Laptop Apple MacBook Air MC965LL/A Deals & Reviews

Alex Green "alx779" (Toronto, Canada): I continued to experience high heat/fan noise issues throughout the week. Sometimes it was during routine web browsing where some of the websites contained Flash elements. Starting Windows XP in Parallels would immediately set the fan in motion, again, sometimes hitting 6,000+ rpm. Playing Civilization IV, a fairly old game, had fan going full blast entire time with CPU again reaching 90C. Apple's own "Cosmos" screensaver brings the CPU temperature up to 80-85C and the fan up to 4500-5000rpm. The most annoying thing -- none of these tasks were taxing the CPU at more than 50%!

iGlaswegian "Z.S" (Scotland): I want to raise a point not many people write about in their reviews and that is SSD performance over time. Although, OS X Lion includes TRIM support the performance of all solid state drives degrades as you store more data to the drive. I've experienced this with a couple of desktop builds I've done. With some SSD's the performance degradation begins after filling up just half the disk drive, and affects nearly all drives to some extent once the drive is 70% full. This is something to consider when storing data. An external storage solution of some kind is strongly recommended.

R. V. Laxmikanth "L.V. Raghavendra" (Detroit, USA): Those that saw my previous review of the 2010 11" MacBook Air will fully understand that title. The 2010 MacBook Air suffered from a lack of true value, attempting instead to do the absolute minimum in an attempt to appeal to people's aesthetic tastes while sacrificing key features and not pushing the envelope. Well, with the 2011 version, they have gone back to the drawing board. Indeed, they have released what the MacBook Air should have been all along. You can read the specs above for details about what is all here. I'm only focusing on what's improved over the last gen.

M.D.C. "The Franchise" (San Diego, CA): Lastly, I am compelled to knock them for their refusal to at least include a USB restore drive in the box. I know they're pushing downloads and streaming media, but the reality is that physical media for computer restoration is almost a necessity. The novelty of an internet-based reinstall is nice, and they can keep that, but I still say that they should have included the Lion OS on a USB drive like they did with the 2010. The additional cost is pennies for that drive, so cost isn't the reason. They're pushing an agenda, and I don't like being tethered to the internet if and when I need to reinstall my operating system. There is a hidden recovery partition for this purpose that you can also use. But I think Apple is missing the boat here. What if the drive itself, the physical drive, goes toast? You're stuck unless you pay money. Thus the value of having external media for restoration if and when that were to happen. The SSD bar in the Air is replaceable, and there are already options from OWC for those users. But it's useless unless you pay $30 to download Lion and burn it/write it yourself or pay Apple $70 for a USB stick with Lion on it. To me both are unacceptable alternatives for something that should be in the box of every computer.