Apple MacBook Air 13.3" Laptop (1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 64 GB Solid-State Drive)

by Apple

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 7.2 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0010OYRG8
• Item model number: Z0FS
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,324 in Computers & Accessories (See Top 100 in Computers & Accessories)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 15, 2008

Product Description

Capacity: 64 GB Solid State | Product Packaging: Amazon Frustration-Free

Product Features and Technical Details Product Features 1.8 Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4 MB shared L2 cache; Intel GMA X3100 video processor with 144 MB shared memory Thinnest, lightest MacBook ever includes multi-touch trackpad, built-in iSight webcam, and up to 5-hour battery life One USB 2.0, built-in Wi-Fi (802.11n draft plus 802.11b/g), Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, Micro-DVI video output with adapters Preloaded with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system and iLife '08 suite of applications 13.3-inch glossy LED-backlit screen; 64 GB solid-state hard drive; 2 GB of RAM (maximum capacity) Product Description Product Description With the MacBook Air, Apple has created the world's thinnest laptop--measuring an unprecedented 0.16-inches at its thinnest point (and 0.76 inches thick overall). Apple also introduces its vaunted multi-touch technology, found on the

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My best laptop ever, March 3, 2008

By 

Kenneth B. Strumpf (Manlius, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Apple MacBook Air 13.3" Laptop (1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 64 GB Solid-State Drive) (Personal Computers)

I've had my Macbook Air for over two weeks now and it continues to amaze me. I bought it to replace an almost 5 year old 17" Powerbook and the first thing that struck me was how light it felt on my lap. It's almost like it isn't even there. I bought the 64 gig SSD version and the second thing that struck me was how cool the computer felt. Literally. My Powerbook would become uncomfortably hot after a while but the MBA remains cool the whole time I use it. This may be a function of the SSD not having any moving parts but it certainly is welcome, especially for prolonged web-browsing on the couch.

Several other things make this my best laptop. First, it wakes up in a snap when I open the lid, although it does take a few seconds to find the wireless network. As others have mentioned, the screen is bright and absolutely gorgeous. I was a little nervous about these 52 year old eyes reading on the small screen but no problem at all so far. Watching downloaded movies and TV shows is a pleasure. The computer is plenty powerful for my needs. I use a laptop for web-surfing, watching videos, Office type applications and making presentations and the MBA is just fine for this. I have an Imac for heavier duty applications like Photoshop and video creation.

Last week I flew with my MBA on commuter planes, the ultimate test for any laptop. It was great replacing my heavy Powerbook with something so light and easy to handle. I didn't do any work on the plane (I find it hard to work while flying) but I did watch videos and the computer opened up sufficiently to allow me to enjoy what I was watching. Plus it was easy to store under the seat for takeoff and landing. And as an added benefit, two flight attendants came up to me to ogle my MBA and chat with me. That never happened when I had a Dell!

I bought the external DVD drive and used it to load some software. The lack of a built-in drive is no issue for me. Neither is the port "shortage". I've never had more than one USB device hooked up to a laptop at a time anyway and I don't need Firewire. So Apple's compromise is no compromise at all for me.

So if your needs are like mine I'd urge you to strongly consider the MBA. It's pricey in my configuration- although I did get the 10% education discount available through Apple- but if you plan to keep it for years like I do it's less of an issue. It's light, stylish, highly functional and fun to use. What more can you ask for?

81 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Both wonderful and terrible and highly dependent on your requirements., April 3, 2008

By 

Adam Dachis "adachis" (Pasadena, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Apple MacBook Air 13.3" Laptop (1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 64 GB Solid-State Drive) (Personal Computers)

This is a very in-depth review, so if you want to get to the point I suggest skipping to the last paragraph.

I might not have much to say that hasn't already been said several times over, but I wanted to give my take on this laptop as it's can be a difficult choice to make and perhaps I can be of some help. When the Air was released I thought it was the height of frivolity for Apple, but I've since come to understand it better. I spent eight days getting to know it in the standard 1.8Ghz/64GB SSD configuration and I'm still wavering on whether or not I want to keep it. I'm writing this review on a MacBook Pro that has been configured to be almost the exact opposite of what you'd get with the Air. When I bought the Air I wanted to see if I could handle such immense limitations, being so used to the freedom of maxed out laptops and desktops. As I'm writing this, the answer is "kind of."

