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PrintLimited Options
During the MacBook Air's introduction at Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs showed a photograph of the MacBook Air's interior and compared the length of its motherboard to the length of a pencil. All that miniaturization comes at a price, however--in terms of a lack of options and a limited set of features for many of the MacBook Air's basic technologies.
Take the hard drive. Its storage capacity is 80GB, the same size as the entry-level MacBook. But the MacBook and MacBook Pro can be optionally configured with drives as large as 250GB. Those models use standard laptop drives; the MacBook Air uses a smaller 1.8-inch drive more like those found in iPods. And space is at such a premium in the MacBook Air that even the 120GB drive once used by the iPod is too thick to fit. As a result, 80GB is currently the only size of hard drive available for the Air. And the Air's drive is slow as well as small, spinning at 4,200-rpm (compared to the 5,400-rpm and 7,200-rpm drives available in Apple's other laptops) and connected via parallel ATA (rather than the newer serial ATA method used in the other MacBooks).
There is another storage option for the Air. For $999, you can have Apple swap in a 64GB SSD (solid-state drive). Though you'll be paying nearly a thousand bucks for 16GB less storage, the SSD option should use less power and be faster than the hard drive option. (We weren't able to acquire an SSD-bearing MacBook Air; we'll share the results of our tests of that model as soon as we can.) Perhaps more importantly, the SSD--which uses flash memory like that found on digital camera cards, the iPhone, and the iPod nano and touch--has no moving parts, meaning it should be far more resistant to shocks and far more reliable than a traditional hard drive.
In any event, if you're someone who needs more than 80GB of onboard storage, you'll need to slim down your data before switching to an Air. I managed to switch from my nearly-full 160GB MacBook drive through a judicious program of throwing out ancient applications and preferences, moving my media to other devices, and copying old files to an external hard drive and a networked file server. If your MacBook Air isn't your primary system, but more of a sidekick to your desktop system, the drive size should be less of an issue.
There are a similar lack of options when it comes to the MacBook Air's RAM. The MacBook Air comes with a stock 2GB of RAM, an excellent allotment--but Apple has a very practical reason to be so generous with the stock RAM. That's because the MacBook Air's RAM is built in to the computer itself, inaccessible and non-upgradeable. Fortunately, 2GB is a good amount. Any less, and Apple would have risked crippling the MacBook Air into irrelevance.
In terms of the onboard Intel Core 2 Duo processor, Apple gives MacBook Air buyers two speed options: the standard 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz, a $300 option. Both speeds fall short of what's available on the MacBook (2.0GHz, 2.2GHz) and MacBook Pro (2.2GHz, 2.4GHz, 2.6Ghz) lines.
What it all boils down to is that one of the less obvious compromises built into the MacBook Air, at least for now, is a lack of customizability and serviceability.
