Last week we were invited by Apple India to try our hands on the new Macbook Air that has been selling for over a month in the United States and has recently gone on sale in India. Apple’s smaller Macbook had been rumored for quite some time but after playing with, we can safely say Apple’s 11-inch Macbook Air (MBA) is one fully blown computer in a very compact chassis.
The first thing to strike about the new MBAs is its size. It’s ridiculously thin, small and light. Apple engineers have crammed the latest hardware components in Macbook Air’s unibody aluminum enclosure. The unibody enclosure is similar to what we see in high-end Macbooks but the Macbook Air has also managed to carve the display from the same sheet, making it more durable.
Apple says the new Macbook Air is a culmination of what they learned while making the iPad and one thing they’ve adopted from the tablet is its flash storage. The new MBAs do not have a HDD but a NAND flash storage, which allows Apple to further shrink the notebook’s size and also offer improved performance as compared to a mechanical hard drive.
Other notable things we found are a large multi-touch glass trackpad and a full-size keyboard. Both work as intended but one (passable) gripe with the keyboard is that it does not have a keyboard backlight.
As for the performance, the 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM supported the base MBA model well. It managed to load up content quickly with less — or most of the times with no — waiting time. Apple says the smaller MBA can run for about 5 hours on a single charge but we think it’s pretty subjective considering the usage pattern is different from user to user.
The 11-inch Macbook Air starts from Rs.60,900 whereas the larger 13-inch Macbook Air starts from Rs.79,900.
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