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Macbook Air (2010) 1st Impressions - Is it For You?

2010-10-21
what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here and i want to talk about the just rien on smack book airs and sort of give you my thoughts and impressions on it who I think these computers are targeted for and more importantly whether or not they're going to be right for you so stick around so the redesigned macbook air much like the model replaces a very polarizing product some love it some hate it and some may be sort of in between so I want to go ahead and run through the specs first and talk about who these are targeting so they're going to come in actually four configurations to screen size eleven point six and 13.3 let's start with the newest form factor 11.6 inches it features a 1.4 gigahertz core 2 duo chip next one hundred dollars is going to get you a 1.6 bigger its core 2 duo chip come to two gigabytes ram you can up that to four gigs for extra hundred dollars which is actually relatively reasonably priced considering apples rammed the notoriously expensive so it's finally nice to see Apple bring the prices down to a reasonable expectations the standard configuration for 999 didn't get you 64 gigabytes of flash storage essentially what Apple did was they took a standard a solid-state drive that in a previous macbook air came I believe a 2.5 inch container ticket out of the container soldered it right to the motherboard and that's going to give you this new Insadong capability which is not instant on from a cold boot but from a deep hibernation and you can upgrade that to 128 gigabytes if you want to sort of jump to the next model which is going to be one thousand one hundred and ninety nine dollars and this whole thing is going away two point three pounds going to give you five hours of supposedly actually use battery life which is pretty long for a computer that size now it gives you an extra USB port to bring total to which sort of addresses one of the major complaints with the original macbook air it's got a screen resolution extremely high actually higher than the outgoing 13 inch models that replace of 1366 x 768 so really high res screen and they all feature the nvidia geforce 320 em jumping up to the larger model the 13.3 you're going to get a 1.86 gigahertz processor standard 128 gigabytes of flash memory for 1299 you can up the ram if you want four hundred dollars you can also a processor four hundred bucks at 2.13 and of course you can go to the four gigs ram as i just mentioned they try to sort of do all that together and if 256 and a little bit of faster processor 2.1 three gigahertz it is going to cost you just about 1,600 bucks so it is going to be a little bit on the expensive side so who is the macbook air for in this era of chord ship so core i3 or i5 or i7 the macbook air certainly doesn't keep pace with the faster laptops on the market i think really the sweet spot is that 11.6 inch model i'm just going to be ideal for students and business travelers a person thing i do a lot of traveling i need my mac for video editing and i was carrying around the macbook with me which is certainly a part of a computer but it's a little bit on the heavy side i think something this small and portable is really an ideal companion for traveling specs for someone like me who doesn't east amount of video ending if you travel a lot for work i need something that can edit video and you can emulate a windows in you can use you know parallels or do a native of boot camp you now have a full power computer in the 11.6 inch netbook size package weighing very little and with stupendous battery life so if you're wanting something to take the class with you or something to carry with you when you're traveling it's a fantastic secondary computer i don't think this is going to serve you well as a primary computer i certainly it does have a cord to do a chip which will make it decently powerfully nvidia graphics is going to be unusable and it's going to sort of take care of your regular graphics needs but as an everyday powerhouse you're going to sort of run into i think a storage bottleneck as well sort of maxing out 128 gigs on that 11 inch model you can live within its limitations however the macbook air may serve you if all you're looking to do is a regular email do some web browser maybe check out some youtube videos and play an occasional light game like World of Warcraft on some low settings Matt Berger actually may be a pretty decent computer to bring with you and it can power the full 27 inch apple cinema display right from that little 11.6 inch screen on the 13.3 model is ups a little bit of power certainly either model I definitely recommend configuring them online and getting the four gigs ram for a hundred bucks that seems like a no-brainer to really improve performance if you ever want to run windows or virtualized that having that extra ram you really can be helpful running multiple programs doing video it's really gonna help so if you're looking to get a macbook air either configuration get it online and get the extra ram do that before you upgrade the processor or do you want to go 1.4 1.6 or ever you want to do really go for the ramp first 13.3 i'm not actually sure who that's targeting the macbook air now is sort of teetering on that netbook line entry point of a thousand dollars 1100 after you upgrade the RAM for five hundred dollars more than a standard netbook but you're not getting much more features than you would get on a standard netbook my poor usability then you get with an atom processor so I think it's really going to improve the longevity of the computer where you might have to pick up a new netbook after year and a half because it's slow and isn't working especially if you're trying to do a decent amount of video watching our HD streaming the macbook air is really going to serve you 13.3 inch if you're still a visit traveler your students want something a little bit larger it may be not a bad option it's sort of now in a power line with the entry-level macbook the white plastic one certainly par for par inspect respect it's very close it certainly way is much much much less a little bit smaller so sort of the short when to answer here the macbook air get a perfect for you if you are a business traveler or a student or someone who demands portability wherever you go you're going to get a computer that's going to be able to do all of your area computer tasks including HD video streaming you're going to look at the limitations however you're not going to have a optical drive so unless you want to pick up an eighty dollar addition you're going to sort of live within that limitations and use USB or ever else you want to do to get your content i'm downloading it or otherwise however that being said i'm quite excited about the macbook air i think it is a complete huge step forward as far as design engineering and whether or not you love apple or hate apple there's no doubt that's going to sort of drive the market forward and we'll see competing products from Dell HP and the like that are utilizing some of these new engineering techniques like actually taking the flash out of the container put it right on the motherboard so we're going to see sort of a new wave of ultra-thin actually powerful computers so I'm excited about it what about you you agree/disagree you excited about the macbook air not excited about the macbook air early one hear what you guys have to say I am jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo and i'll see you guys in the next video bye bye
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