MacBook Air Review
April 20th, 2008

I began writing this review while on the bus home from university. Having carried a PowerBook in my backpack in previous years, the MacBook Air is certainly a welcomed change. While not a laptop for power users, it is more than adequate for lighter use. But how does it really benchmark against other Macs? Are common criticisms online and in the media founded on real use or simply conjecture? Since the release of the MacBook Air, almost every major publication has released a review of some sort. Instead of evaluating every aspect of the MacBook Air, this review will focus on some of the more common concerns and differences between the Air and its larger counterparts, the MacBook and the MacBook Pro.

Aesthetics

Given the MacBook Air was presented in an envelope at Macworld earlier this year, it makes sense to start by discussing the aesthetics of the product, after all, how many laptops would even fit into an envelope, let alone one with a full sized keyboard and 13-inch screen. While Apple products have always had exceptional design, the MacBook Air is perhaps the first local product launch in the last few years to truly revolutionize its product category (the iPhone is yet to be released locally in New Zealand).

Can I lift it? If I had a dollar for every person that had asked that question, I’d probably have, well, something like $25 dollars. Not a huge amount, but much more than most people. Weighing in at 1.36 kg, and measuring 1.94 cm at its thickest point, this contender certainly leads the way in portability. We will look at performance later in this review, but purely from the portability point of view, the MacBook Air is essentially like carrying a magazine, while a MacBook might be likened to carrying a textbook.

It isn’t until you have been using the MacBook for a few days and then sit down with a more typical laptop that you really realize that this is what a notebook should be. It is supposed to be portable. If you have a decent desktop at home, why on earth would you want to be carrying around additional weight for no reason? When I leave for university each day, I often have a lot in my bag: my laptop, sports gear and course materials. Sure, it all fits in my bag fine and I can store much of it in my locker during the day, but it sure is a heavy load to be carrying to and from university. It can not be understated just how much a 43% decrease in weight makes in this regard.

Weight and dimensions, of course, aren’t the only impressive design elements Apple’s engineers have cooked up. While the iMac G4 and G5 suited their white design, I’ve personally never really liked the iBook or MacBook casing, so in my mind it is a good thing that the MacBook Air is the first notebook in a complete redesign of Apple’s portable line up. Just as the iMac has adopted a more professional aluminum casing with black trimming, the Air follows this trend with an all aluminum case and a black keyboard, which includes the much loved backlight previously only available on the MacBook Pro.

Functionality

I’ve already discussed most of the benefits of the size and weight of the MacBook Air in the aesthetics section. To put it bluntly, given the choice, I would never buy a computer with a non standard sized keyboard or a tiny screen. It is the weight and thickness that are my prime concerns, and for this reason the MacBook Air is perfect for me. At this point, it is fair to say that the MacBook Air is likely out of a large percentage of people’s annual tech budget. However, the beauty of the product is that it gets people thinking about how heavy their laptop is, and whether they really need to be carrying around a disk drive they only use once every few months. While they won’t be direct competitors to the MacBook Air, over the next year, I expect we will see an increased number light weight notebooks to fill the void in the market between the MacBook Air, and perhaps at the low end, the Eee PC (a functional little machine, but too small and fiddly to really be practical for most people).

So far I have been largely positive about the MacBook Air. However, there are some areas that definitely need improvement. I’ll start with my biggest beef, the screen. Apple has adopted an LED backlit screen, which is great. It uses less power than older LCD screens and won’t fad over time. However, I’m not a fan of glossy screens. Some might say I’m picky, but the reasons we were so happy to get rid of CRT monitors around 2000 was the fact that glare causes your eyes try and focus on two images at once, hence giving you a headache. Now I can’t say I’ve been given a headache, but seeing reflections on your monitor certainly isn’t optimal, and given the choice, I would certainly have opted for a matte screen.

