“It’s kind of hard to improve on a 4.5-star rating. And yet Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Air (starting at $1,299, $1,599 as configured) is better than its predecessor in some key ways,” Mark Spoonauer reports for Laptop Magazine.
“Just like before, this ultraporable is wonderfully thin and light and wakes up instantly when you lift the lid, but the new Air ups the ante with a backlit keyboard and a faster Core i5 [and i7] processor[s],” Spoonauer reports. “The notebook is also more versatile, thanks to a new Thunderbolt port that allows you to connect the laptop to a growing number of super high-speed peripherals, including Apple’s new Thunderbolt display.”
Advertisement: Students, Parents and Faculty save up to $200 on a new Mac.
“We already loved the 13-inch MacBook Air, and Apple’s improvements make it the perfect notebook as far as we’re concerned. When you combine a sleek ultraportable design with a great display and touchpad then nearly double the performance–without sacrificing battery life–you’re left with a winner,” Spoonauer reports. “You also get an improved backlit keyboard, Thunderbolt support, and the more powerful and versatle Mac OS X Lion… Add it all up and you have a machine that not only earns our Editors’ Choice award but also a very rare five-star rating.”
Full review – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: The world’s best operating system inside the world’s best ultraportable computer. It doesn’t get any better than Mac™.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple marketing, you may use the last sentence of our Take, “It doesn’t get any better than Mac™,” for a modest fee. 😉
Related articles:
WSJ’s Mossberg reviews Mac OS X Lion: ‘The best computer operating system’ – July 21, 2011
2011 MacBook Air benchmarked; outperforms all 2010 MacBook Pros – July 21, 2011
Apple debuts new MacBook Air with Intel Core i5 & i7, Thunderbolt I/O & backlit keyboard – July 20, 2011
The MDN take sounds like hyperbolic ad copy. But it’s the honest truth.
Indeed, there is none better than this one!!!
Congratulations Apple !
I dunno, my Dell XP4437465 with Windows 7 Ultimate is faster, and I think its’ name has a much better ring to it.
That name does sound catchy. 😉 I need one of those. Lol.
Faster? You mean it flushes faster? A product number like that could only refer to a toilet.
$1,000 bill you Dell does not startup faster and get photoshop up and going …..
I’ve got my money where my mouth is …. Where is your money?
Wow. Thats a great endorsement and 5 out of 5 STARS! I want a 15″ MacBook Air!!!!
I expect we will see the MB Pros becoming thinner and lightter.
But they will still be heavier than my 13-inch Airs. I’ve got a 2010 Air and have ordered on this week, both with 4 GB RAM. I’m old enough that every ounce of weight counts, on those long treks through airports. (There’s a joke that, because of high fuel costs, airport terminals are being redesigned so that passengers walk to their destinations.)
I work with large collections of documents in DEVONthink databases. In a few days the new Air with Thunderbolt will arrive, as will a Pegasus multiterabyte Thunderbolt RAID array. Sheer power!
It would have been nice if the new Air held more than 4 GB RAM, but 4 GB is enough. BTW, the 13-inch Air has the same screen resolution as most 15-inch MB Pros.
MBA needs a discrete GPU much more than 4+ GB of RAM, honestly
Perhaps, but not for the work I do.
““Just like before, this ultraporable is wonderfully thin and light. . . .”
I pore over mine, and that ain’t easy with an iMac.
How hot to the MB Airs get? Is it comfortable to have them on your lap for long periods? My 15″ MB Pro cooks my thighs.
You shouldn’t use it in a speedo.
But, but…I rather like that feeling…
Schweddy balls!
Don’t forget Dusty Muffins!
I shouldn’t have said that. Now I can’t get the image of @Spark in a speedo out of my head.
It gets warm but not blazing. Even when doing heavy CPU stuff like encoding it gets warmer still but it never gets too hot or “cooks”. I think the SSD help with this alot. My old spinning platter HD laptop could fry an egg on it if I was encoding.
Cheers
I love MBAs, and am about 10 minutes away from upgrading to the new one. That said, in all honesty, they get pretty hot. I live in FL and like to sit on the patio couch with it on my lap. Let’s just put it this way, if you do that, have the courtesy to wash-up before asking your wife to give you any oral favors.
My one complaint with the story was about Thunderbolt. They did not say that it could connect to HDMI, USB 3.0, FW 400 & 800, ect. People unfamiliar with it, and I think that is most in PC world, will think that Apple left out those ports. The Trolls will have them eating out of their hands.
Hey MDN, don’t offer your quote for a fee, let them use it and then you can sue them for $8M to start! 🙂
I’d like to see a Mac that also runs IOS apps. At least the pro audio ones.
I think Lion is a big step down the convergence path. I would like to see an iPad Air or Mac iPad etc in the 11 to 15 inch range that runs a converged iOS and OSX. I expect that to happen at the latest by OS 11 Elephant :).
It would be just the screen and the current updated iPad design.
I am surprised that they didn’t complain that it doesn’t have an optical drive, a floppy drive, a serial port, 6 usb ports, a VGA connector, and two HDMI connectors.
Though I don’t have a problem with the lack of an optical drive in the MBA (and possibly the mini, too), they should have put one in the new display. That would have made things perfect.
The original MBA wowed a few folks who prize portability above everything. But it met a fairly lukewarm response, overall. Negative comments included: underpowered, no built-in optical drive, limited storage, mediocre graphics, limited I/O, etc.
But Apple had a plan and stuck with it. The second generation MBA included some substantial advances and the and the third generation MBA is a jewel. About the only valid complaint that I can see is that the storage is still quite limited relative to traditional notebook HDD alternatives, and the $300 bump to go from 128GB to 256GB is fairly steep in the days of sub-$100 2TB HDDs. But the benefits of solid state storage are tremendous, and the price will continue to decline.
Once again, Apple leads and others wonder how to follow.