“Apple has applied its expertise in miniaturization to achieve a design that’s unconsciously portable yet super sturdy. The 11-inch Air’s 2.3-pound weight is more than a full pound lighter than the 12-inch Asus Eee PC 1215N (3.4 pounds), and easier to tote than the Acer Aspire 1830t (3 pounds),” Spoonauer reports. “Even 10-inch netbooks such as the Toshiba NB305 (2.8 pounds) feel bulky by comparison.”
MacDailyNews Take: And that’s even before you’re confronted by the bloatastic Windows OS to which those crapslabs doom their sufferers. Spoonauer ignores the OS issue completely.
Spoonauer continues, “Thanks to the 11-inch Air’s unibody aluminum housing, this machine feels a lot more durable than its plastic competition. It’s also very, very thin… You won’t find a brighter, crisper, or more colorful display on an notebook this class… The 11-inch MacBook Air may be thin, but the sound is anything but. Two stereo speakers project audio right through the top of the keyboard, pumping out surprisingly loud sound… Thanks to a new FaceTime desktop beta application, MacBook owners can make video calls to other Mac owners, as well as to those who have an iPhone 4 and the latest iPod touch.
“The 11-inch MacBook Air features a 1.4-GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM,” Spoonauer reports. “Some might reasonably expect a low-voltage Core i5 or Core i7 CPU and more memory at this price, but these components–in combination with the 128 GB of all-flash storage and Nvidia graphics, give this ultraportable plenty of muscle for running Mac OS X Snow Leopard. In the GeekBench test, for example, the Air scored 2,159, which is nearly 900 points higher than the Asus Eee PC 1215N… After simply opening the lid once we’d reached cruising altitude on a recent flight, the Air lit up instantly. No twiddling thumbs required. Anyone from business travelers to students can appreciate this responsiveness. Just as impressive, the Air cold booted into Mac OS X in just under 15 seconds, the fastest time we’ve ever seen from a Mac or PC… In our tests, this notebook proved snappy when rendering video in the new version of iMovie, as well as when manipulating photos in iPhoto.”
Spoonauer reports, “Apple said it would never make a netbook, and it hasn’t. The 11-inch MacBook Air is a powerful ultraportable that makes other systems in its class look positively bloated… If you want the thinnest, lightest Mac experience ever, this Air will leave you elated.”
There’s much more, including benchmarks in the full – recommended – review, here.