Steve Jobs ended months of speculation when he unveiled ‘one more thing’ at Apple’s Back to the Mac event. Describing the new MacBook Air, available with either a 11.6in or 13.3in screen, as ‘the first of a new generation of notebooks,’ he explained how the new machines represented what would happen if a Macbook and an iPad ‘hooked up.’
The new MacBook Airs don’t have hard drives or SSDs, instead they use flash storage soldered directly onto the motherboard. This increases the space available for the battery, allowing the MacBook Air to have a battery life of five hours in the 11.6in model, and 7 hours in the 13.in notebook when measured using Apple’s wireless productivity tests. Standby time for both models is 30 days.
The new MacBook Air, like its predecessor, has a full-size keyboard. It also has a glass multi-touch trackpad, two USB 2 ports, mini DisplayPort, an SD card slot, stereo speakers, and a headphone jack.
Both MacBooks Airs are 0.3cm thick at their thinnest point and the smaller of the two tips the scales at 1.06kg, while the 13.3in model weighs in at 1.32kg.
The Core 2 Duo processors clock speeds run at 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz in the 11.6in notebook, and 1.86GHz and 2.13GHz in the larger one. Both come with 2GB Ram and have Nvidia’s GeForce 320M graphics processor, which shares 256MB Ram with main memory. Storage is 64GB or 128GB in the smaller model and 128GB or 256GB in the larger one.
The MacBook Airs have higher resolution displays than their nearest equivalents, the 13in and 15in MacBook Pros: 1366 x 768 pixels and 1440 x 900 pixels respectively.
The MacBook’s camera is now known as a FaceTime camera because Apple has also introduced a FaceTime application for Mac OS X, which allows Mac users to make and receive FaceTime calls to and from iPhone and iPod touch users.
The MacBook Air is priced at £849 and £999 for the 11.6in model with 64GB and 128GB storage respectively, and £1099 and £1349 for the 13.3in version with 128GB and 256GB storage respectively.
