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MacBook Air is a mightly fine-looking piece of device, a newly designed unbody shell, it is so thin only 0.3cm . Price from: £929.97 Dixons |
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Reviews
This is a superb-looking and performing machine on which Apple has finally managed to bestow the performance that its appearance and price deserve. The lightweight, streamlined design of the MacBook Air is undeniably attractive, and still leaves most of its ultraportable PC rivals looking like a chaotic collision metal and plastic.
The off-the-shelf models come with the blistering Core i5 1.6 (11-inch, £849/£999 depending on memory and SSD) or 1.7 Ghz (13-inch, £1,099/£1,349 (upu may want to consider whether is MacBook air or food or shelter) depending on memory and SSD) variants. Both Core i5s are dual-core with 3MB shared L3 cache. The 1.7GHz version in the 13-inch has 4GB of DDR3.
Features a 1.7GHz Core i5-2557M processor, 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD. For £1349 you get a 256GB SSD, which is the model on review here. If you want to splash out a further £100 you can have a 1.8GHz Core i7 CPU. Alas, if you want this Core i7 option, then you’re forced to stump up the extra cash for the 256GB SSD drive.
Four models are available - two 11-inch and two 13-inch, all with Core i5 processors as standard - more on that on the next page. The 13-inch Airs have 384MB of dedicated DDR3 graphics memory, while the other MacBook Airs have 384MB. All the memory is solid state as with the last generation, and the 13-inch provides either 128GB or 256GB depending on the model. You can have up to 4GB of DDR3 memory. As such, the Air is getting to be a machine that you can use as your main system, but we doubt many purchasers will - once apps are installed those with large media collections will find themselves a little restricted.
Having only two USB ports does allow the Air to remain incredibly thin at the edges, but it'll prove awkward when you need to use more than two USB devices.
Very ompressive battery life, delivered a full 240 minutes from the MacBook Air, so you can certainly expect to get a good five hours out of it for less demanding tasks.
What Good
The 11-inch MacBook Air. At 3mm at its thinnest edge and is still boasts the unibody construction, hence the whole thing is machined from a single piece of aluminium. As there are no different sections to the chassis that could come apart, the Air is very sturdy and durable -- we poked and prodded and didn't detect any flex or weak spots. We wanted to use it as a sledge down the stairs, but thought that might be overkill.
The 11-inch screen makes the MacBook Air very portable size at 300mm wide and 192mm deep almost the size of A4 paper.
What Bad
The Air comes with a disappointed USB 2.0 rather than USB 3.0 -- this means you won't get a super high-speed data transfer to an external HDD. There is the rapid Thunderbolt port, but right now, there are very few peripherals that use this connection.
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