MacBook Air: Apple MacWorld keynote announcements
January 15th, 2008Steve Jobs is no stranger to the corporate presentation and with his usual flair he launched Apple’s latest computer product, removing it from it’s wrapping — a standard sized manila envelope!
Yes, the new micro-thin MacBook Air sub-notebook fits in an envelope roughly A4 in size and yet still boasts a 13.3 inch screen and a full-sized keyboard. It is indeed the World’s thinnest notebook at 0.16 inches to 0.76 inches thick (the keyboard section is slightly thinner at the front. The screen is LED back-lit and has an integrated iSight camera. The machine weighs 3.0 pounds, Steve saying that rivals have made too many compromises in the pursuit of low weight notebooks.
The MultiTouch trackpad supports all of the gestures that we have come to love on the iPhone and iTouch.
The hard disk is based on those used in iPods and are 80 GB or 64 GB SSD and the processors are 1.6Ghz or 1.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo. 2 GB RAM is standard memory configuration. The circuits are flame retardant and made with some eco-friendly/recycled components including the aluminium case.
Here are the general specs
- 13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display with 1280×800 resolution
- 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache
- 800 MHz front-side bus
- 2GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
- 80GB hard disk drive with Sudden Motion Sensor
- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
- Micro-DVI port (includes Micro-DVI to VGA and Micro-DVI to DVI Adapters)
- Built-in iSight video camera
- Built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
- One USB 2.0 port
- One headphone port
- Multi-touch TrackPad with support for advanced multi-touch gestures including tap, scroll, pinch, rotate and swipe
- 45 Watt MagSafe Power Adapter
Unfortunately some users may miss a few features that Apple had to forego in order to meet the dimensional constraints. We all know by now that there is no optical drive — users will have to plug in an external device. Apple has introduced an option in the Air’s implementation of Finder called Remote Disk which will allow Air users to install software without the need of an internal optical so this may not be such a problem. But it also means you can’t boot from an inserted DVD and there is no information at the time of writing as to whether you can boot from an external optical drive. This has proven essential at times when the hard disk is corrupted or the OS unavailable for some reason and you need to recover data.
The Battery is not user replaceable so you may have to return the machine to Apple when the installed battery gives up the ghost and battery swapping to extend on-the-road charge life is not an option.
There is no FireWire port. This also means no Target Disk mode, essential for troubleshooting and data recovery. It also means that all those peripherals that you have that are FireWire connected are of no use on this machine.
No built-in Ethernet means no network boot without a $20 USB-to-Ethernet adapter.
Some of these problems may be solved by whatever software installation Apple comes up with. The others are just going to cost you money!
The MacBook Air is available for pre-order now from the Mac Store for $1799 for the base configuration and ships in two weeks.
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