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Early Review of 11" Macbook Air
adeelarshad82 writes "Apple's latest entry into the ultraportable space is no netbook, even though it's the closest the company has come to making one. Its chassis is, amazingly, even thinner than the original MacBook Air, with a screen two sizes smaller. Moreover, the MacBook Air's 11.6-inch widescreen is not the only first for Apple; so is its 1,366-by-768 resolution. Although Apple found a way to squeeze in two USB ports and a speedy solid-state drive (SSD), the MacBook Air (11-inch) is not nearly as feature-packed or as fast as the rest of the MacBook family, primarily because its 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 Ultra-Low Voltage (ULV) processor is running on previous-generation Intel technology. Still, it will give the latest batch of Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) laptops a run for their money."
In case you're interested, Ars has a good piece on why Apple chose the Core 2 instead of an i-series chip. Basically it boils down to
a) Graphics performance. The integrated graphics on the i-series can't touch Nvidia's 320M, and Nvidia hasn't come out an equivalent for Arrandale yet.
b) Arrandale needs a separate memory controller, and there's no room for it on the MBA's tiny motherboard.
Good points, though I still want to see head-to-head performance numbers to see if the choice was a good one.
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Toshiba does this, I got one with my NB-100 netbook without a cd/dvd drive.
But netbooks got their names because they can basically only surf the web, unlike this one.
I've been using a netbook as my primary work computing device since last March. People tend to snub netbooks because they're "underpowered", without considering what they're underpowered to actually do.
You're not going to play high end games on it, but I use autocad, do DVD transcoding, email, excel...everything I need to do for my job works just fine. This macbook has better specs in some areas, but my netbook blows the doors off of it in practicality, and the macbook isn't going to get my work done any more efficiently than the netbook that cost 1/3 as much.
Your Aspire One with no SSD, smaller screen, lower resolution, twice the thickness, 6 ounces more weight..
It does include a web cam (Now called face time camera). I can not find your reference to room for in any of the specs..
Not defending either machine, just straightening your facts.
The Acer is more extensible, with user-replaceable battery, savvy-user-replaceable hard drive and RAM (though the RAM is a total pain to get to, not just a door on the back, everything has to come out to get at it) and the possibility for a lot more storage as laptop hard drives get bigger. If it gets stolen, and your data on it is backed up and protected from malcontents, it's $300 and not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things.
The Macbook is much thinner, a little lighter, significantly more powerful with it's 64-bit dual core processor, has reportedly better battery life (Apple's reporting has been pretty close to reality lately) and a full-sized keyboard and almost full-sized multi-touch trackpad (compared to the postage stamp Acer calls a trackpad,) slightly larger screen with quite a bit higher resolution, higher resolution webcam, much faster but more limited storage, can be configured with 4gb RAM (must be done at config time, part of the logic board) and for those that care, Apple's customer service and reliability are rated much higher (per the keynote video.)
Between the two? I'm probably going with the Macbook Air. I don't mind the premium for what I think will be better usability. I'm a larger gentleman with larger hands, and I haven't found a netbook keyboard and/or trackpad yet I want to use for more than a few minutes at a time... too small, slash key and period/comma keys are half size, etc. While the machines are similar in size, the MBAir has it beaten quite soundly in specs. It's really easy to say "haha, Jobs-o made a netbook after putting them down..." but he really didn't. This is no netbook. I had a netbook for two months, gave it to my mother, and I'll never own one again.