The two have identical port layouts however the 13-inch MacBook Air gets an integrated SD card reader like its Pro siblings. There are of course now two MacBook Airs that make up the family: an 11.6-inch model and a 13.3-inch model. As long as you’re not sitting to the right of a horribly noisy person/animal/box you should be good to go. The microphone’s left leaning location didn’t negatively impact audio performance in our tests.

Apple states it is an omnidirectional mic, but its placement is curious given the original MacBook Air had its mic at the top of the screen bezel. Next to the headset jack on the left side is the integrated microphone. Everything is fully accessible from the start, nothing is hidden behind any secret panels.įrom left to right: MagSafe Power Connector, USB 2.0 port, headset jack, microphone Connectors like flat surfaces so Apple outfitted the new MacBook Air with a pair of USB ports (one on each side) in addition to the MagSafe connector, miniDP out and line out. The new design forgoes the rounded nature of its predecessor and introduces more angular surfaces toward the rear of the machine. The right side of the machine was home to three hidden connectors: mini DisplayPort, USB and line out. It had an angled MagSafe power connector but that was it for visible ports. The original MacBook Air was very light on connectivity. Last week Apple announced the biggest upgrade to the MacBook Air since 2008, complete with a redesign, price reduction and improved internals. Battery life didn’t get any better and memory sizes never moved beyond 2GB. Apple moved from an Intel supplied chipset to one made by NVIDIA, and SSDs eventually became standard issue. I hardly ever used it after that point.Īpple updated the MacBook Air hardware since its original release, but the updates were nothing spectacular. The combination of the two was enough for me to let my MacBook Air collect dust. Apple ramped up battery capacity enough where I could get much better battery life and performance out of the MacBook Pro.

What prompted me to stop using the MacBook Air was the second generation unibody MacBook Pro. And when you needed to, you had the greater-than-Atom performance to get more intensive work done. It was a great machine for writers as you could open up TextEdit and hammer out a document for five hours straight. It was hot, the 1.8” HDD was unbearably slow, and it shipped with 2GB of memory that you couldn’t expand to 4GB. The original MacBook Air had three main issues. Back in 2008, the MacBook Air was the perfect solution to that problem. I needed a notebook fast enough for me to get work done when necessary, but with long enough battery life to last me through a trip across the country. It wasn’t the styling that won me over, but rather the combination of performance, form factor and battery life. I remember falling in love with the original MacBook Air.

Apple macbook 11 inch