Price: £849 (11-inch), £1099 (13-inch)
Cheapest at: Laptops Direct
The 2010 MacBook Air from Apple is now available in two different sizes, with 11-inch and 13-inch displays and four standard configurations. New to the MacBook Air is flash memory (SSD) in place of a standard hard drive.
Storage ranges from 64GB to 256 GB, and provides some interesting improvements, including almost instant-on and vastly superior data access speeds.
With the latest MacBook Airs, Apple has lowered prices whilst providing new features and capabilities that travellers and fanboys, who are the target audience for the MacBook Air, will enjoy.
Up to 7 hours battery life
The Macbook Air is incredibly rugged compared to the usual hard-drive-based storage methods. Both the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air provide up to (a stunning) 30 days of standby time. In continuous use, the 11-inch models will provide up to 5 hours of battery time and the 13-inch Macbook Air up to 7 hours - miles ahead of laptops like the Xtreme X790.
NVIDIA GeForce 320M
All models of the MacBook Air use an NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor. This is the same graphics chip used in the current MacBook and Mac mini.
Apple chose to use an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.4/1.6/1.86/2.13 GHz (depending on model and configuration), making the MacBook Air probably the last Mac model that will use the older Core 2 Duo processors.
Having said that, it’s about time they start using the i-range of processors from Intel. For that reason, it’d be worth considering an M15x or even a M11x from Alienware or even a Toshiba Tecra M11.
1440x900 pixel display
The MacBook Air uses high-resolution displays in both the 11-inch and 13-inch models. Coming in at 1440x900 pixels, the 13-inch MacBook Air has the same resolution as the bigger 15-inch MacBook Pro. The 11-inch display has a 1366x768 resolution, which is larger than many competing 13-inch notebooks.
In terms of competitors, the Dell Latitude Z600 compares to the Macbook Air in terms of size, weight, looks and SSD hard drive and is definitely worth a look.
The final fanboy favourite is the MacBook Air’s new Multi-Touch trackpad for precise cursor control. With precise cursor control, inertial scrolling, pinch, rotate, swipe, three-finger swipe, four-finger swipe, tap, double-tap and drag capabilities are all easy as 1-2-3.
Apple deliver a fantastic product. However, with no optical drive, no Ethernet port and a 256GB maximum capacity hard disk drive, we consider it to be a glorified iPad. Having said that, we’re sure it’ll sell very well.
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