Does the reality ever live up to the hype?

Everyone knew it was coming—they just weren't entirely sure what, exactly, it would be. The MacBook Air was rumored to have a lot of things—a black (or silver) aluminum case, a multitouch screen, massive trackpad, 12- or 13-inch screen, a solid-state hard drive, the moniker of "MacBook Thin" ("Pro" was optional). The rumors and speculation just went on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

But when Steve Jobs took the stage and announced the MacBook Air at Macworld 2008, Apple's ultraslim laptop still managed to take some by surprise. The haters sipped their hatorade while the fanboys sipped their Kool-Aid; the other 98 percent of us were left wondering exactly how the Air fit into our suddenly expanded notebook worldview.

It's silver aluminum (not black). It comes in 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz flavors of Intel's Core 2 Duo, with 2GB of soldered RAM, 802.11a/b/g/n (802.11n is Draft 2.0), Bluetooth, a 13.3-inch LED-backlit screen, and a choice between a standard 80GB ATA hard drive or a 64GB solid-state flash drive. There is no optical drive, no FireWire ports, only one USB port, and a micro-DVI port.

The aluminum casing, at its smallest point, is only 0.16 inches thick—that's half as thick as an iPod touch, and close to a third of the thickness of an iPhone. But most importantly, it fits in a manila envelope.



Sorry, we had to Sorry, we had to

But let's back up for a second. We decided to take a look at this thing to see whether Apple had come up with the next iPod for the computer world, or whether it had cut too many corners in its attempt to make the slimmest, sexiest notebook ever. And for that, we have to start at the beginning.

This review covers the 1.6GHz MacBook Air with the 4200rpm drive. We'll touch upon the 1.8GHz solid-state drive MacBook Air in a separate feature on February 5.

Unboxing

This wouldn't be an Apple product review of if we didn't include some observations about the packaging and unboxing process (we'll try to make it brief). As we observed on Infinite Loop, the MacBook Air's packaging is significantly smaller than the packaging of any previous notebook from Apple—Steve Jobs said that it was reduced by 40 percent. This is very evident the first time you lay eyes on it.



MacBook Pro, MacBook, and MacBook Air boxes MacBook Pro, MacBook, and MacBook Air boxes

The top of the box slides off like an iPhone box, and the air is nestled inside on top of its related components.



Two monitor cables that come with the Air Two monitor cables that come with the Air

The Air comes with a power cable, two monitor adapters (unusual for an Apple notebook), some Air-specific CDs (more on this later), and a handy wiping cloth, also like the iPhone. I guess Apple likes making sure its users keep their glossy displays smudge-free.

We used the standard 1.6GHz, 80GB hard drive-based model for our review since the SSD model was not available yet by publication time. For those of you worrying about numbers, worry not—we plan to write a follow-up review of the SSD version once it become available for comparison purposes.

Tech specs

CPU 1.60GHz Core 2 Duo Memory 2GB Video card Intel GMA X3100, 144MB FSB 800MHz Weight 3lb Hard drive 80GB Imaginary battery life 5 hours

Let's examine exactly how this thing is different from Apple's other offerings.