The new 11-inch MacBook Air is Apple's first true attempt at a bona fide subnotebook in a long time. Just don't call it a 'netbook,' because it's so not. Apple's brand new 11-inch MacBook Air starts out a scant 1.7 cm thick and tapers to a razor's edge 0.3 cm that somehow doesn't feel as dangerously sharp as the original MacBook Air. The 11-inch glossy LED screen actually boasts the same pixel count the larger 13-inch MacBook Pro, just condensed into a smaller form factor.

This ultra-totable kit weighs in at feathery 2.3 pounds - just a touch heavier than an Apple iPad, by comparison, yet sporting a bigger screen and a full, chiclet-style QWERTY keyboard to boot.

Clearly, much of the MacBook Air's design was dictated by what the company learned in building the iPad. That is to say, everything has been integrated into the motherboard, including its Flash hard drive - not a disc drive, but a high capacity memory chip with no spinning parts, also known as a Solid State Drive (SSD). That along with its RAM and processors all lay flat within in the thin and tiny enclosure, nestled in next to six large batteries accounting for most of the thing's heft.

Performance-wise, the MacBook Air is a lot like full-sized MacBook, except with way fewer ports, no optical drive and, obviously, a much slimmer and lighter body.

While some may dismiss it as just a wimpy "netbook" with Apple's overpriced brand name slapped on top, the new MacBook Air's speed and performance say otherwise.

You simply can't compare the performance of MacBook Air with typical netbooks and their underwhelming Intel Atom processors, or the cheap-like-borsht AMD Neo processors normally found in affordable subcompact laptops. MacBook Air's Intel Core 2 Duo processor backed by a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM puts it in serious-notebook league; its diminutive form factor is just an added convenience.

In fact, it's best to compare the MacBook Air to premium thin and light business notebooks like Sony's Vaio X, in which case the Air comes off looking underpriced.

As tested, the new MacBook Air is able to slice and dice though Photoshop CS5 nicely, run though a session of StarCraft II decently, perform iMovie-editing tasks with no problems, and play 1080p video smooth as silk. The best part is that the MacBook Air remained mostly quiet and cool throughout.

Type on the MacBook Air and you quickly forget that it is a shrunken and slimmed down version of a notebook, and you can therefore focus on the act of computing rather a scaled down semblance of it. With typical netbooks, you're forced to adjust your typing habits and learn odd key placements on keys squished together and flat. MacBook Air's clean, elegant, sequestered little chiclet keys are a breeze.

Battery life while using Wi-Fi is close to the 5-hours that Apple claims. The stereo speakers are also surprisingly loud and clear. Other features include a FaceTime camera (now available on Macs, in fact), two USB ports and a mini DisplayPort connector plus a headphone jack, microphone and the MagSafe adaptor port, but it notably lacks the SD Card slot found on the larger, 13-inch MacBook Air.

Booting the MacBook Air takes around 6-10 seconds, which is incredible. Of course, as more applications and files are added you can expect starts to take longer, but the use of SSD instead of old school HDD (Hard Disc Drive) really speeds up the boot up.

That said, the MacBook Air is a lightweight laptop at the end of the day, good for general purpose computing, iLife and some light duty Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop stuff. Don't delude yourself into thinking that the MacBook Air is a candidate for your pro level video or photo work at a consumer level price point. It's just not.

And that aforementioned SSD maybe speedy as all heck, but with only 64GB or 128GB, you're looking at miserly storage space, especially considering an imaging professional will be looking at storage in the 500 - 1000GB range - terabytes, not gigabytes. And for all is superior computing mojo over cheap-o netbooks, the MacBook Air's processor will be a bottleneck under duress. For the same price or even less, a MacBook or MacBook Pro would be the smarter option for processor-hungry media creators and creatives.

And really, the MacBook Air isn't cheap - especially if you want the version with maxed-out 128 GB drive capacity - but it is cutting edge stuff. Super fast SSD, unibody aluminum, low power consumption, a gorgeous LED cinema screen in a 2.3-pound enclosure, all the best-in-class stuff you'd expect from Apple... for a whole 11 months until the new one comes out, of course.