Macbook Air 2011 Review: The MacBook Air that debuted last October was a mighty fine-looking piece of hardware - a newly designed uni body shell, 0.3cm at its thinnest.
Trouble is, the meat inside didn't quite match up with the supreme exterior – Apple had been forced to stick with the aging Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Intel had originally produced a special, smaller packaged Core 2 Duo variant for the first-generation MacBook Air that was still clinging on in last year's release.
The small processor package, presumably, couldn't be bettered until this year's Sandy Bridge generation of Intel Core chips. So here we are with the newly-launched 2011 MacBook Air running the day-old Mac OS X 10.7 Lion - featuring all new processors.
Trouble is, the meat inside didn't quite match up with the supreme exterior – Apple had been forced to stick with the aging Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Intel had originally produced a special, smaller packaged Core 2 Duo variant for the first-generation MacBook Air that was still clinging on in last year's release.
The small processor package, presumably, couldn't be bettered until this year's Sandy Bridge generation of Intel Core chips. So here we are with the newly-launched 2011 MacBook Air running the day-old Mac OS X 10.7 Lion - featuring all new processors.
The great news is that the new models don't lack for performance. Even the base models are stacked. The off-the shelf models come with the blistering Core i5 1.6 (11-inch, £849/£999 depending on memory and SSD) or 1.7 Ghz (13-inch, £1,099/£1,349 depending on memory and SSD) variants.
Even better is that, for an extra £100 you can pop a 1.8GHz Core i7 into the high-end 13-inch and that is what is inside the 13-inch MacBook Air Apple has been kind enough to loan us here. (It's the 7-2677M, if you're a code aficionado.)
Moving centre stage
The model we have in our hands is seriously quick, though having used numerous Sandy Bridge Core i5s including the new 2011 MacBook Pro, we're confident the performance of those machines won't disappoint.
Whichever you choose, the MacBook Air is certainly no longer the poor-powered portable Mac – indeed, Apple has so much faith in it that it has discontinued the MacBook for retail purchase (it's still going to be available for education, apparently).
The MacBook Air is expensive of course, but you get what you pay for. As with the new MacBook Pros, the new MacBook Air also adopts the Intel-gestated Thunderbolt technology - again manifesting in a DisplayPort connection. Various Thunderbolt products will launch in due course, but in the meantime Apple has also released a new Apple Thunderbolt Display which is a thorn in our theory that thunderbolt is just a gimmick.Which should you choose?
Although the 13-inch MacBook Air is a lot more usable for most workhorse tasks, the 11-inch MacBook Air is still a highly capable machine for most purposes. The displays remain the same as the last generation, though what they're driven by is different.
Graphics is now provided by Intel's HD 3000 graphics built into the new Core chips rather than the Nvidia GeForce 320M used in the last generation. While Intel's Sandy Bridge graphics are fine for most needs, if it's supreme graphics performance you want than you need a MacBook Pro.
In terms of pixels, the 11-inch is a 16:9 1366 × 768 panel, while the 13-inch is 16:10 - 1440 × 900.
All the memory is solid state as with the last generation, and the 11-inch comes with either 64GB or 128GB while the 13-inch provides either 128GB or 256GB depending on model. You can have up to 4GB of DDR3 memory.
One of the most annoying things about the last MacBook Air was that a compromise had had to be made about the backlit keyboard – it disappeared to the chagrin of many potential purchasers. Thankfully, it is now well and truly back.
As you'd expect from any Apple notebook, there's the glass Multi-Touch trackpad that supports Lion's multi-touch gestures.
There's also support for Bluetooth 4.0 should you be interested in that, while you also get the standard Apple webcam (not HD) and an SD card in the 13-inch which was introduced with the last generation. As then, there isn't the space to include one in the 11-inch.
Weight is comparable to the last generation of the Air at 1.08Kg for the 11-inch and 1.34Kg for the 13-inch. It seems strange that the MacBook Air has become Apple's entry-level notebook. But that's what has happened. If you can spare the not-inconsiderable cash, its one hell of a power portable whichever model you decide to plump for.
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