Steve Jobs has just come on stage with his “one more thing”… and as predicted, it’s a new MacBook Air, in both 11.6 and 13.3-inch versions.
Steve explains that with the new MacBook Air, they wanted to leverage the advantages of the iPad to a real laptop, including instant on, great battery life, amazing standby time, solid state storage, no movie parts and thin and light.
That’s the design philosophy that led to the new MacBook Air. It’s a completely unibody design, 0.11 inches thick at its thinnest, and 0.68 inches at its thickest. Overall, it’s 90% smaller and lighter, with completely silent operation.
The 13.3-incher is running 1440×900 pixels, which makes it a higher pixel density than even the 15-inch MacBook Pro. It features a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Processor, a max of 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics, a full size multitouch trackpad, one USB port, an SD card slot and a FaceTime camera.
It’s the battery life that astounds, though. It’s a holy crap moment: the new 13.3-inch MacBook Air will supposedly have a 30 day standby time and seven hours of wireless web usage. This thing is basically all battery inside.
The 11.6-inch is mostly the same specs, but has a woeful 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor, a smaller 1366×768 resolution and only 5 hours on wireless web… presumably because they had to shrink the battery packs.
So what’ll these cost? Well, the 11.6-inch starts at $999 for 64GB SSD space, while a bump to $1199 will double your storage. The 13.3-inch starts at $1299 for a 128GB hard drive, and jumps to $1599 for a 256GB hard drive.
Honestly? This is pretty underwhelming: even accounting for the major performance bumps you see when you go SSD, that’s a wimpy computer for the price. We’re not sure we’re sold. What do you think?
