by: Eli Ungar-Sargon

Price: $1,799 without external Super Drive

As I cut through the tape of the brown UPS box, I was filled with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Excitement, because I was about to see my brand new Macbook Air. Apprehension, because for the first time ever, I had decided to go with the slowest Apple laptop available. In the weeks leading up to this moment, my wife had warned me that this was the wrong machine for my needs. She told me that I was being taken for a ride by Apple’s legendary marketing and that I couldn’t resist the sexiness of the Air. She said that the Air was for business travelers and that I would live to regret this decision. Was she right? Would this purchase be my technological Waterloo?

Industrial Design and Hardware

The first thing you notice when you use a Macbook Air is just how beautiful it is. Indeed, it feels more like a functional sculpture than a computer. Sleek minimalism is what Apple does best and the effect here is enhanced by the superior build quality of the Air. My previous laptop was a Black Macbook and while I got used to typing on its chicklet-style keyboard, the keys always had a slightly cheap feel to them and my wrists would invariably get tired after long typing sessions. The Macbook Air’s backlit keyboard is the most comfortable laptop keyboard I have ever used. It yields a much richer and more satisfying feel than my old Macbook’s and the position of the keys relative to the wrist rest makes typing a pleasure.

Shift your gaze north of the keyboard and you’ll be looking at the stunningly beautiful 1280×800 LED display. While technically a glossy screen, the fact that the Air’s display doesn’t have a panel of glass over it, like both its Macbook and Macbook Pro brethren, means that it manages to achieve those inky blacks without being overly reflective. It may not be the highest resolution screen on an Apple portable, but it is arguably the best.

Beneath the keyboard is the generously oversized trackpad. Apple has over the past year integrated gesture-based commands into its trackpads and while I didn’t really get the appeal at first, I now use these gestures on a regular basis. Place two fingers on the trackpad and click the button to get a right-click. Swipe with three fingers across the trackpad and you can browse backwards and forwards in the Safari web browser and use four finger swipes to move all of your open windows out of the way and reveal the desktop. Simple, intuitive, classic Apple. And while the Air did not get the excellent new glass trackpads of the unibody Macbook and Macbook Pro lines, it is the only Apple laptop that still ships with a separate physical trackpad button.

As your hands wander around the underside of the Air, and you start to get a feel for just how thin this laptop is, you will notice that two things are missing. First, there’s no way to replace the battery and second, there is no optical drive. To mitigate the former compromise, Apple will replace the Air’s battery when it loses capacity for a fee of $130. To help out with the latter, Apple has invented an ingenious software solution called “Remote Disc” that allows you to wirelessly mooch off of another Mac or PC’s optical drive, provided that said computer is on the same wireless network.

In my tests, Remote Disc was a snap to set up and worked like a charm on both Mac and PC. If you’re still not feeling Apple’s futuristic vision here, they do offer a matching Super Drive accessory for the Macbook Air for an extra $100. I bought this drive in part because I was having a hard time letting go of optical media, but also because I wanted to install Windows on my Air and this is one of the few things that can’t be done through Remote Disc (it also won’t let you watch a commercial DVD or play games that require optical media).

I’m surprised to report that I use the external drive a lot less than I expected. This may have more to do with the fact that it takes up the only USB 2.0 port and I like to keep that free for syncing my iPhone, but upon further reflection, I think that Apple was right to leave out the optical drive. If you have to compromise, it should be on something inessential that is not used a lot. In light of Remote Disc, the optical drive fits that bill.

What Apple seems to have gotten wrong is the single USB 2.0 port. More often than not, I found myself needing at least two ports. For example, most of the good quality wireless mice these days use a 2.4 GHZ wireless transmitter that plugs into one of your USB ports. On the Air, using an external mouse of this variety means that you’re done. You can’t sync your iPod or iPhone and you can’t connect the computer to any other external peripherals. I’m not sure why Apple couldn’t squeeze another USB 2.0 port into the Air, but this was one compromise that I wish they hadn’t made. The only other criticism that I have regarding the industrial design of the Macbook Air is that the hinge between the screen and the keyboard doesn’t allow for a wide enough range of motion, a minor annoyance, but worth mentioning.

