Not much has changed in the form factor of the update MacBook Air, still featuring the same slender, sexy and ultra-thin portable body we’ve come to know. Under the hood, however, is a considerable change – faster processor, a more powerful graphics card and a 128 GB Solid State Drive.
Everything we love about the old MacBook Air manages to make a return in this iteration – rich 13.3 inch LED display, multi-touch trackpad and backlit keyboard. As with its predecessor, though, the updated MacBook Air keeps the same minimalist theme, offering a minimum of ports for connectivity. You still won’t be buying one for all the peripherals you can slap into it and requires plenty of tradeoffs on that end. Still ever present is the old problem for the lone USB port, housed in a flip-down panel that makes plugging in some peripherals a difficult challenge.
Upgrades to the innards include a new 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of DDR3 (no expansion), Nvidia GeForce 9400M GPU and twice the size of the original SSD offering. As expected, operation is smooth with almost zero problems after pushing its capacity with a number of concurrently-running applications, including a graphics-intensive game while streaming a number of services in the background.
If you’ve held off on buying a MacBook Air in the past due to the paltry battery life then you still won’t be interested now. Powering all that impressive hardware in a super-slim box still proves a bit too difficult, leaving the machine usable for barely two hours on a full bar of battery. You’re pulling the trigger, instead, for a capable ultra-portable with one of the sexiest form factors on a computing device and overall reliability that comes with the Apple brand.
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