Read on after the break for my full review. Yes, it physically looks the same and those may seem like just minor spec updates, but the additions change a heck of a lot more than you’d think. And it boots Apple’s brand new Mac OS X Lion (10.7), which we’ve already deemed pretty great. The Air is now stuffed with a fresh dual-core Core i5 processor (there’s an i7 option too), a glowing keyboard, and a new Thunderbolt port. Which brings us to Apple’s 2011 version of the 13-inch MacBook Air and this review. And in a tragic oversight, the keyboard wasn’t backlit. If you didn’t need an optical drive, it had almost about everything it needed to be both a no-compromise ultraportable and a primary computer, but the older processors still didn’t offer quite enough performance to do the job.

The second Air (or heir!) was priced significantly less at $1,299 ($999 for the 11-inch version), included some speedy solid state drives, and mended some of those port issues. If I think back, they were actually pretty rare to see out and about, and when I would spot one, I can remember thinking “that guy must have a nice car, too.”īut then came the major revision (the original Air got a slight spec bump in 2008, but it didn’t change much).

For most, the sacrifices were just too many to justify for the high price. Sure, it was a functional laptop that could glide into a manila envelope, but the $1,799 laptop was, by and large, a secondary machine - it trailed behind other ultraportables in performance, lacked some essential ports (it only had one USB port and there was no SD card slot), and packed a small and slow hard drive. The original MacBook Air was more of a status symbol than a computer.

Macbook air 11 inch 2011 charger