The MacBook Air inaugurates a new generation of touchpad, inspired by the iPhone, the first movable telephone of Apple. It is wider, a traditional touchpad. With three fingers, you can use the navigator Safari... but not with Firefox. Most of these small functionalities do not radically transform the user experience, but are part of the charm of the Apple products.

Connections

The three connectors proposed by the MacBook Air are located on left side, sheltered by a small trap door that, once opened, leaves only little space to reach them. Concretely, if your connector is thick, or if you use a wide USB key, you will not be able to connect them directly. In order to remedy the problem, Apple suggests suing an extension. These are rather inexpensive, but one is now obliged to multiply the cables, which somewhat diminishes the ultra portable aspect of the machine.

WiFi but no DVD

The absence of DVD reader is voluntary (there is not enough thickness anyway). Apple's marketing states that at a time where wires are going away, is it still necessary to have a DVD reader? Apple plays the network card, with an application compatible with Mac as well as Windows XP and Windows Vista that allows DAV and CD use wirelessly. The reader of your principal machine will be able therefore you to serve to install applications, transfer contents towards the MacBook Air and even resettle your operating system but it may take 5 to 10 times longer than using a DVD reader. If that is a major issue you will have to buy an external $99 USB 2.0 based DVD reader.

Speed

Powered by a processor Core 2 rhythmical Duets to 1.6 GHz, engraved in 65 nanometers, the MacBook Air is not a speed demon, and is slower than the other Apple laptops. The choice of Apple is therefore supposed to guarantee a level of acceptable performances for light and medium users.

If you are ready to spend more the MacBook Air comes with a more powerful processor posting a frequency of 1.8 GHz but also and especially of a hard disc to memory Flash of type SSD of 64 Go, similar to the one that integrates in standard Lenovo in his Thinkpad X300. To take advantage of these two improvements, it will be necessary nevertheless to pay out a supplement of some $1,300, which will carry the final price of the MacBook Air to about $3,098.

Performance

Certain applications extremely resource intensive work clearly slowly on the MacBook Air, due to its 1.6 GHz processor. In other words the manipulation of pictures of big size under Photoshop or video editing will put your patience to a certain test.

On the other hand, the manipulation of photos or video sequences by means of iMovie will work without difficulties, and without any notable discomfort. The interface preserves the fluidity that you can expect of Leopard in spite of the poor performances of its processor. The Web navigation, office, music and video use do not suffer from any problem. As for games, let's keep it simple, just choose a different laptop.

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