Hands-On With the Ho-Hum MacBook Air (With Video)

by Noah Kravitz, Reviews Editor	16 January 2008

It's late and I'm now reeling from a CES/MacWorld double tradeshow hangover, so I'll get to the point: MacWorld today was fairly disappointing. My favorite new products were things that came out last week at CES - the Logitech Squeezebox Duet and the Etymotic Research hf2 headset for iPhone. My friend Doug and I walked the show floor from the moment it opened until it was time to line up with a bunch of other giveaway-hungry Media Badge bearers for a 5 pm press thing for a new iPod speaker system, and there really wasn't a ton of wow to be found at Moscone. Some cool stuff, some potentially quite useful if not super flashy stuff, but not all that much to get in a tizzy about.

MacBook Air looks kind of lame to me. At $1,799 for a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 80 GB 4200 rpm hard drive (i.e. an iPod drive), and a single USB port, Apple has basically given us a very overpriced entry level machine (with a multitouch trackpad!) in a sexed up outfit. Don't get me wrong, it's one of those very alluring sexed up outfits, but unless you're either lugging your laptop around darn near every day or absolutely must make an image statement every time you pull out your laptop, I'm not sure why you'd want this machine. The "entry level" MacBook is faster, more versatile, and $700 cheaper than Air, and the MB Pro provides way more performance for the dollar if you've got two grand to spend.

Ad: Shop for your new MacBook at Mac Prices. Trackers updated daily. MacBooks are available today for up to $200 off MSRP!

I'm not dumb - I get the appeal here. "The Thinnest Notebook Computer in the World" is all about sex appeal (with a minor bone tossed the way of Mac-faithful road warriors), not value or any other form of pragmatism. But even there it really didn't do much for me. Check out the video below - my first reaction to getting the thing in my hands was amazement that the blogger in line in front of me was so in awe of the thing (his hands were shaking and sweat dripped from his nose as he narrated his hands-on video). Yeah, I could appreciate the style and engineering - and would love some multitouch on my MacBook's trackpad - but I saw MacBook Air more as an example of Apple's "Slight of Illusion" [sic] than the Next Big Thing.

I've been known to be wrong - way wrong - about new Apple products. I hated iPod before it found a sweet spot I liked. I thought iPhone was under-spec'd and too expensive until Jobs cut the price and I bought the one I still use today. So it may well be that six or nine months from now the new Mac will have a faster chip and bigger hard drive inside of that wafer-thin body and I'll be saving my pennies up to get me some Air.

But today at Moscone the something I smelled in the air reminded me of the G4 Cube. So tiny, so avant-garde, such a feat of engineering ... and what a total bust. MacBook Air won't be a total bust, but it's not the gee-whiz home run that most folks I know wanted from a Mac subnotebook. I'm pretty sure the footprint of my Duo 280 is smaller than Air's footprint. That is to say that Air is more a flattened out, compromised MacBook than it is a truly new genre of machine from Apple. It's no Vaio TZ, Eee PC, or Everex Cloudbook that weighs two pounds and fits in a coat pocket. Instead it's a very thin MacBook that's also very light. Which is great. But not as it could have been.

As several folks have already pointed out, MacBook Air is likely more interesting as a harbringer of things to come than as the product it is today. A $999 build-to-order option hard drive that reduces the machine's overall storage capacity from 80 to 64 GB isn't all that great on its own, but getting a taste of the speed of an SSD-based machine today will certainly cause folks to keep their eyes on the flash memory market over the next six to nine months. Before too long we'll start to see prices fall to earth and that thousand dollar option will become a standard SSD drive across the MacBook line. SImilarly, while the Rev A MacBook Air is just begging for all sorts of heat related hardware problems, if the design catches on we could well see a thinning out of the rest of the MacBook line's profile.

A few weeks ago Apple replaced my MacBook after it broke for the fourth time in nine months. I was basically given $1,299 in store credit - the price of replacing my MacBook with a new model. I opted for the current mid-range MacBook, which had recently been significantly bumped to the "Santa Rosa" system architecture featuring a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. When the rumor mill went abuzz with talk of an ultraportable Mac, I started to worry about Buyer's Remorse, to so speak, wondering if I could somehow talk Apple into letting me trade up to whatever they had in store for MacWorld.

Now that I've seen the new MacBook Air, I have no envy at all. My MacBook is the machine I want at a price I'm happy with. If Apple had priced MacBook Air down around the $1,200-1,400 range, it might seem more compelling to me. But at nearly 40% more over the price of a mid-range MacBook, it's hard to justify the cost of owning Air. Then again, Apple products are routinely as much about emotional justification as they are pure bang for the buck. And that "too expensive" business? That's also what I said about the first iPods, and now I couldn't imagine not owning one (or three). So let's give it a year or two and we'll see if MacBook Air is the shape of things to come, or bound for a spot in the Hall of Shame alongside the cracked acrylic housing of the G4 Cube.

* * * *

Shop for your new MacBook Pro with Intel's Core 2 Duo processor at PCPrices/Mac: Over 2 million Mac users served.