The good: Incredibly thin yet surprisingly sturdy; new touchpad gesture controls are very useful; remote optical drive makes living without a built-in drive much easier.

The bad: Very limited connectivity; slower than other MacBooks; SSD hard-drive option is ridiculously expensive and standard hard drive is small; battery is not replaceable.

The bottom line: The design is revolutionary, but Apple's MacBook Air will appeal to a smaller, more specialized audience than the standard MacBook, thanks to a stripped-down set of connections and features.

Read full review of the Apple MacBook Air »

By Dan Ackerman, CNET.com
Jan 28, 2008

Apple's new laptop, the MacBook Air, may not be the true ultraportable that many had hoped for, but it still easily breaks new ground for small laptops. Mimicking the 13-inch silhouette of the current MacBook line, it's only 19.4mm thick at its thickest part, and Apple calls it the "world's thinnest notebook". Some nitpickers say an obscure Mitsubishi laptop from 1997 was a hair thinner, but two of the smallest current ultraportable laptops, the 11-inch Sony Vaio VGN-TZ16GN and the 12-inch Toshiba Portege R500, are both slightly thicker, and neither tapers to 4mm as the Air does along its front edge.

Editors' note : This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.com. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some of other products in this review may not be available or applicable in Asia. Please check directly with your local distributor for details.

Design

As we've come to expect from Apple, the design and engineering that went into the MacBook Air is extraordinary, but it's certainly a much more specialized product than the standard 13-inch MacBook and won't be as universally useful as that popular system. The biggest compromises, which have been well-documented, come in its connectivity: The MacBook Air finds room for only one USB port and doesn't include a built-in optical drive, FireWire, Ethernet, or mobile broadband. And, like with its other laptops, Apple refuses to outfit the Air with a media-card reader or an expansion card slot. Offsetting its sparse connectivity are genuinely useful new features including new touchpad gesture controls and the ability to wirelessly "borrow" another system's optical drive.

Choosing the Air over the cheaper, faster standard 13-inch MacBook, or the comparably priced MacBook Pro, will depend on your needs. Travelers who want minimum weight but maximum screen real estate, and who live their lives via Wi-Fi hotspots, with little need for wired connectivity, will find the S$2,988 (US$2,144.70) starting price a reasonable investment for owning one of the world's premier bits of high-tech eye candy. And while the MacBook Air's specs are inferior to those found on the cheaper MacBook, they compare more favorably when you look at other ultraportables where a price premium is always exacted. For instance, both the Sony Vaio VGN-TZ16GN and Toshiba Portege R500 cost hundreds more than the MacBook Air and feature slower CPUs and half the RAM as the Air.

Although it shares a desktop footprint with the standard black or white MacBooks, the first thing you notice about the Air is its aluminum chassis--similar to the one found on the MacBook Pro, and much more fingerprint resistant than the standard MacBooks. Picking it up, the MacBook Air feels a little heavier than you'd expect from looking at it, even though it's only 1.36kg. At the same time, it feels very sturdy and solid, thanks in part to the aluminum construction, and we'd have no qualms about carting it around with us all day. By way of comparison, the Sony Vaio VGN-TZ16GN features an 11.1-inch screen and weighs only 160g lighter than the Air, and the Portege R500 is 270g lighter than the Air with a 12.1-inch screen.

Features

The MacBook Air includes an iSight camera and mic, and an LED backlit display that works with an ambient light sensor to adjust the screen brightness in response to the light in the room. The keyboard--the same full-size version found in other MacBooks--has backlit keys that are also controlled by the ambient light sensor, although we really had to adjust the room lighting a good deal to see any difference.

The revamped touchpad is large, measuring nearly 5 inches diagonally, and it works with new multitouch gestures. Other MacBooks let you do things like use two fingers to scroll through documents--this one lets you use three fingers to go forward and back in your Web browser history, and use your thumb and forefinger to zoom in and out of documents and photos--much like on the iPhone. The three-finger forward/back gesture was immediately useful, and we're already missing it when using another laptop. Apple tells us these new gestures won't be available on older MacBooks as a firmware upgrade, as the hardware behind the new touchpad is different.

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