I still recall when the first MacBook Air was greeted with awe and utter amazement. It was Apple's smallest and thinnest laptop, the closest thing it had to a true ultraportable. Some even called it the answer to the then rising netbook market, albeit costing three times more. The MacBook Air (11-inch) ($1,199 direct), Apple's latest entry into the ultraportable space, is no netbook, even though it's the closest the company has come to making one. It's strikingly thinner than the original MacBook Air, with a screen two sizes smaller. Although Apple found a way to squeeze in two USB ports and a speedy solid-state drive (SSD), the MacBook Air (11-inch) is not nearly as feature-packed or as fast as the rest of the MacBook family, yet it'll cost you just as much. Still, it will give the latest batch of Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) laptops a run for their money.

Amazingly Thin Design
The width and depth of the MacBook Air (11-inch)—11.8 by 7.5 inches—are no different than what you'd get with Windows-based laptops like the Asus UL20FT-A1 ($630 direct, 3 stars) and Acer Aspire 1830T-3721 ($700 street, 4 stars), but what Apple shaved off in terms of thickness makes the other two look like giants. It's hard to gauge how shockingly thin it is until you pick it up, cradle it, and put it against the thinnest thing you can find in the room. It stands as the tall as the iPhone 4 at its thinnest part: The front bezel, which measures a mere 0.11 inch, is actually not that much thinner than the back of unit (0.68 inch). It's thinner, without a doubt, than any current netbook in the market. The 11-inch MacBook Air's razor-thin frame is triumphantly proportional to its weight, as its 2.3-pound frame is easily lighter than the Acer UL20FT-A1 (3.3 pounds), Acer 1830T-3721 (3 pounds), and Dell Inspiron M1010z (3.4 pounds).

The "magic," as Steve Jobs likes to put it, is in the MacBook Air's construction. It takes a page from the rest of the MacBook family, applying the same gorgeous aluminum to its Unibody chassis. Unlike the Asus UL20F-A1 and Acer 1830T-3721, which have aluminum on their top halves only (the base is plastic), the 11-inch MacBook Air is completely clad in it. The aluminum is unyielding, almost ruggedized. The screen, for instance, isn't as susceptible to flexing as that of its Windows-based counterparts.

New Screen Size, Resolution
The MacBook Air's 11.6-inch widescreen is not the only first for Apple; so is its 1,366-by-768 resolution. It's the first Apple laptop to conform to the 16:9 aspect ratio, as is the case with practically every Windows-based laptop nowadays. In a way, it sets the precedent for what's to come (think: future MacBook or a MacBook Pro with a 1,366-by-768 or a 1,600-by-900 resolution). The screen is sharp, and its viewing angles are superb. A bigger screen, however, is always a boon for productivity, which is why there is also a 13-inch MacBook Air, and a 13-inch CULV-equipped laptop, like the Toshiba Satellite T235-S1350 ($630 direct, 4 stars), is readily available.

Although other 11.6-inch laptops are already doing it, give Apple credit for squeezing in a full-size keyboard. The keys are flatter than those of the Asus UL20FT-A1 and Acer 1830T-3721—all of which use a chiclet-style keyboard. Personally, I prefer the keys on the Toshiba T235-S1350 and Dell M101z, which are raised higher and have a mushier response. The top rows, where the function keys are, were trimmed to half their size in order to make room for Apple's signature trackpad. And backlit keyboards are still not available on the MacBook Air models. The only 11-inch laptop that has one is the Alienware M11x (Core i7) ($1,175 direct, 4 stars), a gaming ultraportable. Even with a full-size keyboard, Apple still managed to include an oversized clickpad. That's very impressive. It's slightly more compressed than that of the MacBooks, but the navigating experience is great: The two-fingered gestures worked perfectly, at least much better than the implementations found in all the other Windows-based laptops mentioned in this review.

SSDs Only
Being the thinnest implies certain handicaps, with features being one of them. Although many Apple users are cheering the two USB ports, almost every single 11-inch laptop I've reviewed comes with three. These laptops also have an SD slot (or some kind of multimedia card reader) and an Ethernet port—features you won't find in the 11-inch MacBook Air. In place of Ethernet is 802.11n Wi-Fi, which should be enough for most people. It doesn't have an optical drive, obviously, but you can buy an external Apple SuperDrive for $79. Third-party USB optical drives, like my Toshiba DVD Super MultiDrive, will also work with the MacBook Air.

Spinning hard drives are no longer part of the MacBook Air's features list; it's SSDs only now. Of course, there are pros and cons to using SSDs, most of them the former. For instance, an SSD doesn't have any movable parts; hence, it's more durable, which is a boon if you're the clumsy type. Two, the transfer speeds of an SSD are supposedly faster than a spinning drive. It allows Apple to mimic the iPad's wake-from-sleep times, a feature Apple calls "Instant-On." The idea here is that if a MacBook Air user closes the lid or puts the system to sleep, it would stay asleep for 60 minutes and then goes directly into standby mode. That way, as soon as a key is pressed or if the lid is popped open, the MacBook Air will turn on instantly. According to Apple, the MacBook Air (11-inch) can stay in standby mode for up to 30 days, so there's no need to shut it down completely. From my experience with this feature, waking up from sleep mode is indeed "instant." With SSDs, however, you're limited in terms of capacity. The 11-inch MacBook Air starts with a 64GB SSD (the $999 configuration) and tops out at 128GB ($1,199 configuration). Compare them with the 500GB spinning drives found in the Toshiba T235-S1350 and Acer AS1830T, and the difference is clear. If you're an avid videophile, make sure you invest in a spacious external hard drive.

