Customer Reviews

MacBook Air Portable Genius

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If you've used any kind of MacBook, you probably won't learn anything from this book that previous experience, the Help menu, and intuition already know. But if you'd like the security of a book devoted to the MacBook Air (my personal favorite of all Apple's products, with the possible exception of the iPod Touch 4th generation), it's important not to error in matching your Air with the appropriate book.

Any book published before August 2011 is NOT going to address any of the changes (admittedly minor) that have been made to the hardware as well as the OS (now Lion) of both Airs (11" and 13") that were released for the first time in late July of 2011.

Any book published before November of 2010 will NOT address the specific changes Apple made to the machine released during October 2010 (when the company first supplemented the 13" with an 11" model).

Books published before November 2010 will deal only with the 1st generation 13" Air (we're now at Generation 3), and they also should explain some subtle but crucial differences between the conventional hard drive model and the solid state model (in October 2010 Apple went exclusively to solid state machines in their Air line). Some experts and even certified technicians will tell you that a first generation Air with a broken hinge (caused by a defective design) cannot be repaired. Untrue. (But you may need to consult a number of repair services and be prepared to pay a price approaching the original cost of a new machine.)

The pictured book, incidentally, deals with the 2nd generation 13" model and the 1st generation 11" model, but it was published before the current versions of either Macbook Air. Its audience is necessarily directed at those consumers who acted within the 9-month time window when the previous generation of Airs (without Lion) were being sold.