The look of the MacBook Air is dominated by its ultra-thin design. A bottom trough flattened at the edges even intensifies this slim look. We liked the simple white appearance without ornaments from the very beginning. The whole notebook seems like being milled out of a  single piece of aluminium. Overall it sets optical standards. Our team agreed on that the MacBook Air is simple beautiful and even more desirable in reality.

The workmanship of the MacBook Air is typical Apple, excellent. The used aluminium felt high-quality to the touch. Furthermore, there aren't any visible weaknesses of workmanship like uneven gaps. The pressure resistance of the bottom trough is due to being made of a massive aluminium part very good - nothing yields. The lid is, because of its low height, e.g., compared to the thicker MacBook Pro's lid, not that flexural rigid. Nevertheless the flexural rigidity of the lid is very good and the aluminium seems to properly protect the sensible display. Even the small aluminium cover, which hides 3 ports, appears to be durable and of high-quality.

The nice-looking display hinge can be easily and precisely moved and appears to be relatively durable. Unfortunately the used mechanism limits the maximum opening angle. A property all current MacBooks have in common. If you work with this notebook on your lap this is actually annoying. If closed the lid is locked by a magnetic mechanism. However, the lock is not very strong, so, you should take care when carrying this notebook. Due to a fine plastic border strip the MacBook Air closes tightly and evenly.

To summarize, Apple sets once again (especially regarding this notebook category) standards regarding design and workmanship.

As a trade-off for the slim design the provided interfaces were decreased. The MacBook Air is only equipped with the most necessary ports: Power connector, mini-DVI (including adapter for VGA and DVI), one USB 2.0, and an analogue audio out (for headphones). Further important ports like LAN and microphone port are missing. Nevertheless this styled notebook is still fit for telecommunication, because there are two built-in microphones, one of them right, the other one left beside the built-in iSight web cam. Compared to the MacBook Pro's camera, the picture quality of this camera is rather moderate. The main reason is its lower resolution. Nonetheless, video telephoning was possible without problems.

Because there aren't many interfaces provided, it is even worse that the MacBook Air isn't equipped with a docking port.

The improved MagSafe power plug is better than its predecessor's, which could be easily loosened unintentionally.

The equipment with wireless interfaces is good. 802.11 Draft-n WLAN, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR+, and a unidirectional infrared port for IR remote control called Appleremote leave hardly anything to be desired (besides maybe a bidirectional IR port).

During our review the optional USB super drive played a DVD back without problems, whereas it stayed rather quiet.  Connecting a burner occupies the only available USB interface - in our test the drive did not work when attached to a USB HUB. These are definitely bad news for fans of DVDs. For standard use an optical drive is no longer that important, so, this was not an overall restriction. Furthermore, Apple provides a tool called "Remote Disk", which makes it possible to use a DVD drive of another computer (PC or MAC) via WLAN (or via optional USB LAN adapter).

Besides being poorly equipped with interfaces, it is also difficult to upgrade the MacBook Air. The available 2 GB RAM are directly soldered onto the mainboard. So, it cannot be exchanged without problems. The same is true for the battery. Both problems are due to trade-off for the benefit of slimness.

Following accessories are provided: an adapter from mini-DVI to DVI and VGA, installations CDs, user guides, and a microfibre cloth.

A special feature of this notebook is its full-size keyboard with 1.5 cm x 1.5 cm keys. The keyboard looks  similar to the MacBook keyboard and is flawless in use. We even felt that typing is more user-friendly than with the keyboard of the bigger MacBook Pro. Only the cursor keys are slightly rubbery and small (0.7 cm height). The imprints follow the new Apple concept, whereas 'cmd' is used instead of 'Apple' and special functions of the function keys are highlighted - The MacBook Air does not offer any special functions. Once again, a point of critique is that the braces and brackets are not imprinted (Alt + 5/6 respectively Alt + 7/8). This is very annoying for software developers who come from the Microsoft Windows world.

Under Windows we recognized heavily fluctuating results of the 3DMark06 benchmark (539, 513, 465, 540, 471, 510 points). Similar results can be observed for the PCMark test. The results of consecutive runs differed a lot (2752 and 2658 points). Therefore, we assume that the CPU is automatically clocked down, if it gets too hot (thermal throtteling). Tools like CPU-Z did not display changing clock rates, but, the Intel's TAT tool discovered that the clock rate was decreased down to 800 MHz. A temperature of up to 80°C at the CPU would also support this theory. Under MacOs X the benchmark results did not fluctuate that much (Cinebench R10- Multiple CPU: 2412, 2644, 2781, 2768, 2756 points).

The small 1.8" hard disk, the same than used in the iPod-Classic, turned out to be the major bottle neck of this system. However, the optionally available flash drive could help. However, the surcharge of 900 Euro at the time of writing for 64GB is quiet high.

To summarize, the performance of this styled notebook is sufficient for office applications, Internet, and other kinds of work. The optionally 1.8 GHz processor does not really change the performance characteristics of this notebook. So, it is only reasonable in special cases.

Temperature

After a longer time of continuous load we measured a maximum temperature of 42.5°C at the left back corner of the aluminium case. Especially the temperature of the bottom side, which ranges from 30 to 42°C gets soon slightly uncomfortable, if you work at the top of your lap. The temperature of the left palm rest area also increases to up to 36°C. Because most users won't run the notebook under full load most of the time, this value is not overall important.

Without or with low load (which is frequent in practice) the bottom and the top side of the notebook stay perceptibly cool. So, it is user-friendly regarding this aspect.

The battery runtime of about 1,5 - 5,5 h is alright, considering the small 37 Wh  battery. A practice near test, i.e., browsing the Internet via WLAN with maximum brightness of the display resulted in a runtime of nearly two and a half hours.
However, the biggest disadvantage of this small lithium polymer battery, which needs nearly two third of the available space of the MacBook Air, is that it cannot be changed by the user. In addition charging the battery takes due to the small 45 Watt power supply unit up to 5 hours.