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MacBook Air is light

Along with a few other folks at closerlook, I was eagerly anticipating an exciting announcement to come out of MacWorld on Tuesday. Well, the news was thin. About three quarters of an inch thin. Apple announced an ultra portable laptop called the MacBook Air. It’s so small it can “fit in an envelope”. That’s some fine marketing, but as fellow blogger Jon Varner pointed out, “there are some pretty big envelopes”. I must admit that I am in the market for a laptop so I was pretty excited about the newest addition to the MacBook family. After the initial marketing haze from Job’s keynote had subsided, I came to my senses and decided to take a closer look at what the Air had to offer. It is thin and light. Did I say that already? Unfortunately, the features are the same; thin and light. If only the price tag matched. I was comparing the MacBook Air to the Dell XPS 1330. They are both ultralight and portable 13 inch laptops. I know what you are thinking. “Oh no, the Dell is probably ugly as sin”. It’s actually pretty sexy AND comes in 3 color choices. It is a bit over an inch thick and weighs in at 4 pounds. Doing a side by side, the only thing the the MacBook Air comes out on top in is size. Did I mention that it’s really thin and light? Both have built-in 802.11n wireless. Both have LED backlit 1280×800 screens. Here are a couple of key differentiators:

• Mac has a 1.8Ghz processor vs. a 2.2Ghz in the Dell
• Mac has a 2GB of RAM vs. 3GB in the Dell
• Mac has a 80GB 4200-rpm hard drive vs. 200GB 7200-rpm (this is huge)
• Mac has integrated Intel graphics processor vs. 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS in the Dell
• Mac has no optical drive or Ethernet port

All that being said, when I added the optical drive and Ethernet adapter to the Air just to make it somewhat comparable, the price tag was at $2,227 vs. $1,779 for the 1330. I would say the Air is worth about $1,300. I appreciate the MacBook Air and there are a lot of folks who would gladly pay the inflated price just to have the latest Apple product. I am not one of them.