Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal puts the enormous gains in the electric efficiency of computation (or how much power a computer draws) in perspective using the example of Apple’s new MacBook Air.

Imagine you’ve got a shiny computer that is identical to a Macbook Air, except that it has the energy efficiency of a machine from 20 years ago. That computer would use so much power that you’d get a mere 2.5 seconds of battery life out of the Air’s 50 watt-hour battery instead of the seven hours that the Air actually gets. That is to say, you’d need 10,000 Air batteries to run our hypothetical machine for seven hours. There’s no way you’d fit a beast like that into a slim mailing envelope.

When Steve Jobs called the MacBook Air magical, this isn’t what he meant, but after reading this article, it’ll be hard to look at the wafer-thin ultrabook on my desk the same way ever again.

Even just looking at the picture, it’s easy to see this 11-inch MacBook Air “luxury mod” is a grotesque mockery. Crystallize-Your-Design would probably have you believe that recreating “Angel of the Chapel Sistine” on a MacBook Air in Swarovski Crystals took some sort of artistry, but this is the high-end equivalent of smearing your laptop in glue and then rolling it in crushed glass and glitter.

Here’s where you’ll want to lose your lunch, though. This frickin’ thing is being positioned as a product that pays tribute to the life of Steve Jobs! A man whose obsession with clean zen aesthetics would have caused him to suffer some sort of rectal prolapse just looking at this glittering pile of faux-diamond puke. The audacity!

Apple is supposedly is preparing to overhaul its key product trifecta: the iPhone, the iPad and iMac, as well as the MacBook Air in 2012. The report, based on the tech giant’s “upstream supply chain,” echos existing chatter the company will unveil new versions of its products in the coming year.

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.

Hot on the heels of the early 2011 iMac firmware update comes an EFI firmware update for the mid-2011 MacBook Air and Mac Mini. The new updates are labeled version 2.2 and 1.4 respectively. The updates are available via Software Update or direct download.

The updates address the following issues:

A Chinese plant temporarily closed because of noxious odors wafting into nearby communities is spending millions to reopen. The Catcher Technology site, which produces 60 percent of unibody cases for Apple’s top-selling MacBook and iMac, hopes to reopen by November.

Some PC makers may have taken comfort in a few analyst comments following Apple’s fourth-quarter financial report that left some on Wall Street wondering if the laptop was truly dead. However, look a bit closer and it becomes a case of Apple sales being lost to, um, Apple.

Are you running Lion on a MacBook Air that shipped with a Snow Leopard restore drive? Would you like to turn that sexy Apple-emblazoned USB stick into something that will restore your slim laptop to the latest and shiniest version of OS X in a pinch?

Great news: it’s actually possible to rewrite the MacBook Air Software Reinstall USB Drive to restore Lion to your Macs, not Snow Leopard. And while it’s not for the faint-hearted, nor is it for the superhacker.

Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge processor could finally bring Retina displays to our Macs, after the company announced support for ‘4K displays’ last week. That’s a display with a staggering resolution of 4096×4096 pixels.

If you’ve got one of the 2011 MacBook Airs and have been waiting to umbilical it by Thunderbolt to one of Apple’s massive new 27-inch Cinema Displays, Apple’s just pushed live the software that will tell your notebook just how to do so.