Gadgetory

hey guys this is austin and stay mute the review of the 2012 MacBook Air 11 inch I was a big fan of the previous generation air and the latest model bring some salt improvements but are they worth it externally the computer looks nearly identical to the last year which isn't a bad thing at all the build is entirely aluminium with a wet shape that gives it one of the thinnest profiles of any laptop you can buy best of all the 11 inch air is still totally usable as the keyboard and trackpad are full-sized while the 135 pixel per inch display can't touch the 220 PPI on the retina MacBook Pro it rains very good for a laptop of this size powering the screen is a Core i5 or Core i7 processor with intel HD 4000 graphics as the latest ultra-low voltage CPUs from Intel you'll find that there's plenty of performance while still running cool and being easy on the battery I won't go too in depth on the performance but if you're interested in the details feel free to check out this video I made measuring how fast the air is and what kind of games it can handle just like the last two versions the MacBook Air comes standard with an SSD I've talked about what SSDs are all about before but to sum up quickly a solid state drive is a collection of chips that replaces a normal spinning hard drive an SSD is generally more reliable as there are no moving parts to break and are around four to five times faster in the real world this means the air is extremely snappy the computer boots in just over 13 seconds and programs fly open much faster than with mechanical hard drive for an 11 inch laptop battery life isn't half bad with watching a few HD YouTube videos writing this review and Google Drive and listening to music I was able to get just over five hours on a charge one thing that's entirely unchanged from the last air is the keyboard and trackpad combo the backlit keyboard is great bordering on excellent if only it had a bit more travel the trackpad on the other hand is basically perfect and is right up there with the macbook pro as the best trackpads I've ever used it's large for any computer but especially for an 11 inch laptop and the glass surfers works very well with the various multi-touch gestures in OS 10 speaking of OS 10 as of recording this review the MacBook Air comes pre-loaded with 10.7 lion if you've used any recent Mac you'll know what you're getting and what we're very soon OS 10.8 mountain lion will be out newer errors will come pre-loaded with this but if you buy one with line you'll get a free upgrade once it's available there's some slight changes with the ports on the left side you'll find MagSafe 2 for charging which works exactly the same as before but with a new thinner magnetic connector beside that is a USB 3.0 port and there's also the headphone jack and a microphone on the right side is the Thunderbolt port that doubles as a mini DisplayPort along with your second USB 3.0 I mostly use the air as a portable video production machine and it works well here obviously you wouldn't want to spend all day using After Effects on it but it can absolutely handle a decent amount of editing another thing that's very important to me is how quiet it runs as the air is usually how I record my audio the last gen kick the fan app pretty quickly however thankfully the new air with the core i5 stay silent for much longer the fan only firing up audibly when doing heavy lifting you can order the air with quite a few options the basic configuration costs $1000 for four gigabytes of RAM core i5 and 64 gigabyte SSD $100 more will get you 128 gigabytes of storage and another $100 will double your RAM to 8 gigabytes which is the air I'm using now you can also order a core i7 for an additional $150 and bump the SSD up to 256 kilobytes or 512 gigabytes for three hundred and eight hundred dollars respectively the options you choose are up to you but one important thing to keep in mind is that you really can't upgrade the laptop after you buy it the RAM is completely non removable and the SSD uses a special connector so it's best to get any upgrades up front you can always want more on products and the air is no exception while the extreme thinness is great I would gladly trade a few millimeters for an included SD card reader and another USB port the battery life is solid but nothing spectacular and while it's more than fast enough from 98% of users having a bit more power can make editing better and gaming more viable all that said the MacBook Air is a fantastic computer the size is perfect for me the keyboard and trackpad are phenomenal and with both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt you won't like anything for high-speed connectivity with the new Ivy Bridge processors and the option to get eight gigabytes of RAM I wish list is steadily disappearing well it's not a massive upgrade from the last generation I can easily say that the 2012 MacBook Air remains an excellent choice if you're interested more on the MacBook Air feel free to check out my unboxing as well as take a look at the game performance and speed test here if you enjoyed definitely be sure to leave this video a thumbs up and if you're interested in more videos like this be sure to subscribe