13 INCH MAC BOOK AIR REVIEW

FOR:-

• Ivy Bright Power
• USB 3.0 Port
• Thunderbolt Connectivity
• Incredibly thin and light

AGAINST:-

• No Ethernet Option
• Same old design
• No SD card reader
• No optical Drive

OVERVIEW:-

The Apple MacBook Air is back, in the same super-skinny chassis that I originally fell in love with back in 2010. The latest model was officially unveiled at the Cupertino company's WWDC conference in June, along with the refreshed MacBook Pro models and the incredible MacBook Pro with Retina display.

The MacBook Air boasts a design that has become a classic, a blueprint for contemporary technology done correctly, and an inspiration for the ever-increasing Ultrabook brigade. But it's also the third time that I've seen the tech giant wheel out the same exterior for its slimline laptop.

BUILD AND DESIGN:-

The design of the MacBook Air is nothing short of amazing, when you compare its basic shape and look to a standard notebook. It is so incredibly thin compared to anything else I have played around with, and seems paper thin during use. With the display open and the notebook laying flat on your desk the palmrest is a pencil eraser's height above the surface of your desk. The real beauty of this notebook though is its clean design with only one visible port connection, with the rest hidden by a magnetic latch cover. The body continues with its sleek look with all rounded and polished surfaces and not even a foot to catch when the notebook is being slid into a bag.

The downside to this beautiful design is the missing features that have been standard on notebooks almost since conception. User replaceable batteries, decent port selection, or even a docking connector are all missing. While you could get away with an external hub and USB devices on the road for additional hookups, not having a spare battery to swap in is a huge disadvantage. Combine this with a slow charging battery and you have the opposite of an ultimate road warrior.

SPECIFICATION:-

The 11-inch MacBook Air that I used as the subject for this review packed a 1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-3317U chip, which can be ramped up to 2.6GHz using Intel's Turbo Boost function. There's a 1.8GHz Core i5 CPU for the 13-inch version as standard, and you can also opt to upgrade to a 2GHz Core i7 processor on either version for £130/$150 extra.

Storing your HD media could be problematic, however, especially if you're the type of person who likes to have extensive high-quality digital libraries everywhere you go. The cheapest option offers just 64GB of flash storage, and our review model packed a mediocre 128GB. You can go up to 512GB of storage for a whopping £640/$800 extra, should money be no option.There's no discrete graphics option but, this being an Ivy Bridge setup, you are treated to integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000, which means graphic processing is twice as fast as the previous MacBook Air models. With 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3L RAM onboard - also a significant upgrade from the last MacBook Air - the performance is much slicker and impressive than the already-impressive 2011 MacBook Air range.

Many Ultrabooks now, such as the Sony Vaio T13 and the HP Envy 6, offer a dual SSD and HDD option - enabling more space while keeping the price down. Apple has decided against moving parts in its MacBook Air laptops though, stating that complete flash storage is the key reason for the skinny notebook's responsiveness.  This flash storage, the company tells us, is up to four times faster than a traditional 5400rpm hard drive. You certainly won't hear us disagreeing or complaining about speed - the MacBook Air is lightening-quick.

To call the 2012 Apple MacBook Air's design identical to the last two is not entirely accurate. You may notice that the MagSafe power connection has been redesigned. MagSafe 2 is thinner and longer. No probably I'm not sure why either, but unless you've got a close affiliation with your old Mac power pack, you shouldn't have a problem. There is an adapter that Apple will sell you for £9/$9.99 if you do intend to use your old power source.

There's now a USB 3.0 port duo - although this being Apple, there's no blue marker to indicate them. It's white and silver all the way. Added to these there is a Thunderbolt port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the 13-inch 2012 MacBook Air, there's enough space for an SD card reader as well, but there's not one on the 11-inch model that we reviewed, unfortunately.  The webcam has also been improved; it's now a 720p HD one - so your FaceTime calls can be clearer than ever.

Apple states a battery life of five hours of wireless web browsing for the 11-inch model, and 7 hours for its bigger brother. In our test, which involved looping Full HD video on full brightness, it lasted just under four hours, which indicates that Apple's estimate for normal usage is about right.

DISPLAY:-

The screen on the MacBook is very nice, with vibrant colors and intense backlight. Black levels are nice and even with very little backlight bleed showing through even on very dark scenes in movies or games. Comfortable viewing brightness during my review was around 15-20%, matching 80% on my Thinkpad. 100% on the MacBook Air is close to the brightness levels that my desktop LCD can reach. Viewing angles of the LCD were above average.

Horizontal viewing range was perfect up until the screen was blocked by metal backing, but vertical viewing range was limited if you went 10 to 15 degrees up or down from straight on. No screen defects were present on our online purchased model; this included stuck and dead pixels as well as backlight bleed.

KEYPAD AND TOUCHPAD:-

The MacBook Air keyboard is the slim key design that is also found across the board on other Apple products. Spacing is slightly off compared to a more normal keyboard, and it took a while to get used to the layout. Once you get past the transition, you notice the keyboard is very well built and pretty comfortable to type on. Individual keys require little pressure to activate, and the keyboard has zero flex.

