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| Brand: Apple
Category: Personal Computer
List Price: $1,799.00
Buy New: $1,739.99
You Save: $59.01 (3%)
New (5) from $1,739.99
Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 33
Media: Personal Computers
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Operating System: Apple MacOS X 10.5
CPU Manufacturer: Intel
CPU Speed: 1.6
CPU Type: Intel Core Duo
Processors: 1
System Bus Speed: 800
System Memory: 2000
Memory Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Hard Drive Size: 80
Floppy Disk Drive: None
Native Resolution: 13.3
Modem: None
Display Size: 13.3
Size: 80 GB ATA Hard Drive
Shipping Weight (lbs): 8.2
Dimensions (in): 16.5 x 12.6 x 5.1
Warranty: 1 year warranty
MPN: MB003LL/A
Model: MB003LL/A
UPC: 885909166312
EAN: 0885909166312
ASIN: B0006HU4DK
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Super laptop, if you are looking for a true portable, not sole computer March 11, 2008
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
Let me start with a simple disclaimer, first I worked for Apple (a long time ago) for 11 years, I also worked for Microsoft for 6 years and I'm pretty comfortable in both camps but I truly love Apple for it's design and combined hardware/software implementations. I go through laptops pretty frequently and have owned UMPC's and full heavyweight desktop replacements. Having said all that, I think the MacBook Air is a home run IF you fit the right profile. The profile is that you want a device that you can carry around easily every day from meeting to meeting, home to work, travel, etc. This is not the laptop for your sole machine, instead it's truly the best device I've every owned for taking notes, staying on top of email, doing some on the fly spreadsheet or database creation, watch ripped or downloaded movies, and generally working through a "normal" business day. If you're looking for a game machine, power photo processing or video processing laptop, or 1 PC to suit all your needs this isn't the right product. But for me, it's close to 100% perfect, the battery life is good enough to get me through more than a couple of meetings, I can watch a movie that I rented on iTunes or ripped on a flight, I can easily do all my email on a week long trip, and basically take the machine with me wherever I go without a big penalty in weight or size. The display is super, the keyboard is wonderful, and I'm personally fine with not having a user replaceable battery. Bottom line is that, if you are clear about what you need, and understand the trade off's, the MacBook Air is a winner of a portable device.
Fantastic little laptop!!! March 4, 2008
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
I have had this little miracle for a couple of weeks and I absolutely love it, in fact I take it with me anywhere I go. Alot fo people are negative about this product because of it's lack of a DVD drive and an ethernet port, I very very rarely use them so it fits me just fine. You should note that the Air was not intended as an all in one computing solution but as an extension of your system. An iMac and Macbook Air would fit perfectely together for around the price of the MacBook Pro.
The fit and finish is spectacular, it feels light yet solid. Other laptops in this weight range feel flimsy, none of that here.
Performance is much better than i had anticipated, the 2GB of ram really do make a diference. It does suffer with very very high resolution 1080P videos but other than that it's pretty snappy. Much more so than any other portable in its range.
I would recomened you stick to this configuration, the higher processor is not worth the extra 300 USD and the SSD drive is definately not worth an extra 1K!!!
What are you waiting for? add the damn thing to your cart already!!!
Macbook Air, despite issues, if you buy it you will love it! March 1, 2008
20 out of 26 found this review helpful
I purchased a 1.6Ghz 80GB HDD based MacBook Air about 2 weeks ago. Honestly I was not sure that I would keep the device but I had to review it for myself based on some not so positive reviews and the fact that I own a large amount of Apple stock and have been concerned about the recent drop in the stock price.
My business is to help companies make better products with better overall strategic plans and I have learned from past experience that many "professional" reviewers really don't get it. Often they write great reviews for terrible products and while not as often they also write terrible reviews for great products. In a past life I directly managed the widely successful Iomega Zip drive so I speak from a level of experience on this issue. In short it was easily worth a 10% restocking fee to me to find out what I thought the real truth is.
In my acuitize consulting business we have found that after extensive direct in person customer interviews working with a wide variety of companies with an even wider variety of products that customers really care about only a few key items for each of the products or services they buy. We call these items the "defining parameters" of any true 10X product or service. While there are lots of items that must be accomplished well for a true 10X product we find that there are only 3-5 things that must be done to perfection to achieve 10x success.
So what do I now believe?
