Prior to Oct 2010, the only way one could really get an ultra-portable computer running Mac OS X was to hackintosh it. Netbooks were great in that they cannibalized laptop sales and pricing and in turn the general overall cost for a laptop dropped sharply in the next year. Netbooks took off, the original EeePC netbook sold out instantly. For those who don’t remember but the ‘official’ branding of the netbook meant that a laptop had to: be under 10″ in screen size, run an Intel Atom CPU (no AMD cpu until recently for netbooks), and under $500 in price. At the same time another genre/category of computers were born the netbook. However, the price and performance balance just was not there for most home users.

Several revisions were done to help increase performance with upgrades to video chipsets and cpus and faster memory (ddr3 vs ddr2). It was too expensive for its very sub par performance. To wrap it up the original Macbook Air was more of a symbol than a tool. Add into the mix a very bad job of thermal paste placement/application and you were better off avoiding YouTube and any Flash videos since it would most likely stuttering. Heat and under-clocking of the cpu problems did plague the first versions. The build quality on the original Macbook Air (MBA) was solidly built and did not flex when holding. The price of what you got at the time was really not worth it for the general public it was an elite geek object of lust. However its design did turn heads and even helped an owner miss his flight due to TSA not knowing what it was because of its thinness. So, is the Macbook Air 11″ just an expensive netbook or is it finally the official hackinstosh (OS X hacked onto non mac hardware) ultraportable we’ve always wanted? Keep reading for the full review and benchmark comparisons.Īpple introduced the original Macbook Air way back in Janufor an incredibly expensive entry price of $1799 for the non SSD based Air and up to $3100 with the SSD and 1.8Ghz C2D processor. Apple previously had said it would never build a netbook and has lived by its promise with the Air. On OctoApple unveiled its updated Macbook Air line and introduced the smaller 11″ version. Like any blogger and traveler, I love my portables and ultraportable laptops.

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