $154.82 more than the entry level MacBook Pro. With competitive pricing and a formidable list of specifications, the new MacBook Air is certainly a feasible alternative to the Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro, and we can’t wait to see what Apple have in store for us next.

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