Last October, Apple released the last MacBook Air. It was a mighty fine-looking piece of hardware - a newly designed unibody shell, 0.3cm at its thinnest.

Trouble is, the meat inside didn't quite match up with the supreme exterior – Apple had been forced to stick with the ageing Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

Intel had originally produced a special, smaller packaged Core 2 Duo variant for the first-generation MacBook Air that was still clinging on in last year's release.

Check out our hands on video of the MacBook Air below:

The small processor package, presumably, couldn't be bettered until this year's Sandy Bridge generation of Intel Core chips arrived.

So here we are with the newly-launched 13-inch 2011 MacBook Air running the new Mac OS X 10.7 Lion operating system. The MacBook Air is expensive for what it is, starting at £849. For the components involved, it's an expensive system. But as with all Macs, it's the sum of its parts that gets everyone excited – and this time, it's with really just cause.

There's no doubt about it - this is a superb-looking and performing machine on which Apple has finally managed to bestow the performance that its appearance and price deserve.

Four models are available - two 11-inch and two 13-inch, all with Core i5 processors as standard - more on that on the next page.

MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro: which is right for you?

The 13-inch MacBook Air is a lot more usable for most workhorse tasks than the 11-inch -although it is still a highly capable machine.

The MacBook Air 2011 is certainly no longer the poor-powered portable Mac – indeed, Apple has so much faith in it that it has discontinued the MacBook for retail purchase (it's still going to be available for education, apparently).

It's worth mentioning that are now some genuine contenders to the MacBook Air's ultraportable crown – the Samsung 9 Series ultraportable offers a genuine alternative to the MacBook Air while there's also the powerful Sony VAIO Z Series and the cheaper but older Dell Adamo XPS. But even the 9 Series doesn't have as speedy an i5 as the MacBook (1.4GHz) while the Z Series is crazily powerful but simply too expensive.

Let's look at the Specifications in greater depth overleaf before moving onto the Performance.