Apple has a way of creating an aura about their products. And no one can deny
the precise attention to detail in the design. The Air is just 0.16 inches thin
at the edges and increases to 0.76 inches at the centre. Numbers just don't do
it justice; it has to be seen to be believed! It still houses a 13.3-inch LED
backlit LCD, full-size backlit keyboard, a gigantic multi-touch touchpad and
webcam + mic. The multitouch touchpad can be used to zoom in or out of images,
rotate them or flip pages using a three-finger gesture It has the latest OSX
Leopard, a C2D processor (1.6 GHz), 2 GB DDR2 RAM and a 1.8-inch 80 GB hard
drive. Every time you use it, you'll catch admiring glances coming your way. But
you'll also be reminded of the omissions. We used BootCamp and loaded Windows XP
for our benchmarks. It managed 244 3D marks and the battery managed a runtime of
2 hours 45 minutes with the brightness set to max. The MacBook Air can be one of
the hottest gadgets of the decade. But the omissions like optical drive, USB
ports, and Ethernet have ensured that it's a machine only for a select few;
die-hard Apple aficionados and those who just love to show off.
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Bottomline: You'll have the thinnest notebook in the world, but be
prepared to make some compromises in lieu of that.