Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

15Jan/080

Apple Introduces the MacBook Air

Apple is one of the few computing companies I really admire. They have the engineers, the talent, the designers and the visionary to lead them. Apple products are some of the most elegant products in the industry.
Apple today released their latest notebook, the MacBook Air. Its an amazing peace of technology and one of the first notebooks to use moderately large solid state hard drives, which surely are the future. Although the screen is just 13.3'', it comes in a higher resolution than traditional 13.3''. It comes with 1280x800, which is equivalent to my 15'' notebook! One of the innovations on the notebook is the multitouch touchpad. The touchpad has been around on laptops for years, recently they incooperated support for browsing documents and screens, now multi-touch is the next evolution. Multitouch allows us to use gestures like zoom into the screen, rotate etc...
It does not come with a DVD drive, which is a sensible move, rather supports external drives. I rarely use my DVD drive, and if I want to watch some movie or something, I copy it to my Hard disk. Normally ultra-portable PCs like the Asus EeePC make comprises in terms of hardware capability, not in the MacBook Air! It comes with 2 GB RAM and is based on the Intel Core 2 Duo 1.88 Ghz processor, just as any other notebook.

The price is a little too steep for the MacBook Air for now, but I expect price to fall very quickly as bigger and bigger Solid State hard drives are developed also as new smaller Intel processors are developed, both factors will push down the price. There are some big gambles Apple is taking with this notebook: unlike in other notebooks batteries are not user replaceable, there is no ethernet port and only one usb port. I'll buy one after 2-3 generations of the product

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