At three pounds, the Macbook Air is the lightest laptop that Apple has ever made. By comparison, the current unibody Macbooks weigh 4.5 pounds while the 12’’ Powerbook of yesteryear, which had a smaller footprint than the Air, weighed 4.6 pounds. To some this may seem like a negligible difference in weight, but it’s actually the difference between taking your laptop with you everywhere, and only taking it with you when absolutely necessary. After a week of taking the Macbook Air everywhere, I find myself not wanting to have to tote around anything heavier ever again.

In evaluating the Macbook Air’s performance, I decided to ignore the benchmarks and run it through a series of real-world tests. For most everyday uses, the Air performed flawlessly. Web browsing was snappy and media playback through iTunes came across smoothly and without a hitch. All of the included iLife 09 apps ran well and I was surprised to learn that even Aperture and Photoshop didn’t give the Air any problems. The one area in which it started to choke a little was when I tried to watch CNET TV with HD turned on. The Air did play the stream, but it dropped frames every 5 seconds which resulted in jerky playback even when I let the video buffer completely.

This was particularly strange as the Air had absolutely no problems playing back even 1080p content through Quicktime. For a while, I attributed the CNET TV issue to the Air’s weakest link: The 4200 rpm 120 GB hard drive. I reasoned that it just wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the data rate required for streaming HD video. I am now convinced that this was not the problem. When I accessed CNET TV from my Windows partition (more on this blasphemous situation in a bit), the video ran smoothly. It must, therefore, have had something to do with the way that Flash is implemented on OS X.

For my next test, I ripped the DVD “Moulin Rouge” (running time 2:07:40) to iPhone format using Handbrake on a 17’’ Macbook Pro (2.66 ghz with 4GB RAM), a Black Macbook (2.0 ghz with 1 GB RAM), and my new Macbook Air (1.6 ghz with 2 GB RAM). The Macbook Pro finished the task in 1:10:00, the Macbook in 1:56:00, and the Macbook Air in 2:08:00. As this task is all about the CPU my results are not shocking, but I was impressed that the Air managed to encode a DVD in real time.

To really push the new NVIDIA integrated graphics, I bought a copy of the popular game “Call of Duty 4.” In order to play, I needed to use the external drive which took up the lone USB port. Luckily, I had a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse handy, otherwise I would have been stuck gaming with the trackpad! At the higher settings, Call of Duty got so jerky that it became difficult to play. I ended up turning the settings all the way down and under these conditions the game was quite enjoyable. Nevertheless, the Macbook Air is clearly not a gaming machine and I wouldn’t recommend it for anything more demanding than Spore, or Civilization 4.

In order to truly test the Macbook Air as a Windows machine, I took it over to a close friend who is more familiar than I am with the Dark Side. Eli Vaknin is a software engineer for the Chicago-based company Seatquest and I was curious to get his reactions to the Air as a developer and regular Windows user. As we fired up Boot Camp and installed Windows XP, Eli commented on how much he liked the keyboard. In particular, he found the backlight to be a marvelous innovation and while some of the key positions were unfamiliar to him, he loved the overall look and feel of the keys.

What he didn’t love so much was the non-upgradable 2 GB of RAM. For Eli, this, in addition to the slow hard drive, were deal-breakers. He appreciated the Air for all of its groundbreaking design, but at the end of the day, it was not sufficiently powerful to run his development environment. It’s worth mentioning that we had some strange and unresolved networking issues that had the effect of slowing down simple web browsing. I’ve also experienced problems getting on to my wireless network at home through the windows partition. I guess it serves me right for violating my new mac in this hideous way!

Apple claims that the Macbook Air gets 4.5 hours of battery life. To test this assertion, I ran my Air through a series of drain tests. I set the screen brightness to half (which, as it turns out, is the equivalent of full brightness on my old Macbook ), set the Energy Saver to the most efficient setting, and tested the Air under a number of different usage scenarios. The first scenario was DVD playback. In this test I played the Lord of the Rings film “The Return of the King” through the external Super Drive. The Macbook Air made it through the first DVD and part way through the second before giving up the ghost at 2:33:00.

