The future of notebooks: Ars reviews the 11" MacBook Air By Chris Foresman
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is no stranger to superlatives. Every product Apple makes is "insanely great," "amazing," or even "magical." So when he unveiled the latest MacBook Air models, declaring them to be the "future of notebooks," it was easy to dismiss his claims as nothing more than the usual Apple marketing. After spending some quality time with an 11" MacBook Air, however, it's hard not to hope he's right. The new MacBook Air is a great package, but there is one glaring weakness in it that will keep many potential buyers away: the CPU. When the new machine's hardware specs were announced, we had concerns about its performance given Apple's decision to stick with older Core 2 Duo processors-let's face it, a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo is laughably behind the performance curve of current mobile processors from Intel. Given the tiny space inside the 11" MacBook Air's case, Apple chose slower ultra-low voltage processors, and, as you'll see in our benchmarks, this decision has a real impact. Though we can appreciate the design tradeoffs, that doesn't mean we're necessarily ready to accept subpar performance. We also wanted to know if Apple's battery life claims would prove accurate under use outside of a laboratory. We already answered a number of your specific questions about the 11" MacBook Air last week. Read on to find out more of what we learned after putting it through its paces in real-world settings. ... http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/11/the-future-of-notebooks-ars-reviews-the-11-macbook-air.ars _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
