Apple MacBook Air Fall 2010 Review

Apple makes the MacBook Air both smaller and less expensive, creating an excellent ultraportable, but leaving out a few features along the way. Find out if it lives up to all the hype in our Product Spotlight

Apple MacBook Air Fall 2010 Review Dan Ackerman: I'm Dan Ackerman and as Apple's new 11-inch MacBook Air is one of the snazziest, most popular laptops for the holiday season, we're going to shine it under the harsh glare of the Product Spotlight. Now, 11-inch laptops have really become very popular in the latter half of 2010. Originally, they were all sorts of 10-inch Intel Atom netbooks, kind of low-power, low-cost systems but now you have 11-inch laptops with dual core ultra-low voltage CPUs that are nearly as powerful or nearly as full featured as regular 14-, 15-inch or even larger laptops. Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air is the latest version of that super thin series from Apple. If you remember the original MacBook Air, it was not rightful itself for only having one USB port. The new version actually doubles that to two. You're still missing basics like an SD card slot on the 11-inch version. There's actually an SD card slot on the 13-inch version of the MacBook Air now. In the 11-inch MacBook Air, you get an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and Nvidia's basic 320 graphics that's actually very similar to what you'd find in the basic $999.00 white MacBook, although this is a low voltage version of that processor. What you do get, however, is pretty decent graphics for not truly discrete graphics and enough processing power to do basic tasks like word processing, web surfing, and streaming video, and pretty much what you'd want to do with your laptop 99% of the time. One of the most interesting things about this new MacBook Air is this is the first MacBook with a 16 X 9 display which is pretty much what you'd find in any other type of laptop. It's a 1366 X 768 display. Actually the 13-inch MacBook Air along with the other MacBooks still has 16 X 10 displays. If this looks very familiar, that's because it's got the same flat key widely spaced keyboard that you see on other MacBooks along with the same large, multitouch trackpad. It's almost as big as the ones on the 13-inch MacBooks and, of course, it's got all those cool multitouch features like using the four-finger swipe here to get to all your windows. Pretty much no PC laptop has a touchpad that is as intuitive and works as smoothly with multitouch gestures. Of course, one of the reasons you really want to get a MacBook Air is because they're so slim and so sleek. This guy is about 0.68 inches thick in the back, about 0.11 inches in the front and when you open it up, it wakes up from the sleep state very quickly. In fact, it even turns on from a full stop almost as fast. If you're thinking that this new smaller screen size makes it look a little bit like an iPad just with a keyboard attached, well that actually makes sense. Apple is taking some of that iOS development and moving it into the MacBook line. In the case of the new MacBook Airs, you can actually close the lid, it will go into a super low power standby state and you can leave it for up 30 days without fully draining the battery. I'm Dan Ackerman and that's the new 11-inch MacBook Air.