The quickest answer is that within an hour of my first use there was no way that I was taking the system back. Words cannot do justice to the sheer brilliance of the industrial design of this product. It simply "feels" great when you use it and it is so thin and light you become worried that you forgot it on a business trip. The screen is simply brilliant and far better that any screen I have ever seen on any other laptop I have used or seen to date. The keyboard, while I am probably the world's worst typist, also "feels" great when you use it. I have found myself using the system all over my house at all times of day due to the wonderful backlight keyboard & display (& size). I'd rather go without paying my heat bill than taking back the air!
The Good
- The industrial design and size/weight.
- The screen
- The keyboard
- The overall feeling of a supremely engineered product
- It's a Mac and it comes with Leopard and iLife 08
- The tradeoffs they made to fit the size/weight requirements are fine with me and largely non-issues (& my issues can be fixed)
- If you buy it you will love it (ps - I am not connected with Apple in any way)
Interestingly while I have a number of issues with the product I think they could all be easily fixed into the future making the "Air" a true 10x product. By the way I think you will find my "issues" are largely different from what most reviewers write as the issues.
My issues;
#1 - The price is simply way too high for wild market acceptance
While I would love to do the research to determine the real price points required can you imagine the sales of this product if it were a $499 product ramping up to a $999 product as opposed to the $2K-$3K product it is today? High volumes will lower manufacturing costs that should allow Apple to do this in the future (an inherently this system should be cheaper to build anyway). By the way for me the dramatically increased price and lower storage capacity make the solid-state storage option a non-factor for me (I continue to be amazed at what appears to be close to a 50/50 sales mix of the solid-state option to the HDD based option). Give me a 128GB solid sate drive at a $500 or lower cost and then I will be interested. Up until then, and speaking as a shareholder rather than a user, I love the mix of sales of the higher end system.
#2 - Migration and Syncing is a disaster
This one amazes me and one I think is a huge disappointment especially from a company like Apple that seems to think this stuff out ahead of time. It is based on the premise that the vast majority of MacBook air buyers (especially at the current prices) already will own another "main" Mac. Migration assistant needs to be greatly modified to enable simply and easily dealing with moving only your critical stuff to the air to fit in the limited space available (now it's an all or nothing approach). Migrating your stuff from another Mac is an enormous pain and waste of time. Interestingly I think they completely solved a parallel issue to this in the removal of the optical disk drive by enabling remote drive access. I did buy a $99 superdrive but after 2 weeks it's still in the plastic wrapped box and I doubt I will ever use it.
On a similar issue an what presents a much larger ongoing problem is synching between the air and your "main" Mac. It is simply a pain to try and keep my Air and iMac synched with the same critical stuff. From the examples that Apple already set with the iPod and AppleTV with "great" synching capabilities it amazes me they dropped the ball on this feature for the Air. Apple representatives have told me to use .Mac but I find this an unacceptable answer. My #1 software priority would be a great wireless simple software synching functionality as per AppleTV and the iPod.
Interesting what was my largest pre-purchase factor was the smallish 80GB hard drive (I really wished it was 120 or 160GB at least). Now I have found that after a painful couple of days of moving my critical stuff that 80GB is in fact fine for me - just make it easy for me to move my stuff on and off of it.
#3 - I hate the dongle for video presentations (I am afraid I will lose it or leave it behind)
I assume that a lot of traveling professionals are like me and need from time to time to connect the air to an external projector. While to Apple's credit they do provide the cable as standard I hat the dongle idea. I think this could be solved by simply shipping the air with a neat internal and inexpensive protective case-in-a-case that can go in your laptop bag that has a standard place for the power adapter and dongles. On a similar not the low cost remote should have also been included primarily for remote presentations if not for watching movies (at $2K or $3K leaving a $2 cost remote out was a extremely poor strategic decision.).
My bottom line is that, even with these shortcomings, if you can afford it buy the "Air" you will love it!
The best Apple has yet to offer February 27, 2008
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
Is it a compromise? Well I guess for those who don't mind carrying around a 6 lb portable with all the bells and whistles or an ultraportable with slow processor, small keyboard but with more ports, I guess the MBA is.
