Anyone who has used the new MacBook Air can attest to what a tiny miracle it is. Spec-wise, it doesn’t look like much at all, but even the 1.4GHz 11-incher surprises by bleeding the edge of OS X performance in nearly all the ways that count for the average users through the accomplishment of its standard SSD drive. Consumers are thrilled, and so is Apple, with Tim Cook recently saying that Apple saw the new Air as “the future” of the MacBook line.
Looks like NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang agrees, but if anything, he’s even more excited about the Air than Cook is, claiming it’s not just the future of the MacBook line, but the future of laptop design across all platforms.
It’s easy to see his point. With the one-two punch of the iPad and MacBook Air, Apple has virtually destroyed last year’s rancid du jour, the netbook. They’ve proven that you can fill the same niche with actually capable hardware that is just as dainty about its power-sipping. For those who just want to browse web pages, play games and read e-mail on the cheap, that’s the iPad; for pro-users who want a fully functioning laptop in the smallest form factor possible, it’s the Air.
So yeah, the Air’s the future of laptops. Thank god. After over a decade of thick, chunky notebooks that are portable compared to a PC, the future is here, and it’s good.
