Digital Trends

Apple MacBook Air (80GB) March 4th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Remote Disc

Apple’s Remote Disc technology is intriguing, as it allows the Air to use the optical drive of another PC or Mac wirelessly. This is important since there’s no optical drive in the Air. You can purchase a USB-powered optical drive for $99 USD, however. We tested the Remote Disc and found it to be quite limited in usefulness. We installed the required files on our desktop PC and then tried to read several discs on the Air. We first tried playing an audio CD but the Air couldn’t see the disc. Next we tried playing a DVD movie but this also didn’t work. We did some research and found that the Air is unable to handle the CSS encryption on DVDs, and that in order to watch a movie on the Air you’d have to decrypt the DVD, rip the files to the hard drive and then watch it. Finally we inserted the Mac OS X disc that came with the Air, and it worked just fine. It seems that the true purpose of Remote Disc isn’t so much full usage of an optical drive, but rather to use it primarily for installing software on your Mac.

Nice Touches

As with most Apple products, elegant touches abound with the Air. We loved the backlit keyboard and found the ambient light sensor to work very well. It’s also great how the Mac instantly goes to sleep when you close the lid, and comes back to life immediately when you re-open it. We were also smitten with the huge touchpad, which incorporates multi-touch gestures like those found on the iPhone. If you pinch the touchpad you shrink the interface, and so forth. It works amazingly well and is an awesome feature indeed. The Air also feels completely solid and well-built despite being so thin.

Conclusion

There are always numerous factors to take into consideration when evaluating a laptop, but the problem with the Air is that it introduces several intangible factors that we have never encountered when reviewing PCs. Like other Apple products such as the iPhone, the Air is so beautiful and easy to use that we found ourselves becoming one of those Mac people who fall in “love” with the Apple product. It has undeniable appeal, and even us lifelong PC users were not only impressed with its performance and usability but felt drawn to it like we are to our iPhone. In fact, despite its drawbacks, our final conclusion is that we’d buy one in a heartbeat. We acknowledge its shortcomings, but in our mind they don’t outweigh its many positive attributes.


Pros:

• Amazingly light
• Snappy performance
• Lots of neat features


Cons:

• Non-removable battery
• Few expansion options,
• Remote Disc is flaky