apple macbook air charger 13 inch mid 2011

Seriously, the rigidity of the hinge is downright impressive. (Sadly, those black MacBook Air rumors didn’t pan out this time around - next time, perhaps.) In comparison to Sony’s flimsy screen panel, Apple’s is like a brick wall.

And while the all-black Sony VAIO Z might appeal to some more than the Air’s grayish aluminum, the Air’s metal build certainly feels more rigid than the VAIO’s carbon fiber case and floppy screen. The aluminum unibody construction has proved to be incredibly sturdy and the minimalist aesthetic is really unmatched there’s a reason companies like Dell and HP have moved over to building their laptops out of similar materials and cut the glossy plastics. The new 13-inch MacBook Air doesn’t look any different than its predecessor, but I don’t think anyone is going to complain - I certainly won’t. Read on after the break for my full review.

Yes, it physically looks the same and those may seem like just minor spec updates, but the additions change a heck of a lot more than you’d think. And it boots Apple’s brand new Mac OS X Lion (10.7), which we’ve already deemed pretty great. The Air is now stuffed with a fresh dual-core Core i5 processor (there’s an i7 option too), a glowing keyboard, and a new Thunderbolt port.

Which brings us to Apple’s 2011 version of the 13-inch MacBook Air and this review. And in a tragic oversight, the keyboard wasn’t backlit. If you didn’t need an optical drive, it had almost about everything it needed to be both a no-compromise ultraportable and a primary computer, but the older processors still didn’t offer quite enough performance to do the job. The second Air (or heir!) was priced significantly less at $1,299 ($999 for the 11-inch version), included some speedy solid state drives, and mended some of those port issues. If I think back, they were actually pretty rare to see out and about, and when I would spot one, I can remember thinking “that guy must have a nice car, too.”īut then came the major revision (the original Air got a slight spec bump in 2008, but it didn’t change much). For most, the sacrifices were just too many to justify for the high price. Sure, it was a functional laptop that could glide into a manila envelope, but the $1,799 laptop was, by and large, a secondary machine - it trailed behind other ultraportables in performance, lacked some essential ports (it only had one USB port and there was no SD card slot), and packed a small and slow hard drive. The original MacBook Air was more of a status symbol than a computer.

Apple macbook air charger 13 inch mid 2011