The MacBook Air, in my opinion, is ridiculously expensive. It's also ridiculously cool, especially when it's closed. In fact, every time I found something I didn't like and soon closed it to let it sleep, I had difficulty hating the thing because it's just so cool when it collapses to be a thin sheet of metal. Every little nuance of the outer design is elegant and perfect--visually, that is. There are a some hardware flaws that may or may not upset the user, and one that, in my opinion, throws the machine's worth into question. Let's deal with that first.

As someone who thought he used several USB devices, I found that I really do not. I might use two at a time, namely when importing footage from a video camera into the computer and saving it to an external hard drive. An important thing to note is that while the Air is certainly not made for video editing, it manages nonetheless. It can be done and it's not as horrible as one would imagine. Having one USB port also works just fine in pretty much every other case. I did get a tiny hub to use with the Air, but as it's tiny it's not a nuisance to carry and generally doesn't get carried around anyhow. If I'm editing, I'll usually edit at a home (not mine, as I'd use a desktop machine at home). Although it can get by, I would never recommend the air as a video editing machine. This probably goes without saying. Still, it's good to know that it can if it has to (even with Final Cut Studio's lack of support for it's integrated graphics processor).

Many people conclude that the Air is impractical as the machine does not have an optical drive. If you live by CDs and/or DVDs, then yes, it probably isn't practical for you. I never use my optical drive in my MacBook Pro. If I want to watch a movie, I rip it first. Most people do the same with their music so I don't think it's fair to cite this as a reason you'd need an optical drive. This does assume, of course, that you have another machine with an optical drive. If you don't and you want the Air as a primary machine then you will absolutely need to purchase the optional Super Drive Apple offers. You might think of going with a cheaper drive, such as the ones Lacie makes (which are good), but I wouldn't as even the Air, with it's added USB power, cannot power them. The one Apple offers doesn't cost much more and is worth it if you have no other machine. But if you do and you don't want to travel around with a drive (like me), there's another nice solution that I found worked very well. I bought a few 8GB flash drives, which are comparable to the speed of a DVD (if not faster) and hardly cost anything these days. I loaded the MacBook Air's installation media on one drive and made it bootable so I could restore the operating system or boot from the media while traveling should the need arise. I used one drive to hold a few movies I wanted to watch and another for any vital software I would need to install should I need to ever wipe the Air's drive while traveling. I bought four 8GB drives but only used three to do all of this. For less than the size of three fingers you can easily prepare for the worst and bring along some entertainment. If you want to bring along several more movies and music, an iPod is a good choice. You can always hook it up to the Air and play the movies/music through the machine.

I wanted to save it for last, but it makes sense to address the biggest flaw of the machine now. As I've said, this is not a video machine. It can be a video machine under very specific circumstances, but it is not, apparently, designed for use with any video at all whatsoever. I say this because of how the Air handles heat. The graphics processor (GPU) warms up rather quickly, even if you're just browsing the web. Watching video on the Internet, or even on your hard drive (perhaps something you downloaded from iTunes, generates quite a bit of heat. When the machine grows too hot, the first thing it does is underclock the GPU. Imagine watching a movie at about 1 or 2 frames per second. This is what you can expect when the Air gets too hot. If this wasn't the case, I wouldn't be so conflicted over the machine. I can let go of doing any heavy media work with it, but I can't let go of being able to watch a TV show without it skipping. You can work around this terrible design flaw by giving the air vent plenty of room to breathe. What I did is put the sleeve I purchased under the Air and then rested most of the air on it. I let the back section, with the air vent, hang off the edge so it had space to vent. This worked perfectly when the Air wasn't hooked up to external power. When it was, it became a problem. It was an issue on an airplane, though, and the short power available on the flight may have been feeding more power into the Air than it should have. The Air exhibited some strange behavior when plugged into the power port on the airplane, rendering the trackpad pretty much useless. The Air seemed to hold up just fine, when it had breathing room, when plugged into a normal outlet. Nonetheless, this trick is annoying and is even required when the Air is on a desk or table (though you'd get through a sitcom without any trouble if it's on a desk). The computer should be able to play back an MPEG4 or H.264 file without skipping, throughout the duration, without special treatment. If you have no interest in doing anything with video, watching or otherwise, this won't be a problem for you. I just can't imagine anyone using their laptop these days without watching some sort of video online or on their machine. I see this as an enormous drawback and will be the main reason I return the machine, if I decide to do so (and it is what I'm leaning towards).

But moving on...

