We've all seen the macbook air, but is it worth the price tag
When an Apple release proclaimed that the world’s thinnest notebook is Macbook Air, we started wondering whether there was something wrong with our high school mathematics. Ok…we pose this question to the readers: Is 0.72 inches(Toshiba protégé 2000’ thickness) less than 0.76 inches(MacAir thickness)? If you vote for the latter, congrats, you are in league with the Apple people.
Yes, the Macbook air is simple and beautiful. But that is art and I am not an art lover. And neither is technology art’s soul mate. It is so thin and sleek that you could keep caressing it. But, this is not Carmen Electra.
The Air opens and closes with a magnetic latch. It has a Core 2 Duo chip that has been redesigned such that the physical size is reduced by sixty percent. The LCD screen is backlit with LEDs. This saves battery and dims the screen much lower than CCFL screens for additional battery. The build quality is excellent - While using the air, you never feel the edge of the front wrist rest, because it is so narrow. The keyboard is black and backlit. I can use the air for eight hours without feeling the pinch. (But, that will never happen as the Air lives for three hours in one life time as against Apple’s claim of five hours) There is an isight camera above the screen and keyboard. It records to 640 by 480 res which is same as any other isight. And then there are the laser cut grills – one is a light sensor that adjusts the keyboard and the other is for the microphone. There is a single speaker that is louder than the speakers on Macbook.
The feature that was displayed in all the 4 presentations that were made in the Macworld by Steve Jobs contained few things in common, the most notable ones being the 3lbs Air that fits into an envelope and the demo of Air’s capability to access the optical drive of anther PC.
Now, we come to the interesting part:
There is no built in removable media. There are no security slots and Ethernet portals, though a USB-to-Ethernet adapter may be purchased separately.(Wow, that’s quite an option. Look out Google, there is competition for the Google Sky). There is a single USB port and it has to contend with the companionship of a headphone jack and external monitor port. There are no Cardbus or Expresscard slots. There is the optional 64 GB solid state hard drive, the first of its kind in Apple’s laptop computer. It can be preferred over the standard 80 GB hard drive at the cost of some extra dollars with no great improvements.