What’s this? Looks like a unibody MacBook Air, right? Don’t bet a kidney on it: Shenzhen’s Evil Confederacy of Mad Scientist Cloners have managed to almost perfectly rip off the feel of Apple’s bestselling MacBook Air, including unibody enclosure, for under half the price of Apple’s ultraportable.
And you know what? For a piece-of-$%@! netbook dumped into a MacBook Air-like shell, it’s not a bad machine for the sub-$500 price.
Here are the specs we’re looking at: a 1.86GHz Intel Atom N2800 CPU with a GMA3600 integrated GPU, 13.3-inch 1366×768 LED display, 2GB of RAM, 32GB SSD, two USB 2.0 ports, a 3-in-1 card reader, mini-HDMI output and a non-removable 4100mAh battery that gives you up to 3.5 hours of battery life.
The MacBook Air knockoff only weights a few grams more than the real MacBook Air, and is only 0.1 centimeter thicker to boot. The battery life isn’t all that great, but otherwise, I’m pretty impressed by the specs they managed to get in this thing, especially in the form factor: without turning it on, about the only way to tell this apart from a real MacBook Air is the missing Apple logo!
If you happen to be prowling around the bartering alleys of Shenzhen, you should see this Air clone netbook sometime in November, for a few bucks less than $500. If you still aren’t convinced that netbooks are total crap, that’s a pretty good price for such a pretty netbook. I bet you could Hackintosh Snow Leopard on it, too.
[via MIC Gadget]
