New 13-Inch MacBook Air Earns CNET Editors’ Choice Salute, But Is It The Best 13″ Apple Notebook?

CNET’s Dan Ackerman notes that with the demise of the $999 white plastic MacBook, the base MacBook Air has become the default mainstream entry-level Apple laptop, specifically the 64 GB SSD (of which, only about a measly 48GB is actually available to use) 11-inch version, which starts at the same $999 price point that the erstwhile MacBook did. However Akerman suggests that unless you need the larger capacity hard drive or built-in optical drive of the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the new 13-inch Air should be your first stop for that screen size, which is why CNET given it a rare Editors’ Choice nod.

I beg to differ somewhat. The 13″ MacBook Pro sells for $100 less than the cheapest 13″ MacBook Air variant, which comes with a barely marginal 128 GB SSD capacity, no optical drive (an external USB unit is a $79.95 option), has non-upgradable RAM, and not built-in Ethernet or FireWire port. The 13″ Pro has a 320 GB HDD and the aforementioned other features, and is is in my estimation the best all-round value Apple has ever offered in a laptop PC. The 13″ Air does have a higher-res. display than the 13″ Pro.

With 4GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD storage, the 13-inch Air is a better bet for trouble-free mainstream computing than the 11-inch version, which defaults to 2GB of RAM and only a 64GB SSD (of which, only around 48GB is available to use). The trend toward cloud storage makes this less of a problem than it might have been, but you may want a little more breathing room.

The full CNET review of the 13-inch MacBook Air is here:
http://cnet.co/qNLqcr