Many people like glossy screens, so this won’t be a problem for a large percentage of people. However, the issues don’t stop there. There have been complaints about Apple’s glossy screens in the past, and to put it simply the screen just isn’t up to the standard of a matte MacBook Pro screen or Apple’s desktop monitors. But, says the not so tech savvy consumer, a screen is a screen right? Wrong. Just sit a cheap display by a more expensive one and the difference is very apparent (I’ve seen some horrendous displays on cheap Asus laptops for example). Now the MacBook Air isn’t that bad, in fact may people probably won’t notice any defects at first sight. However, on closer inspection the display suffers from a very mild version of the same problem exhibited in the aforementioned monitors. Instead of gradients appearing as a solid colour, you can see bands of colour and horizontal lines when you really look. Now, maybe this is a sacrifice you have to make for such a thin screen. However, while it doesn’t present a huge problem and certainly wouldn’t stop me from buying a MacBook Air, it is one area I would like to see Apple improve on in future models.

Additionally, long time Mac users have become accustom to having an external battery meter. The MacBook Air lacks this simple feature. Having to boot your Mac just to find out if the battery is charged, or even having to open it up if it is already running can be a pain. Once again, this may come down to difficulties in engineering. In terms battery performance, I’ve found that I get around four hours of use while running a word processor and making limited use of the internet with the screen brightness set at around one half, which on the MacBook Air is actually reasonably bright. Bumping it up to a few notches off full brightness will decrease battery life under light use to just under three hours. As soon as you start doing more processor intensive tasks, the battery life naturally drops quite quickly.

Performance

To benchmark the MacBook Air I used XBench 1.3 and compared it to both a late model 15-inch MacBook Pro and an older iMac G5:

The results are largely as expected. The MacBook Pro dominated and is clearly the fastest amongst those tested. Interestingly, the iMac G5, with it’s almighty PowerPC processor, still manages to beat many of Intel’s higher end mobile processors in scenarios in which full advantage of multiple cores is not made. The MacBook Air led in the memory test and didn’t perform as badly as expected in the disk test, given it is using an iPod size hard drive. However, the area where the Air clearly falls down is in the graphics department. There simple is no contest when comparing integrated and dedicated graphics. Do not try and play games on this machine.

As far as real world performance goes, with general use (word processing, spreadsheets and web browsing), there really isn’t a noticeable difference between any. From this perspective, I would recommend the MacBook Air for portability over the MacBook Pro as you aren’t sacrificing any noticeable power. However, if you intend to do more processor intensive tasks, it is a different story.

The MacBook Pro will play anything you through at it, from YouTube through to 1080p H.264. However, while the iMac and Air will play 720p without any problems (bar stutters with Freeview HD samples, but this may be a codec issue), 1080p is a different story. Many people can’t understand why this would be an issue in the case of the MacBook given it doesn’t have the resolution for anything more than 720p. However, if you are wanting to watch recorded television shows in 1080i without having to encode them again, this might be an important requirement. It may also be an issue if you want to use your MacBook Air as a source on your 1080p flat panel television.

Unfortunately I can’t get a working 1080i H.264 sample at the moment as there appears to be issues playing back 1080i Freeview HD under Mac OS X. I will update this review when I get this sorted out. However, I suspect the Air might just have the power to play back samples without noticeably dropping frames. 1080p H.264 trailers off Apple’s website are watchable, but action sequences can see the number of frames per second drop to around 12, at which point the video is visibly stuttering. This is clearly a CPU issue rather than a disk speed issue as higher bit rate 1080i files in MPEG2 play perfectly. At this stage, I would recommend buying the 1.8GHz upgrade, just to be on the safe side.

Conclusion

Clearly the MacBook Air has redefined portability and is likely to be the first of a new breed of notebooks. If you plan on doing processor intensive work on the road, then it may not be for you. However, for the majority of people who don’t feel the need to play Doom 3 while on the bus and don’t render hugh amounts of high definition video, the MacBook Air is ideal and truely deserving of our Macworld Best of Show Award.

Benchmark Configurations

MacBook Air:
Processor: 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Graphics: Intel GMA X3100 with 144MB of DDR2 SDRAM
Disk: 80GB 4200 rpm Parallel ATA

MacBook Pro:
Processor: 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor
Memory: 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 128MB GDDR3
Disk: 120GB 5400 rpm Serial ATA

iMac G5:
Processor: 2.1GHz G5 PowerPC
Memory: 1.5GB 533 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Graphics: ATI Radeon X600 XT with 128MB DDR
Disk: 250GB 7200 rpm Serial ATA

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