Performance: Yay or Nay?
The 11-inch MacBook Air's 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 is an Ultra-Low Voltage (ULV) processor. The only issue I have with this processor is that it's based on a previous-generation Intel technology. Meanwhile, the Acer 1830T (Core i5-430um) and Asus UL20FT-A1 (Core i3-330um) run on Intel's latest Core processors—also of the ULV variant, but much faster. The two MacBook Air configurations start with 2GB of DDR3 memory; doubling memory to 4GB will cost you an extra $100. Meanwhile, most of the MacBook Air's peers are standardizing on 4GB of DDR3 memory. These two components—processor and memory—were drags on performance.

The tests mentioned here are performed in Mac OS 10.6.4 (Handbrake, Cinebench R11.5, and Adobe Photoshop CS5 have Mac versions). Keep in mind, running performance benchmark tests doesn't dictate whether a particular task can be done; it's how fast it can be done compared with other laptops in its class. In this case, the MacBook Air is not the zippiest laptop. It took almost four times (23 minutes 23 seconds) as long to encode a video than the Toshiba T235-S1350 (6:24). Because the Photoshop CS5 test is memory intensive, the MacBook Air (14:03) trailed against the Asus UL20FT-A1 (9:31) and Toshiba T235-S1350 (11:28).

The reason why Apple chose to stay with a Core 2 Duo was so that it can benefit from a better graphics environment, specifically Nvidia's integrated one. The Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics chip is the MacBook Air's one redeeming feature in terms of performance. Though it's not the kind of laptop you'd bring to a LAN party, it's a better gaming solution than Intel's integrated graphics—the kind found in the Asus Ul20FT-A1, Acer AS1830T-3721, and Toshiba T235-S1350. Its 3DMark 06 scores (4,569 and 3,984) were at least three-times better than the rest of the field. It was the only laptop that could handle our 3D intensive gaming demos, Crysis and Lost Planet 2. PCMark Vantage scores also favored the 11-inch Air (4,226), since a good chunk of this test is 3D intensive. A better graphics solution also benefits HD playback: I tried several 1080p and 720p high-definition video clips, at high bit rates, and the 11-inch MacBook Air played them beautifully. For those who are worried about heat, the base of the system measured 83-87 degree Fahrenheit (measured with a Fluke Thermometer) while playing back an HD video clip and rendering a photo with Photoshop CS5. Excessive heat is not an issue from what I'm seeing so far.

The 11-inch MacBook Air's 35WH battery is the component that takes up most of the space internally, yet the capacity is equivalent to a 4-cell. That's not much, but Apple made the most of it. According to the company, the 11-inch MacBook Air will get you about 5 hours of Web surfing time. We tested it running down a MP4 video file in Mac OS 10.6.4, a more aggressive way of running down the battery than Web surfing. The 11-inch MacBook Air finished in 3 hours, 44 minutes. We also did a battery rundown in Windows 7 (via BootCamp), using MobileMark 2007, which doesn't benefit from MAC OS 10's power management technology. The 11-inch Macbook Air finished in 3 hours 52 minutes, which is well shy of the Toshiba's and Acer's 8 hour scores. It also helps that the Toshiba T235-S1350 (61WH) and the Acer AS1830T (58WH) have much bigger batteries.

Final Thoughts
Rest assured that despite its size, the Apple MacBook Air (11-inch) is not a netbook. It will share the spotlight with the 13-inch MacBook Air as two of the prettiest, and certainly thinnest, laptops ever made. However, the stratospheric standards that Apple places on aesthetics comes at the cost of features, speed, and battery life—all three areas where the 11-inch MacBook Air trailed rather than led. On top of that, it's a pricey system and pricier still once you start piling on the extras—the 128GB SSD, upgrade to 4GB of memory, and adding-on the SuperDrive, bringing its final price tag to as high as an Apple MacBook (Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz) or a MacBook Pro 13-inch (2.4-GHz Core 2 Duo). If I based this laptop's success merely on its features, hardware specifications, and price, the 11-inch MacBook Air would have fared a lot worse.

But I have to look at the big picture. After witnessing what's coming down the pike in terms software—an area that I didn't talk about because these enhancements are not yet available—the 11-inch MacBook Air is more than just a design spectacle. With the addition of FaceTime (Apple's video-chat software that allows you to communicate with iPhone 4 and Touch users), opening the beloved App store to Mac OS X, and factoring all the included software that comes with iLife 11, the 11-inch Air is essentially an iPad that comes with a full size keyboard and runs a full-blown operating system so that users can run full blown apps. And it's the lightest and thinnest Apple laptop to do all of these things on. If you want a practical Windows-based laptop that costs half as much, runs faster parts, and has more features, look no further than the Toshiba Satellite T235-S1350—the Editors' Choice in the CULV category.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Check out the test scores for the Apple MacBook Air (11-inch)

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Apple MacBook Air (11-inch) with several other laptops side by side.