Review: MacBook Air

Apple's MacBook Air family. Photo / Apple Inc.

I have been glibly telling people who ask, 'if you want to do serious work like Final Cut and Photoshop, don't get a MacBook Air. If you want something super portable but still capable and your work is mostly email, web surfing and writing, an Air is ideal'.

So I was a bit surprised when Apple's 11-inch (actually, the screen is 11.6 inches diagonally) review model arrived with Final Cut installed.

Of course, with so little physical space, Apple left things out. There's no FireWire 800 (or 400) port on the Air - it has one USB2 port each side, plus the MagSafe power connector, audio in/out, and a video out on the right side.

This makes you wonder how you get files onto it - there's no optical drive, either. Not even an SD Card slot. Apple intends to move to a download and streaming model for all content - indeed, the announcement of the forthcoming App Store for Mac software and the new style of Apple TV underline this.

But when you get a new Mac, on first boot Migration Assistant lets you choose to transfer files from a Mac you are upgrading from. This is achieved with a FireWire cable - not an option on the Air.

Migration Assistant effectively gives your new Mac the settings, network connections, passwords, Dock items, contacts, schedule, all the Apps you've bought and all documents, including music, photos and movies - even your Safari bookmarks, although this may be pretty slow over wireless.

Apple has posted articles about how this is done with an Air.

Other reviewers have been saying the new Air is surprisingly fast, despite the anaemic CPU.

Good performance is attributed to the Solid State Drive (SSD), essentially a chip (or set thereof) like Flash memory cards in cameras.

An SSD is vastly different to a hard drive because it has no moving parts, saving weigh. It doesn't require the same cooling, saves power (it's not mechanical), and it doesn't need anywhere near the same amount of shock-mounting. It's robust - and it's faster.

But SSD is expensive compared to hard drives, and with smaller capacities.

Both these factors are improving as demand rises.

SSDs are options on some MacBooks and iMacs, but they're wickedly expensive options, still. For example, a MacBook Pro 15-inch 2.66GHz i7 with a 500GB 5400rpm hard drive costs $3799 - switch that for a 512GB SSD and it becomes $6191. That's an additional $2392.

A 27-inch iMac (stock at $3065 with a 3.2GHz i3 CPU) has a 1TB HD. The option to switch that to a quarter the capacity but SSD (256GB) makes it $4292. It's a contradictory solution - typically, you want a fast hard drive for video editing, which also requires lots of space. So who's going to go to a quarter the capacity for an extra $1227?

Just to further underline this issue of reduced capacity, the fully-loaded-up Apple review Air had less than 5GB space available. This wasn't even enough to install the recommended OS updates, until I deleted some demo AV files.

My 6-week-old MacBook Pro, which already has a lot of data, Final Cut, Logic and Adobe CS5 loaded up on it, still has 297GB available.

I shot the biggest high definition (1080p) video sequence my card could take - 3.98GB in one shot. Copying it onto my MacBook Pro 15-inch (2.66GHz i7) took one minute 30 seconds via a Lexar FireWire 800 card reader.

Via USB2 on the same laptop, from the USB2 cable direct from the camera, it took 17 minutes for the same file to transfer; this was the same time, camera-to-MB Air via USB2.

Duplicating the 3.98GB movie file on the MacBook Pro 15's hard drive took 1:24 - this has a faster-than-stock 7200pm 500GB drive fitted.

On the MacBook Air, the same duplication took 42 seconds - twice as fast on a machine with a lowly 1.4GHz Core2 Duo processor and 2GB RAM.

And check out launch times:

GarageBand launched in 15 seconds on the MBP, 8 seconds on the MBA

Aperture: 7.3 secs (273 pics) seconds on the MBP, 3.8 seconds (310 pics) on the MBA

Pages : 3.3 seconds on the MBP, 2.2 seconds on the MBA

Keynote: 7 seconds on the MBP, 2.7 seconds on the MBA

iMovie: 7.8 seconds on the MBP, 4.9 seconds on the MBA

*Final Cut: 18.2 seconds on the MBP, 24.3 seconds on the MBA

(*Final Cut Pro 7 on the MacBook Pro, Final Cut Express 4 on the MacBook Air. It's likely this is the only timing test the Pro won due to differences in the versions.)

On the road, nothing is quite so satisfying as fast loading of applications and documents.

But the bigger question it begs is: how does such an underpowered Mac perform so well against a much better-specced one?

Final Cut performance, using admittedly very high-definition footage, dropped so many frames it was very hard to work with on the Air.

And actual CPU, RAM and video performance paints a different picture.

Geekbench running in 64-bit mode presents an overall figure of a not-unreasonable 2253.

A 13-inch MacBook Pro still pips this (3736 in 32-bit mode).

My 15-inch i7 presented a Geekbench score of 6353, so file copies aside, I can take some solace in my 15's 3x better CPU performance.

The MacBook Air features the NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor - that's the same one as in the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Cinebench, a set of tests skewed more at video performance, gives results of 11.11 frames per second, .80 pts for CPU (and .42 for single core). The multiprocessor ratio was expressed as 1.91x (this measures the efficiency of two or more processors working together).

This is considerably better than a three-year-old MacBook Pro's figure of 7.04fps.

My 15-inch MacBook Pro, with an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M card with 512MB VRAM, presents 15.11fps.

Note that the bigger 13-inch model has a faster CPU. The smaller 11-inch screen packs 1366 by 768 pixels; as the 13-inch 1440x900. If your eyesight's OK, you get a small, but impressively crisp and dynamic screen for even better portability with the 11. In fact, I assumed this 11.6 inch was the 13 when it arrived, as it's so readable.

Generally speaking, I have to say the 11-inch MacBook Air really impressed me. It's very cute, very portable and much more usable than I had given it credit for.

It's also more robust than the other MacBooks - no danger of bangs producing hard drive head crashes.

The Air, thanks to the SSD, blows most criticisms of 'underpowered netbooks' out of the water. Most netbooks are capability-crippled by the need for small form factor. But if this is 'Apple's netbook', it's the netbook of anyone's dreams. But - as with any small notebook - it's not for editing serious movies.

PC World ran a performance comparison against PC netbooks, by the way.

For email and writing, and maybe some iPhoto work, the 11.5-inch is great - put another couple of applications on there, though, and you are left with very little storage, at least with the 64GB model.

I only have one other tiny criticism: the Apple logo looks too big in proportion to the size of the back of the screen on the 11-inch.

The MacBook Air starts at $1699 (64GB 11-inch 1.4GHz, as tested).

The same model with a much handier 128GB SSD is $1999. The 13-inch has a faster processor (1.86GHz) and costs $2199 or $256GB SSD for $2699.

apple.com/nz/macbookair

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com