The MacBook Air is considered the worlds thinnest notebook ever produced. This product was designed and produced by Apple for one purpose, to be the world’s thinnest notebook on the market, with no cost to its performance. Apple achieved this with one major priority in mind, quality.

Fitness For Purpose

The MacBook Air achieved its goal to be the world’s thinnest notebook with its thickest part at 0.76 inches and its thinnest part at 0.16 inches. This was the main design principle which Apple undertook, but did this come at any cost? The answer to that is no, not for the initial specification of this notebook. This notebook was designed to be an innovation in wireless technology. The inside of a MacBook Air consists of a battery, the electronics and a hard disk. Apple had to sacrifice the optical drive (CD/DVD drive) to achieve this, but with the wireless technology Apple introduced this was not a flaw with the product.

No Optical Drive?

The design to remove the optical drive was not at a disadvantage to the mass market, in the modern world; music, films, software, etc, are all widely available on the internet. To include the optical drive would make the notebook too thick, but as said before, this comes at no disadvantage to the quality of the product. The Macbook Air had its software engineers design a functionality to enable it to connect to an optical drive on another local computer wirelessly, whether it being a Mac or PC. This allows the MacBook Air to still be able to write and read CD's, DVD's, etc. If this does not satisfy the customers needs, an external USB optical drive is available, but at an extra cost to the customer.

This however, may be the only "disadvantage" to the functionality of the product. The KISS principle applies to this product as Apple did not intend to incorporate the optical drive in this product, and neither did they try to.

Electronics, How Does It Fit?

Apple had to fit what they achieve from a normal MacBook into this ultra thin version of the MacBook. The designers of the MacBook Air reduced the main proportion of the motherboard down to roughly the length of a pencil. This was a major innovative achievement for Apple, as they specified that the performance of the system would still remain at a very high level. Apple managed to incorporate an Intel Core 2 Duo processor in this as well as 2GB of memory. Although the incorporation of the processor would not have been achieved without Intel having to redesign their processor down to 60% of its original size specifically for the MacBook Air. The original Intel processor chip would not have fit inside the MacBook Air without this redesign.

The cost to incorporate and design the electronics and hardware for this product takes effect on the price of the product. Below shows the standard MacBook Air along with the closest MacBook in regards to its performance.

The cost is quite clear, as the standard MacBook costs just £929, with an improvement on the 2GHz processor and 160GB hard drive compared to the MacBook Air. Where as the MacBook Air costs £1,271, due to the level of design put into making the notebook thin. The design to make the MacBook Air thin has clearly had a significant impact on the price of the product, but the quality of the product remains still at Apples standard high level.

Apple and the Environment

Greenpeace took some measurements to ensure that Apple takes into regards safety for the environment, therefore Apple took some extra measures with the MacBook Air and its design to ensure that everything can be done to have minimal effect on the environment. The Aluminium casing is fully recyclable, meaning no waste in natural resources. The display is Apples first mercury-free display and features arsenic-free glass, both of which are very poisonous for the environment. The packaging is also 50% less than the previous smallest packaging for the original MacBook, which is good for energy saving, expenditure and transporting the products. These to the customer can be seen as a very positive manufacturing technique, even though these techniques may lead to increase in price.

Conclusion

As from shown in the article, the design to make this notebook the thinnest one in the market has taken a toll on the price, mainly due to the design techniques and incorporation of the desired technology within the MacBook Air. Although the quality side of the MacBook Air can be looked at from a couple of different sides, the quality of build and reliability lays in Apples standard quality which is known over the world, the quality from the environmental point of view is taken positively too, where Apple have taken extra measures to remove particular hazardous resources/materials from their product.

References

Apple MacBook Air (2009). Retrieved May 2, 2009, from http://www.apple.com/uk/macbookair/design.html
Apple MacBook(2009). Retrieved May 2, 2009, from http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook