MacBook Air - New Apple Compact Notebook

On Tuesday, 15 Jan 2008, at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, Apple show its latest new wares. Apple unveiled a brand new subcompact Apple notebook computer. - the Apple MacBook Air. This LED backlit 13.3" widescreen, a keyboard that has an ambient light sensor and a large multi-touch trackpad and a built-in Apple iSight webcam. What make this unique is its thinness, about 50% thinner than existing Mac laptops. This is way thinner than the thinnest part of the much-hyped Sony TZ series laptop. It's so slim, Apple ads show it being pulled it out of one of those little brown manila mailing envelopes. The MacBook air will start at US$1,799 for a model with an Intel full-speed Core 2 Duo processor chip running at 1.6 GHz with an 80 GB hard drive. For about double the money at US$3,098, you can get a faster model, 1.8 GHz, that also packs a 64 GB SSD (solid state drive), which has no moving parts. The use of SSD translates to faster boot ups and reduced power consumption. Worldwide, notebooks are the fastest-growing segment of the computer market. More people are bringing their computers everywhere with them. The new notebook is is by far, the lightest computer Apple ever released, or less than 1.5 Kilogram.

A flip-down door on one side reveals USB 2.0, Micro-DVI (to connect an external display) and a headphone jack. The MacBook Air also includes 802.11n-based wireless networking support and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR - help you connect to the "outside" world.

The MacBook Air's touchpad is disproportionately large, compared to the size of touchpad found on other notebooks. So why such a large touchpad? This is because the touchpad beside allow the user to do the usual mouse action, it is also capable of recognizing multi-touch gestures, similar to using an iPhone or iPod touch.

The MacBook Air's Core 2 Duo specifically built by Intel to Apple's specifications - it's 60 percent smaller than others. The Intel chip operates with 4MB of on-chip shared L2 cache running at full processor speed, and uses an 800MHz frontside bus. 2GB of 667MH DDR2 SDRAM.

The sub-notebook also comes without an optical drive which will help to make it ultra small. The MacBook Air has no internal optical drive, but Apple will offer a US$99 USB 2.0-based add-on SuperDrive for users who need it. For users that opt not to get the optical drive, Apple is offering a new software feature on this machine called Remote Disk; it enables you to "borrow" the optical drive of another Mac or PC on the same network as the MacBook Air, to use for installing software, for example.

Apple going green - The Apple MacBook Air has a fully recyclable aluminum case, and is "the first" to have a mercury-free display with arsenic-free glass. All the circuit boards are BFR-free and PVC-free, and the retail packaging uses 56 percent less material than the older MacBook packaging.

Big catch-22: NO replaceable battery for Apple MacBook Air! Need to send it back to Apple $ervice Center$ for replacement$. The Apple MacBook Air does not even come with an Ethernet port.

Competition Notes: Apple has lost the innovative edge on this one as it reinvents Fujitsu's wheel; to wit, 2006's Q2010 with similar specs and a full pound lighter. Dell has also announced a similar laptop (and one that is arguably more attractive).