MacBook Air: The Best Business Laptop Ever?

Apple boss Steve Jobs is well known for using his keynote address at the annual Macworld geekfest to wow the world with the company’s latest must-have gadgets. Last year, he pulled an iPhone out of his pocket. What would he do to top that this year? Tech bloggers and writers around the world feverishly speculated what might be announced and some of them even got it right.

Jobs walked on stage with a manila envelope and whipped out what looks set to the business traveller laptop to be seen with this year. Except that it might not get seen at all given how thin it is. At its thickest point, the Macbook Air stands just 0.76 inches high; at its thinnest, it is 0.16 inches.

While the previous incarnations of the Macbook have been extremely desirable for their looks, business travellers have sometimes shied away from them because of their bulk. The lightest in the range weighs in at more than 2.27 kilos, whereas Windows-powered laptops with similar specs are considerably slimmer, typically a kilo lighter. For a business traveller constrained by the weight limit of hand luggage, especially in the current climate. The Macbook Air, by contrast, comes in at 1.36 kilos – lodging it firmly in the realm of the lightweights.

Much of the weight loss is achieved through an Atkins-style avoidance of certain things – no optical drive, a handful of ports and a non-swappable battery. Intel even redesigned its processor to cut down on size and weight.

The lack of an optical drive could worry some. It is possible to hook up to an optical drive on the network or plug one in to the single USB port but Apple is banking on the future being wireless. It sports the latest version of wi-fi - 802.11n – but on the downside there’s no WiMax and, unforgiveably in my opinion, no in-built high-speed 3G SIM card like most of the latest Windows business traveller laptops.

The battery could give cause for concern too. Apple says it will last for five hours, even if you are using wireless. However, some reviewers, such as USA Today’s Edward Baig and the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg got less than this.

The keyboard will be familiar to anyone who has used a Macbook and it has the added benefit of backlighting, making them easy to see read when you’re in a low-light situation.

It’s a pretty green beast too – recyclable aluminium casing, mercury and arsenic-free display and eco-friendly circuit boards. Even better, it comes in a box with the minimum of packaging.

Despite the potential problems, this is a beauty. As a lifelong Windows laptop user, it has even made me start to think the unthinkable of defecting to Apple.

Macbook Air