Some items missing from the keyboard are markings for page up/down, home/end, but those key functions were present if you press the FN key and one of the arrow buttons

The touchpad has a few unique qualities that are either not seen in most notebooks, or were a first for notebooks. Windows users will notice right away that the touchpad is roughly a billion times larger than anything they have seen before, while Mac users will feel right at home. Measuring in at 4.12" by 2.48" it was larger than anything I have ever used in the past. The new feature new to this touchpad on the MacBook air is its multitouch capabilities, which give the user the chance to play around with objects like they would on an iPod Touch or iPhone. This means pinching or spreading apart your fingers to zoom in and out, circling your fingers around to rotate objects, and other advanced motions.

General use of the touchpad inside Mac OS 10 or Windows Vista was spotty with either sensitivity that was not adjustable to suite my preference, or the multitouch features kicking in when I was not expecting. The problem I found was my palm was always touching the edge of the touchpad while I was typing, and it would trigger a two-touch motion like scrolling, instead of moving the cursor.

Another obvious problem we encountered with the multitouch touchpad under Windows was the issue of touchpad freezes and blue screens. I suspect there is an issue with the touchpad drivers for Windows since I could consistently cause a failure simply by touching the touchpad with multiple fingers. It's pretty clear there is a problem when multiple touches disable a "multitouch" touchpad.

PERFORMANCE:-

The speed of the MacBook air was surprising from the moment we received. I expected it to be somewhat slow with its mobile processor, but its real world performance was lacking especially inside its native OS 10.5. Boot times were in the 56 second range, and starting up a wide array of programs took much longer than normal. Even basic rendering of web pages seemed to lag when viewing new pages. Bootcamp performance though (while very buggy) was quite snappy. Including the 16 seconds or so from power button press to the loading of Vista Ultimate, total boot time was 50 seconds to the Windows desktop. IE and Firefox loaded up much faster in Vista than Safari or Firefox did in OS 10.

Overall the machine seemed to enjoy running inside Vista more than it did OS 10, but bugs were prevalent all throughout bootcamp with the current Apple-provided drivers. The touchpad was the source of many problems, including six bluescreens and 30+ touchpad lockups from "multiple touches." While the features worked occasionally trying to use the scrolling motions or even tapping multiple fingers on the touchpad would be enough to lock until a reboot. The bluescreens would often come at random, with the culprit always being the "Applemtp.sys" driver crashing. More than a few times the machine would bluescreen when I was not even touching anything on the notebook.

Audio is surprisingly good, if somewhat tinny, for such a small machine. It's no audio dock replacement, that's for sure, but for video watching or the odd bit of background music streaming while you're web surfing or working, it does the job nicely. Of course, you can always plug some external speakers or some headphones in, or even make use of Apple AirPlay through iTunes for a much richer audio experience.

Using the MacBook Air is a real pleasure, with the isolated backlit keyboard still being about the best in the business. Travel is minimal, but there is still enough bounce and response to invoke confidence while typing, and the intelligent backlight is great for when the sun starts to set.

The multi-touch gesture-tastic trackpad is also a delight to use, although fans of older Mac OS versions may have to do a bit of tweaking to get it performing like it did in the old days. I find the two-finger scrolling, three-finger swiping and four-finger pinching an incredibly intuitive way of controlling the system, though. iPad owners, in particular, will feel right at home.Don't worry about the backlights running the battery down when it's light enough that they are not needed - the system is clever enough to switch them off when your environment is well lit.

BATTERY AND POWER:-

Apple claimed five hours of battery life with wireless enabled, and from my testing I think that would be possible ... under the right situation. With screen brightness at 25%, Bluetooth off, and WiFi on, the MacBook Air got 4 hours and 20 minutes of battery life with above average web activity. Half of this time was spent in Mac OS, with the other half in Vista. If you had very light internet traffic, or even had wireless disabled and were just typing on the notebook you should get five hours or more productivity from the battery.

One huge complaint this notebook gets in my opinion is the integrated battery. Not only can you not swap the battery if it dies while traveling, but to make matters worse the charging speed is abysmal. Our MacBook Air from a dead state would only reach 25-30% after charging for one hour with the notebook turned off. On most notebooks, in this period of time the battery would be well above 50% if not much higher.

VERDICT:-

While Apple doesn't own the exclusive rights to the super-skinny notebook guest list any longer, it is still the market leader. But while the latest MacBook Air impressed me greatly, the wow-factor has worn off slightly, due to this being the third iteration of the current design.

In a market becoming densely populated with slim-line laptops from a massive range of manufacturers, Apple still holds the trump card with the MacBook Air - but only just. And as such, I fully expect a design overhaul from the Cupertino-based tech giant in 2013.

It's easy for me to recommend the newest MacBook Air, because it's a fantastic machine. But, unlike this time last year, there are other impressive lightweight options out there. So be sure to check out my Best Ultrabook feature and reviews to see if the MacBook Air is the right ultra-portable notebook for you.

COURTESY:- AARUSH