Perhaps disk space is a drawback? I thought it would be for me, but I found that I only used about 25GB once I loaded on everything I felt I needed, including my entire music collection (which is only about 9GB and not the norm, I'll admit) and photo library. I also loaded about 3GB of e-mail, Final Cut Pro, Final Draft, Adobe CS3 (without Illustrator and InDesign), Episode, VisualHub, and several other pieces of software. I installed almost every piece of software I have on my MacBook Pro and left off the things I've either never used or used so rarely I forgot I had them. I didn't miss a single thing. I certainly use the majority of my MacBook Pro's 250GB disk and have so much data on external drives, at home, that it would scare you (I never throw anything away), but in terms of what you actually use I'd bet you'll find you can fit it on a 64GB or 80GB drive very easily. You did a few years ago, right? Perhaps you're still doing it. Either way, there's an easy solution. Buy an external hard drive. Some might argue that this is sort of counter-intuitive as the point of the air is to be pretty much non-existent. Adding things goes against that mantra. Well, yes, but again you can leave this drive at home or where you're staying. When you're walking around with the Air you don't need it. When you go back to your hotel, your friend's house, or wherever you're staying, you can pull it out of your other bag (the one you used for clothing, etc.). If you're at home, well, then you certainly have somewhere to put it. Rarely will you have to take it with you and it's not like it's that big if you do. I have a couple of Western Digital 250GB Passport drives (in black, if you're wondering) and they're great. I don't see drive space as a drawback at all. It's a problem easily solved.

There may be questions for some if the SSD is faster than a standard hard drive. For random tasks, yes, very much. OS X is good with caching common tasks, such as launching applications you use often, so while application performance is definitely faster via SSD the crappy little 1.8" iPod hard drive the standard model has will not slow you down too much once the Air gets to know your habits. Startup isn't as instant as everyone says, but you can immediately use the machine after startup. I'd much rather have an SSD over a hard drive as the speed increase is very noticeable, but my main draw to the SSD version of the Air was for data security. It's just less likely to die and that is very appealing to me.

Speaking of death, battery life is what you'd expect from an Apple Laptop. In fact, I might call it both better and worse. During my tests, I went to a coffee shop to write for a few hours. I left with about 30 minutes left on the battery, having used it for two and a half hours (give or take ten minutes). I wasn't playing music, browsing the web, or anything at all. I had the wireless off. The only issue is that I was in direct sunlight and countered it with the display at full brightness (which is completely and wonderfully visible). For a battery rated for five hours under wireless use with the screen not... Read more ›

31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Macbook Air defines "laptop", February 19, 2008

By 

C. Ohashi (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Apple MacBook Air 13.3" Laptop (1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 64 GB Solid-State Drive) (Personal Computers)

Let's start with the negatives.

This laptop is not for everyone.

Obligatory Disclaimer to the savvy consumer: this laptop is a don't buy. First of all, it's a first generation product. NEVER buy a first generation product. The only people who should buy this laptop are the people who can shrug if they lose the thing.

* There are limited ports. In fact, there's only one.
* The battery is not replaceable.
* There is no integrated Wi-Max.
* The battery life is on par with current generation Apple laptops.
* It's "underpowered" in this generation of overpowered desktop-replacements.

Consumers who worry about the above, but still want to run a variation of OS X may purchase this: Apple MacBook MB063LL/B 13.3" Laptop (2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, 8x Super Drive) Black Or this:Apple MacBook Pro MA896LL/A 15" Laptop (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD SuperDrive).

Or simply get the Thinkpad X300 and run it on a last generation OS.

But I gave this 5 stars, why?

* It's beautiful.
* The build is solid.
* I can carry it in one hand with no effort.

And here's the thing about the lack of ports.

* Peripherals will eventually all be wireless.

Bluetooth peripherals are already in the marketplace (obviously where Apple hedges its bets on). Products like Eye-Fi Card, Wireless 2 GB SD Memory Card will become the norm. Laser Printers can be run on wireless networks.

And why pay $1000 more for a lower memory Drive?

If you can't afford it, then don't! But consider this in two years:

* SSD will be the standard for all future laptops.

This price will definitely go down in future renditions of the laptop and will no doubt be the standard in 2 - 3 years. Not only will the price fall, but the speed and quality will undoubtedly increase too.

I've had every laptop hard drive fail on me throughout the past 5 years. No more. The reason why the military invests in SSD is in their stability. I "needed" stability in my laptop HDs, and I "wanted" it now.

This laptop is ahead of its time. People shouldn't kid themselves. It's the equivalent of having the option to own either a Ferrari or a Toyota pickup (Apple apparently recommends both i.e. wireless CD access). They accomplish the same thing, but the former's capacity is limited by legal speed limits. Not only that, the former is vastly expensive to maintain and has limited applicability.

Both is better, but if you had to choose?

This laptop is the same thing. And I love it.

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