11-Inch MacBook Air Review: A Tiny Miracle [Review]

The 11-inch MacBook Air is marvelously twee-many people quite literally marvel at it. It’s stupid thin. And if it were any lighter, it can feel more like a trick than a tiny wonder of engineering and design.

Of the MacBooks Air, it most credibly possesses some small niblets of the iPad’s DNA-namely, the portability gene. The 11-inch Air is probably the most portable MacBook that Apple makes, the first really tiny Apple laptop since the 12-inch PowerBook went extinct. And while the Air costs as much as the lowly plastic MacBook, it’s the iPad it’ll be pulling people far from. The folks who wanted an almost invisible computer they may take anywhere.

The difference is that the iPad is the first computer you are able to take to bed, and the Air seriously isn’t meant for lounging around under the covers. It’s a completely productive computer. It could do anything a real Mac can do, unlike the iPad . The keyboard is full-sized-a minimum of, the keys that matter are. The trackpad is massive enough. The 1366×768 res display (with more pixels than 13-inch Pro) makes work possible on a screen this size. In practice, the Air’s nimbleness dramatically alters the important life flowchart of ” What do I pull out of my bag to do that thing I must do?” because now it’s just as quick as any other option.

On paper, what’s behind the Air’s aluminum-and-glass skirt is just not impressive. A pokey, practically ancient 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a trifling 2GB of RAM and an integrated graphics card. A GeekBench score of 2253 (compared to the 13′s 3026 and the 13-inch Pro’s 3239) and taking half an hour to convert an identical five-minute, 1080p Muppets video in Handbrake that took the 13-inch Air just 13 minutes , seemingly bear this out. Even the flash storage isn’t bleeding-edge speedwise, consistent with Anandtech’s SSD benchmarks , using a comparatively smeh Toshiba microcontroller for middle-of-the-road random read and random write performance.

But the specs seem to have little concerning reality, at the least as far as the user experience is worried. Day after day, it truly is remarkably capable, even more so because you know what it’s working with. It is a legit Mac, and in everyday usage, it runs perfectly. I used it as my only computer for per week as opposed to a 15-inch Pro, and it miraculously juggled basically everything I wanted it to without ever choking or stuttering-upwards of 20 browser tabs, IM client, chat client, mail app, iTunes, text editor, Twitter all running simultaneously. No slowdowns. Apps open like they’re primed on Red Bull and methamphetamines. The weak-sauce CPU only punches through reality whenever you’re going through video or editing photos. When you’re watching 1080p YouTube videos or HD Netflix, it means you’ll be monotasking (and that’s with the GPU helping out). Editing RAW photos or going through iMovie is basically an exercise in masochism, though-and this what distinguishes it from an iPad, really-it’s doable.

While Apple products often involve the types of tradeoffs nerds don’t like, here Apple didn’t dick us on the display. Or the keyboard. Or the USB ports. The remarkable balance between feeling sturdy and incredible, like a nice section of Tony Stark technology, and as insignificant as a magazine. The little high you get whenever you employ it, because it’s so small but you’re doing so much (and because you know everyone is staring at it, and by extension, you).

Despite being essentially the most mutagenically akin to the iPad, it doesn’t share the miraculous battery life. It was just a little heartbreaking the first time the ” your battery is toast” warning popped up. During a common work day, I ground the battery into nothing twice, netting around 4 hours per charge. Not terrible, truthfully. But, ironically, the Air’s immateriality just made me want a lot more. Why does something so effervescent need so much energy?

A thousand bucks remains to be ‘spensive for a second computer, and the pricing structure for upgrades, especially the iMovie-and-Photoshop averse CPU, is designed to hurt you. Even counting on cloud storage, 64GB of storage-and truly just 48GB is yours to play with-can feel awfully claustrophobic, awfully quick.

The 11-inch Air should be would becould very well be the first computer that you would be able to seriously take with you everywhere and almost never regret leaving your beefier machine at home. The pain of dropping a thousand dollars won’t last for extremely long, either. At the very least, not when I sell my iPad.

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This post is tagged: first computer, flash storage, graphics card, integrated graphics, invisible computer, productive computer