Taking aesthetic designs of laptops into new frontiers has always been Apple’s first point of distinction among various laptop providers. And With new Mac Air Book in the market, it has befittingly come as a surprise to all the Apple’s fans across the world.

The Strength:

Thinnest, lightest and yet the strongest is what describes the best of the new Mac Air Book. “Whether to or not to - take your laptop with you” - the usual dilemma is a thing of bygone days with the ultra slim Mac Air Book weighing just about 3.0-3.4 pounds and 0.76 inch thick. Mac Air Book has been deemed as revolutionary by the standard of designs that people with lots of extra cash would like to add yet another eye-candy laptop to their collection. It comes along with an Aluminium chassis which is much more fingerprint resistant than the usual standard Macbooks. Apart from it the aluminium body lends the Air book a very sturdy and robust construction much in line with the kind of games Apple engineers likes to play with any of their products.

The 13.3 inch display, fitted with a built-in iSight camera, mic and an LED-backlit display has certainly taken the innovations in laptops to a new level. The LED-backlit display is controlled by the ambient light sensor which automatically adjusts the screen brightness in response to the light in the room. The apple trackpad has also got quite a facelifts.The new Air book’s trackpad measures 5 inches diagonally making it comparatively larger than any of the Mac book’s trackpads and has features that lets you use three fingers rather than the usual two fingers.

This multi-touch gestures enables the user to go forward and back within their Web browser history, and just like zoom-in and zoom-out features in the iPhone, one can do the same with Mac Air Book.

The Weakness:

Not everything is a ‘wow’ with the new Mac Air Book. Like any great designs that come in with its own shortcomings - the Air book too has a list of its own tradeoffs. Apple probably wanted to deliver a laptop that does all the works any normal laptop would have delivered with the prime distinction being its design and a little bit accelerated performance. However, heavy gamers, web programmers, using heavy applications has different thing to say on this. So, goes on with the complaints from people who are most of the time in travel. The lack of user replaceable batteries is one of the biggest offset with the Air book. You will have to shell out minimum of $129 for a new MBA Air book battery replacement but by returning the machine to the Apple.

Making the end user battery installation a viable option is something people are looking forward to. Other shortcomings identified are WiFi with very limited connectivity much slower than other Macbooks; standard hard drive of 80GB with the base $1,799 model and additional option of 64GB SSD hard drive at very expensive price. The option of hard drive upgradation from normal 80GB to a lower capacity 64GB but SSD hard-drives, all at $999 might find only few takers.

The single USB jack slot is yet another big limiting factor for people who frequently prefer to use more than one USB device simultaneously. However, everything is not so black here. The only other internal hardware option is a CPU uptick, to upgrade from 1.6GHz to 1.8GHz - but for $300. Like anything beautiful things in world that costs a little bit more - the $1,799 Mac Air Book suddenly becomes a $3,098 laptop with all the upgrades it can ask for.

Summary:

The design is revolutionary, aesthetically appealing and targeted to only a segmented niche of laptop users willing to shell out extra bucks for something that’s scarce. But, certainly scoring low with people who wouldn’t like to pay for something that doesn’t deliver much beyond a pleasant experience just to the eyes.

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