The rumors were true. The MacBook Air, announced by Steve Jobs yesterday, is the thinnest computer ever. Something tells me it’s is going to be a big seller this year.

Starting at $1799, the Air is so thin it can fit inside one of those yellow envelopes (pictured to the right). It’s tiny, and it’s a full-featured Mac. Well, almost full-featured.

To fit a computer into that tiny package, some compromises were made (as usual with ultraportables).

• Few upgrades available
• Internal Lithium-Polymer battery cannot be swapped-out at will
• No optical drive. You can (and will want to) purchase a $99 external DVD burner. There’s a feature that allows you to “borrow” the drive of another PC/Mac via Wi-Fi, but you really should pay the extra $99.
• Lack of ports. There is only one USB 2.0 port, a micro-DVI port, and a headphone jack
• Internal speakers are mono

Other than that, this is a real cool computer.

• The Touchpad responds to several iPhone-like gestures (pinch to zoom, etc).
• It weighs 3.0 pounds, and is only 0.76 inches thick.
• It has a 13.3 inch display and full-size keyboard (no dedicated numerical keypad, though)
• 802.11n
• 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo (or optional 1.8GHz)
• 2GB of RAM (only option available)
• 80GB Hard Drive or 64GB SSD (no higher capacities for either)
• Onboard Intel GMA X3100 graphics
• 5 hours of battery life

If you need a thin and light laptop, and can deal with the limitations, this is the computer for you.

Further Reading

• MacBook Air: Holding my breath
• MacBook Air’s tradeoffs
• MacBook Air: Thinning My Expectations

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 3:32 pm by Matt and is filed under Apple, Features, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.