Apple's 2010 MacBook Air (11 & 13 inch) Thoroughly Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 26, 2010 10:08 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- MacBook Air
- Laptops
The 11
While both models are extremely light, the 11-inch MacBook Air is portable perfection. It’s the closest thing to an iPad with a keyboard (short of an iPad with an actual keyboard). I’m afraid that’s where the comparison ends. Despite what Apple would have you feel, the new MacBook Air is no more an iPad than its predecessor. The size and form factor is really nice however.
Apple won’t call it a netbook, but that’s exactly what the 11.6 inch MacBook Air is: a netbook with much better hardware. You get a full sized keyboard, an old but faster-than-Atom processor and a great screen. If you’re a writer, the 11-inch MacBook Air is the perfect tool just at an imperfect price.
While $999 is much more affordable than the previous generation MacBook Air, it’s at least $400 more than you would expect to pay for a notebook with these hardware specs. We’re talking about 2GB of memory, a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU with 3MB L2 cache and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M integrated graphics chipset.
Using the 11-inch MacBook Air is great. Closed it’s small enough to painlessly carry around and open it’s functional enough to get real work done on. The keyboard is mostly unchanged from the rest of Apple’s lineup.
You do make three sacrifices with the 11-inch’s keyboard: thinner function keys across the top, a not-as-tall trackpad and not as much wrist-rest area. Overall they are worthy tradeoffs as none of them impact typing speed. Despite the smaller than normal trackpad, it’s still much larger than what you get on most similarly sized notebooks from other vendors.
Build quality is of course excellent. The MacBook Air employs Apple’s unibody construction. There’s a removable plate at the bottom of the machine that covers the internals, but the typing/mousing surface is carved out of a single piece of aluminum and is solid.
The weakest link in the design is the hinge, which I feel is actually a bit looser than the hinges in other Apple notebooks. While the display is far from floppy, the hinge isn’t strong enough to keep the display from opening/closing more when faced with sudden movements of the notebook. Picking it up from a desk without closing the lid would sometimes cause the lid to tilt back . I didn’t have the problem of the lid auto closing due to gravity when I used the 11-inch Air while laying down, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if that developed over time. In the quest for weight savings sacrifices have to be made. While the rest of the construction is flawless, the hinge isn’t.
The screen is an odd (for Apple) 16:9 ratio 1366 x 768 panel glossy, LED backlit panel. You don’t get the glass bezel from the standard MacBook Pro and as a result the display doesn’t seem quite as glossy. Reflections indoors were minimal at worst, but it’s not a matte screen.
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Exelius - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
I don't know any company that will do this -- HP and Dell require you to mail your machine in as well (unless you pay the extra $500 for the "Gold" replacement plans; an option only available on their most expensive "business" machines.) Often you have to remove the HD before you send it off or else yours might get "lost" (along with all the data on it.)Not that it's a great situation to be in; but this is an issue with many more companies than Apple. You'd still be out a machine.
I own an MBP because it was the only machine available with both discrete graphics and better than 3 hours of battery life. The screen is also dynamite. Were there other machines that were cheaper? Sure. But Apple is the only company that makes a machine comparable to the MBP at any price.
khimera2000 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
M11x has a descreet, and intergrated, and better then 4+ battery life, in home repair (they send out technicions)ill give ya the screen though. mac books do have nice displays.
khimera2000 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
FYI if you have a Fry's electronics near you, when you get a notebook from them they will give you a loaner laptop till they finish fixing your system. If your paranoid about hardware failing in your system its something to consider.On another note the way that the macbooks are built makes it so that when you drop them you can do serious damage to the internals. Ive seen several MBPs that needed an external disk drive becaus the aluminum mill next to the dvd tray was made to thing and warped to the point where it would scratch any disk going in, or would not be able to load a disk at all.
Roland00Address - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
You only get a loaner if you bough Fry's Protection Plan that they offer not if you get it repaired under a manufacturer warranty (which Fry's will gladly service since they are an authorized repair center for many brands.)I second the aluminum mill being able to be warped it happened with my 08 macbook pro. That said many samsung dvd external drives are so cheap (and work with OS-X). I am seriously considering buying another ssd and a mounting mechanism in my macbook pro and then booting from the ssd.
ajuez - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
According to Anand:"The SSD isn’t in an industry standard form factor, although the connector appears to be either micro or mini SATA. Presumably 3rd party SSD manufacturers (ahem, SandForce partners I’m looking at you) could produce drop in replacements for the MacBook Air SSD."
And... bingo!
http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/27/macbook-air-upg...
"The Air USB 3 Adapter gives you not only a brand-spanking-new 256GB module with a Sandforce SF-1200 controller, but a speedy USB 3.0 flash drive too -- which smartly doubles as the mechanism by which you move your old files over, as you can just transfer everything through the USB port. Once you're done swapping modules, the company says you'll see a 30 percent speed boost over the original drive, with reported transfer rates of 250MB/s on both sequential reads and writes. "
lemonadesoda - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Thanks for the link. Interesting.And matte screens are also available:
http://www.techrestore.com/pr/macbook-air-matte-sc...
All that is missing is an SD card slot
Exodite - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
It's a couple of very interesting machines, to say the least, but seem to suffer from much the same issues as previous generations.That said i'd be a pretty much perfect machine for me if it had;
The traditional backlit keyboard.
AMD's upcoming thin-and-light Fusion chips or an Intel Sandy Bridge ULV.
USB 3.0 and HDMI ports.
Matte screen options.
Maybe the next version, eh?
SlyNine - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
"In practice I found the 2008 13-inch MBA launched applications quicker (short bursts of full clock speed), but after prolonged use or completing CPU intensive tasks it was tough to tell apart from the new 11-inch. What's even more troublesome is that Apple's aggressive clock throttling went relatively undetected until now. This is something I'm going to have to devise tests for and pay more attention to in future reviews. Sneaky, Steve, sneaky."And this isn't the first time, Your Dell XPS 16's throttled like crazzy, and still do.
ipredroid - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Anand, can 13in MBA run 30FPS on StarCraft 2? I realize this isn't a support forum... sorry for the lazy question. Thanks for the review. I saw the 11in MBA FPS) no 13in MBA :( FPSkhimera2000 - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
it is possible to do SC2. the memory bump would do you well if your considering running starcraft on the Air (RAM is shared with gpu and cpu) since you loose 256 megs of your 2 gigs to the video card and SC2 has a min spec of 2 gigs with a recommended of 4.it has performed respecabaly on the old air on low settings, so you should be able to bump up a couple of settings possibly getting up to medium with this new revision.
but if your looking for 30FPS through i would go for low. with lots of units on the map in some games your system might lock up at the wrong time.