In January 2008 Apple introduced the revolutionary MacBook Air, which at the time was believed to be the slimmest notebook available on the market. It was graceful, thin, and light, a dream for laptop lovers with bad backs. But priced at well over $2000, the MacBook Air wasn’t necessarily all that accessible.
Well, the folks at Apple finally realized that in order to compete with other thin notebook offerings by companies like Acer and Sony, not to mention the plethora of compact netbooks now on the market, it had to slash the MacBook Air’s price considerably.
So, the newest MacBook Air sells for $1499 for the base model, not very cheap in the laptop world these days considering you can purchase notebooks running Microsoft Windows for as low as $600. So what do you get for that high price tag?
Let’s start with the dimensions. The MacBook Air for starters is only three-quarters of an inch thick and weighs just three pounds. And like its siblings, the MacBook Air is constructed from a single block of aluminum, which means there are no seams in the case and thus, no creaking sounds as the notebook ages. Also, the corners of the case are tapered, which accentuates the elegance of the design.
The base MacBook Air model ships with an 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB L2 cache, a 120 GB hard drive, 2GB of computer hardware memory, a bright 13.3-inch display at 1280 x 800 resolution, a backlit keyboard for comfortably working in dim-lit settings and a battery that holds a charge for five hours. There’s also a built-in web cam, a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor and a WiFi card that is compatible with IEEE 802.11a/b/g networks (no 3G support yet). For another $300 you can have a 128 GB solid-state hard drive and a faster Intel processor running at 2.13GHz. You can also save some money with a MacBook Air refurbished notebook.
Great, but why is this thing so expensive? Maybe you missed that point—it’s only 0.76 inches high, which means it took a considerable amount of mindboggling engineering brainpower to figure out how to cram everything into that svelte case. There is a downside to slimness, however. There is no on-board optical drive, which means you won’t be able to watch or burn DVDs (although an external drive that matches the style of the MacBook Air is available). And there’s only three ports— one USB, one audio out, and one video out.
So basically the MacBook Air is aimed at power Internet users who don’t necessarily care about entertainment features and super-fast performance. Then again, so are sub-$500 netbooks, but they tend to have tiny screens and keyboards.
Then you have the software that makes a Mac magical. Mac OS X 10.5, which of course runs on the MacBook Air, is a superior operating system. Windows users (especially those exponentially suffering with Vista) will embrace Mac OS X in no time. By comparison it is elegant, streamlined, lightweight in terms of draining system resources, and simply put, a lot of fun to use for your everyday work or personal tasks. Using a computer has perhaps never been so easy. Plus, the MacBook Air is packed with productivity notebook software like video editing, e-mail organizing and website creation tools to make life so much easier.
And you may be happy to know that the MacBook Air is a green computer that is BFR and mercury free.
With Apple’s MacBook Air, you will be walking on air (pun intended). So long as you have enough cash in your pocket to afford it, that is.
