The new MacBook Air ships with OS X 10.7 Lion and can be upgraded to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and later for free. Cost to have Apple replace the 37 Watt-hour battery out of warranty is $129. Like the iPad and iPhone, it does not have an easily replaceable battery. The MacBook Air has an 18-bit glossy display (not the 24 bits you might expect). And there’s no built-in ethernet port if you need ethernet, Apple sells a USB ethernet adapter for $29. There is no FireWire port, but that’s far less necessary with USB 3 and Thunderbolt. You can double system memory to 8 GB for $100 more on any model.Ī few things are missing: The MBA has no built-in optical drive, but you can add an external USB 2.0 SuperDrive for $79. The base 11″ model now runs a 1.7 GHz Core i5 processor (with Turbo Boost to 2.6 GHz) with 4 GB of system memory and a 64 GB SSD at $999, and the “better” version ups that to a 128 GB SSD at $1,099.Īpple offers a number of build-to-order options for the better model: Upgrade to a 2.0 GHz Core i7 CPU for $150, choose a 256 GB SSD for $300 more or a 512 GB one for an extra $800. The 2012 MacBook Air adopts Intel’s newest, even more efficient Ivy Bridge processor technology, which incorporates Intel HD Graphics 4000 (up to 60% faster, according to Apple) in the CPU. The new HD camera also supports today’s widescreen displays, and the native screen resolution of 1366 x 768 is the same as last year.
#Macbook air 11 mid 2012 720p#
There’s also an improved webcam, the 720p FaceTime HD camera with three times the resolution of previous MacBook FaceTime cameras. Best of all, Apple uses the same port for USB 2.0 and 3.0, while the standard in the PC world is separate ports for each protocol.
There are already a lot of USB 3.0 drives on the market, and they are far more affordable than Thunderbolt drives. The improved USB specification is over 10x as fast as USB 2.0 and has half the bandwidth of Thunderbolt.
For the first time, Apple has Macs with built-in USB 3.0 support.