Apple’s guillotine-thin ultraportable laptop, the MacBook Air, is disappearing from shelves all around the country, as reports indicate that the low-end 1.83 GHz and the high-end 2.13 GHz are out of stock pretty much everywhere… and it may very way herald the imminent arrival of a smaller and svelter 11.6-inch MacBook Air.
Genius. In the style of Atom-embedded computer-in-a-keyboard solutions like the Asus EEE Keyboard, a plucky modder gutted a partially dead MacBook Air and crammed its workings into an old, heavily modified Apple Keyboard casing, precisely topped by an Apple Wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad snuggled together.
The result? The MacBook Air Project, an all-in-one Mac-in-a-keyboard: just plug in a monitor to the MacBook Air keyboard’s DVI port and you’re ready to rip. Hey Apple: this is what the next Mac mini should look like!
Last month, the always somewhat suspect Digitimes asserted that Apple intended on going head-to-head with the netbook market by releasing an 11.6-inch MacBook Air something later this year. Here’s one fan’s wishful thinking Photoshop on what such an Air might look like.
There’s nothing too hard to buy about the way Apple would choose to layout the keyboard on an 11.6-inch MacBook: as netbooks have shown, twelve inches is the sweet spot when it comes to not compromising keyboard size. Nor is the trackpad hard to swallow, given the fact that Apple will doubtlessly eliminate the physical button from future Air trackpads.
Making the Air even thinner seems like a pipe dream, though: Apple’s not about to switch over to an Atom chip, which means a thinner Air would come at the expense of battery life. And where’s the black glass bezel that Apple’s favored for all of their modern computer designs?
Still, I’d buy a smaller Air if the price was right and Apple could match the existing MacBook line’s battery life: my Hackintosh netbook is getting woefully long in the tooth.
[via 9to5Mac]
The MacBook Air is a beautiful machine, but with a puny hard drive, no optical drive and one USB port, sometimes its paucity of ports and specs can put the pinch on you.
The Apricorn Aegis NetDock aims to help you supplement your MacBook Air’s specs by umbilicaling your USB port to an attractive little box that merges four USB ports (two of them powered), a dual-layer DVD burner and a 500GB hard drive (or, if you prefer, an empty 2.5-inch SATA hard drive enclosure).
It’s pretty tiny, too. The Apricon Aegis NetDock is only 6.25 x 5.75 x 2.125 inches. The only real problem is it requires a power cord, but powering all of this off of a single USB port is a bit much.
The Aegis Netdock costs $189, or just $89 if you supply your own hard drive.
With the cover blown on a next-generation iPhone, how might we expect Apple to surprise Mac fans at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco? One analyst suggests the Cupertino, Calif. company may use the platform to introduce a cloud-based version of iTunes, as well as updates for the Mac Pro and MacBook Air.
“Other announcements we are picking up that could potentially be made are iTunes.com, a web-based version of [Apple’s] iTunes client, and new Mac refreshes with faster processors and graphics, namely the Mac Pro and MacBook Air,” Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu told investors Friday. The Mac Pro and MacBook Air were last updated in March and June 2009.
The MacBook Air is likely to get a speed boost soon, thanks to freshly shrinked versions of Intel’s Core processors.
Today, Intel announced the expansion of their processor family with six new chips designed for ultraportable notebooks, promising to make MacBook Air sized notebooks thinner and lighter while yielding a 32% performance bump over the last generation of ultrathin Intel chips.
These new mobile Core processors are based on the same 32nm chip design as the standard Core i5 and Core i7, but offer 15% power efficiency and the ability to be packed into machines with a 30% thinner form factor, without giving up features like Hyper Threading or Turbo Boost.
Right now, over 40 OEMs are promising to release new ultrathins using Intel’s mobile Core CPUs. Apple’s not listed among them, but Cupertino’s not going to let Intel spill details of a new MacBook Air for them. Expect a hardware refresh sometime in the coming months.
According to Macworld.com.au’s sources, several thousand items of new Apple stock with the product number MC516LL/A K87 BETTER BTR-USA are now on their way to Australia… and while they aren’t quite sure what it is, they’re positing it might be an updated MacBook Air.
Apple has finally seen fit to update the design of its 85-watt MagSafe Power Adapters to use an all aluminum tip instead of a plastic one, mimicking the design of the 45-watt MacBook Air’s adapter.
Not only will this minimize the 85-Watt MagSafe’s physical footprint, but ditching the plastic should prevent the occasional melting problems we sometimes hear about. It also happens to look a hell of a lot better.
The 60-Watt MagSafe Power Adapter hasn’t been updated yet, but all things in good time. Hey, look at that! As Charli points out in the comments below, they just were.
[via TUAW]
The MacBook Air may be light but its reputation has been weighed down by overheating problems that Apple attempted to patch up with a fix in 2008.
This scorching photo comes from Sarah, who says her 1-year-old machine branded her:
I got this burn an hour into working Monday morning, after picking up my machine from the desk to walk it to a different room. I picked it up with my right hand, set it on my left hand and in the crook of my arm as I grabbed the cord, and almost immediately dropped it because it was so hot. So probably a few seconds of contact led to a burn mark that’s still there 3 days later.
We start off with another deal on MacBook Air laptops from the Apple Store. These deals include a 1.8GHz MacBook Air for $1,199. Also on tap is a new round of App Store price drops, including Amateur Surgeon, for you, well, amateur surgeons out there. Finally, we wrap up the top trio with some refurbed iPhone 3Gs from AT&T, including an 8GB 3G for $49.
As always, for details on these deals and many more bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
