China unleashes plastic unibody MacBook Air knock-offs with netbook specs and glowing logos

By John Brownlee (10:56 am, Jan. 21, 2010)

The techno-sweatshops of Beijing have never seen an Apple design they weren’t willing to ineptly rip off, but these MacBook Air knock-offs spotted by M.I.C. Gadget are the first I’ve actually liked.

Basically, what we have here is a white plastic simulacrum of the MacBook Air’s aluminum unibody chassis, crammed with the innards of your stock, last generation netbook: an Intel Atom N280 processor with up to 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive.

I love it, right down to the lid’s pulsing, multichromatic logo! If Apple ever introduces a plastic unibody Air, this is exactly what I would imagine it looking like. It’s unfortunately a Windows machine, but at around $249 I’m tempted to pick one up anyway, just to see if it’s as easily Hackintoshable as my Asus Eee PC 1000HE. What a coup one of these MacBook Air netbooks with Snow Leopard installed would be for my gadget cred next time I showed up at the blogger’s hall at CES.

Posted by John Brownlee in Macbook, News, Top stories | Comment on this article

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About the author

John Brownlee

John Brownlee has written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Berlin with a charming girlfriend against whom he is currently enjoying a thirteen game cribbage winning streak, and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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9 comments

    they looks pretty legit

    erica, on January 21st, 2010 at 11:05 am

    I’m in the market for such a machine. I would definitely try to hackintosh it, if not, Hack it to run Google Chrome OS.

    Alan, on January 21st, 2010 at 11:44 am

    This must be driving Steve Jobs and Apples marketing team mad!!!

    ocube, on January 21st, 2010 at 12:15 pm

    I prefer my own aluminum Air, but I have to admit, they look kind of cute. Apple lawyers, ready? Go!!

    Hans, on January 21st, 2010 at 4:43 pm

    John, I hope you don’t get poisoned from the toxic heavy metals and chemicals that the Chinese put into those counterfeits. That’s how they keep prices down you know.

    Richard Dyer, on January 22nd, 2010 at 5:26 am

    That thing even has an Apple logo! How do they get away with that?

    cory2107, on January 22nd, 2010 at 7:03 pm

    They get away with these counterfeits because China is a Communist-governed Mafia Nation. If manufacturing fakes and counterfeits is productive to their economy and provides the Chinese people with jobs, then the Communist State simply turns a blind eye.

    It’s exactly like North Korea (another Communist Mafia State) being infamous for being the world’s biggest launderer of counterfeit money. North Korea engages in it because it is profitable for them (and it is a source of state revenue). Why would they care if it’s considered illegal by all other countries? And if the USA does not have the balls to stop NK from making nuclear weapons, the USA simply will not have ANY ABILITY to prevent NK from laundering fake dollar bills. Simple as that.

    Likewise, the USA has ZERO ABILITY to tell China to stop allowing rampant fakes/counterfeits on the market. What’s USA going to do? Threaten to nuke China and start World War 3 if China does not comply with “civilized market practices”? LMAO.

    Mattzook, on January 22nd, 2010 at 9:45 pm

    Sometimes they get them. But it could have been staged for international PR, who knows.

    http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/chinese-officials-raided-a-counterfeit.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

    The imitation Mac would seem legit until you watched Windows boot up and the laptop’s screen fell off. If you like that bit of foreign machined illusion, you’d probably like a woman wearing a fake rolex and sporting fake breasts. Fake is the new real, evidently.

    Magnus Moheney, on January 23rd, 2010 at 10:04 am

    I think these Chinese counterfeits may someday be valuable collectors’ items.

    geedavey, on January 25th, 2010 at 11:14 am

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