MacBook Air

At the time of this writing, the MacBook Air is not yet available in Malaysia. However I was lucky enough to have a friend show me (even though it was only for a short while) his new toy which he bought overseas. Hence this report isn't really a review but more of a first impression.

The box is very 'upmarket'. It's made from hard cardboard and the cover slips over the base - very much like an expensive chocolate box. Inside, the MacBook Air lies snuggly on a plastic cradle, which when lifted reveals the rest of the contents of the box.

There's the power adapter which is smaller than the normal MacBook's. There's also a Micro-DVI to DVI adapter, a Micro-DVI to VGA adapter and the restore CDs.

To be honest, when I held the MacBook Air for the first time it didn't seem as light as I had imagined it to be. But I guess I had allowed myself to be sucked into the 'Air' hype. What is truly impressive though is it's thinness. I was in awe that this slim piece of hardware is actually a computer!

Once opened, in terms of size and layout the MacBook Air looks very similar to the MacBook. The only obvious difference is the black keyboard.

The first thing I did was play around with the multi-touch trackpad in iPhoto. Zooming in and out of thumbnails was really fast - no difference when compared to zooming manually in my 2.2GHz MacBook Pro. Pinching/ expanding and rotating photos were also fun to do even though the rotating needs a little practice. And the three-finger swipe works just fine for scrolling through photos.

One of the biggest concerns about the MacBook Air is the slow 4200-rpm hard disk drive. Even though I didn't have the opportunity to seriously test this, like working in Photoshop or editing videos, video clips play quite smoothly.

The MacBook Air has only one (mono) speaker. This is bad news. But what's truly amazing is this speaker lies somewhere underneath the right side of the keyboard. It's totally unseen, i.e. there are no speaker grills. And the sound is pretty strong.

Finally, to test the Remote Disc feature I installed the Remote Disc software on my MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air easily detects the wireless disc on my MacBook Pro. Very quick and easy to set up.

Well, that's about all I can write considering the short time I had to play with it. Full reviews are available from lots of other sites on the 'Net.

In conclusion I agree with a lot of people that the MacBook Air is cool but expensive. It's definitely not value for money. The perfect target customer is probably a professional who's always on the move, surfing the 'Net at Starbucks and showing presentations to clients. Hmm...now I know why my wife has suddenly been hinting that her 12" Power Book feels too heavy.