![]() ![]() The keys do not give very much spring and are not raised very high due to the design of the Air. The keyboard is a near full keyboard I’d call it a 9/10’s of a full sized keyboard. There is also no infrared sensor so your Apple remote won’t work anymore either. The top bezel of the Air has a new Facetime camera and the backlit keyboard option has been removed from both the 11″ and 13″ models. The screen is the glossy variety which has become the de facto for most laptops and there are no matte screen options (at least not directly from Apple, TechRestore, a third party companies will do a screen replacement). ![]() There is no flexing when holding the base with one hand and feels very solid when tossed or handled. 68 inches high at its thickest (.3 / 1.7 cm) and weighs 2.3lbs (1.06kg). 11 inches high at its thinnest point and. Don’t lie or try to tell yourself its ugly the Macbook Air 11″ is a beauty to hold and carry. Macbook Air 11″ CTO (customized to order)Īpple knows design. Here are the specs of the Macbook Air 11″ that I purchased and will be reviewing: With an entry price of $999 for the slower 1.4Ghz Intel U9400 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM (non upgradable) and 64GB Flash SSD (non upgradeable) and a price of $1,399 for the top end model (1.6Ghz U9600 CPU, 4GB DDR3, 128GB Flash SSD) it already prices itself out of the netbook category. The Macbook Air 11″ is finally Apple’s answer to the netbook category more its middle finger to the category. The 13″ and 11″ are nearly identical in design but differ in specs with the 13″ of course having a faster cpu and also larger ssds. :įast forward to late October 2010, Apple revamps the Macbook Air line with a new unibody design that is thinner and lighter than the original and also answered the prayers of a ton of 12″ macbook followers by releasing the Macbook Air 11″. However the experience was lackluster at times upgrades to OS X always wrecked your install, not all devices/components had drivers, sleep may or may not work and the hardware just wasn’t Apple build quality (most netbooks are very cheaply built, why else do they cost only $300-$400? exactly). The MSI Wind and Dell Mini lines shared common components with the current Intel-based Macbooks and Macbook Pros and in turn could run a hacked/ported version of OS X Snow Leopard. Prior to Oct 2010, the only way one could really get an ultra-portable computer running Mac OS X was to hackintosh it. Netbooks were great in that they cannibalized laptop sales and pricing and in turn the general overall cost for a laptop dropped sharply in the next year. Netbooks took off, the original EeePC netbook sold out instantly. For those who don’t remember but the ‘official’ branding of the netbook meant that a laptop had to: be under 10″ in screen size, run an Intel Atom CPU (no AMD cpu until recently for netbooks), and under $500 in price. ![]() At the same time another genre/category of computers were born the netbook. However, the price and performance balance just was not there for most home users. Several revisions were done to help increase performance with upgrades to video chipsets and cpus and faster memory (ddr3 vs ddr2). It was too expensive for its very sub par performance. To wrap it up the original Macbook Air was more of a symbol than a tool. Add into the mix a very bad job of thermal paste placement/application and you were better off avoiding YouTube and any Flash videos since it would most likely stuttering. Heat and under-clocking of the cpu problems did plague the first versions. The build quality on the original Macbook Air (MBA) was solidly built and did not flex when holding. The price of what you got at the time was really not worth it for the general public it was an elite geek object of lust. However its design did turn heads and even helped an owner miss his flight due to TSA not knowing what it was because of its thinness. So, is the Macbook Air 11″ just an expensive netbook or is it finally the official hackinstosh (OS X hacked onto non mac hardware) ultraportable we’ve always wanted? Keep reading for the full review and benchmark comparisons.Īpple introduced the original Macbook Air way back in Janufor an incredibly expensive entry price of $1799 for the non SSD based Air and up to $3100 with the SSD and 1.8Ghz C2D processor. Apple previously had said it would never build a netbook and has lived by its promise with the Air. On OctoApple unveiled its updated Macbook Air line and introduced the smaller 11″ version. Like any blogger and traveler, I love my portables and ultraportable laptops. ![]()
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