Review: Part I: A second look at Apple's MacBook Air
The Air’s screen, an incredibly bright 13.3” LED-backlit display, was a distinct pleasure to work on. The incredibly thin and lightweight form factor comes with distinct tradeoffs – the Air lacks an internal optical drive and many of the peripheral ports standard on other notebooks.
The Air, which comes with the newest version of OS X Leopard installed, felt snappy and responsive right off the bat. Despite having a processor on the lower end of Apple’s product spectrum, I came across no issues with the Air being unusually slow at booting, loading programs, or performing other standard tasks. The Air was able to multitask amongst a variety of typical functions – web browsing, playing music, editing documents – without stalling or slowdown.
Under no circumstances did the notebook become anything more than what could be best described as ‘mildly warm’. The Air was readily able to connect to both Windows and Mac wireless networks with no hassles and had slightly better WiFi range than my other Dell Latitude notebook. In short, I had no complaints with the Air’s speed or WiFi performance.
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