Where there is no compromise is in the speed, full sized keyboard, screen clarity and battery life. With the 64 Gig SSD and 1.8 GHZ 4MB cache processor the speed is the fastest in its class. While the X300 is the computer that everyone loves to bash the MBA with, I will take the speed of the MBA over the DVD on the X300 anytime. Plus, it can run both VISTA/XP and OSX. So it is a better Vista computer and ALSO a MAC. OH and one more thing compared to the X300-you can actually buy an MBA NOW, it has been available for close to a month, while the X300 just got posted on there site and there is a more than (TYPICAL of Lenovo) 4 week ship time-usually in Lenovo jargon that means wait a few months. It is amazing that Apple used to be the king of announce and wait has now become the company whose products are available (in most cases) on the day or within days of announcement.
My only real complaint is length of time it takes to charge. Mine is taking about 4 hours. Hopefully there will be a firmware fix for that.
The keyboard is the best in class, bar NONE, not even the X series by Lenovo. The screen is bright and crisp. Load times for Vista is the quickest I have seen (probably because of the SSD).
I have heard complaints that there is no built in 3G or EVDO, but in my opinion, that is a waste. Why would anyone want that built in unless that is their only computer?? As a person who has more than one laptop and computer, I much rather have a USB 3G or EVDO. The new Verizon 720 works with the MBA perfectly and has a MicroSDHC slot-for $68 I got the new SanDisk 8 GIG MicroSDHC which works great.
Worth every penny - and the wait February 27, 2008
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
***UPDATE***
I originally purchased the MBA for home - however, due to it's weight and portability - it quickly replaced my work laptop - which was a Dell.
I have Office 2008 for Mac installed, use a Cisco VPN, and Firefox 3 (for .tiff files and some others that Safari didn't work with) When mobile, I am using a Sprint broadband wireless USB card when I am not using WiFi - and the MBA screams when it comes to running Oracle 11i.
So far, I haven't found anything that makes me miss my Dell.
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I purchased a custom configured MBA - I ordered it with the 1.8 Ghz processor and the 80 GB HDD.
So far, I have to say I love this machine!
As some have mentioned - I thought I would miss certain devices - like an Optical drive (CD / DVD) or an Ethernet port - but so far I haven't missed either one!
I get about 3.5 hours to 5 hours out of each charge - and I have the power settings on 'performance' - which is as high as it gets - I imagine if I dialed it back to 'energy saving' I could get more. My Dell only lasted about 2.5 hours - so I know where all the outlets are in airports / airplanes / lounges when I am on the road. It is nice to only have to charge half as much!!
I am using my MBA in conjunction with a wireless network at my house. The remote disk feature worked seamlessly when I installed software from the SuperDrive on my Mac Mini via WiFi to my MBA. In addition, I installed the remote disk software on my Dell, just to see if I could watch a movie - and I could! (Remote disk allows a user to watch movies the user has created, and install software remotely - however, it doesn't allow a user to watch a commercial DVD remotely)
I thought the MBA would be fairly slow with larger programs such as PhotoShop - surprisingly enough it works just fine!
I am keeping all of the bookmarks, preferences, address books, mail accounts, etc synced between my Mac Mini, MBA, and iPod Touch using my .Mac account.
Any files I want to use between the devices, I use via 'Sharing Files' under preferences in Leopard.
If you haven't used Leopard before - you are in for a treat!
I have Expose set up so every time I move my mouse to the upper left corner of my screen 'All Windows' come to the forefront. I also have it set so if I move my mouse to the lower left portion of my screen, it launches Spaces.
Spaces is a program that works as if you have 'virtual desktops'. I set mine up to have 12 'screens' - two rows, six columns. This means I can be running up to twelve programs - or have up to 12 windows open at a time - move my cursor to the lower left of the screen, enter Spaces and switch between any of the twelve applications / screens - with literally one movement and a click.
Speaking of clicks - I don't use the track pad buttons like I used to - which was odd at first - but, once I got used to using the functions of the new track pad - one finger (tap=left click), two fingers (tap=right click), or three fingers (swipe=next page/screen), two finger pinch= small font/small pic, two finger spread=larger font/larger pic - I can't imagine ever going back.
Overall, I am VERY pleased with the performance of this device. I used to 'make a decision' whether or not to 'lug' along my laptop, now I just grab the MBA.
I recommend purchasing the Ethernet/USB adapter - we all have to use Ethernet at some point ;-)
BTW - if you are looking for a carrying case - I purchased a bag from SFBags.com which is basically a sleeve, a flap, and a shoulder strap for under a hundred bucks - and it's VERY high quality. You will want to get a size 13-2 (MBA) and a suspension strap (it has a gripper pad on it).
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