The MacBook Air is an enigma. Its key strength is its lightweight, ultra-thin design making it ideal for carrying around with you. Yet it makes significant sacrifices to achieve this degree of style and portability.

Despite an inevitable speed boost, the Air is still the slowest machine in the Mac range. The entry-level model, with a 120GB hard drive and 2GB of RAM, has a processor running at only 1.86GHz. The high-end version boasts a 128GB solid-state drive instead of a hard drive and a 2.13GHz processor.

This is the same speed as the white polycarbonate MacBook, Apple's entry-level laptop, which is £600 cheaper. The solid-state drive certainly makes its presence felt when booting the machine. Those of us more used to hard disk drives – and that's just about all of us – will find its start-up time refreshingly rapid.

Benchmark results

Once again, our benchmark results made for some interesting reading. The Air famously has no optical drive, but can instead share one with a computer on the same network. Alternatively, you can buy an external USB SuperDrive from Apple.

In our iTunes encoding benchmark test, this new release performed identically to last year's 1.6GHz model, but both were marginally defeated by the MacBook, due to the faster nature of an internal drive.

Benchmarks

The new Air performed competently, though not brilliantly, in the graphics-heavy Cinebench and Doom 3 tests. When first released, the Air was so slow in this respect it was almost unusable, but this new model can get by when used for gaming or rendering.

Despite having the same 2.13GHz processor speed it can't match the MacBook; the Air is still a poor choice of machine if you do a lot of high-performance video work. Even so, it's great to know that it can cope if it has to.

The Air still has limited expansion ports too, with its flip-down door concealing a headphone jack, a single USB port and a video-out, which is now a MiniDisplay Port. The Air is the only Mac in Apple's current range not to support FireWire.

But for fans of the machine, these sacrifices are worth making for the Air's extreme portability, and the new model makes several improvements on its predecessors, without detracting from this key strength.

A welcome price cut brings the 1.86GHz model down to £1,149 from £1,271, and the 2.13GHz Air reviewed here is now £1,349, down from £1,761.

Although Wi-Fi is still its main means of connecting to networks or the internet, you now get a USB Ethernet adaptor in the box, should you need a wired connection. Trading power for portability and connectivity for convenience means the MacBook Air will never be a machine for everyone, but improved specs at a lower price can only be welcomed.

A refreshing update for a machine that just oozes style.

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