New MacBook Air: As Good As the Hype?

Why Was I Pre­pared to Be Unimpressed?

I recently unboxed and set up Apple’s new Mac­Book Air and I must say I was pre­pared to be unim­pressed. Why? I had heard oth­ers say it was under­pow­ered and it was actu­ally too thin. Ha, fig­ure that. Oth­ers had com­plained that there was no DVD/CD drive and no eth­er­net port so it’s crip­pled. So you might be sur­prised when I tell you I agree entirely and moreso with the Con­sumer Reports Mac­Book Air review that gives it high marks and a rec­om­mended sta­tus. I imag­ine there’s also a good rea­son for the aver­age user rat­ing of a solid 5 stars too.

Under­pow­ered? Not at all.

Once I actu­ally started using it I found that it was more respon­sive and cer­tainly booted faster than my cur­rent iMac which is a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM. They men­tion that encod­ing Quik­Time video would be slower than other Mac mod­els, but I have to ask, what the heck are you doing encod­ing Quick­Time with a lap­top in the first place! If you’re check­ing email, surf­ing the web, play­ing video and edit­ing your Keynote pre­sen­ta­tions or work­ing in Microsoft Word, you will have zero prob­lems with the speed and respon­sive­ness. It’s faster than you. Also, the fact that it has a solid state drive means that it basi­cally boots up almost instantly. No wait­ing is always nice.

And even bet­ter, since the drive is solid-state (no mov­ing parts) it’s less sus­cep­ti­ble to dam­age from drops and bumps, unlike stan­dard hard dri­ves. And with a full size key­board and a gor­geous dis­play I was already 80% of the way to thrilled. Find­ing out that you can get an exter­nal DVD/CD burner/player for $79 as well as an exter­nal USB to eth­er­net adapter for $29 pretty much put me over the top con­sid­er­ing the extreme light­ness and porta­bil­ity of the unit.

Max Porta­bil­ity, Max Functionality

So there you have it. This is a mar­velous lap­top for most peo­ple who need max­i­mum porta­bil­ity and prac­ti­cally all the func­tion­al­ity of a desk­top com­puter. If you don’t need to do video edit­ing and you don’t need to store huge files (the largest drive is only 256GB so if you need more space you should look at the Mac­book Pro instead) then the Mac­Book Air is truly a fan­tas­tic choice for max­i­mum porta­bil­ity with full-size key­board and a beau­ti­ful screen. Of course you can also hook up an exter­nal dis­play if you need even more mon­i­tor real estate when sit­ting at your desk. All in all, this is the new device to covet. Get it. You’ll love it.