New MacBook Air The Death Of The Hard Drive ?
On Wednesday, Apple unveiled a range of new products: a new operating system called Lion, an App Store for Mac OS X widgets, and FaceTime on the Mac. But perhaps the most hotly-followed announcement concerns an update to the MacBook Air laptop, which had remained relatively unchanged since its launch in 2008. So what are critics saying about the new MacBook Air?
Good things, mostly. Over at TechCrunch, MG Siegler confesses that the latest iteration of Air fulfills his every need. “After using it pretty much non-stop for the past 7 hours or so, I’m happy to report that I couldn’t find one task in my regular routine that the Air wasn’t able to handle with ease,” Siegler writes. “I did some work, I did some regular browsing, I edited some pictures, I played some videos, etc.”
“To be honest, it makes me feel a little silly,” Siegler continued. “Why on Earth have I been lugging around a machine that’s twice as heavy if I didn’t need it? I’m not sure. The lure of the 2.8 GHz i7 chip, 8GB of RAM, and dual graphics cards got to me, I guess. But I really don’t need that. And I’m sure most people don’t either.”
The staff at Electronista – which posted an unboxing and a quick round of “first impressions” – also likes the rejiggered MacBook Air. Still, they have a few reservations: “The only aspects that are somewhat disappointing are the lack of keyboard backlighting, and the fact that it doesn’t use Intel’s latest generation of Core i series chips, but a previous generation CULV Core 2 Duo.”
“Though, as already noted, performance is more than adequate; it’s just nice to have more processing grunt than one needs. Then again, Apple would have had to sacrifice on graphics performance and increase the asking price,” Electronista writes.
Meanwhile, Jason Snell of PC World takes stock of the impressively sleek dimensions of the MacBook Air. “I love small Mac laptops. The smaller, the better. That’s why I embraced the 12-inch PowerBook (and before it, the iBook),” Snell writes. “But the 11-inch MacBook Air puts that venerated system to shame.” (As we noted yesterday, the MacBook Air will come in two dimensions: 13.3-inch and 11.6-inch.)
“It’s got roughly the same width and depth as the paragon of tiny Mac laptops (the 11-inch Air is almost an inch wider, but is an inch less deep), but of course the Air is also only seven-tenths of an inch thick at its thickest point, while the old PowerBook was a full half-inch thick. And that old standard was twice as heavy (at 4.6 pounds, compared with the 11-inch Air’s 2.3 pounds)
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Posted by Steve McGregor
on Oct 22 2010. Filed under Business, Technology.
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