The problem is, the MBA battery does not deliver what Apple said it should, that is, five hours of moderate usage with the WiFi turned on. In the Apple support forums, new MacBook Air users are complaining that MBA battery gives them only 2 hours, if at all. There are also reports that the MBA battery takes 10 hours to fully recharge. Say what! I think we’ve posted about this somewhere but due to expert reviewers, we gave Apple the benefit of the doubt and began buying one ultra-expensive ultra-portable MacBook Air. Apparently, real life use for many MacBook Air owners do not support the results of expert testing.

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Well, a team of Japanese PC makers thinks the MBA, Apple’s latest masterpiece of state-of-the-art engineering, is badly designed. Yep, the MacBook Air is built with so many redundancies it is actually more expensive than it should be. Yathink?

Mayuko Uno, a member of the crack laptop team says, Can we say that the MacBook Air has a perfect, sophisticated external appearance, but its insides are full of waste?” The team from the Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad unanimously concluded that the MacBook Air design is different from anything they have seen before. They are surprised at the apparent waste in the design like the 30 screws simply to attach the keyboard. To be fair to Apple, it probably was their Chinese OEM that cost the $1799 MSRP to be $1799 and not lower. HonHai Precision Industry Co Ltd of Taiwan makes the iPod and iPhone but this may be the first time they made laptops for Apple.

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Anandtech did a thorough review of the MacBook Air and found it on the bleeding edge of ultra portable technology. The only problem is that it’s so thin it does not fit into any laptop bag currently available in the market. We’re not talking about fancy Manila envelope sleeves here (AirMail, InterofficMac) or this Studio Leung  conversation piece but a serious carrying case that can safely fit the MBA and its accessories. My own opinion? Make a MacBook Air sleeve so thick it’ll fit the Air comfortably in a regular laptop bag for 13-inch notebooks.
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Lenovo has announced the X300 ultraportable. While MacBook Air has the faster processor and comes with 2GB of RAM, the X300 fits the description of an ultraportable more faithfully. One thing makes me curious about one item in the X300’s specification, the 13.3-inch screen. It sounds like vindication on Apple’s choice to put 13.3-inch of screen space on their ultraportable instead of the more common 12 or 11 inches. The Lenovo X300’s processor lower processor speed comes as a surprise. Rumors had it that the X300 was going to be a 2.0Ghz Santa Rosa laptop. Anyway, the X300 comes with a 64GB SSD standard, though starting price is $900 more expensive than MBA. At just under 3 pounds with 3 USB ports, an Ethernet port and the famous Thinkpad build, the Lenovo camp is calling the X300 an almost perfect laptop.

Read more MacBook Air rivals here and then here. Or take the poll.

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The good: Incredibly thin yet surprisingly sturdy; new trackpad gesture controls are very useful; remote optical drive makes living without a built-in drive much easier.

The bad: Very limited connectivity; slower than other MacBooks; SSD hard-drive option is ridiculously expensive and standard hard drive is small; battery is not user replaceable.

The bottom line: The design is revolutionary, but Apple’s MacBook Air will appeal to a smaller, more specialized audience than the standard MacBook, thanks to a stripped-down set of connections and features.

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The review concludes:

We’re still hard at work on the MacBook Air review, but this data was too important not to share right away. By now you’ve heard that under “normal” usage, the Air can only manage about 2.5 hours of battery life. That’s true and at the same time it isn’t. I touch on part of this in the review, but the MacBook Air isn’t designed to be your work notebook – no ultra portable is. It’s a notebook for a writer, for someone taking notes in class; it’s a second notebook, or a third system. As such, the typical usage model can be very different than your standard notebook.

To be fair, MBA lasted 4.27 hours on browsing the Web or playing MP3 music. I admit, this is good enough for me since I use my MacBook primarily to surf and blog. What I don’t understand is why watching a movie on the Air sucks the battery faster than having the WiFi on. Maybe the testers didn’t turn WiFi off.

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So you’ve bought a MacBook Air and are ready to take it with you on the road, or maybe just as far as the nearest Starbucks. You begin by booting up the laptop, downloading Leopard updates wirelessly and then the next thing you’d want is to transfer files and user profiles from your other Mac computers. Apple upgraded their Migration Assistant especially for the Air. Without the Firewire, Air users will have to choose between USB and a WiFi migration. First some apps have to be installed on the source computer, which can be found on the discs that come with the Air. After that, things become slow and complex. The guys at Apple Insider found out that tha Air’s Draft N WiFi is pretty fast but takes 14:39 minutes to migrate 1GB of files. Imagine transferring user accounts and files worth 20GB or more.

MacBook Air gives the impression of being a very high-maintenance computer. It’s certainly not built for the rugged life style and to serve users as a workhorse computer. What it is… well, besides from being the slimmest laptop around, we can’t figure out what it is.

Read on here.

It’s obvious Apple didn’t think it would be used in such a way. They designed the MacBook Air to be ultra-portable, while not making any compromises, i.e. keeping the screen size a decent 13.3. What they didn’t expect is to hear someone using the “cutting-edge” laptop as a deadly weapon. The Ferret (UK newspaper) reports that a man in LA County suffered two stab wounds from an MBA and died in the hospital.

Through a spokesperson Ellen Doppler Apple expressed its “deeply regrets the incident, and deplores its products being used for any violent purpose. The Macbook Air was designed as a stylish on-the-move media machine with desktop specs, not as a stabbing implement.”

Right after the MBA was released, sociologists have warned that Apple’s newest laptop was so thin it can be used to kill. Dell echoed these sentiments after the stabbing incident was reported.