Falling in love can blind you to your lover's faults. And we've fallen head over heels in love with the MacBook Air...

Despite the removal of key hardware components, a lack of processor oomph, so-so battery life and only one USB port, we're still thrilled to be owning one of the first units to enter the UK.

It really is a thing of beauty, light and compact, and a capable performer, given its tech-compromising design.

Light yet powerful

Several of us at TechRadar have a Mac desktop for heavy workloads, so performance grumbles about the MacBook Air are mostly mute. It's not meant for heavy work and doesn't really need more power than it has.

Owners of MacBook Pros might cluck that their processing power widdles all over the MacBook Air for the same price, but hands up all those people who really push the MacBook Pros to the limit? And how much does your MacBook Pro weigh? For surfing, corresponding and handling most media needs, the MacBook Air is perfectly spritely.

We took a look at the 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Air with an 80GB hard drive and 2GB of RAM. You can upgrade to a 1.8GHz chip at purchase (£190) and a solid state drive (SSD) for £639.

The Air sports the same 13.3-inch glossy screen as your standard MacBook (1280x800 pixels), although the Air's screen has an LED backlight source, which has better power efficiency and looks brighter at the maximum setting. The connection options are limited but you do get Bluetooth 2.1 and 802.11n Wi-Fi.

Limited connectivity

The ports are one headphone jack, one USB 2.0 port and one micro-DVI port (common adaptors are included in the box), which you access via a tuck-away flap in the base. You also get the iSight, a speaker under the keyboard and twin mics. But that's yer lot, folks. There's no Ethernet port, FireWire, audio input jack, ExpressCard, Apple remote or optical drive.

The two biggest adjustments for us were the lack of an optical drive and the lack of an Ethernet port. If you want to access DVD or CD media, you need to buy an external SuperDrive separately (£65) and connect it to the Air's single high-powered seven-volt USB port.

Alternatively, you can install a new software release from Apple called Remote Disk onto a second Mac that has an optical drive. The MacBook Air can then access the drive wirelessly.