Digital Trends

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

Features and Design

Apple's stated design goal for the MacBook Air was to make it as thin as possible while still being able to accommodate Apple's must-have features. Achieving that goal required Apple to ditch many of the features most people have come to expect on a notebook computer, including the optical drive, USB ports, removable battery, expansion ports and so forth. The result is an amazingly thin notebook that simply ditches any and all legacy connectors, expansion ports and features.

CPU, RAM, Storage

The specs on the MacBook certainly aren’t going to blow anyone’s hair back as they are decidedly middle-of-the-road. The CPU is a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, though it’s the good kind with 4MB of L2 cache. The MacBook also has 2GB of DDR 667 RAM, an 80GB 4,200rpm hard drive, and uses onboard Intel graphics. That’s the meat of it, which is typical for an ultra-portable notebook since they skimp on performance in favor of portability and battery life. We should also note that we’re evaluating the base model, but Apple does offer a souped up version that includes a 64GB solid-state hard drive and a 1.8GHz processor for an extra $1,300 USD.

LED Display and Wireless

Though the above specs are somewhat lack-luster, there are certain features of the MacBook Air that are quite interesting. The first is the 13.3” LED backlit display, which uses LEDs to light the display rather than a cold cathode. The benefits of this approach are more even lighting and better contrast. It also avoids “leakage” that some LCDs suffer, where the backlight “leaks” out from the edges of the display. It also supports wireless Draft-N wireless, which is something no future-proof notebook can be without in our opinion. Draft-N wireless is the successor to 80211.G and provides faster transfer speeds and increased broadcast range.

Backlit Keys

The Air has a backlit keyboard, which is a new development in the notebook world and one we suspect will be quite popular in the near future. The keys are illuminated by a soft white light that is adjustable if you want to control the brightness, but there’s an onboard ambient light sensor that detects available light and automatically adjusts the brightness of both the display and the keyboard backlight.

Expansion Ports

Hahah, that’s a good one. The MacBook Air has no expansion ports, though it does have a tiny little flap on the right-side that flips open to expose a headphone jack, USB port and a mini-DVI (or VGA) connector. The opposite side of the notebook has a magnetic power jack. That’s it as far as ports go. There is no optical drive, nor is there a removable battery. 

No Optical Drive?

Let’s be honest – most ultra-portable notebooks don’t have optical drives. This has been the standard for some time now, and the MacBook Air is no different than the majority of ultra-portable notebooks. However, Apple has created a clever workaround for this conundrum called Remote Disc, and it lets you access the optical drive of another Mac or PC wirelessly across a home network. You do have to install some files on the host PC to enable this feature though, so it’s not like you can just pop a disc into any PC and use it on the Air.

OS Situation

The MacBook Air comes with the newest version of OS X, dubbed Leopard. This revision of the OS adds several enhancements including Cover Flow navigation in Finder, Time Machine (which requires an external hard drive, not included), “stacks” that pop out of the dock and other features.

Image Courtesy of Apple