Next, I played HD TV episodes of the FX show “Damages” that I had downloaded from iTunes. Here, the Air kicked the bucket at 2:40:00. For the next test I did some online research using a combination of Wikipedia and Google Earth to see how the Air would perform during casual use. In this test, it lasted for 3:55:00 before buying the farm. Finally, I turned off WiFi and Bluetooth and did some heavy word processing. This is where the Air came closest to Apple’s claims. It finally joined the choir invisible at 4:24:00.

Overall, I’m disappointed in the Macbook Air’s battery life. For a machine that is so portable and has such an amazing screen it’s a shame that it can only manage two and a half hours of media playback. I mean, my iPhone can do better than that! And while getting around four hours of battery life for casual use is respectable, it is marred by what I consider to be the most bizarre drawback of the Macbook Air. Namely, that it takes a really long time to charge. In my tests it took four hours and thirty eight minutes to go from running-on-fumes empty to fully charged!

I’m sure that this can be explained by taking into account the laws of physics that govern a battery small enough to fit into the Air’s ultra-thin body, but this machine really wants more juice. Perhaps Apple will adapt some of the battery breakthroughs that it made with its latest 17’’ Macbook Pro for the next generation of the Macbook Air.

So who is the Macbook Air for? First and foremost, the Macbook Air is for the road warrior. If you travel a lot, the weight alone will make such a difference that every other consideration will pale in comparison. But the Macbook Air is also for people looking for a second computer. If you have a desktop, or a powerful laptop and you want a basic computer to take with you everywhere, the Macbook Air is a great option. You will pay at least a $200 premium over the unibody Macbook with illuminated keyboard, but the savings in weight along with the higher quality screen, make the premium worth it.

If you are considering the Air as your primary machine and you are not a road warrior, it’s a tougher call. It’s not that the Air is a bad computer, or even a particularly weak computer. It’s simply compromised in very specific ways. If you spend the majority of your computer time word processing, writing email, surfing the web, Facebooking, Twittering, Skyping, watching movies, and listening to music, then the Macbook Air is plenty of computer for you. If you do a lot of gaming, heavy HD video editing, or RAM intensive software development, you will find the Air to be insufficient for your needs.

And what about me? Was my wife right? Will I live to regret this purchase? Only time will tell, but right now I’m very happy with my Air. You see, I’m one of those people who already owns a powerful laptop which I use as my primary production machine and the Macbook Air is now my second computer. Despite this fact, I created every element of this review, including the images and HD video, on the Macbook Air and I am overall very pleased with its performance. Would I prefer the solid state version? Sure. Thanks to the slow hard drive, startup on the Macbook Air takes substantially longer than any mac in recent memory.

The solid state drive, on the other hand, reportedly starts the Air up faster than any mac in history. In addition, applications launch much faster on the solid state drive, though Macworld’s James Galbraith found that the solid state Air was slower at writing-to-disk tasks. Are the perks worth $500? I don’t think so. As nice as it would be to have a peppier machine, the price premium in this case seems a bit too steep to recommend.

The design of an ultraportable is all about the art of compromise. Traditionally, in order to achieve the size and weight necessary for this class of computer, manufacturers have had to compromise in three main areas: Screen size, keyboard quality, and processor speed. Apple, being Apple, decided that none of these compromises were acceptable. When they set out to design the first generation Macbook Air, they wanted to make an ultraportable with a beautiful screen, a phenomenal keyboard and a decent processor. But in January of 2008, the technology did not exist to deliver a consistent user experience.

The first generation of Airs, which had a custom Intel chip, were notorious for overheating and having problems with media playback. While indisputably beautiful, the first generation of Macbook Airs were a bit flaky. With the Macbook Air Rev B, Apple has stuck to its philosophy of what an ultraportable ought to be and the technology has caught up to their vision. The Air now has a proper Intel Core 2 Duo chip and a much improved graphics subsystem. It runs cooler and quieter than my Black Macbook did and there isn’t a trace of the overheating or core shutdown problems that plagued the original model. All that remains is a sexy and capable ultraportble that turns heads and gets the job done. If you’re in the market for an ultraportable, the Macbook Air Rev B should be at the top of your list.