Apple launches 11 and 13 inch MacBook Air in India
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 29 November 2010, 15:26 IST   |    1 Comments
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Mumbai: With Apple iPhones and iPads flowing big time into Indian market and people going ga-ga over them, Apple will further hypnotize its fans with the launch of the MacBook Air which is considered the thinnest and sleekest laptop that Apple has ever produced. Two of the most common wish-list items from prospective Apple customers have been a smaller, sub-13-inch MacBook, and a less-expensive version of the ultrathin MacBook Air. The new 11.6-inch version of the MacBook Air kills both birds with one stone, as the smallest current Apple laptop (there were 12-inch PowerBook models as recently as five years ago), and also lowering the entry price to $999, coincidentally, the same as the white basic 13 inch MacBook. The quick boot times, long battery life (with extralong standby time), and excellent keyboard/trackpad combo make this our new go-to ultraportable (if price is not an issue), with our enthusiasm muted only by a missing SD card slot and older low-voltage CPU. The new Airs, in both the 13-inch and 11-inch formats, are incredibly thin and light, even to someone used to working with very small laptops. There's a legitimate concern for hard-drive hogs that the 64GB or 128GB of flash hard-drive space may not be enough for high-res photos and video. We've rarely filled up too much of a hard drive, but today's laptop users are indeed more used to 500GB of space on even the most basic systems. The 11-inch Air feels speedy enough, closer to a full-size laptop than than most dual-core 11-inch premium Netbook. That makes sense, as the Core 2 Duo/Nvidia 320M combo is similar to what you'd find in the current $999 white MacBook (although this is a ULV version of the Core 2 Duo in this case). It's especially interesting to compare this with the 11-inch Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T-68U118, which has a low-voltage Intel Core i7 CPU for $899. The Acer was faster in our Photoshop and iTunes tests, but slower than the Air in our multitasking test. Though it's not as fast as a non-ULV laptop, the MacBook Air is about as good as you're going to find in this 11-inch arena.

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