Review of the Apple MacBook Air 11inch 2011

The 11-inch MacBook Air has been a big hit ever since it came out in October 2010. It has a thin design and turns on instantly, and it costs a reasonable amount of money. Apple thinks the new version is so good that the smaller of its two Airs will kill off the MacBook, leaving this laptop as the only $999 option in the company's lineup. For a notebook that only weighs 2.4 pounds, that's a lot of stress. But the 11-inch Air is more than up to the task. It now has a more powerful Core i5 processor to run the new Mac OS X Lion, a backlit keyboard, and a Thunderbolt port for super-fast file transfers. (In our $1,499 model, the RAM goes from 2GB to 4GB, and 256GB of flash storage are added.) Is this computer good enough to be your everyday notebook?

1 Design

Even though the 11-inch Air has been out for nine months, the design still looks very current. This notebook is well-known for its sleek design and rounded edges, as well as its large glass touchpad and backlit logo. Both the screen and the base of the 11-inch Air are made of aluminium, which gives it a strong feel. The model we looked at last fall had a backward-flopping screen when you picked it up, but this time the lid didn't move.

2 Heat

It's cool and not too loud. After watching a full-screen Hulu video for 15 minutes on an 11-inch MacBook Air, the temperature between the G and H keys was 88 degrees Fahrenheit, but the touchpad was only 78 degrees. We don't like temperatures that are higher than 95 degrees. Even the bottom stayed pretty cold at 86 degrees. The only part that really warmed up was the bottom left side by the hinge, which reached 97 degrees.

Only when we ran the demanding Cinebench benchmark did the 11-inch MacBook Air's fan get loud, and even then, the laptop was quieter than the VAIO Z.

3 The keypad and keyboard

So much for one of the few things we didn't like about the 11-inch MacBook Air when it first came out. Apple has added a backlit keyboard, which makes the laptop easier to use in dark places. A sensor that measures the amount of light in the room automatically changes how bright the backlight is, but you can also change it yourself by using shortcut keys on the keyboard. The layout on the 11-inch Air is very comfortable to type on, even though it is so thin. The keys have a lot of travel and a springy feel when you press them. Plus, all of the function keys do something right away, like change the brightness or turn on the Launchpad (a new feature in Lion).

At this point, Apple should probably just teach laptop makers who use Windows how to make a great touchpad. The 11-inch Air's glass trackpad is by far the best in its class, measuring 4.1 by 2.5 inches. And now, with the Lion OS, you can do more with it. We could easily zoom in on a specific part of a website by double-tapping with two fingers, and a three-finger swipe up brought up Mission Control (where you can see everything running on your Mac).

As expected, both using two fingers to scroll and pinching to zoom worked perfectly. And there's a new way to scroll. Apple has added a natural scroll option under settings that lets you scroll like you would on an iPad or iPhone. So, you drag down to move content up. If this doesn't make sense to you, you can turn this setting off.

Clicking down on the trackpad of the 11-inch Air is all it takes to make a choice, but you can turn on tap-to-select in the settings.

4 Screen and Sound

During the battery test for the 11-inch Air, we couldn't help but notice that from about 15 feet away, at a 45-degree angle, we could see certain websites on the screen. And this was with the brightness at 40%. When the brightness is at 100%, it's almost hard to remember that the screen is only 11.6 inches. When we watched an episode of The Daily Show on Hulu, we also liked how detailed it was, right down to the grey streaks in Jon Stewart's hair and the reflections on his desk. Still, some people will find the 11-inch size too small for a main computer, even though it has a better resolution than the now-discontinued MacBook (1366 x 768 instead of 1280 x 800).

The sound quality of the 11-inch Air keeps impressing us. The stereo speakers put out a good amount of sound through the keyboard's top. When we streamed "Resistance" by Muse and "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters from Slacker, they were both nice and loud on this ultraportable, but only "Resistance" started to sound harsh at the highest volume level.